The Dark Beneath the Ice

by Amelinda Bérubé

  “What does that even mean?”

  “Well, what does a safe space look like for you? What are you safe from in a safe space?”

  The answer to that is so obvious and so impossible I can’t think of a more normal one.

  “Think about that, maybe,” he suggests when I stay silent. “About what would make you feel safe.”

  He changes tactics and asks me what I like to read. Asks me why. Asks about school, about my friends. I draw out a conversation about Ingrid for a little while, as close to monosyllables as I can get away with. I don’t mention Ron. What’s to mention? She might never speak to me again.

  “I definitely get the feeling you don’t want to talk to me today,” Dr. Fortin remarks. Not accusingly, but with mild interest, like he’s talking about philosophy or a math problem. I lift my chin and don’t answer.

  “Well, you don’t have to,” he says. “But that’s what I’m here for. I might be able to help. You never know. Think about it for next week, okay? And think about the day program. Let’s keep our options open.”

  The room recedes from me, a peaceful island, insubstantial as an image on a screen. A mirage. I close my eyes.

  “Yeah,” I manage. “Okay. Sure.”

  But even as I say it, the resolution is forming. I’m not coming back here again.

  15

  Mom is drawn and silent on the way home. At least she doesn’t ask me how the appointment went. As we step through the door she mumbles something about taking a nap before her meeting with the lawyer, dropping her coat on the bench in the front hall. It slithers off onto the chilly tiles, but she disappears up the stairs without turning. I hang it up in the closet, next to Dad’s winter coat. Quiet settles over the house, crowds close around me.

  It’s like Dad’s ridiculous excuses were some kind of curse. The house might have felt empty before, but it was never lonely. Now it feels full of edges hard enough to bruise, without comfort or refuge. The farthest thing from a safe space.

  Dad said he couldn’t make her happy. Since when? There’s a picture of them sitting on Mom’s night table. Or it used to, maybe she’s gotten rid of it now. It was grainy and old, a weird size so that it sat a little askew in the frame. From sometime when Dad had more hair and a goatee that looked, to my eye, kind of ridiculous on him. Mom looked just like me. Frighteningly like me. She’s always said that we’re twins twenty-two years apart. In the photo she’s scooped up in his arms, her head thrown back, her hair a long, black fan. And Dad’s looking into the camera, half smiling, like he can’t believe his luck. Like he’s about to tell you how he got away with it. They’re standing in the middle of the patch of mud that became the front garden at the town house; the paneling above the door was the same weird teal I remember. What could have driven them apart? Was it the house?

  Was it me?

  I lean against the closet door. Think about what would make you feel safe, Dr. Fortin said. I’ll never feel safe again. I’m so tired. My head is killing me. How am I going to make it through the rest of the day? The one after that?

  I drift down to the basement with some notion of watching TV and pause outside the long, hardwood corridor of the studio. It’s cool and dim, still holding a ghost of that new-house smell. Paint and varnish. In another lifetime it was filled with blaring music, the thump of shoes against the floor. Julie and Shayna used to come over to dance here. Others too, sometimes. We’d help each other stretch, chat over our phones, bound up the stairs for a snack. It was easier than trying to elbow our way into the scraps of rehearsal time available at the studio. It was more fun.

  I’m glad we lost touch. They inhabit some alternate reality where I’m dancing down the road to fame, forgetting all about them. Maybe in that world I’m a better version of myself. Maybe I’ll open my eyes to find the last two years were just some incoherent stress nightmare from the night before a show.

  I pad inside and rest a hesitant hand on the barre. The wood is cool and smooth under my fingers. I arrange myself into first position, sweep my arm out à la seconde, extend a leg into a développé, feeling for that glow of rightness from my dream. All that’s left is embarrassment, ungainly weight, joints gone stiff and sullen, refusing to form a clean line. I drop back to the floor, wishing I hadn’t tried it. Mom’s right, after all. It’s too late. I could never go back to it.

  Even if I could, there’s no way. Not after that last awful week when Mom confronted me about the weeks and weeks of rehearsals I missed.

