The Dark Beneath the Ice

by Amelinda Bérubé

  I used to dance to this when I visited, twirling around the tiny living room on the tips of my toes, my hair swinging out behind me, my arms swept over my head, fingers poised to pluck butterflies from the air, just like they’d taught us. Mom always applauded earnestly. I was her star. Dad would be watching us both, smiling.

  Water can stop bullets if it’s deep enough. The memory can’t touch me. I just have to breathe, breathe, and let it sink. Like everything else.

  Like my silent phone.

  Call me, I want to type, but how many ways can you tell somebody you miss them before you end up sounding hopelessly needy? If I could talk to Ingrid about all this awfulness, it would lose its weight, disappear. If I confided in her, maybe I wouldn’t feel so alone. But maybe—probably—it would just be oversharing. And I can’t think of a way to tell her about the things that scare me most. Strange things.

  Like the mirror. Its broken face keeps twinkling in the pale afternoon light, catching my eye, drawing it back. Eventually I grab the quilt folded at the end of the bed and throw it over the frame. Was it me? It must have been me. How else could that happen, glass simply breaking, out of nowhere?

  2

  Mom used to tell me all the time there’s no such thing as perfect.

  My family wasn’t perfect. I knew that. But I thought it was working. It worked for me. My parents were never the hypercritical, clueless control freaks people at school always whine about. No brothers or sisters to fight with. It was quiet, but a comfortable quiet, a book-and-a-blanket quiet.

  In my head I have this picture of us: Me curled up reading on the couch, not the chilly leather bench we got for the new house, but the old, olive-green corduroy one with a rip in the side Mom hid with a table. Dad in his habitual after-work spot, perched on an ergonomic stool in front of a canvas, taking advantage of the light from the north-facing window. He’d have traded his sober, anonymous tie and jacket for one of the painting shirts we got him every year for Father’s Day, the louder and sillier the better. His favorite had flamingos on it. Mom, meanwhile, would be just out of sight around the corner, clinking and humming in the kitchen. She’d come in to bring Dad a cup of coffee, reminding him not to put his paintbrush in it. He’d emerge from his reverie for long enough to smile up at her, for her to kiss his cheek.

  After Dad’s company took off, when we moved to the new house, it was different: all the chrome accents, white and black, straight lines. Dad insisted on all this stupid art that looks deep but doesn’t mean anything, even though he claimed it was “expressive.” My dance friends stared like tourists when they came over, craning their necks to take it all in, the sweep of the staircase that looks like it’s floating, the huge soaring windows that turn the rolling hills on the far side of the river into wallpaper. The quiet there was emptier. The whole house was flooded with north-facing light, but Dad didn’t have time to paint anymore. He kept a little caddy of brushes next to his desk, called it his five-minute project station; he’d add a few brushstrokes at a time, he told me, in between emails.

  At night, inside, the house is like a ship, the prow facing out into the dark of the river. The only lights would be a white strip under Dad’s office door on one side of the house and on the other, the washed-out blue flicker of the television in their room as Mom graded papers in bed.

  Maybe the cracks widening between them should have been obvious. But I hadn’t heard them fight since those awful few days at the end of dance class, back in ninth grade. I think they must have, every once in a while. They never said anything to me about it, but Mom was like a barometer. Every now and again her anger suffused the whole house. Always unspoken, never explained, it seeped into every corner, followed me into every room. It echoed in the clanking of dishes as she stood at the sink, in the slam of the dryer door, in the whirring of the furnace filling the silence.

  I asked her about it once. She said, without looking at me, that I didn’t need to worry about it.

  “Marriage is work, Marianne,” she said. “Nobody agrees all the time. Reasonable people work out their differences.”

  That was her mantra. When I quit dance, that whole terrible week Dad didn’t even come home, Mom had repeated it like a prayer. And it had worked, in the end. So I would wait, just like I had then: Holding my breath. Not rocking the boat. Being good. Keeping quiet.

