by Donna Milner
But it’s too late. Beneath Julie’s feet the lake groans in protest. In the split second before the ice gives way, Julie sees it coming, as clearly as if this has all happened before. But she is powerless to stop it. It happens in less than a heartbeat. In one moment her world is filled with afternoon twilight, swirling snow, the image of a bear, and Pup’s howling pleas, and the next, she is plunged into a black nothingness. Before her brain can make sense of what’s happening, the shock of cold hits and the frigid water sucks her deeper and deeper. She kicks frantically against its icy grip. Her lungs screaming for air, not knowing if she is up or down, she struggles until she feels her head break though the surface, feels air on her face, hears Pup’s howls. In a panicked gasp she sucks in water, and is pulled back under, her heavy jacket, her boots weighing her down. She searches madly for them, trying to kick them free, but cannot locate her own feet. Struggling against the inevitable, feeling the penetrating cold sapping her strength, paralyzing her body, she gives one last futile kick. Her head bumps up against something solid. Her heart and lungs ready to explode, she reaches up, blindly searching with unfeeling fingers for the opening in the ice above her.
And then suddenly, in the black silent depths a pinpoint of light appears, and a peaceful warmth, a lightness of being, floods through her. She stops struggling. There is no more fear. No more urgency. Surrendering, she reaches toward the light and sinks slowly down into the murky depths.
54
“You have to go back.”
“Darla!”
“You can’t stay here, Mom.”
“Oh my God! Darla, where are you?”
“I don’t know how to explain it.” Where is Mr Emerson when I really need him? “I can only tell you that I’m here, somewhere on the edge of forever, waiting for you to let go, to let me move on.”
“Oh, Darla, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I couldn’t save you.”
“I didn’t need to be saved, Mom. Nothing you, or Dad, or Levi, could have done would have changed my date with destiny. My life, my purpose, on earth, was over.”
“So is mine now.”
“No, it’s not; you have to go back to your life.”
“Please. Let me stay with you. I don’t want to return to a world without you.”
“You’re never without me. The only thing that separates us is time.” How can I explain that here, in this in-between place, time is not linear, but concurrent, eternal. That our lives on earth are nothing more than a breath in eternity? I can’t.
“I’m ready now, Darla, I’m not afraid to die if only I can be with you.”
“It’s not your time, you still have so much to do on earth.”
“Please, no. It’s too painful.”
“Pain is the price we pay for love during life’s journey. No one escapes it.” I no longer question these thoughts manifesting themselves as I need them. Neither does Mom—the reversal of our roles is as natural as if it has always been this way. Maybe she knows more than she realizes.
“If you give up now, if you don’t pull yourself back up onto that ice, Levi will be lost forever.”
“Levi? I forgave him.”
“He didn’t ask for your forgiveness. If he needed that he could have told you about the rose.”
“The rose?”
“The reason I took off my seatbelt.” He didn’t tell Mom because he was afraid that it would hurt her too much. But I would rather she blamed a rose for what happened, than Levi. So I tell her about the yellow rose falling out of my hair, taking off my seatbelt to reach for it, splashing the beer over Levi, causing him to brake. I tell her everything that Levi couldn’t bring himself to. “Levi needs much more than your forgiveness, Mom.” And then I tell her about his determination to help me reach the spirit world. About his secret sweat lodge, the danger in his plan—the danger hidden in the rocks.
“You are the only one who can stop him. The only one who can release him from his promise to bring me home safely.”
“It’s too late.”
“It’s not too late. You can go back and stop him.”
“Please, let me stay with you.”
“I know you would die for me, Mom. But will you live for me?”
55
Her eyelids slowly flutter open. The vague memory of a dream she doesn’t want to let go of slips away into the murky green light. Through a veil of watery half-vision the green hues turn into curtains. Beyond an opening in those curtains, a large wall clock takes shape, its minute hand soundlessly clicking off the seconds. She lets her gaze stray downward, to the blankets covering her—their warmth radiating throughout her body—and to the head resting in folded arms on the edge of the bed.
