Out on the Ice

The ice always seemed too thin to him, but he had learned to ignore that fear. An unwise decision, some might say, but he had learned that fear could be a crutch. It was fear that had kept him from learning to skate; fear had killed his wife and daughter.

The blades of the skates always felt too small beneath his feet. He had tried figure skates at first, but he almost snapped his ankles. The hockey blades were thicker, but never thick enough in his mind. Cole stepped out onto the ice, trying again to skate like his wife, like his daughter.

The pond behind their house had always been there, and it would always freeze near the onset of the brutal winters they faced each year. Cole loved seeing Meredith skate on the ice from his office window on the second floor of the house. She would curve and sway and leap on the ice, graceful as a swan in flight. The ice was where she seemed most at home.

“Why do you love the ice so much?” Cole had asked her once.

She was picking up her skates for the second time that day; she always skated for a bit before work and for a longer time after she got home for the day. “Why?” she said. “It reminds me of my mother, I guess.” Meredith pushed her russet hair back into a ponytail and slipped on a knit-wool watch cap. The cap was emblazoned with the initials of her maiden name: “M.B.S.” She had worn it every winter Cole had known her.

“Why your mother?” Meredith’s mother had died before he met her. He used to joke that he was spared the pleasure of having a mother-in-law to torment about never paying the bills. Meredith chided him by saying that her mother would have helped to pay them if needed.

“She taught me how to skate. Every winter she’d take me out on the ice, ever since I was 5. Some day when we have a daughter, I’ll teach her to skate.”

“You won’t teach me?”

“If you ever wanted to try again, I might.” She smiled, knowing that he never would. The first and only time she tried to teach him, Cole had fallen and cracked his skull on the ice. The concussion blacked him out for the rest of that day and made him unsteady on his feet for the next couple days. They both knew it would take a miracle for him to get back on the ice.

As she trotted out along the path leading to the pond, Cole ran back to his warm office with his cup of hot coffee and started composing his next lecture. Every ten minutes or so, he would stop and gaze at Meredith drifting across the ice. She was a brown and black dot shifting and sliding across the white plain, carving delicate patterns into the ice. Her hair was sliding from its ponytail, eventually fanning out behind her as she leapt in the air. The lecture was focused on beauty and he thought she was demonstrating it perfectly: something superficially eye-catching, emerging from the transcendent: a girl skating fractal shapes in the ice, trying to reach her mother. Beauty makes a husband willing to die for his wife, or a father die for his child, he wrote.

That memory was years ago and seemed unreachable now as he fell on his knees for the tenth time today. “Damn it!” The curse seemed to echo beyond the trees and within his ears. Why can’t I move and stay on my feet?

He came up to his feet, well-accustomed to it by this time. Meredith glided, he thought. She just pushed off and she could drift. Auri could do the same, since she was young. She took to it so easily, “like a pig to mud,” Cole’s father would say. The skates seemed to mold to her feet; to move on them seemed easier than walking. The lightness of their feet, of their souls, he thought. How heavy I am.

Auri had been born with the name “Aurora,” and she had come in the dead of a winter’s night. Soon after she was born and started to cry, the sun broke over the trees and the snow and bathed everything in a deep ruby red. “That’s the earliest sunrise I’ve ever seen in winter,” the midwife said, and suggested her name. “After the goddess of dawn.” A bit too pagan for Cole’s liking, but Meredith thought it sounded beautiful. The wife gets what she wants, Cole thought.

On Auri’s 5th birthday, Meredith bought her a pair of skates and took her out to the pond on her shoulders. Cole stood on the sidelines with the video camera, watching his wife lace the skates. Every smile they gave him, staring into the camera, stabbed him with guilt, and asked him why he wasn’t on the ice. “Come on, Auri! Smile for the camera!” he said. Meredith gave Auri a kiss on the forehead and held her tiny mitten of a hand out on to the ice.

