“Mare-bear, get up, there’s—” She gasps as the door splashes through the water on the floor, and lets out a wail. “Oh, look at this!”
“It wasn’t me!” I cry. “I don’t know where it came from!”
“Well of course, of course it wasn’t you! Why would I think that?” She reaches a placating hand toward me. “Don’t cry, sweetie, it’s okay. A pipe must have burst. Or maybe it’s the roof, with all this rain. I’ll call the landlord right away. It’s okay, Mare-bear, it’s—”
“My name is Marianne!”
My shout brings her up short, but only for a moment; she splashes across the floor, pulls me gently, insistently to my feet in the knife-cold water, wraps her arm around my shoulders to lead me from the room. I wipe my eyes, feeling guilty, feeling stupid. She may as well call me Mare-bear. Look at me, crying and needing a hug.
Behind us, the lamp on the nightstand crashes to the floor.
• • •
We sit on the couch while the maintenance guys clank around the furnace room, troop up and down the stairs. I can feel Aunt Jen looking at me, but I keep my eyes on my hands. They declare the drywall in my room shot, make noises about checking the insulation, set up huge clattering fans.
“Damnedest thing,” one of them tells Aunt Jen. “I mean, the ceiling’s dry. And there’s a lake up on the roof, all right, but it’s on the other side of the building. And all the pipes are fine, but they’re across the hall anyway. So where the hell did it come from?”
“I guess that’s what you get with an old building,” Aunt Jen responds helplessly.
“Well,” she sighs with half a smile once the door has finally closed behind them, “I think that’s quite enough excitement before nine in the morning, don’t you?”
I can’t summon an answer to that, so I blow out my breath in something that could be interpreted as agreement. She gets up to answer the phone and disappears with it into the dining room. The sudden tone of concern as she answers and her mm-hmming with long pauses in between make me think she’s probably talking to my mom; an “Oh, Laura” confirms it.
“Well, I need to talk to you about that, as it turns out,” she says eventually. “We had a bit of a flood here this morning. No, not yet anyway, the city added some more sandbags the other day. No, they’re not quite sure where it came from, but Marianne’s room is a mess.” She leans out of the kitchen to flash me an apologetic smile. “I think that would probably be best, honestly… Laura. You’ll be fine. You can always give me a call if you have any trouble, right?”
Going home? The prospect is a relief, for a split-second, before all the reasons to dread it pile back onto me. I want my mom, desperately, but what’s going to happen if she sees what’s been going on? Or if I end up in that other place again? Should I tell her? She thinks she was hallucinating.
Am I so sure I’m not?
What we need is something objective, Ron declared. Well, we’ve got it now. I could play Mom the tape. But there’s no way anyone would believe Ron and I hadn’t cooked that up ourselves. We could use it to audition for horror movies. I hug my knees, wondering momentarily whether going away from here might be enough to lose whatever is stalking me, but I can’t summon much hope at the thought. It followed me here, after all.
“Mare-b—Marianne?” Aunt Jen is holding the phone out to me. “Your mom wants to talk to you for a second.”
The static is a scouring storm in the background, making Mom’s voice pale and distant.
“Marianne?” When I don’t answer she says it again, anxiously. “Are you there?”
“Yeah. Yeah, sorry.” I swallow. “Can you hear me?”
“Of course.” She sounds puzzled. “Can you hear me?”
“There’s just…a lot of noise on the line here for some reason.”
“Listen, sweetie. Did you hear us talking just now?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you…do you think you’re ready to come home?”
I lean my forehead against the cool glass of the patio door. The phone crackles and whines.
“Yeah,” I manage eventually. “I just. It’s just that—”
“I know it’s not the same.” She speaks in a low, hurt voice that makes me wince.
“It’s not that, Mom. Really. I’m just afraid that—”
I don’t know how to say it. I’m afraid you were right. I’m afraid it’s real.
“Would you feel better if Aunt Jen stayed over for a few days?”