  I want to hide from the memory. But I was hiding then too, a mouse down a bolt-hole. The library was where I’d discovered fantasy novels. I started with Tad Williams, almost at random; To Green Angel Tower caught my eye as I huddled on the floor at the very end of the stacks. It was the biggest volume on the shelf. Big enough to get lost in. All I wanted was to disappear, to escape from the impossible waiting game I’d landed myself in, the hovering question of how long I could keep it up.

  It worked for a while. It worked so well that when familiar footsteps came stalking down the aisle I barely heard them. Until they were closing in. When I finally felt a lurch of premonition and looked up, Mom was standing over me, her mouth a bowstring. Drawn and waiting.

  “Is this where you’ve been?” she asked. She didn’t yell. “All this time?”

  What was there to say? I stared up at her, hugging the book a little closer, until she yanked it from my hands. She hauled me to my feet, pushed me stumbling forward.

  “Mom—ow, Mom, let go—”

  “They said you haven’t been to rehearsal in weeks, Marianne. Months.” We drew stares as she frog-marched me past the circulation desk, out into the airy, echoing foyer. My face was hot, my hands blocks of ice. “I went to ask Miss Giselle if they needed volunteers for the recital. Do you think they were a little surprised to see me?”

  She ignored my attempt at a protest, spoke over it.

  “I got all the way through the form before they told me. In front of the whole office. They didn’t know what to do with me. Like I was some sort of—I have never been so humiliated, Marianne!”

  “You were humiliated!” I jerked my arm free from her grip as we reached the doors. The words rang from the high concrete walls; Mom flinched. “I told you I wanted to quit! I told you over and over!”

  She pinched the bridge of her nose and stood there for a moment, her shoulders rising and falling with a deep breath, like she was grasping for her last shred of patience.

  “Okay. Look. It might not be too late. Here’s what we’re going to do. I am setting up a meeting with Miss Giselle. You will explain this to both of us.”

  “I won’t!” Wings were beating in my head. My vision pulsed.

  “Marianne, lower your voice, for heaven’s sake!”

  “I won’t! You can’t make me!”

  “I can, and I will!”

  My words ran dry. There were none left. I was choking, my ribs were splitting open, bending me double. I clapped my hands over my ears and it came raging out of me: I screamed until my breath ran out, until my throat was ragged. It filled my head, it filled the foyer, it brought people running to doorways to see what was wrong.

  “Oh, for the love of God,” Mom said desperately. She had to put her arms around my waist and heft me bodily through the doors, half carrying, half dragging me as I kicked and thrashed and fought.

  I lay sprawled over the back seat, sobbing, as she drove home in stony silence. I think she expected me to have exhausted myself by the time we got there. But I hadn’t. When we finally pulled into the garage she slammed the door and headed for the house like she didn’t care whether I followed her or not. I went after her anyway. The words drove me forward, a pressure building in my chest, weapons waiting to be used.

  “You don’t want me!” I hurled at her as she dropped her keys on the peninsula in the kitchen. “You never did! You want a trained pony! Yo
u want a performing monkey! On a leash!”

  “I’m trying to help you, Marianne! You were the one who wanted to do ballet! You wanted to be the best! That takes discipline and courage and, well, grit!”

  “Well, maybe I don’t have that! Maybe I never did!”

  “Of course you do! Look how far you’ve come already! You can’t just throw this away!”

  “Why not? You did! Why is it so horrible for me to be a failure just like my mother?”

  Her eyes pooled with tears at that. Just like I’d known they would.

  “How can you say that to me?”

  I didn’t care. I was impervious, white hot.

  “You want me to be perfect. Because you’re not. And fuck that, Mom! Fuck it!” The words I never dared to say flew through the air, incendiary. “You’re not perfect! You don’t do anything, you don’t have courage, you don’t have grit, all you have is me! You’re nothing! And you’ve made me into a nothing, too! Are you happy now? Are you satisfied?”

  Mom buried her face in her hands.

