Turtle under Ice

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Turtle under Ice Page 2

by Juleah del Rosario


  and even though colors may fade

  and stitching unravels,

  we would still hold

  that same smell

  of being a kid.

  I guess I thought

  that even as Ariana and I

  grew older, grew bigger,

  we didn’t have to change

  for each other.

  But that wasn’t happening.

  Ariana was growing

  each day

  into a person

  I didn’t know.

  I love my sister, but

  I wanted to feel

  proud and inspired.

  I wanted to share her

  with everyone and no one.

  But the Ariana

  who was crouched on the floor

  picking up shards

  of a broken figurine

  was someone I didn’t like,

  someone with a cold, unfeeling heart,

  a bristled soul layered in ice.

  I didn’t know what she could say

  to make it better,

  because it wasn’t words

  that I wanted.

  It was action.

  “What is wrong with you?

  You’re better than this.”

  Ariana

  Even there in the bus station I can’t escape from it.

  The reminders of death. A song is playing.

  Alex’s song. The one about ghosts.

  This song is following me, I swear. The way a refrain

  gets stuck in your head and follows you

  from room to room,

  moment to moment,

  maybe days on end.

  Until it eventually fades.

  “Your student ID,” a woman at the ticket counter

  with a haggard face interrupts.

  I am struck by the normalness of it all.

  It’s just like the first time we all went to the grocery store

  after Mom died to get milk and eggs and stuff.

  The whole time, all I could think about was

  that our mom had died

  and nobody in there knew.

  Nobody knew that this was our new normal.

  I was surprised how easy

  it was to exist as a faceless child.

  A person that no one knew anything about.

  But I remember having this feeling

  that I wanted people to know.

  I am the girl with the dead mother.

  Standing in front of the ticket counter at the bus station,

  it’s like that first time all over again.

  When the woman behind the counter asks me again

  for my student ID, I have this impulse

  that I want her to know.

  I am the girl with the dead mother.

  I set the painting on the linoleum floor.

  I unzip every pocket but can’t find my ID.

  “Just give me an adult ticket,” I say.

  I’m trying to be someone more.

  The woman nods. “Bus boards in twenty minutes.”

  Row

  I stare into the empty living room

  at a quiet couch, a lonely blanket,

  and remember the time

  a bird flew into this room.

  Small with yellow and red feathers.

  It flapped its wings frantically

  and bounced from wall to wall.

  Ariana and I were alone

  with the bird.

  “You left the door open,”

  she said.

  “For two seconds. I swear.”

  I shut the door.

  The bird flew smack

  into a window and continued

  to flap around, scared

  like we were.

  “What are you doing?

  Open it back up!”

  The bird pooped on a bookcase.

  A white smear slid down

  the wooden exterior.

  A small splatter

  hit the spine

  of a book.

  “A bird poops

  every ten minutes,”

  I said, as if it were

  our call to action.

  Ten minutes until

  it poops again,

  until Dad comes home,

  until the bird flies

  into something breakable.

  Framed family photos.

  Mom’s collection of figurines.

  “I saw this in a movie,” Ariana said.

  She handed me a corner of a blanket.

  “What movie?”

  “Does it matter?”

  We unfurled the blanket like a flag

  and held both ends

  across the room,

  trying to sweep the bird,

  coax it closer to the door.

  At first it just flew over us,

  avoiding the blanket entirely.

  But then, maybe it knew

  that this strange environment

  it landed in wasn’t home.

  Maybe it missed

  the trees and the wind

  and the other birds.

  Maybe it started to feel caged

  flying from wall to wall.

  Hitting the windows,

  perching on things

  that weren’t green.

  The bird flew without coaxing

  straight out the door,

  heading for the woods,

  like it was all a temporary detour

  in bird life to see what it might be like

  to live in a house

  with the two of us.

  Ariana collapsed

  on the couch

  with the blanket.

  I plucked a book off the shelf.