“Ian?” Her voice comes out a hoarse whisper.
His head jerks up. His silver hair sticking up at odd angles, his swollen eyes searching her face, he chokes, “Oh God! Julie, you’re awake.” He reaches up to touch her cheek.
“Where am I?”
“In the hospital.”
“How...?”
The curtain snaps back and a white-coated doctor steps in. “Well, back with us, are you?” he asks picking up a chart at the foot of the bed.
Ian reaches for his crutches, but is waved to stay in his seat by the doctor. “This won’t take long,” he says removing the stethoscope from around his neck and placing it in his ears.
While she’s being examined Julie searches Ian’s face. Beyond the relief etched into his furrowed brows, she senses something different. And then she realizes that the difference is not in him, but in her. Something is missing. The resentment, the bitterness she has carried for so long is no longer there. Looking into Ian’s eyes, she is filled with comforting warmth that goes beyond the warmth being forced into her body by the intravenous tubes, the heated blankets.
“That was pretty clever of you,” the doctor says replacing the stethoscope around his neck. “Hoisting yourself up onto the edge of the ice like that.”
Julie looks from Ian to him. She has no idea what he’s talking about.
He pulls another instrument from his pocket and clicks on the light. “If your jacket sleeves hadn’t frozen to the ice,” he says leaning forward, “you would certainly have slipped back under when you lost consciousness.”
Trying to make sense of what he’s saying, she lets him move her head from one side to the other to peer into her ears. Satisfied, he gently lifts one of her eyelids and says, “Look into the light.”
And the fragmented memories come flooding in with his words. She tries to sort through the vague details of the dream, the hallucination, whatever it was, as the light moves from one eye to the other.
The doctor straightens up, clicks off the instrument and replaces it in his pocket. Julie only half hears him speaking about hypothermia, about bringing her core temperature up a few more degrees. She glances beyond him at the wall clock. Nine o’clock. Morning? Night? She has no idea how long she has been unconscious. Her last clear memory is of walking out onto the frozen lake, in a blur of swirling snow.
“We’ll just keep an eye on her for a few more hours,” the doctor says to Ian. “But I’m pretty certain they’ll be no reason you can’t take her home in the morning.” He smiles down at Julie. “You’re a lucky lady.”
After he leaves, she turns toward Ian. “I went through the ice.”
“Yes,” he says. He leans down to press his lips on her fingertips. But not before she sees the unasked question in his eyes. Why?
“Ian?” she whispers to the top of his head, “I need to ask you something.”
Without looking up he squeezes her hand.
“If there were no me,” she asks, “would you still sell the ranch?”
His lifts his head, his red-rimmed eyes searching hers. “If there were no you,” he says, “I would be devastated.”
Julie swallows back the lump in her throat. “I don’t know why I walked out onto that ice,” she says holding his gaze. “I can’t tell you in all honesty that it w
asn’t on purpose. But I can promise that you will never have to worry about me doing anything like that again.”
Ian lowers his head, saying, “We don’t need to talk about this right now.”
She places her hand onto his face. “Darla was there,” she tells him. “When I was under the ice... Darla spoke to me.”
She feels him stiffen. Feels him withdrawing into wherever he goes whenever their daughter’s name is mentioned.
“Listen to me, Ian,” she says gently. “I don’t want to leave the ranch, or you. But what I can’t do anymore, what I won’t do, is continue on without being able to share Darla’s memory. Isolation is more than a place. We can’t go on together, out in the Chilcotin, or anywhere else, without Darla’s memory being a part of who we are.”
Ian slumps back in his chair, dropping his head into his hands. Julie reaches over and strokes his hair. “We need to celebrate her life, the time she spent with us, instead of dwelling on her death. I need to be able to say her name out loud, without fear that the reminder is too painful, for you, or for me.”