  And the clouds always passed. Mom would still make Dad his coffee. She would pad off to his office with it while I did my homework perched on a bar stool at the chilly stone counter of the kitchen peninsula. And Dad would emerge later with the empty mug and ask me about my day. I’d breathe a sigh of relief and feel a little proud that they were such reasonable people. People who knew how to stay calm and work things out.

  When I think about it now, it’s like Dad had been leaving for a long time, a point on the horizon getting smaller and smaller, so slowly I didn’t see it happen. I didn’t want to admit it. There was always another explanation. In that cavernous glass ship it seemed only logical we would spread out a little thinner, bump into each other less. That I’d only see them by themselves, in their separate corners of the house.

  It might have been work that kept Mom up past midnight. I was up studying for a test one night, and she came into my room with a plate of cookies to share and a mug of hot chocolate, saying she couldn’t sleep. We had a wonderful, cozy chat about nothing much: the book I was reading, the shenanigans her first-year students tried to pull. I felt so grown up, like I was someone she could rely on, someone she could come to for company. But I heard her footsteps in the hall so many other nights. Dad didn’t even get home until eight o’clock, and then he’d disappear into his office. Mom set her jaw and said you can’t expect to work nine to five when you’re running a tech start-up, even after the IPO. There was always a deadline, or a manager who left and took most of their employees with them, or a new client to meet with… He was busy, that was all. It didn’t seem strange.

  It’s two days ago now that it all fell apart.

  • • •

  Tuesday night. The cathedral windows were going dim. The mascara streaking Mom’s face was the first sign it was coming. She sat across from me, chin lifted, arms tightly folded, in the far corner of the couch. As far from Dad as she could get. She fixed her red-rimmed glare on a point on the wall.

  And Dad, his elbows on his knees, spoke to the floor. Didn’t meet my eyes except in the barest glances while he delivered this terrible, practiced speech about how he and Mom couldn’t live together anymore, how they both loved me very much, how this wasn’t anyone’s fault. Mom snorted at the last statement, and he winced, letting his words trail off.

  The rain hammered on the tall windows. I sat there, smooth and frozen, waiting for time to resume. Waiting to find out none of this weird, ugly drama was real.

  But all that happened was that Mom stood up and stalked out of the room while Dad dropped his head into his hands.

  “I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this, bunny,” he said as a door slammed, echoing across the house. “I’m sorry.”

  The blue-veined surface of the ice dimmed above me. I’d sink so deep they’d never find me. Dad shifted under my stare.

  “It’s okay to be angry.” He sighed. “Let’s just talk about things, okay?”

  “Things,” I echoed.

  “Well, yeah. Lots of things. I need to explain.”

  A muffled, irregular sound crept through the silence between us. The sound of Mom crying.

  I meant to say something. I meant to be reasonable and cooperative and all the things he wanted. But instead, I got to my feet and left the room. I barely saw where I was going. Around me the ice stretched out forever, a vast arctic sea.

  Dad called after me. “Marianne? Come on, please?”

  But he only called once.

  Mom was lying on the bed, facing away from me. She didn’t turn around when I came i
nto the room.

  “Mom?”

  When she didn’t answer I sat down on the bed, then lay down next to her, put my arms around her. And we stayed like that for a long time, listening to the rain beating on the skylights as the colors in the room dissolved into twilight.

  Eventually she spoke, told me he didn’t want counseling, and she couldn’t make him stay. I listened in the dark as Mom sobbed about how she was sure he was seeing someone else, and where were we going to live now, and how could he do this, how. I tried to let it wash over me, to stay in the depths untouched, but I could feel the bottom dropping away beneath me, the directions melting, the compass meaningless, spinning in free fall.

  After that broken night, after waking up alone in my parents’ bed, nothing seemed real anymore. Going to school was unthinkable. Dad’s absence was nothing unusual, but it screamed at me from every side, from every piece of furniture he’d picked out, every fixture they’d debated over. The spare tidiness of the house made no sense. The windows should have been smashed all over the floor, the rain blowing through the house. Mom couldn’t sit still, pacing from room to room, raging. I trailed helplessly in her wake, wishing I could hide from the storm, unable to abandon her. If you stayed calm and waited long enough, Hurricane Laura would eventually blow herself out.