  “What do you think it says

  that the bird chose

  to poop on Little Women?” I said.

  “It’s still pissed that Amy

  ends up with Laurie,” Ariana replied.

  I wiped the bird poop off with my sleeve.

  Ariana blinked hard at me. She shook her head.

  “Gotta love a sister who will wipe up literal shit.”

  I shrugged and curled up next to her

  on the couch, together reading

  the first page, silently

  holding our breath, wondering

  what it would be like

  if someone were to tell a story,

  not of four little

  white girls from New England,

  but of brown girls,

  who loved each other fiercely

  and of a world

  that didn’t get

  in their way.

  Ariana

  Our mother came from an island where it never snowed.

  She would have hated this.

  “This isn’t natural,” she would have said.

  She came from an island where families are traced

  through their mothers, grandmothers, aunties, and

  great-aunties.

  On our mother’s island, women inherited the land.

  Women had a final say in governance.

  Women defined and shaped and perpetuated the culture.

  So when the colonizers came, they were baffled.

  What are we supposed to do with an island governed

  by women?

  In the wars against the colonialists, women survived.

  Women held on with power and land and culture in

  their fists.

  I wonder how our mother would have raised us

  as young women. I wonder what she could have taught us

  about governance and power, about running a household,

  a community, a culture. I think about who she was

  before she died. The breadwinner with a fancy corporate job.

  Maybe she was trying to show us culture,

  through her place in the household with Dad.

  But there’s one other thing that women

  from the island are
supposed to do.

  Mothers are supposed to determine

  the destiny of their own children.

  The place and role children will assume in the future.

  But when your mother dies, what happens

  to your own destiny?

  Who are you supposed to be?

  What role are you to assume

  if your mother isn’t there to guide you?

  Row

  I text my sister

  wherever she is.

  There’s a lot of fricken snow outside.

  For ten, then twenty,

  then thirty seconds,

  Ariana doesn’t respond.

  Maybe it’s because I didn’t

  ask her a question.

  I text her again.

  Why aren’t you here?

  I really expect her to respond.

  I don’t even care what she says.

  Just to know that she’s out there

  thinking of me.

  We’ve been through a lot of crap.

  I get it. But I’m still here.

  I’m your sister.

  The screen starts to dim

  like a slow goodbye,

  the kind where someone says,

  Hey, I’m going now,

  before they finally leave.

  I want to believe

  that she’s going to text back,

  but there’s nothing.

  While everyone else

  is watching their mothers

  soar over them like an airplane,

  skirting around weather formations,

  showing them different routes,

  all I have is Ariana,

  who doesn’t know how to fly.

  I watch my sister approach her future

  with the reluctance

  of a train conductor,

  and while everyone else

  is flying around in airplanes,

  who is left to use the rails?

  It’s me, Ariana.

  I’m behind you.

  Stuck on this line,

  pulled along the same

  steel tracks as you.

  But if you’re not here, ahead of me,

  who am I to follow?

  How am I supposed to learn?

  Ariana

  “I don’t know what to do with you Ariana,”

  Ms. Wex said as she sat at her desk, flipping through

  a grade book after class a week ago.

  “Because you’re technically failing this class.

  You were supposed to complete a portfolio,

  tied together with a single theme.

  Like Rory’s over there.”

  Ms. Wex paused, searching for something

  more to say about Rory’s work.

  “Her theme is supposed to be letters. Like the alphabet,”

  I said. I nodded at a cubist-style painting

  of an apple and a surrealist take on a boat.

  There was a technical quality to each image,

  but nothing that screamed out with heart.

  “Five original works of art,” Ms. Wex continued.

  “That’s what I wrote on the syllabus. You have

  produced only one. And the theme?”

  Ms. Wex looked at my painting again. Her head tilted,

  in the kind of way that said, I don’t really know where my eyes

  are supposed to look, and the color is all confusing.

  “Grief,” I said. “It’s about grief.”