Ian raises his head, his face a mask of anguish. “I don’t need reminding,” he chokes. “I go to bed every night with her name in my mind and wake up every morning seeing her face.” He brushes away a tear. “And every time I look at you, I am reminded that if I had been there that night, if I had not made such a stupid meaningless choice, Darla would still be alive.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” she says. “I’m sorry, so sorry that I held onto my anger at you for so long. Anger is easier to deal with than grief, I guess. But it wasn’t anyone’s fault. Not yours, not mine, not Levi Johnny’s. Nothing any of us did would have changed what happened. I know that now. Your being home, or not being home, the door being locked or unlocked, made no difference. Darla made me see that.
“We need to move on, Ian, for Darla’s sake, for ourselves, we have to let go of all the useless remorse. Our love for Darla didn’t die with her. That we can hang onto.”
Ian pushes himself up and takes Julie in his arms. His face pressed against hers, he whispers into her hair, “I miss her so much.”
“I know,” she replies, and for the first time the tears she feels flowing down her cheek belong to them both.
There is so much more to say. But now is not the time. Perhaps someday she will be able to tell Ian about how their daughter—a wiser, older, more complete Darla, she realizes now—convinced her to make the choice to live. Through the clearing fog of memory, she recalls begging to see her one more time, and an answer coming from somewhere in the darkness, ‘look into the light.’ And when she did, the pinpoint of light grew and Darla appeared. Wearing the costume from the play that night, a yellow rose pinned into her hair, she had smiled so peacefully that Julie felt the lightness of acceptance replacing the hot stone of sorrow she had carried for so long. A dream? Perhaps. But the promise she made to Darla within that dream, she will keep—the promise to return to life, not simply to endure, but to live with purpose.
With a start, she tries to sit up but there is no energy in her body. She reaches for Ian’s hand, asking, “How did I get here?”
“Virgil and Levi,” he says. His fingers interlock with hers, he explains how Virgil’s dog had become so agitated by what they thought was a pack of wolves howling, that they had followed him out to the road and spotted her tracks in the snow. They took the van to investigate, and Pup’s howling had led them to where she lay, half in and half out of the frigid water. With Virgil on one end of a rope, Levi had tied the other end around his waist and crawled across the ice to her.
She has no memory of being pulled out, carried to the van, or of Virgil stripping her of her wet clothes to wrap her in a sleeping bag.
“Your body temperature was so low, the hypothermia so set in, that you barely had a heartbeat by the time they found you,” Ian says, his voice catching. “Virgil crawled into the sleeping bag with you to warm you while Levi drove back to the house.”
“I called the Champion ranch. Thank God your friend Terri was home,” he says, pushing a hand through his hair. “Twenty minutes later she landed her ski-plane in front of the house. You were in the hospital emergency room less than an hour after you were pulled from the lake.”
As the story unfolds Julie realizes that she owes her life to the three of them, especially Virgil and Levi. Levi? She owes him even more. She struggles to sit up again. “Where are they? I need to speak to Levi.”
“What you need is rest.”
“No! I have to see him. It can’t wait. We’ve got to find him.”
“Don’t worry, he’s right here—out in the waiting room with Virgil and Terri. You can thank them all later.”
“Please, Ian,” she begs, “go out and ask them to come in.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, it’s important. It can’t wait. Please.”
Reluctantly, Ian gives into the urgency in her voice. Before he leaves, she asks him to raise the head of the bed. She needs to be able to look into the boy’s eyes.
Waiting nervously she begins to question her own memory. How was it possible for Darla to have told her so much in the brief time she was under the ice? Was it nothing more than a dream, an illusion brought on by her oxygen-deprived brain? She tries to recall the exact words, the sound of Darla’s voice as she spoke to her. Spoke? No, not really, her voice had not come from outside of Julie, but from somewhere within. It had all seemed so real moments ago, but now she is beginning to doubt. Had she only imagined it all?
And then in a moment of clarity it comes to her that it doesn’t really matter. Levi is in trouble, she saw that the moment he walked into Virgil’s cabin. Whether she only imagined her encounter with Darla or not, she will keep her promise to release him from his.