  “I told him,” she seethed. She stood in the middle of the living room, hands on her hips. I was perched on the edge of one of the weird, hard decorative chairs that no one sits in, hands folded in my lap. I’d been watching her stalk around the living room in a prowling circle, all explosive energy, a wild thing in a cage. “I told him if he was going to do this to us, if he was going to do this again, he was going to be the one to tell you. Do you know the real reason why he missed your show in Montreal?”

  That show was a blur of lights and anxiety in my head. Mom was a waiting shadow, a fierce backstage whisper, an even hand wielding lip liner when mine shook too badly. She’d stayed in the wings long past the end of her volunteer shift, earning flutters of admiring protest from the others. She was the queen of the dance moms, sticking on false eyelashes, organizing garment bags, threading safety pins together, applying hairspray to running nylons.

  “Well, let’s just say it sure as hell wasn’t a business trip. And I forgave him. I took him back! And now he just walks out the door. Did he think I’d let him just sneak off without a word to you?” She tossed her hair, not needing an answer. “He thought he could dump everything in my lap. Like he always does. Well, it’s different this time. He’s not coming crawling back to us again. I hope he has found someone else. Maybe she can clean up after him and his fucking executive job—she can—”

  Her words dissolved into a cry of fury and disgust, and she stormed from the room, leaving me to sink forward till my forehead touched my knees, too wrung out from listening to her to even cry.

  When she came marching back into the room she had a knife in her hand. One of Dad’s fancy kitchen knives.

  “Mom!”

  She climbed up on the couch, her feet barely sinking into the gleaming black leather, and buried the point of the knife in the painting that filled the wall there. She sawed at it, but the canvas refused to slice, so she reached up to yank at the hole she’d punched through it, hauling on the cloth until it ripped, a long, ragged slash, leaving it curling down like peeling skin.

  She stood there, panting, and I waded forward. Didn’t come too close.

  “Mom. You should give me the knife.”

  She looked around at me, her eyes widening, like she’d just remembered I was there. Cold, luminous water, I thought, looking steadily at her. A shield of ice. Beyond depth, beyond waves, beyond fear.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie,” she whispered. “I’m just… I’m so angry. You didn’t think—I didn’t mean to—”

  “Mom.” I was so calm. I would make this disappear like everything else. “Please.”

  Her mouth twisted up; she put a hand over her face, turned away from me. I took her wrist in one hand, pulled the knife from her slack fingers with the other. Her muffled sobs followed me as I carried it back to the kitchen. I didn’t run. My feet in their fuzzy socks were silent on the hardwood.

  This was it. This was the bottom, the lightless sandy floor beneath the ocean, too cold and too heavy for anything to live. If I could make it through this, I thought, I could make it through anything.

  • • •

  Finally, thankfully, she left for a meeting with a lawyer. I fled to my room and immersed myself in cool, green silence until my heartbeat stopped hammering in my ears. Eventually the car purred back into the driveway. I ignored it, but then there were noises from the yard: a scrape and clatter.

  When I reluctantly pushed the front door open, I found Mom kneeling in the mud in her nice faculty interview slacks in the middle of one of the garden beds, yanking long threads of quack grass and seedy dandelions from a matted tangle of some ground-hugging plant. Strings of black hair hung wet down her neck. The rain plastered her blouse to her back, water dripping from the tip of her nose, her forehead.

  Maybe she wasn’t crying. Maybe it was just the rain.

  “Mom?” She didn’t answer at first, just sniffed and wiped a hand across her face, leaving a streak of mud. I almost asked her if she was okay, but thought better of it. “What are you doing?”

  “What does it look like?” She was crying. It left her voice broken and gluey. A dandelion stalk snapped in her hand. She threw it to the ground. “We’re going to have to sell this place now. I can’t afford to pay for it by myself. So it has to be presentable.”

