Turtle under Ice

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Turtle under Ice Page 11

by Juleah del Rosario


  “But as a girl. Like you.

  Who lost her mother.

  “Someone you think you know,

  but you don’t.

  “Someone who isn’t going to love you

  unconditionally.

  “Someone you have to care for.

  Feed and water.”

  “Like friendships,” I say.

  “Yep. Like friendships.”

  Row

  I wanted to keep us the same, Ariana and me.

  Even after our world had already changed.

  But maybe that safety. That lack of evolution.

  It kept me from growing. From noticing.

  From understanding

  that you can’t control what you have.

  You can only breathe and exist

  in the present.

  Ariana

  Because part of me knew that to hold this painting.

  To hang it against a wall. To create it. To dig down deep,

  it meant letting go.

  Not only of Mom, but of the part of me

  that maybe wanted to remain the girl

  who saw her mother die.

  I had to let go of being solely defined by that moment.

  I had to figure out what happens to the girl

  after she leaves the scene.

  Because no matter how many miles I traveled,

  how many years have passed,

  I am still that girl, living in a state of limbo

  between the moment my mother lived and my mother died

  and as a result, I’ve become the one hovering

  between the moment of life and death.

  But this painting, it’s my way of saying,

  not to the world, but to myself, it’s time.

  Time to take a deep breath, time to swim

  and start to notice what kind of person I am.

  Who I can be, not as a girl without a mother,

  but as a young woman

  who has lived through something

  and continues to live through everything.

  I unwrap the brown paper from the canvas

  and take the painting and center it on the wall.

  Then I leave it there hanging

  and walk to the other side of the room,

  where there are drinks and snacks set out on a table,

  and a few of the other students are mingling.

  “Hi. I’m Ariana.” I outstretch my hand,

  and a boy still wearing his beanie and scarf

  extends his hand toward me, nodding back at the wall.

  “Dope painting.”

  Row

  We hear an announcement

  that the bus is approaching the station.

  “What if I can’t find her?

  What if I do and she doesn’t want me?”

  Kennedy nods slowly

  but doesn’t respond.

  She takes me in her arms.

  An announcement

  is telling me to board.

  Kennedy squeezes me hard.

  “It’s gonna be okay,”

  she whispers,

  and even though so many people

  have said this to me

  for my entire life,

  it feels different coming from Kennedy.

  This time it feels true.

  Ariana

  I thought that because of the snow, people wouldn’t be here.

  But they are. The room is alive. Crowded and pulsing.

  A middle-aged woman bumps into me. Wine spills on her shawl.

  “Sorry,” I say to her, and look around for a napkin.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she says. “It was my fault.”

  She flips the shawl over her shoulder.

  The stain lost in the draping.

  I watch the parents studying their child’s work.

  I see siblings growing restless in a room with too many people.

  I see Rory and her brother. I see the multicolored-hair girl

  in front of her caution tape. I see her wrapping herself

  in her caution tape,

  and I look toward the door, at the windows outside,

  where taxicabs slow and some stop. Where strangers pause

  in front of the gallery and consider walking in,

  and I see Row, bundled in a thick puffy jacket

  and sweatpants, reaching for the door handle,

  wanting to be let in.

  Row

  I spot her immediately.

  Her hair is limp and flat

  around the crown,

  and dark shadows

  hang under her eyes.

  But her mouth is stretched

  across her face,

  and she’s laughing.

  It’s not the image

  I anticipated seeing

  of my sister.

  But I’m not sure

  what I was expecting.

  She sees me

  from across the room

  and starts walking toward me.

  She’s still smiling.

  I don’t move.

  I don’t want to ruin

  this moment.

  I had a lot of time

  on the bus down here

  to think about what to say.

  Her face is neither

  happy nor sad

  nor perplexed.

  It’s focused.

  Determined.

  As she approaches,

  my lip starts to quiver.

  I bite it hard.

  Scrunch my face.

  But I can’t help it.

  There’s an arm’s length of

  distance between us,

  but her closeness feels

  like she’s already touching me.

