Thin Ice
Lou had picked ice skating because she couldn't think of anything less demonic.
She had lain awake on Tuesday night going through the options with the cat asleep on her feet. The movies were too dark, too quiet, an hour and a half sitting next to it in the black with nothing to do but think. Dinner meant looking at it across a table. Bowling she rejected for reasons she couldn't articulate, except that she could picture it far too clearly, the thing in the van in rented shoes. Ice skating came to her at about two, and she sat up and said "Ha," out loud, and the cat left.
So on Saturday she stood at the rental counter of the outdoor rink in Carver Square at four in the afternoon, under a string of white lights that hadn't come on yet, and watched a fallen angel tell a teenager in a fleece its shoe size.
"Thirty-eight," it said. Then: "Seven and a half."
The teenager put a pair of scuffed black skates on the counter without looking up from his phone.
They sat on a bench to put them on. Lou had hers laced in a minute; she'd skated every winter as a kid on the pond behind her Tita's house, and her hands remembered. Beside her the other one sat with a skate on each foot and the laces hanging loose, looking down at them the way you'd look at a piece of furniture that had arrived without instructions.
"You've never done this," Lou said.
"She did. Once. She was seven." It frowned at the laces. "She remembers it hurting."
Lou looked at it. Then she sighed, got down off the bench onto one knee on the rubber mat, and took the left foot in her hands.
"Tighter than you think," she said. "All the way up. If it's loose your ankle goes." She pulled the laces through the hooks one at a time, crossing them, hard. "Tell me if it's too much."
"It's fine."
She did the right one. When she finished she was still kneeling there, both hands on the boot, and she looked up, and the face looking down at her was Morgana's face in a grey knitted hat, cheeks pink from the cold, watching her tie its skates with an expression of complete and serious attention.
Lou got up rather quickly and brushed off her knee.
It fell four times before it let go of the rail.
The first time it went down all at once, both feet shooting out in front of it, and landed flat on its back on the ice with a sound like a dropped bag of groceries. Lou, who had been about to say something useful, said nothing. She stood over it with her hands in her pockets. It lay there looking up at the grey sky with its hat knocked over one eye.
"Okay," it said to the sky.
The second time it went sideways into the boards. The third time it got halfway up and sat down again, hard, and said a word that Lou hadn't known it knew, and a man skating past with a little boy on his shoulders turned and looked. The fourth time it grabbed for the rail, missed, and grabbed Lou's arm instead.
It held on. Its grip was very strong, much stronger than it looked, five fingers locked around her forearm through two layers of coat. It pulled itself upright on her as if she were a post, and stood there swaying with both blades skittering, and didn't let go.
Lou looked down at the hand on her arm. Grey wool glove. The fingers under it.
That's its hand, she thought. I'm holding up a...
"Sorry," it said, out of breath. "Don't let go."
"I'm not letting go."
She didn't. She stood there with her feet planted and her knees bent and her arm out like a railing, and the demon hung on to it and found its balance by degrees, and after a while its blades stopped chattering on the ice.
It watched the others. That was how it learned.
Lou noticed after the first twenty minutes. It had stopped trying to work it out with its own body, all stiff knees and windmilling arms, and had started watching everyone else instead: a girl of maybe twelve doing lazy circles in the middle; an old man in a flat cap with his hands behind his back, gliding as if he were taking a walk; a couple going round together with their arms linked. It watched their feet and their hips and the way they leaned. Then it tried it. It was bad. It watched again, and tried again. It was a little less bad.
It went on like that for a long time. Lou skated slow laps along the boards and kept an eye on it each time she came round, and each time it had moved a few feet further from the rail.
Somewhere around the fifth lap she came round and it was standing on its own in the middle of the ice.
It wasn't moving. It was just standing there, arms half out from its sides, knees bent, quite still, on two narrow blades on the frozen surface with people going round it on every side. Its head was down. It was looking at the ice under its feet.
Lou stopped by the boards and looked at it standing there.
Peter got three steps, she thought, completely unbidden. Before he looked down.
She put a gloved hand over her mouth. She didn't know if she was going to laugh or what. It was the stupidest thing she had ever thought, and her mother would have been horrified, and Sister Imelda would have made her copy out the whole of Matthew fourteen by hand. She stood there with her hand over her mouth and her eyes watering in the cold, and in the middle of the ice the demon lifted one foot, set it down again a little further on, and pushed.
It glided. It went about two metres. Then it put its arms up and wobbled and didn't fall.
It turned its head and found Lou by the boards, and its face did something Lou had not seen on it before. It wasn't the warm amused face from a hundred red carpets, or the careful face in the van, or the wet tired face in the candlelight. It was the face of someone who has just done something for the first time and can't believe it worked.
Lou took her hand away from her mouth and lifted it, a small stupid wave.
The demon waved back and fell over.
The hot chocolate came from a stand at the edge of the plaza that also sold roasted chestnuts and something called a churro dog. They drank it on a bench outside the boards with their skates still on, steam coming off the paper cups into the cold. The white lights had come on overhead. It was getting dark.
"It's warm," it said, as if reporting a discovery.
"It's hot chocolate."
"It's very sweet."
"It's hot chocolate," Lou said again, and it laughed. Lou found she was smiling, and let herself.