  “I can’t have this conversation,” she said in a weepy, stuffy voice designed to make me fold. “Not when you’re going to speak to me like that. You can deal with your father whenever he gets home. Get out of my sight, Marianne. Go!”

  But I wasn’t done. I snatched the nearest breakable thing—Dad’s cup, left in haste that morning on the counter—and threw it across the kitchen, splattering cold coffee everywhere. Mom’s mouth fell open, but I didn’t care what she was going to say.

  “Make me!” I shrieked. “Make me!”

  The days that followed are a sleepless haze in my head. My throat was raw and scratchy from screaming. Every conversation devolved into a spiral of rage. I can close my eyes and see my father’s horrified face. He didn’t know what to do with me, with this sudden explosion of messy violence. Let’s talk about this, he said. Calm down. We can’t discuss this when you use that tone of voice, young lady.

  But I couldn’t calm down. There was nothing to discuss. I was a firestorm, a volcano. I don’t know what I wanted. Maybe to make them pay. And I did. Over and over. I threw everything I had at them: They didn’t love me. They just wanted a doll to dress up. Every melodramatic thought I’d ever swallowed while I thumped through pirouette after jeté after sauté under Mom’s watchful eye. I watched every missile find its mark. Mom cried and fled the room; Dad’s shoulders sagged. And he said in this gray, strained voice, “I don’t even know who you are when you’re like this. Is this what it’s going to be like now, Marianne?”

  The last time he shut me in my room, I tore the pictures off the wall, swept everything off the shelves, wreaked as much destruction as I could. When I finally ran down and stood panting in the middle of the floor, their arguing echoed down the hall, low and fierce. They were talking about me. I knew it. When I opened the door a crack, it made every word razor sharp.

  “She just needs time to calm down,” Mom said tearfully. “There’s no reason to pathologize this. She’s just angry. Maybe she’s angry at me.”

  “It’s been days,” Dad snapped. “How long is she going to keep this up? We’re out of our depth here. She needs help, Laura.”

  “Just give her a chance,” Mom pleaded. “Please. We can handle her. I just need you to back me up. I need your help.”

  “I can’t deal with this right now, I have to be at the meeting with the military stakeholders tomorrow—”

  “Of course. Because they need you.”

  “Laura—”

  “No, go ahead! Your only daughter is falling apart and you just want to throw her in the psych ward so you can get back to what’s really important!”

  “Jesus, Laura, be reasonable. Yes, she’s falling apart, okay? What’s so terrible about getting help when you need it?”

  “Don’t you dare make this about me.”

  “This is already about you,” Dad sighed. “It’s always about you.”

  “How can you say that to me! After I’ve been dealing with this by myself all week!”

  “You’re not dealing with it at all! You’re just… Look. Let’s think about this rationally for thirty seconds, okay? Please? Let’s think about Marianne. She needs help.”

  “Right. And you would know. Because you’re paying such close attention.”

  “How can I not pay attention? I can hear you screaming at each other across the house! I swear to God, sometimes I think I should find somewhere else to stay just so I can hear myself think!”

  “Maybe you should!” Mom shouted. Heavy footsteps thumped into the basement; a door slammed. Like a spell had broken, I pushed my door quickly, silently closed, backed away from it. But the sound of her crying seeped through anyway, little hands clinging to me, inescapable. I hid from them under the bed, like I was a little kid, staring up at the cobwebby underside of the box spring, my hands over my ears, drowning in the roar of my own heartbeat. Wishing I could disappear.

  Dad came into my room later that evening with hardly a sound. Curled on the bed, I kept my back to him, unmoving. Until then it had been Mom who made the first sallies into the storm, trying to sympathize, trying to talk me down.

  He sat on the edge of the bed. When I stole a glance at him his shoulders were slumped in defeat.

  “You can quit,” he said finally. “You haven’t left us much choice about that one. But I need my bunny back. I need you to put yourself back together. Okay? This is… I don’t even know what to do with this. It’s crazy. It’s not you.”