  Then she’s there.

  “I thought you left me,” I cry.

  Her arms wrap around me.

  Pulling me into her sweater.

  Maybe people are staring.

  Maybe they’ve stopped talking.

  Maybe they’re trying to ignore

  the weird girls who are hugging

  and crying in the middle of this otherwise

  ordinary event.

  But I can’t tell

  what is happening

  in the rest of this room,

  because Ariana is holding me,

  saying, “It’s okay.”

  After a moment, I wriggle

  out of her arms, wipe the snot

  on the cuff of my sleeve.

  Ariana hands me a crumpled napkin.

  I blow into it hard.

  “Why didn’t you tell me

  where you went?

  I was worried.”

  Ariana looks at her feet.

  Mom used to have the same look

  on her face after she missed

  yet another one of my games.

  The way Mom’s face changed

  when I asked her

  if she could make the next one.

  It wasn’t a look of guilt or regret.

  It was a look of truthfulness.

  She wouldn’t make it,

  because she loved

  and was enlivened

  by her job.

  She wasn’t the type of mother

  who would schedule around work

  or drive her kids to practice.

  I know that’s why I hold on to her

  on the field. Because I want Mom

  to be the person who showed up

  to my games.

  I want to feel her in my heart

  each time I strike the ball.

  Mom loved us, fiercely,

  but she was a person

  with hopes and dreams,

  fears and flaws,

  like her daughters.

  I think about

  what Kennedy said.

  What would I say

  to a girl who also

  lost her mother?

  I wish I had the right words

&nb
sp; to say.

  People brush past us,

  but we can’t change

  how we feel just because

  the room shifts around us.

  “I’m scared of losing you.

  I’m scared of us changing.

  I know that you will someday

  leave. I know that we both

  will change,

  but it’s scary.”

  Ariana doesn’t say anything for a moment.

  She hesitates to get her words out.

  “I’m scared too,” she says.

  “To let go, to become a person

  whose life drifts farther away

  from the moment Mom died.”

  Ariana pauses.

  “I’m afraid of being

  a bad role model,

  a disappointment

  to you. I thought

  you deserved someone

  perfect, but I can’t be that.”

  I snort. “Ariana. I know

  you’re not perfect.

  If you were perfect,

  you would let me

  listen to all of my

  soccer podcasts on the way

  to school.”

  Ariana shakes her head.

  “Yeah, not gonna happen.

  But seriously,” she continues,

  “I made an eight-year-old cry today.

  I said things that hurt him.

  It wasn’t all that different

  from how I might have hurt

  you and Dad and Maribel

  after learning about the miscarriage.

  Or not telling you where I went today.”

  She pauses. “We have the capacity

  to be cruel, if we let the pain consume us.

  “But it isn’t an excuse. My pain

  doesn’t give me the right

  to inflict pain on someone else.

  “I think the truth is,

  I wanted to remain the same,

  the younger me, frozen in the moment

  with too many emotions I didn’t know

  how to deal with when Mom died,

  because I was too scared

  to be someone different,

  maybe better, maybe changed.”

  I reach out and hug her.

  She smells like

  laundry detergent

  and pancakes

  and sisters.

  “We both changed,” I say.

  “But maybe sometimes

  we couldn’t see it

  in each other,

  or in ourselves.”

  She squeezes me so tight,

  and I never want to let her go,

  but I know I will have to, someday,

  and when it happens

  it will be okay.

  “Do you want to see my painting?”

  Ariana whispers.

  I drop my arms and look around the room.

  “Yeah. Of course. Why do you think

  I’m here?” I smile.

  Ariana

  There is a girl around my age standing in front of my painting.

  When we get closer, I see a tear running down her cheek.

  We stand in front of the painting.

  Next to the girl we don’t know.

  And the more all of us stare at the painting,

  the more I feel something.

  Eyes stinging. A lump gathering in my throat.

  Row wipes at her cheek, and so does the stranger next to us.

  Maybe the stranger cries for her mother.