Cole remembered it very clearly: the shaking camera, the distant voice of his wife and the tinny chatter of his daughter. “Shift your feet, baby girl,” the mother would say. A couple of short falls, but Meredith would help her back to her feet. “Don’t step, but glide”—Auri copied her mother’s shifting and swaying, and was soon right beside her mother, free of any hand-holding—“That’s it! You’re a natural.”

The little girl in a bright red coat turned back to the camera, standing out like a blooming rose among the ice. “Come on, daddy!”

Every time Cole re-watched the video, his own voice sounded so weak and puny: “Not right now, baby girl! Maybe later.” Auri would then turn away and skate alongside her mother. The video would keep playing for another 10 minutes, the two beauties—red and brown—drifting and gliding and sliding through the deep white landscape. Cole, even five years later, still couldn’t make it to the end of the video without crying. He would delve deeper into the blanket wrapped around his shoulders and cry by himself in his office.

He fell again with a tremendous thwack. The popping of broken ice echoed in his ears. Its proximity made it seem loud enough to be a gunshot. Crrr-ACK! The cracks were near him; a twitch of the knee and he felt the rough ice underneath him. Shit, he thought. What now?

Don’t lose your head, he heard. Meredith was talking. Maybe it was a conversation he was remembering for the first time in years. Maybe it was her ghost. Don’t they always hang around places that were important to them? He heard her voice; that was all he knew. Don’t lose your head. Stay spread out. You stand up and you focus your weight on one spot, you’re going to make the crack bigger. Stay on your stomach, sweetheart. Now he knew she wasn’t speaking to him. She never called him sweetheart. That was for Auri only.

He never came on the ice when they skated, but he was always close by. He loved watching the two of them play and chatter with each other. They would race across the ice, and spin and twirl, Auri always copying her dear mother. One day, Auri tried to copy her mother and couldn’t make the landing. She came down on a thin patch of ice and it cracked under her small weight. Cole saw his daughter lying on her stomach, trying to come to her feet, but Meredith stopped her. He felt the urge to run out and pick her up, but then the thought of the ice crept into his mind. What if there are more thin patches? What if I catch one? What if I fall through? Then what? By the time he found the resolve to take the first step on the ice, Auri was backing away and on her feet again.

He tried to remember the rest of that conversation, but all he could remember was the shame he felt afterwards. He managed to back himself away from the crack and scramble back to his feet, but even once he was standing, he couldn’t skate.

Cole felt eyes on him. On the shore, there was a figure in a dark coat. A woman, with russet hair and a wool cap with the initials “M.B.S.” This isn’t real, he thought. This has never been real.

A sharp pain struck him in the chest; her eyes pierced him. She could read and know his weaknesses; she knew firsthand the fear he felt.

“Nice job helping your daughter,” she said that night.

“You had it covered,” he said, dragging the sponge across another dinner plate. Washing the dishes was typically a time he could think. Not tonight.

“But you didn’t even move,” she said. Meredith leaned against the counter, trying to look into his eyes. She would turn her head and shift her weight, trying, for once, to catch a good glimpse at his eyes, at his soul.

Cole kept glancing away. Looking at her was just another stab of shame in his chest. Why didn’t I run? Why didn’t I at least try to help? he thought. “What was I going to do?” he said.

“Try to help your daughter.”

He stopped scrubbing. “And do what? Hit another thin patch and fall through? Or fall and black-out again? What good would that do?”

“That’s what you were worried about? What about that paternal impulse? Sacrificial love you always talk about in your lectures. Where was that?” She was off the counter now.

“Just a theory, dear.” Meredith grabbed his shoulders and turned him to face her. “Don’t touch me!” He threw his arms out and brushed off her hands.

Her face was contorted in disgust, confusion, and anger; her mouth was agape, and her face was flushing with a rush of blood. “If something had gone wrong, if that ice was just a bit thinner, your daughter could have died. And yet still, you didn’t move an inch. What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Just thinking logically.” He turned away, but she pulled him back. He threw her off and pushed her away. She tripped over herself and fell to the floor. “Don’t touch me.”