  “Mom, it’s pouring, can’t it wait until—”

  “Until what?” she shouted, finally looking up at me through her dripping hair. “Until your father shows up to help?”

  I stared back at her, frozen, still leaning against the open door. I stood my ground. I didn’t back away.

  “This place will take forever to sell.” She snatched a dandelion digger from the path, renewing her attack. “The architect told us that when we were building it. He warned us. Three bedrooms in a place this size. And I said it didn’t matter. I said we’d be here forever.”

  She sobbed once and stabbed the ground with the digger. Again, and again, and then she hit a rock and hurled the tool aside. It hit the side of the house with a bang, and she slumped over with her hands over her face. Crying like I’d never heard her cry, in noisy hacking sounds that echoed down the street.

  I stepped gingerly over to her, put an arm around her shoulders, almost afraid to touch her. But she sagged into me, heavy and shaking, her forehead a weight on my shoulder. The rain prickled down around us, and the mud soaked slowly into my knees.

  My phone was ringing when I finally managed to coax her back inside. The insistent chime echoed through the house as she disappeared down the hall, saying dully she was going to take a shower. Four, five, six times. Pause. And again.

  I’d left it in the kitchen; it rang again as I trudged into the room. It kept ringing as I set the kettle on the stove to boil, fished the last few cookies from the cupboard, ate them mechanically. Finally I gave up and picked it up from the counter. I didn’t recognize the number.

  “Hello?”

  “Marianne?”

  Dad. For a long beat I didn’t speak. My thoughts were a roaring blank.

  “Marianne? Is that you, bunny?”

  “Hi.” I heard the word come out of my mouth. I had to say something.

  “You weren’t picking up. I thought if I kept calling… Is everything… How are you doing?”

  I was talking to a stranger. My dad wouldn’t have left us. He would have calmed Mom down, worked things out. Why did he still sound like my dad? His concern was warm as a hug.

  “Fine.” I took a deep breath, tried again. Was it going to be my job to tell him about the knife in Mom’s hand? Would he use that agains
t her? “Well. Not so good.”

  “I…I see.” Dad’s turn to pause. The silence stretched. A hiss of static skirled over the phone line. “Listen, we really need to talk. I need to tell you what’s going on with me.”

  I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want to know. Whatever he was trying to tell me, whatever I was going to have to accept, it loomed over me like a mountain, too heavy to carry, too huge to drown. I was choking on Mom’s fury already. I couldn’t do it. The phone crackled and whispered in my hand.

  “Marianne?” His words faded in and out of the rising tide of white noise, like rocks in the river. “…there, bun? Listen, please, this doesn’t change anyth…figure something…for coffee or…”

  And after that—what? I might have closed my eyes. The rush of static on the phone washed over me between one breath and the next, an endless wave of sound, a vast, underwater gulf. Or was that part of the dream?

  Because it’s all I can remember after that. The dream. The sand cold between my bare toes. Stepping out of the shadow of the trees, silence smothering even the sound of my breath. The crescent of the beach stretched out to rocky points, barely visible. The faint orange glow of the city spilled over my shoulders, staining the ragged, pale boundary of a crust of ice. But out there, beyond the light, even that disappeared. There was no horizon. The surface stretching out before me was a cool breath on my face, an extension of the starless sky.

  I couldn’t look away from it. I couldn’t stop walking. My feet carried me forward like they didn’t belong to me. The water sliced into my feet, over my knees, panic climbing with it. Something pressed me forward, invisible hands forcing me down, irresistible as gravity. There was no fighting it, whatever it was—whoever it was. And if I couldn’t break their grip I would drown. That’s what they wanted. I knew it like I knew my heart was beating.

  But it must have been a dream. When I woke up in bed it was morning, so I must have slept. When I opened my eyes in the faint gray light, Mom was sitting on the edge of my bed, hunched over, hands clasped between her knees, not looking at me.