  Maybe she cries for her sister.

  Maybe she cries for a grandparent or friend.

  But it is unmistakable looking at the painting.

  When you know grief, you see it too.

  In colors. In paintings. In the faces of strangers.

  When the stranger senses us standing next to her,

  she tries to quickly wipe the tears off her cheek,

  but when she looks over at us,

  she stops and goes back to looking at the painting

  sinking back into her place of feeling

  loss and grief and maybe

  a sense of understanding.

  Row

  There’s someone from the gallery,

  dressed in all black,

  walking around the room,

  going up to everyone.

  The woman hands me

  a sticky-note pad.

  “What do you see?”

  “Huh?”

  She hands me a pen.

  “Write it on a sticky note.”

  She hands one

  to the girl standing next to us,

  another to Ariana.

  I see Mom staring back

  at me through

  the various shades

  of green.

  Just like the way

  she is on the soccer field.

  Except so incredibly different.

  Mom is a brushstroke.

  Mom is a mix of brown paint.

  “She’s everywhere,” I say quietly.

  Ariana’s face is surprised.

  Like she doesn’t realize

  that I see her too.

  Then she nods at her painting.

  “She’s here.”

  I rip off a bright orange

  sticky note

  and write,

  Mom.

  But the girl next to us,

  the stranger,

  she scribbles

  something too.

  She walks up to Ariana’s painting

  and places her note on the wall,

  next to the placard with the title that reads

  TURTLE UNDER ICE.

  She smooths down the note,

  makes sure it sticks,

  then moves on

  to the next painting.

  Ariana and I walk closer

  together,

  to see what it says,

  until we are close enough to read,

  I see hope.

  Row

  There was one winter

  it got real cold

  in California. So cold

  that the ground froze.

  The puddles. The ponds.

  Bundled in layers of clothes

  and thick jackets,

  Mom, Ariana, and I

  went outside for a walk.

  We came across a frozen pond.

  Beneath the ice something was trapped.

  I pointed to the dark spot in the water.

  “A turtle under ice,” Mom said.

  I crouched down

  at the edge of the pond,

  the hard ground holding me.

  “It lives there?” I asked.

  Mom nodded.

  “It doesn’t hibernate

  or bury itself in the mud

  or wander south

  for the winter?” Ariana asked.

  Mom shook her head.

  “It stays put in its pond,

  breathing underwater.”

  “Will it die?” I said.

  She kissed the top of my head

  and squeezed my hand.

  “The winter can’t stop

  a turtle under ice

  from swimming,”

  she said.

  I watched the cross-hatched shell

  move so slowly under all that ice.

  “No one can stop us

  from swimming,” I replied.

  Ariana

  Maybe not everyone gets my painting.

  Maybe they don’t see the ice.

  Maybe they don’t even see the turtle.

  I tried to paint it from memory. The refractions of light

  under the ice, in colors of green and yellow,

  reflections of red.

  The large brown lump taking up nearly

  the whole canvas. Like you’re looking down

  on it from above. The way we saw the turtle.

  But someone saw something that even I didn’t see


  in the water, under all that ice.

  Maybe hope is like a turtle under ice

  breathing through its shell,

  through its biochemistry, still alive.

  Maybe hope waits for spring to come, for the ice to thaw

  for the weight of the pond that encapsulates us

  to melt into nothing.

  But maybe we are not meant to wait for springtime.

  Maybe, instead, we are meant

  to break the ice

  and be free.

  Acknowledgments

  This book was not easy to write, and this one in particular is the result of so much love, support, patience, and understanding of so many people. I am grateful to all my friends and family who stood on the sidelines as cheerleaders through this process, helping this book get here into your hands.

  First off, thank you so much to my enormously supportive and patient editor, Jennifer Ung, who read some seriously wild versions of this novel—stuff that will forever be lowered to the bottom of a desk drawer—yet still believing in me and trusting that eventually the heart of the story would come through. The core of the story, the journeys of Ariana and Row, would not have gotten here without your focused attention and dedication.

 

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