The Dark Beneath the Ice

by Amelinda Bérubé

  “But you were a kid,” I say, surprising myself. “Looking after her wasn’t your job.” The words become my father’s in my ears, a resonance that hurts. Don’t put that on your plate. “And I know it’s kind of your job anyway. I really do get that. But that doesn’t make it your job to protect me. You don’t have to come with me. Really.”

  Ron pulls us to a stop, looks at me.

  “Of course I do,” she says.

  The silence is dense with all the words I can’t find. She hugs my arm tight against her side; I can feel the rise and fall of her breath. Miss Giselle’s voice flashes absurdly through my mind. Softness and strength.

  I’m back on that summer beach with the stars falling from the sky, possibilities welling up just out of reach. I can’t make this mistake again. I have to drown this now, sink it as deep as I can before I start to hope, before I cling too tight. Everything screams at me to look away, to break eye contact before she sees through me.

  But she smiles. Just a little bit, an awkward quirk of her lips. And she doesn’t look away.

  And then she jerks away, throwing her arms over her head with a sudden cry. I reel back a couple of steps, my heart lurching, but slowly she straightens up, runs her hands carefully over the back of her head.

  “Sorry,” she stammers. “Sorry. Something…I think it…grabbed my hair.”

  Knock knock knock. The sound is metallic, this time, as if someone’s tapping on the barrel of the streetlight with their knuckles. It’s faint, but Ron shrinks from the sound, looking wildly around for its source.

  “You don’t have to come with me,” I whisper again. Ron lifts her chin.

  “Come on” is all she says.

  We walk with a little distance between us now, me with my arms folded, trying to focus on the shapes of the stones in the retaining wall running beside us, the spiky swaths of juniper spilling over its sides. I can’t think about what I maybe imagined passing between us, an impossible minute ago, what it might mean. I don’t dare. I’ll fall apart if I think about that.

  Ron’s face is full of sharp shadows. Without her usual whorls of eyeliner and dramatic lipstick she looks pale and fragile.

  “You look really different without makeup,” I say, inanely, breaking the silence.

  Ron snorts.

  “I don’t bother with it if I’m just at home,” she replies and sighs, hunching her shoulders. “I wish I had today, though.”

  “What, so you could scare the ghost away?”

  “I don’t know, something like that. It’s war paint.”

  I remember her straddling Farrell, fist raised to strike, and I look at her curiously. “What do you need war paint for? I mean, you were on the rugby team. Nobody bothers the jocks. They’re the ruling class.”

  “You’d think.” Ron looks away, fumbling in her pockets, patting her coat. “It doesn’t matter. Life in the jungle. Show a second of weakness and they’ll tear you down. Ugh, I hope these didn’t get wet. I seriously need a cigarette right now.”

  She slides one from a slightly crumpled box and turns to light it. I wait for her to elaborate, but she’s silent, blowing smoke away from me.

  “It’s not that hard, actually,” she says in the end, her voice low. “Blending in with them. You just have to kind of tack into the wind, you know? Adjust your camouflage a little bit, depending on who’s looking. But not so much that they can tell you’re faking it.”

  “That’s sort of what Ingrid said.” She’d said Luke and Farrell and the rest of them were just doing the same thing, an insight so depressing that it’s probably true. “I never understood how she did it, though.”

  “But that’s something I always thought was cool about you.” She gives me an appraising look. “You don’t buy into it. You’re the same person from every angle. You’ve got…what’s the word. Unity? Integrity. I’d almost forgotten what that looked like, you know?”

  I’m absurdly flattered, but the compliment itches, feels untrue. “Maybe you’re just not seeing all of me.”

  “Well, you’re not faking it.” Ron’s smile twists. “Trust me, I know what that looks like. From personal experience.”

  “What, meaning you did that? Faking it to blend in?” She raises her eyebrows at the surprise in my voice. “I just thought, I don’t know, you act like you couldn’t care less what they think.”