They talked about nothing. About the single, which Marcus had heard and was calling a real departure, a phrase they both agreed meant he didn't understand it. About Lou's new ride cymbal, which had settled in and stopped arguing. About whether the old man in the flat cap had ever once in his life fallen down, and if so, how he'd managed to look so dignified about it. It asked about the cat. Lou told it the cat had learned to open the cupboard where the treats were kept and had to be outsmarted with a child lock. It laughed at that too, the real laugh, short and surprised, with its head back. Lou told it about the time the cat had got into the van and ridden all the way to a session in Tacoma asleep on the cymbal bags. She was halfway through it, doing the cat's voice at the bit where it woke up at a red light, and it was laughing so hard it had to put the cup down on the bench.
Then Lou stopped in the middle of a sentence.
She had forgotten.
She didn't know for how long. Ten minutes. Twenty. Long enough that she'd been sitting on a bench in the cold doing a voice for her cat and laughing, with her shoulder against a shoulder, and it had simply been a friend sitting next to her with hot chocolate. Long enough that the pale light in the dark and the folded limbs and the chapel and the verse had all been somewhere else, in some other part of her life that she didn't happen to be in at the moment.
She came back to it all at once, the way you miss a step in the dark.
The thing beside her had stopped laughing. It was looking at her. Not reading her, she didn't think. Or maybe it was. She couldn't tell anymore and she'd decided at some point in the past two weeks that she might never be able to tell, and had to just keep going anyway.
"Lou," it said.
"I'm fine." She picked up her cup. It had gone lukewarm. "I'm fine. It's just..." She waved a hand at the rink, the lights, the hot chocolate, the whole of Carver Square on a Saturday in December. "Sometimes I remember."
It didn't say anything. It picked up its own cup and drank, and looked out at the ice.
"Me too," it said after a while.
Lou looked at it.
It didn't explain. She thought perhaps it didn't need to. She thought of it standing alone in the middle of the ice with its head down, looking at its own feet, and she didn't ask.
They went back on for the last hour. The rink was busier now, families mostly, and the music had changed from whatever had been playing to something with sleigh bells in it that Lou found unbearable and the demon seemed to like.
It could skate now, after a fashion. It went round slowly near the boards with its arms held out a little from its sides, never quite letting them come all the way down, and every so often it would put on speed for a few metres, and Lou would see its face change again in the dark between the lights.
They were coming round the far end when a little girl in a pink snowsuit went down in front of them. She was perhaps four, skating with a plastic frame shaped like a penguin, and the frame had gone one way and she had gone the other and landed on her front on the ice, and she lay there for a second in absolute silence before she drew the enormous breath that comes before a howl.
The demon was there before Lou was.
It stopped beside the girl. Not well. It hit the boards with its shoulder to do it. Then it crouched, slowly, carefully, both blades shaking under it, until it was down at her level. It put one hand flat on the ice beside her. It didn't touch her. It just put its hand there, near hers.
"That's the worst part," it said to her. "Falling. After that it's easy."
The girl looked at it with her mouth open, halfway to crying, and Lou watched her decide not to. The girl put her small pink-mittened hand on top of the grey woollen one. The demon closed its fingers very gently around it and stood, slowly, bringing her up with it, both of them wobbling. The girl's mother came skating up at speed, saying oh, sweetie, oh, thank you, thank you so much. The demon said it was nothing and let go of the small hand. The girl went off with her mother and the penguin, already chattering, and didn't look back.
Lou stood a few feet away by the boards and watched the demon stand there afterwards with its hand still slightly out.
She had seen it be kind before. She'd seen it be kind to her a dozen times, and every time some part of her had stood off to one side and asked the question. She asked it now. That's how it works. That's what it would do.
She watched it look after the little girl in the pink snowsuit with an expression she couldn't name, and she found that she was asking, and that it didn't matter. It had done the thing. Whatever it was, the girl had got up off the ice and gone back to her mother. Both of those were true at once, and Lou stood by the boards and held both of them, and didn't put either one down.
The demon turned and saw her watching. It skated back to her slowly with its arms out.
"Okay?" Lou said.
"Okay."
By the end Lou's knees were gone. Forty-eight years and thirty-one of them behind a kit; they'd been gone for a while, really, and two hours of skating had just finished the job. On the last lap she went slower and slower, and somewhere along the far end she felt the demon slow down beside her to match.
At the corner she wobbled, just slightly, nothing really. A hand came under her elbow.
She looked at it. The grey glove holding her up.
She thought about pulling away. She thought about it honestly, for about the length of one glide. Then she let her weight go into the hand, and it held her, steadily, the rest of the way round.
They came off the ice as the rink was closing. The lights went off over the far half of the ice first, and a man in a high-visibility vest drove the resurfacing machine out through the gate at the end. They sat on the bench to take their skates off. Lou had hers off in a minute. Beside her the demon was having trouble with the laces, which Lou had tied too tight, and in the end Lou knelt down on the rubber mat again and undid them for it, one hook at a time.
Out on the ice the machine went round in slow wide loops. Behind it the surface came out wet and black and perfectly smooth. Every line they had cut into it that afternoon, the falls, the wobbles, the slow careful circles near the boards, the place in the middle where it had stood alone looking down, went under the water and was gone. The ice lay there afterwards, glassy, without a mark on it, as if nobody had ever been on it at all.
They both watched it for a while, sitting on the bench with their shoes in their laps.
"Next week?" it said.
Lou pulled on her boots, slowly, one knee at a time.
"Next week," she said.