Ian returns to her side, and right behind him the boy appears between the opening in the curtains, followed by Virgil and Terri. The strain of the day’s events etched on their faces, they stand timidly at the foot of her bed.
Terri is the first to speak. “Well, Girl, that’s not exactly how I planned to take you on your first flight over the Chilcotin.”
“Next time I promise I’ll stay awake.”
“Darn tootin,’” Terri replies, failing to conceal the catch in her throat.
Julie leans back on her pillow. “Thank you,” she says, looking from one to the other. “Thank you all for my life.” Her gaze rests on Virgil’s face. She is unable to read if the expression in his dark eyes is relief, or exhaustion. “The healing circle?” she asks him. “Is it possible to do one here? Now?”
Following his mute acknowledgement they all join hands around her bed. Julie meets the boy’s tortured eyes. She smiles softly at him and says, “I see you, Levi Johnny, friend of Darla’s.”
56
The heady aroma of roast turkey and mincemeat pie permeates the ranch house air. The haloed sparkle of multicoloured Christmas tree lights shine from the darkened living room as Julie carries the glistening, oversized bird into the dining room. She sets the heavy platter down ceremoniously in front of Ian—who is wearing a walking cast now—at the head of the table.
“Just a second, everyone,” she says, rushing over to the corner where she has set up her tripod. Ignoring the mock groans, she focuses the camera and then quickly takes her seat. The delayed flash goes off and the chatter around the table resumes. Julie catches the reflection of the scene in the plate-glass windows, just as she had on their first night in this house. How things have changed since then. As if reading her thoughts her sister, Jessie, winks at her, while her brother-in-law, Barry, banters with Ian about the correct way to carve a turkey. Julie smiles and looks down the table, at her nieces, Emily and Amanda, sitting in their red velvet Christmas dresses, eyes wide at the enormous size of the drumsticks, which have been promised to them.
Until the moment the girls had arrived, and she held them in her arms again, smelled the child’s innocence in their hair, Julie had no idea of just how m
uch she has missed them, how much of Darla lives on in them. Now, watching their grandmother lean over to fuss with the ribbon in Emily’s hair she is reminded of how her mother used to fuss over Darla’s hair in the same way. Now, satisfied with the newly straightened bow, she looks up, meets Julie’s eyes and asks, “Grace?”
Julie nods, and lowers her head. Why not? She has a lot to be thankful for. It makes no difference what name is used, God, the Universe, the Holy Spirit, the Great Spirit; she knows there is something larger to give homage to.
With eyes closed, she listens to the rote words of gratitude for the abundance of food, for time spent with family, and then looks up with a start, when her mother concludes with, “And we give thanks for the memory of our beautiful Darla, who is with us all now. Amen.”
At the other end of the table, Julie catches the flicker that crosses Ian’s face. He still struggles with hearing their daughter’s name, she knows, but he is trying. That’s all she can ask. He meets her gaze, then returning her smile, he looks over to his mother-in-law and says, “Thanks, Mom.” Then he pushes his chair back, stands up with the carving knife and fork in hand and commences “butchering”—according to Barry’s teasing—the turkey.
Heaping platters of food are passed from hand to hand, and in the din of the rising conversation, Julie leans to her mother and asks, “Do you remember how excited Darla was about the Obama campaign, Mom?”
“I certainly do.”
“Can you imagine how thrilled she would have been over the results—about the inauguration next month?” Julie says, spooning mashed potatoes onto her plate. “She would have been especially excited to share that with you.” She passes the bowl of potatoes to her mother. “So I’ve been thinking,” she looks back to the head of the table, “well, Ian and I are wondering, if you’d like to stay for a few more weeks after Christmas so we can all watch the inauguration ceremony together.”
Her mother’s hand freezes mid-air. She recovers quickly, accepts the bowl, smiles, and says, “Nothing would make me happier, Dear.”