  “Well, I don’t!” she flares, but a few steps later continues more quietly, “but that’s not really true. I want to make goddamn sure they know I’m not one of them. Right? I used to be pretty good at it. Blending in.” She puts the cigarette to her lips, speaks around it. “I was a fucking pro.”

  “At your old school?”

  “Former lifetime. Yeah.”

  She falls silent. I’m trying to think of some way to ask what happened without prying. The street starts to slope more sharply uphill. We pass a tennis court, dark and empty, flanked by trees. The lights of the houses on the next street wink through the leaves.

  “Sorry,” Ron mutters at last. “I don’t mean to be a drama queen, dragging this out. It’s just a long, stupid story that I’m not proud of. And I haven’t told anyone about it before.”

  I nod, still not speaking, afraid I’ll dissuade her from confiding in me if I say the wrong thing or sound too curious.

  “Yeah. Well. There was this girl at Lebreton last year. Mikayla. She wasn’t one of the queen bees, but you know, up there. She’d sung the lead in the musical for two years straight. And she was Gertrude. In the play. We were… I don’t know what we were. A thing. There was this party where we both had a lot to drink, and I kind of…well…I kissed her.” She clears her throat. “Okay. More accurately, we made out. And at first I was on cloud nine. Like oh my God, I kissed Mikayla. But afterward…she acted like it never happened. She was somebody, right, she couldn’t afford to get branded with the L-word. You know. Lesbian.” She draws the word out—lezzzzzzzbian—and makes jazz hands before rolling her eyes and lifting the cigarette again. “The horror.”

  She scowls for a moment, exhaling a long stream of smoke, then looks away, the corners of her mouth turning down. The silence stretches until my ears ring. I keep my eyes on my feet. I should say something, but I can’t think of anything that doesn’t sound absurd. Fake.

  “Instead she got together with this…this virus. Elliott. He didn’t even like her. Not like I did. He was always ‘teasing’ her.” Ron puts air quotes around the word. “Tearing her down piece by piece. Trying to make it look like she was the one who was lucky to be with him. I can’t have been the only one who noticed. But it was always jokes, right? God forbid anybody take something too seriously. Everyone would smile and laugh and join in. Including her. And I got a little emo over it, I guess.” She runs a hand through her hair, grimacing. “You know that scene in Hamlet where Ophelia is ranting at Gertrude about flowers and shit? Yeah. I was…convincing. It was pretty bad.”

  I can feel the space between us like it’s a solid object, a thing with edges and weight. I could cross that distance, put my arm through hers again, or around her waist. Like she reached out to me.

  “So I dropped out of the show and started hanging out with Tristan Olivier. Nihilist goth boy, most disreputable company I could find.” She waves the cigarette. “Started smoking. Which was when Mom, the great psychic, finally started to worry. God.”

  “Is that why you switched schools?”

  “Well. Part of it. People noticed me turning into a freak show, obviously. They couldn’t figure out what my problem was. Total fall from grace. And maybe I was watching Mikayla and Elliott a little too closely. You know, staring while goth. I guess I freaked her out. It morphed into, like, a million different versions, but basically the story went that I was turning into this psycho stalker. They said I’d been leaving used tampons in her gym shoes. That kind of thing. I was pretty creative, apparently.
r />   “So the last time I saw them, they were just walking across the parking lot, all nauseating, preppy couple of the year with their arms around each other. Me and Tristan were out there smoking. I was already having a bad day. And Elliott says to Tristan as they walk past us—I swear to God—he says, ‘Watch it, man, never stick your dick in crazy.’ And I kind of lost it.” Savage satisfaction creeps into her voice. “I broke his fucking nose. And he’s a lot bigger than Farrell.”

  “Come on, are you kidding? That’s amazing.”

  “Yeah, I guess it sounds good, doesn’t it?” Ron looks away. “But it’s not like it accomplished anything. Except scaring Mom into sending me to Pearson. I can still see her face. Mikayla. The look she gave me. Part of me was still hoping, you know? Stupidly. Right up until that look.” Her fingers are trembling when she takes the cigarette from her lips to exhale. “Anyway. There you go. The sad origin story of Emo Rhiannon.”

