The Furnace Between Your Shoulders

The cold came up through the soles of Maya's sneakers first, then her ankles, then the place behind her knees. She stamped. It did not help.

Soren sat on the bottom step with his hands jammed under his arms, watching his own breath leave him in slow gray clouds. Across the yard, Maya's aunt and uncle dragged a tarp piled with wet leaves toward the curb. The baby, Maya's cousin Reza, sat strapped into the stroller in a snowsuit the color of a tangerine, and he was not shivering.

That was the thing Maya noticed. She noticed it the way she noticed a wrong note in a song.

"He's not cold," she said.

"He's in a snowsuit," Soren said. "I want a snowsuit."

"No, but look at him." Maya crouched by the stroller. Reza's cheeks were pink. His little fists were bare, poking out of the sleeves, and they were warm when she touched them. Warm like he'd been holding them over a heater. "My hands are freezing and I've got gloves. His hands are out and they're warm."

Soren came over. He pressed one finger against the back of the baby's hand, then against his own. He did it again. He did it a third time, the way he always checked a thing more than once before he let himself believe it.

"That's not right," he said. "Smaller things lose heat faster. He should be colder than us. He's tiny."

Reza looked up at the two of them looming over him and laughed, a wet bubbling laugh, and kicked both legs.

Maya sat back on her heels. The cold was in her teeth now. She thought about the heater in her bedroom, how it ticked when it ran, how you could feel the warm coming off it before you ever saw the coils go orange. Something turning fuel into heat. Something burning to keep a room from freezing.

"He's running a heater," she said slowly. "On the inside."

"Everybody runs a heater on the inside," Soren said. "That's why we're warm. But mine is losing right now." He pulled his collar up over his chin. "His isn't. So his is better than ours. Why would a baby have a better heater than us?"

That was the question. Maya could feel it sitting there, the way a missing puzzle piece leaves a shape.

She thought about Reza, two weeks old when she first saw him, how the nurse had wrapped him tight and put a little knit cap on him because, the nurse said, babies lose heat from their heads and they can't shiver well yet.

"Wait," Maya said. "He can't shiver."

"What?"

"The nurse said. Newborns can't really shiver yet. Shivering is how we make heat, right, the shaking, it's muscles burning stuff to get warm." She was talking fast now, following it. "So if he can't shiver, and it's freezing, and his hands are still warm, then he's making heat some other way. A way we mostly don't."

Soren went quiet. He was looking at the back of the baby's neck, at the soft folds where the snowsuit gaped, at the place between the small shoulders.

"Where would you put it," he said. "If you were building a baby and you needed to keep the most important part warm. The spine. The brain. Where's the heater go?"

"Close to those," Maya said. "Around the back. The neck. Between the shoulders."

They both reached at the same time, not to the baby, but to themselves. Maya put her cold hand on the back of her own neck. Soren reached over his shoulder and pressed his palm flat against the top of his spine, between his shoulder blades, the place you can never quite scratch.

"There's something here," Soren said. "On us too. There has to be. We came from babies. You don't just throw a furnace away."

Maya stood up. The cold had stopped being something she wanted to escape. It had become a question she was standing inside of.

"My science teacher said most of our fat just stores stuff," she said. "Energy you save for later. It doesn't do anything, it just sits there waiting." She frowned. "But that can't be the only kind. A baby that can't shiver, freezing weather, warm hands. That's not stored fat sitting there. That's fat that burns. Fat that's a furnace instead of a pantry."

Soren's mouth opened a little. His breath came out in a cloud.

"Two kinds of fat," he said. "One that hoards and one that burns."

"And the burning kind lives where the baby keeps it warmest. The shoulders. The spine." Maya pressed harder at the back of her own neck, as if she could feel it answer. "And we've still got some. Less than him. But some."

"How do you turn it on?" Soren asked.

Maya looked down at her own bare wrists, blue-white, prickled with cold. At the goosebumps marching up her arms. At Soren huddled and shivering, his whole body shaking now in the November air.

"That's the part," she said. "That's the whole part." She started to laugh, and her teeth chattered through it. "This. Right now. The cold isn't the problem. The cold is the switch. We've been standing out here freezing thinking the cold was beating us. The cold is turning it on."

Soren stopped shivering for one second, just one, looking at her.

"We're not losing," he said.

"We're not losing. Something between our shoulders just heard the cold and started up."

The baby laughed again at nothing, at the gray sky, at the two of them standing very still in the yard with their hands behind their necks. Maya's aunt called something about hot chocolate from the porch. Neither of them turned.

Soren crouched back down by the stroller and held his cold finger near Reza's warm bare fist again, not touching, just close, feeling the small heat coming off it the way you feel a heater before you see the coils.

Across the yard the wind picked up off the bare trees and came at them low and hard, and Maya turned her face into it, and felt the prickle climb the back of her neck, and stayed exactly where she was.