it was transformed.
The song ended, the crowd grew quiet, the lights
changed from yellow to blue,
and Alex stepped up to the mic.
“This one’s about ghosts.”
The drummer counted off the song.
I saw Alex glance ever so slightly
over to the empty space next to her,
like she was saying something directly to him.
Then she took her arm and she ripped it.
The chord reverberating against the floor, the ceiling,
and all the walls in the venue.
The crowd cheered, and into the mic
Alex belted out the opening lines to the song,
low and guttural, and maybe,
a music critic might write, haunting.
But it wasn’t like that for me.
Listening to the music,
feeling the sway of bodies around me,
I wasn’t transported to an otherworldly place,
where we could connect deeper, more meaningfully
with those we love and have loved.
I was eleven years old and I was stuck in the moment
where all I could hear was the sound of the frother steaming milk,
a barista’s harried voice speaking to an operator
on the other end of her cell phone,
and my mom.
My mom.
Row
I once told a therapist
that when I’m sad, I play soccer,
and she thought that was
an excellent coping strategy.
She told me about all the benefits
of exercise and endorphins
on feelings of depression,
anxiety, and stress.
Maybe if she were here now,
that same therapist
would see me pulling
on my joggers,
searching for my cleats,
throwing a ball into a bag,
and think:
This young woman is productively
applying a coping strategy to manage
her feelings of sadness.
Because that’s what
it can look like
to everyone else.
Except Kennedy.
Except Ariana.
Except me.
Ariana
Even Elisabeth Kübler-Ross doesn’t believe
in the five stages of grief, and she wrote them.
I have felt all the emotions in the Kübler-Ross model.
From bargaining to acceptance, depression to anger.
Sometimes even denial.
But Kübler-Ross admits there is no set path
to move through grief. No linear structure.
There isn’t even a contained set of emotions.
What about sardonic? What about skeptical?
What about anxiety, fear, and loneliness?
What about love?
We don’t talk enough about love. Love in relation to grief.
It hurts to think about the people we love.
It hurts so much to know that the hearts of people we loved,
once soft and pliable, are now buried in the cold, hard ground.
Row
I don’t know why
someone gets out of bed
in the middle of a snowstorm
and walks outside.
At least, I say I don’t
understand, but I do.
It’s the same reason
I’m out here
in joggers
and cleats
with new snow
falling onto
soft pillowy mounds,
and me
dribbling
fruitlessly
up and down the field.
Because something
inside us
compels us to be here,
to be there,
to be wherever
we need to be
where we don’t have to be fine.
I’m not fine.
No one was fine.
I rip a shot.
It’s six inches wide.
I look around and no one is here.
“Mom, you’re supposed to be helping.”
Ariana
“What did you think?” Alex twisted the cap
on a plastic water bottle. Beads
of condensation formed on the sides.
I couldn’t tell her that I felt like a box of loose
puzzle pieces. That I didn’t feel like I was here,
in this cramped space, behind the stage,
where guys were moving around
instruments and equipment and coiling up cables.
Someone offered us beer.
Alex shook her head. “Driving,”
she said, pointing to the water.
I took the can and cracked it open,
but left it untouched by my side.
I wondered if Alex sang to herself alone
in front of a mirror, trying to get the song right,
finding a way to sing in order to take us somewhere.
I wondered if Alex rehearsed the song about ghosts
the way that doctors rehearsed the words
they must say to a child whose mother has died.
Every hospital has a room reserved
for conversations about death.
A space with four chairs, one for each of us
but no place for Mom.
When they were playing that song
the keyboardist was pounding,
the drummer was beating,
Alex was wailing,
but I couldn’t hear any of them.
All I could hear, echoing off the walls,
were the words repeated,
“I’m sorry. I have bad news. Your mother died today.”
“What did you think?” Alex said again.
Her face was contorted. The high of being up there
onstage starting to fade.
“Do you practice singing that way?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, with all that grief?”
“Do I practice singing with grief?”
She rolled her eyes and didn’t say anything,
and maybe if I had just left it at that,
we would have never stopped talking.
“Because it looks rehearsed.”
“Seriously? You of all people are telling me
that my grief looks rehearsed.”
I felt the ends of my nerves run hot.
Alex’s brow furrowed.
Some people got stress lines on their foreheads
if they worked too hard, but Mom called them trophy lines.
Each one earned through kicking ass.
I’m stuck remembering my mom’s face.
The brow lines left permanently furrowed.
All of her trophies etched across her face
when she died.
I missed her so much. I didn’t know
what to do with the pain.
I thought I liked having a friend who understood,
but I didn’t. Alex understood in a way
that I wanted to forget.
I never felt like I had the space to move forward
with Alex, to grow beyond my grief.
I felt like that’s what she was doing with me.
Using me to help her heal but not allowing me
to do the same. I didn’t like this anymore.
“It just seems a little inauthentic,” I said.
“Ariana, stop being a bitch.
You’re better than this.” Alex stood up
and wandered over to some of her other friends.
I should have been better than this.
I should have normal reactions to watching a friend
sing a song up onstage. But I wasn’t normal,
and I wasn’t sure I was even a friend.
R
ow
Before Mom died,
she had to work late,
or needed to call a client,
or was out of town on business travel.
She never made it to a game.
But after she died, she came back.
That kind of back.
The supernatural kind.
Back to play soccer.
