Her hair was golden, illuminated through the deepening twilight by a few soft, pulsing lampposts which marked the edge of Winnetauk Lake. Her gloves, and scarf, and long, wool coat vanished into the depths of that starry surrounding darkness, leaving only the sharp white of her figure skates to pierce through the winter night. Slowly, the young girl scratched her silver blades through the ice, weaving from side-to-side as a form possessed by the enchantments of moonlit snowfall. Circling, drifting, she watched her chilly breath join the current of some invisible breeze which kissed her cheeks pink in its passing. Absorbed in the world of her mind, time was measured only by the thin, looping cursive she wrote upon the surface of the lake. There is a moment which exists just before a child learns what loneliness is, before she loses the imagination to be so solitary, and so free.
The medical gurney blasted into the ER, ramming the steel bed frame through the swinging hospital doors and vibrating the lights passing overhead; each bar of fluorescent yellow seemed to tick above her like the small red hand on a clock. Several itchy brown blankets were wrapped around her body, but she still shivered and heaved, unable to move her eyes from the ceiling. Her lips were blue and drooling. Her limp hair lay wet on her shoulders in a tangled mess of darkness and dirt. There was blood. All around, people shouted orders in loud voices, and all she wanted was for someone to whisper; for someone to stop the rushing of movement and blood and to reach down for her hand and whisper pretty things into her ear.
“Stop the ride, I want to get off”, she thought. With a tiny pang of fleeting memory, she saw a carnival, and being too scared, and crying until Mommy had said it was okay to go home. Crying until Mommy had scooped her up and carried her back to the car; back to her bed with cotton candy colored sheets, and tucked her in, and kissed her forehead, and she was asleep before her Mother’s lips had left her. Now, all she wanted was to drift away like that again, but every few minutes or seconds or less than that, a man or woman would loom over her, telling her not to sleep – to keep her eyes open – she mustn’t sleep. She knew about white lights at the end of tunnels from movies she wasn’t supposed to watch late at night, but now she figured those people were just mixed up, confused by all the bright things people had kept burning into their faces too. Confused by all the pinching needles, and smelly staleness, and the way time keeps blowing through doorways, following the screams and the crying.
“There’s been an accident”. He poured some more water into a glass of clinking ice, his back to her. “Your Mother was driving and she flipped the car over a snow bank, and the car rolled into a lake.” The kitchen seemed darker than usual, as though a light bulb must have burned out. Mommy was coming back from the supermarket now though, and she probably had some more or knew where they were. Daddy was always asking Mommy where stuff was. “This time of year, the lake is usually pretty solid, but the car broke through.” The little girl tried hard to listen, she knew what Daddy was saying was important. She looked down at her feet; her thick white shoelaces had come undone. “Can you tie my shoe Daddy?” His silence startled her. Maybe she had not been polite enough, “Please? Pretty please?” He turned around to face her. His whole body was rigid and seemed to stretch light years above her, untouchable. “Don’t you understand?!” – He began, she winched at the cut in his voice, and he sunk to his knees before her, “Mom is dead. Mom is not coming home, baby. She’s never coming back home.” He stood and went upstairs, and she understood. She cried for a long time, alone, on the kitchen floor.
Now Dad was sitting in an uncomfortable blue chair, next to her bed. “Hey”, he tried to speak softly as she opened her eyes toward him, but it was just turning the volume down on a lion. He waited for her smile apprehensively at him – a tiny, weak slant on either side of her mouth - before he asked, “Why?” Why had she gone ice skating of all things, alone and in the middle of the night? Why had she been so careless; exposed herself to such danger? Why had the ice cracked and dragged her down into a frosted hell? Why had she gone to the one place he had specifically forbid her from going to?
She turned her head away from him. “I’m tired. Can we talk about it later?”
“What - where you trying to join her?”
“Daddy, please don’t be mad.”
“Tell me what you were doing out on that lake!”
“I just…” She hated looking weak in front of her father, but tears stung in her eyes.
“I told you never to go to Winnetauk, and you know damn well what it means to us – how I feel about it. You’re lucky to be alive. I’m severely disappointed.”
“I just miss her. I’m sorry. I just miss Mom.”
The soundlessness that followed pressed on both father and daughter like a cobra filled with bricks. This was a conversation, one of many conversations, he was never meant to have with his daughter. Of course he loved her. He had also loved her Mother, but she was taken by the very same force, the very same goddamn lake, that had tried to take his little girl tonight. How could he possibly lose them both? How could his own child betray him like this – leave him like this? Life might go on, but what’s the point if the greatest, most important things in your life exist only in the past?
She watched him stare at his feet. She watched him stare at the door. At the television on mute. At the bedspread. At the nurse who came in and out of the room like the tide. Her mother had loved the ocean. Actually, her mother had loved everything that involved water. She had been the one who insisted that they go to the beach each summer, despite how badly Daddy would sunburn. And even on the bitterest February day, she had held both her little hands and inch by inch taught her to slide across the ice. Maybe Dad couldn’t understand, but skating on that lake was like skating with her again. Just being where she had been, when her last breath escaped into that gentle breeze, was like reliving every moment before that day.
There is a moment which exists just before a child learns what loneliness is, before they lose the imagination to be so solitary, and so free. Once that moment passes, no matter their age, the child cannot return to the peace of pure, white snow. Fairies die in the garden. Mermaids wash up on the shore. By witnessing the destruction of life, life gains the necessity of meaning. Under the stress and responsibility of such meaning, the imagination breaks like a treasured object, smashing under the terrible weight and forcing the child to live their life in the reflection of those glass shards. We may try to stick the pieces back together for only a moment, to see a whole person looking back in that sparkling sheet of ice, and yet, these remain just simple moments, strung together along the soon broken path of an endless line etched on the surface – just waiting to break and drown us all.