“You were just scared, weren’t you? Scared of the ice? You were too afraid to help your own daughter.” Meredith clambered to her feet and straightened her sweater. “You’re just a coward, aren’t you?”

“I don’t have to listen to this.” He threw the rag in the sink and pushed past Meredith out of the kitchen.

As he left the kitchen and went for the front door, Meredith called after him: “Where are you going?”

“Out for a drive!”

The roads were clear that evening, an unusual but welcome occurrence. The truck never drifted or lost traction, and Cole felt he could drive forever. At times, he wanted to. He had dreams every now and again of packing up the car and leaving for a while. But then there was the fear…fear of the ice, fear of the unknown, and the ever-increasing fear of his wife and her anger. He had seen it in her face: the occasional glance at him when he cautiously merged into traffic, or refused to ride a roller coaster, or wouldn’t take an exotic trip where he had the slightest chance of contracting a foreign illness. She had grown tired of his fears, he knew that much. He just wondered if she would soon grow tired of him.

Lost in his own mind, Cole didn’t take notice the car that passed by him, heading towards his house. He didn’t see the man who would break into his house and kill Meredith and Auri. He wouldn’t notice anything until he came home from the drive.

The door was ajar and waving with the gentle force of the winter wind. The footprints around the corner of the house were lit up by the floodlights near the door, and Cole at first thought never of it. Just beyond the threshold of the door was the first shattered vase. The dent in the wall was from Meredith’s attempt to hit the intruder. There were more shards near her body. Her stomach had been blown apart and the remnants of her organs were splattered across her sweater. The red of the fabric was only darkened by the blood.

Cole ran to her and picked her up in his arms. Blood ran through his shirt as he held her tight, trying to whisper and apologize to her deaf ears. Underneath the tears and wailing, he thought of Auri. Where is she? Is she all right? He tried to calm himself and listen, but he couldn’t stop his tears. He raised his head and saw a mound on the landing of the steps, half-lit. Auri? He placed his wife on the floor and ran to the landing.

Auri’s body was covered in bruises and her jaw looked crooked and broken. Cole thought she had been beaten to death. Some of her baby teeth were scattered next to her head, mixed in among the bloodstains on the carpet. He wanted to embrace her, to pick her up from the floor and press her to his breast, but she looked frail enough that if he even touched her, she would shatter into pieces.

As Cole knelt down to embrace his daughter (she can’t be broken any worse, he thought), he saw the killer. He wore black coveralls and he had a shotgun in his hand. A sack stretched across his back jangled with bits of finery and jewelry. The double crunch of the shotgun expending a shell almost made Cole soil himself. “You going to kill me?” Cole said. “Then do it.”

The killer came closer and put the shotgun between Cole’s eyes. The muzzle was warm. Cole hoped he’d pull the trigger. Just end it, he thought. Just end the whole damn thing. He closed his eyes, hoping to never open them again.

The warmth of the muzzle left his forehead. He opened his eyes and the killer was walking past him, stepping over Auri’s body. Cole didn’t even try to stop him. When he reached the bottom of the stairs, Cole called to him. The killer turned, back loaded with his plunder. “Why not me?”

The killer shrugged. He removed the bloody covers from his shoes and traipsed out into the night.

Cole called the police and reported the murder, but when he was asked to describe the killer, he couldn’t do it. “He looked like me,” he said. The police interpreted it as a physical description (white, brown hair, about 6 foot tall), but they were wrong. Whenever Cole looked in the mirror after that night, he’d see the killer again; the deadness of his eyes almost matched the killer’s.

His wife and daughter buried, he was left with nothing. Nothing but a house and a pond that froze thick in the winter. So one day, deep in the winter of nightmares, hallucinations, and voices, he laced up the skates and set out on the ice. It wouldn’t bring them back, he knew that. But he thought that maybe he could make the torments stop; he thought that hell had frozen over and that maybe he could learn to skate out of it.