  “Okaaay,” Ms. Wex said, but it came out long and drawn out

  and affectless, like she could have been saying

  any other word, like “potato” or “suitcase” or “carrot.”

  “The school counselor tells me you need

  this class to graduate, so I’m giving you a chance

  to improve your grade. You won’t get an A,

  but at least you won’t fail.”

  “I might not graduate?” A lump grew in my throat.

  One that felt like it had been growing

  since the beginning of senior year,

  whenever I thought about things

  related to my future.

  Ms. Wex didn’t look up or nod or acknowledge my question.

  She scribbled on a pad of paper. Her handwriting,

  exacting. Each letter angled and pointed.

  “There’s a gallery show in the city next Saturday.

  A special exhibit for high school students.

  I’m offering extra credit for those

  who choose to participate.

  Part of being an artist is learning

  how to let your work speak for itself on display.”

  I didn’t know I was failing or that I was

  at risk to not graduate. I figured I still had time

  to produce more. Anything. To retake the class.

  How could I have been so careless to think

  that there would be more time?

  I should have known better.

  There is never enough time.

  Ms. Wex slid across a piece of paper

  with a date, a time, and an address.

  I looked at my lonely painting on the easel.

  A frayed edge of canvas.

  It looked exactly the way I intended,

  even though it took me this entire semester

  just to get over the fear of making

  this painting, that I didn’t have to

  let go of the grief; I just had to let it all out.

  I watched Ms. Wex’s eyes drift over to my painting,

  then dart back to mine. Like she was afraid of it.

  Of what it might mean and say.

  Part of me wanted to take the painting

  and shove it in a closet forever,

  but I folded up the piece of paper

  into a stubby little square

  and pocketed it in my bag.

  because maybe if I did hang it up on a wall,

  maybe if Ms. Wex, if I, if all of us,

  stared at the painting long enough,

  we would stop being so afraid.

  Row

  I know I shouldn’t put

  this much weight

  on a single text.

  But I do.

  Because every second

  Ariana fails to answer

  I worry about

  who we have

  become.

  I want us to be something

  that resembles a family.

  Like a soccer team,

  all running around a field

  in choreographed patterns,

  heading toward the same goal.

  But that’s not what our family is.

  It’s a frayed string of lights

  that someone needs to fix

  with electrical tape.

  It’s the electricity

  that can’t get to us

  because Mom’s bulb

  has burned out,

  so now the whole string is dark.

  But without the lights turned on,

  does anyone even notice

  that we are broken?

  Ariana

  The overhead storage is too narrow for my painting.

  The floor space too dirty. The seat next to me,

  not wide enough. I settle on resting the painting

  on my knees and lean it against the seat back in front of me.

  Air is blasting through tiny vents overhead,

  smelling like strangers. A guy in front of me

  eats a bag of chips, an elderly woman

  hugs a reusable bag. Her eyes dart around.

  Her shoulders fold inward. She hugs

  the bag tighter as people pass her by,

  like she’s afraid of something.

  Is it the snowstorm brewing outside?

  The safety record of the driver?

  Is it the place that she’s headed

  or what she’s leaving behind?

  O
r is she just afraid of the rest of us

  trying to steal all her stuff?

  Sometimes I wonder what people think about.

  Whether their feelings are intense, like mine,

  or completely ordinary and mundane.

  Sometimes I wonder what it might be like

  to spend a whole day thinking about small,

  insignificant things. Like the scratchiness

  of the seat fabric or the steady breeze of recycled air.

  The driver releases the brake, the bus rolls forward.

  I take a few breaths, sink down into the upholstered seats,

  trying to feel excited that I’m here,

  doing something, anything,

  not just for a passing grade,

  but to convince myself that I don’t have to be so scared

  of the future. I don’t have to be scared of the past.

  Row

  I stare at the screen, rereading

  the unanswered text.

  I think back to the first month of school.

  When the captain of the soccer team

  called out to me

  in the hall.

  She stood in the center

 

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