When the balls of my feet
run up and down
the cut-grass field,
she is there
running through me.
So clearly, so viscerally
through every pass
and every play.
And I never want
to stop playing,
stop being there
with Mom,
because when the game is over
and I leave the field,
Mom doesn’t follow.
She never drives home.
She never hugs Dad or Ariana.
She just stays trapped on the pitch,
waiting for me to return.
I never want to stop playing,
because every time I do,
it feels like
she dies
all over
again.
Ariana
“You are the last person I expected to see.
Probably ever,” Alex begins. “You said
some pretty shitty things to me. It wasn’t cool.”
Looking at Alex is like staring into a pool
of gray water of unknown depth.
“I get it,” Alex continued. “I know where
you’re coming from. The impulse to direct pain
on someone else. We could have talked about it.
“But a whole month went by
and you never once returned
any of my texts or phone calls
or even the letter I snail mailed,
not out of desperation but out of hope
that the invisible threads that held us
together would still be there.”
Alex shakes her head. She fumbles
with the pages of her book.
“You never fricken responded.
“I guess I expected you to be a better friend,”
she says low and soft, the way she sometimes sings
the band’s most poignant lyrics.
That’s what I expected from you, too, I don’t say.
I know why I stopped returning her texts, because
when I was around her I felt so one-dimensional.
I am the girl with the dead mother.
I thought I wanted a friend like Alex, not only because
she understood loss, but also because she understood
the feeling of being defined by one thing.
But that’s not who she is. When Alex was up on the stage,
she refused to be defined solely by her grief,
but I felt like I wasn’t allowed to be defined
by anything other than mine.
Outside the window, the traffic is increasing.
Buildings appear. Strip malls guide our way into the city.
“I feel like you were only friends with me
because my mom died,” I finally admit.
Alex immediately starts talking again.
“That’s not true. How could you even say that?”
The bus slows as the cars thicken.
“Ariana, you need to let go. It helps. It really does.
I miss my brother every day,
but with music, the band, and college—
life didn’t stop without my brother.”
Row
No one.
Not Dad.
Not Kennedy.
Not Ariana.
Knows about Mom.
Because Mom returned
to be with me.
But why?
Because I believe in ghosts?
Because I believed all those stories
Mom would tell us
about the dead people
who came to visit her?
“They live with us everywhere,”
she used to say to me, long before she died.
I thought she meant “us”
as in the universal.
Us as in everyone.
But maybe she only meant
“You and me.”
Not Dad.
Not Ariana.
Not anyone else in this family.
Just us.
Ariana
I pause two seconds too long, and my window
of response disappears. The words I want to tell Alex
slip back into my throat, down into my stomach,
churning and stewing alone.
Edward hovers behind Alex, clutching
a thick illustrated volume about pyramids.
“I want to eat my fruit snacks,” Edward announces.
Alex stands up, and it’s like all those invisible threads
that once connected us finally stretch too far,
finally snap,
because before she leaves, Alex says,
“Your mom died, but your life didn’t stop.
You’re just too scared to let yourself figure it out.”
Row
I shag the wayward ball
and tee it up for another shot.
It’s Mom who I can count on,
always on the field,
to be there for me.
I dribble the ball from midfield,
closing in on the goal.
“We’ll get it this time,”
I tell her.
I wind up a shot,
and when the ball hits
the sweet spot on my laces,
I know it’s going to sail in.
Upper left.
Missing the goalpost.
It hits the back of the net.
I go in for another one
and another, and there we are on the field
zigzagging lines in the snow,
smacking sick shots into the goal.
It feels so good.
Until I pause from inside the goal,
retrieving the ball,
and look out onto the white expanse.
The field is empty.
The parking lot is covered in snow.
There are trails of my footprints,
and my bag sits on a solitary bench.
No one else is here.
“Mom?”
No one answers.
“Mom, where’s Ariana?”
No one answers.
I wish that Mom could talk to me.
I wish that she could tell me what to do
about Ariana, about Dad, about Kennedy,
about pain.
But she can’t talk
because she’s dead,
and Ghost Mom never says anything.
She only plays soccer.
“Mom, I need you.”
No one answers.
Row
“Are you even here?” I shout.
No one can hear me.
“Why can’t you answer me?”
She’s dead, you idiot.
Why can’t you be here for me,
for us, for Ariana?
For six years I’ve been asking that question,
but no one will give me an answer.
Why did you have to die?
I run the ball back out of the penalty box.
My foot plants itself on the ground.
It hits something underneath the snow.
My ankle turns.
Body off-balance.
I collapse into the snow.
It’s like all those times
you fall in a game
and the ref halts the play
and your teammates gather around you
and the trainer runs onto the field
with the first-aid kit
asking you,
“Where does it hurt?”
“E
verywhere,”
you mumble.
“I didn’t catch that.
Can you say it again?”
the trainer says.
“Ankle,” you repeat.
“Just give me a minute.”
And you lie there waiting
for the throbbing to subside,
but it never does.
Eventually you pull yourself up
and hobble off the field.
You want your mom to be there
to help you, but she can’t.
Because even Ghost Mom
can’t stop the pain.
Ariana
I can live a better life if I just tried harder?
Is that what Alex is trying to tell me? Get over it.
Move on. Be more like her? Even with Alex
I feel like my grief makes her uncomfortable.
Why couldn’t she just let me be the person who I am?
Turtle under Ice Page 9