  “You can’t blame yourself for any of that,” I protest. “They were horrible to you.”

  “You weren’t there,” she sighs. “Trust me.”

  I watch her smoke, trying to find the words to argue. I want to tell her about Ingrid, but self-consciousness keeps me silent. I’m no braver than Mikayla was. And anyway, there was never anything between me and Ingrid. Just my own inability to face reality.

  “How do you do that?” I ask instead, mostly to change the subject. She gives me a quizzical look, and I mimic her gesture with the cigarette. “Doesn’t it make you cough?”

  Success; she smiles lopsidedly at me.

  “You get used to it. Don’t, though, it’s a stupid habit. Here, see, you go like this.” The point of the cigarette glows as she takes another drag. She blows the smoke out in a long, stage-whispery hiss: “Biiitchy-bitchy-bitchy-bitchy.”

  I burst out laughing, and then half choke trying to stifle it, afraid the sound clattering down the street will bring the ghost down on us again. But the echoes run out ahead of us and fade without incident back into silence and the sound of running water.

  “How’s that supposed to help anything?” I ask, keeping my voice low. Ron grins.

  “No idea. It just does. It’s a trick I learned from Tristan.” She levels a warning glare at me. “Don’t use it.”

  “Are you kidding? My parents would kill me.”

  “Yeah. Mom too. Didn’t stop me. I think she’s pretty much resigned to it by now. It was just badassery at first—war paint—but they get to you, you know?” She folds her arms across her chest again and blows smoke out through her nostrils, then makes a face when she intercepts my admiring look.

  Ron flicks the butt of her cigarette away as we crest the hill. Ahead there are cars passing back and forth, harshly lit by tall white lights looming from the median. Beyond is a long, dark stretch of park or field and a handful of dimly lit, blocky government buildings. We hurry by more regal-looking houses and jarringly vivid blue recycling bins overturned near the sidewalk. On the corner, there’s a glowing blue-and-white sign: Ottawa Hospital, Civic Campus.

  “There’s got to be a phone around here somewhere, right?” Ron throws over her shoulder. I follow her into the parking lot, past a stand of ambulances, past the glaring red letters marking the door to Emergency, through a warren of cars. And next to an antique-looking bus shelter, a pay phone stands in a pool of light.

  “Here.” Ron tips two quarters into my hand. The brush of her fingers against mine reminds me of something.

  “Wait. There was one other thing. About the ghost. It didn’t want me to touch it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Before I got back. I saw it hurting you. I couldn’t touch you, there wasn’t anything I could do to help. And I tried to grab it, make it stop.” I shift a little under Ron’s stare, drop my gaze to my feet. “I know. I wasn’t thinking very clearly.”

  “Jesus, Marianne,” she says weakly. “Who knows what could have happened; it could have eaten you or something.”

  “But it didn’t. It pulled away from me, I felt it.” Ron’s eyes haven’t left my face; she looks so impressed that I feel a little awkward, my head full of protests I don’t voice. She’s the one who stood up to it and didn’t budge. “Does that mean anything, do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” she says, rubbing her eyes. “It seems like it should. I don’t know. I can’t think straight anymore.”

  “Yeah.” I sigh. “Seriously.”

  The streetlight over the phone booth stutters, blinks back on as I push through the plastic doors. My fingers are numb and clumsy, and I have to hang up in the middle of the number and start over again.

  It goes through in the middle of the first ring.

  “Marianne, is that you?”

  It’s a woman’s voice blurting out those words all in a rush, but not my mom’s. I stand there stupidly, trying to figure out who I’m talking to.

  “…Aunt Jen?”

  “Oh my God. Thank God. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I say automatically, a knee-jerk response to the frantic edge in her voice. “I’m just out with Ron.”

  “Why didn’t you pick up your phone? I called you about a million times!”

  “It’s not really working lately,” I stammer. There’s barely any static this time. Just the faintest crackling hiss. It’s barely different from the normal sound of a phone line. It should be a relief; it’s not. Somehow the silence is not empty. There’s a tension in it, an attentiveness. Like someone listening. I clutch the receiver’s chilly silver cord. Fear skates over my skin.