“That’s not what I mean,” I cry, and take a deep, trembling breath before trying again. “Mom, what if you didn’t really—what you saw, what if it was—”
But it’s no good; the static escalates into a feedback howl, so long and sustained that I give up and press End to make it stop. Aunt Jen is watching me with her hand at her mouth. I slam the phone down on the table and wipe my eyes on my sleeve.
“I can stay over for a while, if you want,” she offers hesitantly. “It’s no trouble. You don’t need to worry about your mom; she’s seeing the doctor twice a week for the next while. They’ll keep an eye on her.”
I shake my head without looking at her. All the rational explanations, the medical explanations, hang between us.
“What if it’s real?” I blurt out.
“Oh, Marianne.”
“No, seriously, I know she didn’t just imagine it. What about the water upstairs? I didn’t break your mirror. It wasn’t me. What’s going to happen if I go home?”
“Mare-bear. Sweetie. Listen. All of this has a perfectly reasonable explanation. Okay? Your mom is having a really hard time just now. You are too, come to that. People believe all kinds of things when they’re under that kind of stress. I shouldn’t have told you about it, no matter what she said. Don’t let it get to you. This is not your fault.”
Defeated, I let myself be hugged. It doesn’t matter what I say. She doesn’t believe me. She won’t believe me, unless she sees what Mom saw.
Or what Ron saw.
Under the pretext of packing my stuff, I hurry up the stairs to my room, perch on the stripped-down bed with the fan roaring in my ears, and dig my phone out of my backpack. Fumbling, I type a text to Ron.
plz plz plz plz call me. listened to the tape.
But when I try to send it, the little loading graphic goes around and around and around in circles and then freezes altogether. I poke the screen, hit the Power button, the Menu button. The display flickers, congeals into a weird, scrambled overlap between the app and the home screen, and goes dark.
14
When Mom opens the door she looks thin and hollow, her eyes ringed with dark smudges. She’s trembling when she hugs me. Aunt Jen lingers in the doorway as I lug my suitcase up the sweeping staircase and down the hall. Their low voices echo up to me.
“…really worried. She’s afraid it was actually her. Laura, you have to…”
“…can he do this to us? He hasn’t even…”
“…hasn’t said anything about it, I don’t know if…”
I close the door, shutting them out. My own room looks hopelessly foreign to me. Like it belongs to someone else. I used to love it: the one corner of this huge glass ship that was truly mine. I lost track of how many shopping trips Mom took me on, but I wasn’t tired of them yet when we picked out the eggplant-purple curtains for the tall arched window, the sparkly light fixture, the sleek, chrome-trimmed desk. I helped Mom paint the walls in the snowy color she insisted was different from all the other whites and held the level while she adjusted the shelves.
Now we’ll have to move, eventually. Would any of this have happened if we’d stayed in the town house? I walk around the room with some idea of picking out a book, but I just end up trailing a finger along their spines. I curl up on the bed and don’t look at the tall standing mirror next to the closet.
A tiny creak
and a whisper of slippered feet on slick hardwood betray Mom’s presence outside my door. I listen tensely for the sound of her hand on the knob, but it doesn’t come. Instead there’s a sigh, and a door down the hall opens and closes. The furnace whirs to life. Rain spatters against the windows.
The minutes creep past, and there’s no other sound. It’s getting late; the light is a murky gold that says the sun is getting low behind the clouds. There’s a draft sighing down from the window, and I crawl under the covers to escape it. Maybe I left all the weirdness behind at Aunt Jen’s. It’s like nothing has changed, like any minute Dad will come shuffling up the stairs from his office and knock on my door.
Stupid thought. Useless. I close my eyes against it, but it lingers anyway, a heaviness that won’t dissolve.
• • •
“Marianne?”
I startle awake at the sound of my name. The room is almost dark. Mom sits next to me on the bed, her hand tentative on my shoulder, her hair trailing into my face.
I jerk upright, away from her touch. Mom’s face falls a little.
“Sorry,” I stammer. “Sorry, Mom, it’s not you, I just… Is everything okay? Are you okay?”
