The Ice Cradle by Mary Ann Winkowski, Maureen Foley

kept you from going into the light?”
    The ghost shook his head, as though the truth was too private to impart. He sank back down into the chair, and I held my tongue, trying to allow him some time to absorb what I had just said.
    A doorway of light had certainly opened for Baden at themoment of his death, as it does for every person who dies. If you have ever spoken to someone who has nearly died in an accident or during surgery, or read any accounts of that experience, you’ll usually hear mention of a tunnel, which leads to a doorway of bright, white light.
    Many people experience extraordinary bliss when their spirits leave their bodies at the time of death. They surrender easily and joyfully to the powerful force drawing them toward the light beyond the doorway. With every fiber of their beings, they resist being pulled back to life through medical heroics or a turn of the wheel of fate. Explaining later, they often utter the words, “I didn’t want to come back.”
    This light burns brightly for two or three days, during which time a spirit who is lingering on earth can remain among the people they love, visit the places they long to revisit, and even attend their own funeral, which every ghost I have ever encountered has done. Shortly thereafter, though, the brilliant white light begins to fade, and then it goes out completely. If the earthbound spirit has not yet passed through the doorway to whatever is on the other side—and I have no idea what that is, none at all—he or she is trapped in a no-man’s-land between this life and whatever comes next.
    If there is a next. I, personally, believe that there is. Maybe not the heaven of my First Communion catechism, but something sublime and mysterious. I’ve never forgotten an essay I read long ago, in which a scientist, a biologist whose name I cannot recall, talked about the curious fact that his faith wouldn’t go away, even though he had devoted his entire life to science. What it came down to for him—and I found myself agreeing with him—was the fact that he couldn’t quite believe that a pool of primordial muck could eventually evolve to thepoint at which it had the ability to compose the Mozart Requiem. Not without a little extra help.
    I suddenly felt a sneeze coming on and wondered, irrationally, if sympathy for the victims of the disaster at sea was causing me to develop a cold.
That’s completely ridiculous
, I thought as I closed my eyes and sneezed once, twice, three times.
    When I opened them, the ghost was gone.

Chapter Six

    L AUREN BAKED THE bass with a topping of bread crumbs, spring onions, and chives, and she served the flavorful fillets on a pile of creamy mashed potatoes. I immediately resolved to make potatoes more often, for the first bite took me right back to the suppers of my childhood: the torn vinyl seats of our kitchen chairs, scratchy against the backs of my thighs when I wore shorts; the basket-weave pattern of the enamel tabletop that chilled my forearms in winter and summer. I tend to cook pasta as our starch, because it was Nona who taught me my way around a kitchen. Dad’s repertoire isn’t extensive, but he sure knows how to make mashed potatoes. When Joe and Jay and I were small, he often served them with thick chunks of kielbasa, coiled inside out from having burst in the boiling.
    Henry had surprised me by nearly finishing the food on his plate. He would never have eaten this much fish at home, but I’d witnessed the satisfaction with which he carried the dressed fillets in from the back barn, where he and Mark had done the skinning and gutting, and presented them to Lauren in the kitchen. I noticed that he looked a little pale, but it was good for him to be reminded that fish didn’t come from the counterat the Fishmonger. To be squeamish about consuming their haul, after all of his and Mark’s work, might have elicited a little good-natured teasing, so for tonight at least, Henry managed to be a guy who ate