  “What happened?” Aunt Jen is demanding. “Where are you?”

  “What’s wrong?” I counter instead of answering. “Where’s Mom?”

  “Oh, Mare-bear.” There are tears in her voice. I wait, paralyzed, while she fights for composure.

  “I don’t want to talk about this on the phone,” she says finally. “Where are you? I’m coming to pick you up.”

  “I can’t come home,” I whisper.

  “What was that?”

  I have to force the words out.

  “What happened? Where is my mom?”

  “Marianne,” she says at last, deliberately, obviously steeling herself. “Your mom is back in the hospital.”

  “What?” I choke.

  “She called me earlier, and she was…pretty incoherent. Worse than before. This time she didn’t even seem to know what was real. I was so worried. She just didn’t sound safe.”

  I close my eyes.

  “I had to call someone,” Aunt Jen pleads. “She was talking about knives and ghosts and I don’t know what all else. She said you were in terrible danger. I was so afraid for both of you. I had to call the police.”

  I hunch over the phone, hugging one arm across my midsection, my forehead resting on the black plastic of the case. Too late. My fault. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. Maybe I should have stayed, waited out the storm. I left her alone.

  “They took her in for a seventy-two-hour evaluation. Given her history, and…and the state of the house.”

  The tide of static is still slithering, subdued, under her voice. If I let myself, I think I can feel the weight of the ghost still with me, like it’s holding a rope tied to my wrist, standing behind me somewhere. Waiting to see how I react.

  “Marianne? Are you still there?”

  I nod at first, then shrug my shoulders, trying to shake off the feeling of being stared at. Is it my imagination? I don’t think so; I’m starting to recognize it. Like recognizing the sound of someone’s footsteps, or the way the house creaks when the door opens. Sounds you don’t notice until they start to become familiar. I will not turn around. I clear my throat.

  “Yes. Yes, I’m here. Aunt Jen, listen, I have to talk to her. Okay? I have to explain.”

  “I don’t know if that’s such a good
idea right now, Mare-bear. I…I think we need to wait until they tell us it’s safe for you. And for her.”

  I want to protest, but she’s right. Just not in the way she thinks she is. I can’t let the ghost get near Mom again.

  “Just a phone call,” I plead. “That’s all I’m asking for. Won’t they let me call her?”

  “Listen, where are you? Let me come and get you, okay?”

  I knew I was going to end up crying. I let the tears run hot down my cheeks without bothering to stop them. They send little ripples shattering across the puddle at the bottom of the phone booth.

  “Marianne?”

  “I can’t come home,” I say again, hoarsely. “I can’t.”

  “Of course you can. It’s safe now, sweetie, it’s safe to come home.”

  “It’s not! You don’t understand, I’m so scared—”

  “Now listen,” she interrupts in that firm, no-nonsense way adults get when you’ve really alarmed them. “I don’t know exactly what happened over here tonight, but I can see it must have been pretty upsetting, okay? I get that maybe you don’t want to be here right now. So we’ll go to my place.”

  “But—”

  “Marianne, the police are still here, do you understand? If you don’t tell me where you are this instant, I have to ask them to go find you. Please. Just let me pick you up.”

  And I crumble. I knuckle under. Like I always do.

  “Fine,” I whisper. “Sure. I’m at the Civic.”

  “Where? Reception? What’s the closest door?”

  “No. No, I’m outside. At a bus stop.”

  “All right. Look. Go wait by the big sign at the front entrance, okay? And then stay put. I love you.”

  How long will that last once she figures out what’s really going on? “Yeah.”

  “Okay. Stay put! I’ll be there in ten minutes.” She hangs up.

  I stand there with the phone beeping insistently in my ear. This is my fault. Because I caved and told Mom the truth, I’ve ruined everything. They’ve all written her off. Even if the hospital lets her out, custody will go straight to Dad after this. I’ll never see her again.