  I wanted to tell him he didn’t know me. That he’d snipped out some magazine daughter and pasted her over me. But shame trickled in, and fear, cold and smothering.

  “Your mom and I…we’re going to take a little break. I’m going to be gone for a little bit. Not forever, okay? We just need some space. You know, to calm down and work things out.” I stared at the wall, my whole body locked and rigid. He was mouthing something about how this wasn’t my fault, but I knew better. I’d smashed and burned my family like a Molotov cocktail. I was breaking them apart. And for what? If he went, what would be left? Could he really want to be rid of me that badly?

  “You’re growing up, Marianne,” he said. “This is your chance to decide who you’re going to be. And this family can’t take another hurricane.”

  And I nodded. One little jerk of my chin. He squeezed my shoulder, left the room. When the door closed behind him, I sat up and looked around at the drawers hanging open and the dance posters in shreds on the floor. The wreckage after the storm.

  He was right. Of course he was right.

  I picked up all the disastrous pieces. I apologized to my mother. She offered the yoga class—timidly; pathetically—as a mom-and-daughter thing. A way to calm down, a way to reconnect. When I accepted she brightened the tiniest, heartbreaking bit.

  I was stronger than I knew. I was sharp as a knife. I had to watch myself.

  But in the end it didn’t matter how carefully I tiptoed around them. He still left.

  16

  The TV refuses to work. My computer won’t boot up, either. It doesn’t even get as far as a blue screen of death; it sits whirring uselessly, the screen blank. There’s no escaping the vast quiet of the house. Sleep drags at me, irresistible. When I open my eyes the windows are starting to dim, but there’s still no sign of Mom, no noises from upstairs. She said her medication makes her sleep a lot, too. Maybe I should wake her up, make something to eat.

  I pass Dad’s office on the way to the kitchen. The door is slightly ajar and I stop in front of it, hesitating. It swings open silently at my touch. The room is strangely bare; the bookshelves are still mostly full, but there are wide empty patches that stand out like missing teeth. The rolling cart full of paints and brushes that Dad called his five-minute project station is empty, the latest half-finished canvas landscape vanished from the easel standing next to it. The d
esk has been swept clean of its usual heaps of paper; the laptop and the huge monitor are gone. The only thing left on the wide black surface is a framed picture, one I drew when I was little: a stick figure etched in crayon, with a zigzaggy beard and a lipstick-red smiling mouth.

  It’s sat on his desk forever. And he didn’t take it.

  I don’t know what I’m doing in here. There’s nothing left of him here, nothing to help me, and why would there be? Was he ever really here in the first place?

  I pull the door closed behind me, grind tears away with the heels of my hands. This won’t do. I won’t think about it. Mom can’t see me like this. Will she know I’ve been crying? I should wash my face. I try to draw a steadying breath and walk slowly to the bathroom, slapping at the light switch.

  It doesn’t work.

  Icy fear blooms in the pit of my stomach. I resist the urge to yank the switch back and forth a few times in denial. I stand up straight in the dark, the thin light from the hallway spilling over my feet, and clench my fists.

  “Go away,” I say aloud, as steadily as I can.

  Fuck you, says a voice in return.

  It seems to come from all around me. My reflection in the mirror is a thin wash of light along one cheek, the gleam of an eye, surrounded by undulating shadow. I shrink back against the door, the handle jabbing into my back.

  The reflection, staring back at me, doesn’t move.

  “Who are you?” I try to make my voice as authoritative as Ron’s was, the other night, a lifetime ago. I try to show I’m not afraid.

  Pretending you don’t know isn’t going to help you.

  “But I don’t!” I cry. “I swear!”

  Well, I know you. The words are laden with poisonous contempt. You think you can lie to me?

  “You’re the one who called Ingrid, aren’t you?”

  Oh. Her. Is it smiling?

  “What did you say?” I cry.

  The truth. She’s a fake. She’s a hollow shell. She thinks she’s so kind, so generous, but all she ever sees is her own reflection. All she does is take. Maybe you’re content to follow her around like a dog. I’m sick of being ignored.