“I just woke up,” Mom says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to leave you alone all evening. This medication is killing me. I think I was awake for about four hours yesterday.”
“Do you…feel better, though?”
“Maybe. I got through my last appointment without crying. I ran some errands. I guess that’s an improvement. It’s not…quite such an avalanche, you know?”
We sit in silence for a moment. She studies me, tucks a stray lock of hair behind my ear.
“I thought it would be nice to be home,” she whispers, looking past me, out the window at the rain. “But it’s not. It’s awful.”
I don’t know what to say to that. She turns away, her hair falling over her face, hiding her expression.
“I expect you feel the same way,” she says. “Don’t you?”
“I wish—” I begin, but I can’t find a safe way to finish the thought, one that doesn’t end with me crying. I swallow and twist the edge of the blanket into a tight coil between my hands.
“Listen,” she offers after a second, clearing her throat, “how about we go downstairs and watch a movie? Something funny. I’ll make some popcorn. And we can forget about all this for a couple hours and try to rescue the evening. What do you think?”
I clutch the blanket. I’m afraid to leave the room. I’m afraid to be awake. I can’t tell her that. She’ll think it’s because of her. She already thinks it’s because of her; I can see it in the downturn of her lips, feel it in her weight shifting away from me. “I guess you’re pretty tired,” she says.
“No, it’s okay,” I protest. I push my way out of the covers. “That sounds great, Mom. Really.”
She casts me a long, sideways look, like she’s not buying it, but finally gives me a watery smile and clasps my hand.
“I’m so glad you’re home,” she whispers. “I really am, sweetie. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
She sets off to the kitchen to make popcorn and urges me in an almost normal voice to go ahead and pick something to watch. Reluctantly, I shuffle my way to the basement, turning on every light switch as I pass. I don’t look into the long, echoing room with the barre on one side. These days its only other furnishing is an elliptical trainer, dwarfed and lost in the corner.
When I flick on the lights in the den, I find the sliding doors of the built-in cabinets standing open, pictures strewn over the floor. My dance pictures. All the old recital photos.
I start back from the doorway, my hands over my mouth, but after a first panic-soaked moment I realize this isn’t the ghost’s handiwork. The pictures are all intact, wiped carefully clean of dust, some of them still neatly stacked. Mom must have been going through them.
She’s the one who took them down. Because she didn’t want them to upset me, she said at the time. But it still felt like a message. A reminder of what I’d failed to become.
Dance is the first thing I remember. The Nutcracker at the National Arts Centre. Mom let me wear some of her lipstick. I can close my eyes and still see the snow maidens swirling onto the stage, one by one, spinning into the light exactly like the first dizzy flakes of a blizzard. The lights from the stage lit my parents’ upturned faces, blue and violet, their heads tilted together, Mom’s carefully lined lips curved in perfect happiness.
When the house lights came up, I turned and declared to her that I would be a ballerina. Someday I would be the one up there on the points of my toes, the Snow Queen, poised in effortless, sparkling perfection. It would be me.
“Do you remember the first time you got up on a stage?”
Mom has appeared in the doorway behind me, wearing a wobbly smile.
“No, but you’ve told me about it.”
Many times, actually. But she doesn’t take the hint. She sets the popcorn down on the shelf next to me, picks up one of the pictures on the floor. I was a peacock that year, with a streaming blue-green tail.
“You were only four. You were so little. I was sure you’d get scared at the last minute, going up there without me. So I took you to the dress rehearsal half an hour early, so you could get used to it up there. You stood in the middle of the stage, and you twirled around, and you laughed. And I just knew. You were born for it. I thought, that’s who she is. My Marianne. She’s a dancer.”
“Apparently not,” I mutter, turning to the DVDs on the shelf.
“Sweetie—”
“Mom, I know you were trying to encourage me. I know. But I just wasn’t that good. It wasn’t going to happen.”
“Well, it won’t happen now,” Mom sniffs. “It’s too late now. You should have been off to one of the feeder schools we talked about, not Pearson. You should have been dancing for scouts from the big ballet companies. I don’t understand why you just fell apart like that. You could have had it all.”
I lean against the shelf, close my eyes.
“I wasn’t even good enough for the conservatory.”
“Bullshit!” Mom says, making me flinch. She takes my hand, pulls me toward the TV. “Look. Let me show you something.”
“Mom,” I protest, but she’s already queuing up something on the DVD player. On the screen a pale pink room appears, its carpet shaggy and tired, with a few moving boxes stacked in the corner.
“Mom.” I sigh and try to push past her, but she catches my shoulders, holds me fast.
“Shh,” she says. “Look.”
“Are you recording?” an imperious voice calls out on the screen, out of sight around a corner. Behind the camera, startlingly loud, Mom laughs.
“Yes, yes! I’m hitting Play, okay? Three, two, one…”
Carmina Burana is tinny on the recording, too quiet. Stalking through the doorway comes a girl with a black spangled skirt swirling around her thighs, fabric belling out from her outstretched arms like wings or a cape, diamonds flashing in her coiled hair. She’s a storm of drama, all wicked glee and carmine lipstick.
“You loved that costume,” Mom whispers tearfully.
Then-Marianne catches a toe in the stupid carpet and stumbles out of step, making me wince. But the Marianne in the video collapses gracelessly onto the floor, where she laughs and laughs. And Mom’s laughing too, the camera shaking.
“Oh, that sucked,” then-Marianne gasps. “Let me do it again.”
“There won’t be a rug at the conservatory,” Mom says, unfazed. “And they’ll be done laying the floor at the new house next week. You’ve got weeks to practice. You’ll be great.”
Then-Marianne tosses her head, beaming.
“I know,” she says smugly.
The camera zooms in, blurs, focuses again on her made-up face. She bats her eyelashes, strikes a pos
e. Dissolves into giggles.
“So.” Mom pitches her voice artificially low. “Miss Vandermere. What are you going to do next? What’s in store for the youngest star of the Muse Studio of Dance?”
“Everything,” Then-Marianne tosses out, giving the camera a devilish grin and swirling her gauzy cape. “I’ll be the best thing the conservatory’s ever seen. I’ll dance every part they’ve got. And the company schools will all be fighting for me. I’m unstoppable.”
“That’s my girl,” Mom beams off camera. Then-Marianne grins back. Blows a kiss.
“Now start again,” she demands, levering herself to her feet. “I’m going to do it right this time.”
“See?” Mom pleads, hugging my shoulders. “Don’t you see what I see? You were full of light, Marianne. You were on fire.”
“I screwed it up,” I say numbly. Though I had nailed the conservatory audition. That’s what I was practicing for, in that video. It was one of those times my feet were made of light and sound, connecting with every pulse of the music, my lines scimitar-sharp. One of those times it was magic.
“But you shone,” Mom insists, pointing at the TV with the remote as then-Marianne sweeps onto the screen again. “Look at you. I don’t understand what happened. Was it that cow of a teacher?” She takes a deep breath, looks away. “Or maybe it was me. I know I was…leaning on you pretty heavily for a while.”
“No, no. God, Mom, of course it wasn’t you. I don’t know, okay? I just didn’t want to do it anymore. That’s all.”
The Marianne on the screen can’t feel my presence, my cold-eyed evaluation as she steps and leaps her way through a footwork sequence with the music building behind her. Glissade, petit battement, pas de chat, turn, turn… She’s overeager, too exaggerated, undisciplined. No control. Her lines are sloppy. She doesn’t know it. She will soon.
But I can’t turn away.
Once upon a time that was me. I was that effortless, that sure of everything. Focused like a laser beam, that’s what my teachers at Muse said. Ready to burn through any obstacle. An arrow hurtling toward the bull’s-eye of a single goal. An ambition I should have known was overinflated, ridiculous.
The Dark Beneath the Ice Page 14