Turtle under Ice Read online

of a circle of senior girls

  talking with confidence

  about weekends and parties and classes.

  I shifted my weight

  from one leg to the other.

  Tucked the short ends

  of hair behind my ear.

  “Great game last night, Twenty-four.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said,

  but I wasn’t really

  paying attention.

  I spotted Ariana.

  Her thick and loose ponytail.

  The yellow cardigan

  that matched a pair of sneakers

  I had in my closet.

  I saw a girl who looked like me,

  but wasn’t me.

  I watched Ariana

  duck around the corner

  as soon as I caught her eye.

  She saw me.

  But it’s like here in high school

  she didn’t even know me.

  The senior girls were staring.

  “That’s your sister?”

  one of them said,

  the blond one

  people called “Busy”

  and I never really knew

  whether it was

  a given name,

  a nickname,

  or a reputation.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Huh. I don’t recognize her,”

  the one named Rory said.

  The captain nudged her.

  “She’s in our English class.”

  “Really?”

  “Isn’t she friends with that girl

  from that band? You know, the band

  that actually ended up making it,”

  Busy said.

  They all tilted their heads

  peering into the vacated space

  that Ariana once occupied,

  then back at me.

  Sometimes it’s like

  Ariana disappeared

  altogether.

  I run into

  my best friend, Kennedy,

  without even trying.

  I see half the team

  every time I use the bathroom.

  But I could go days on end

  without seeing Ariana anywhere.

  “But she’s so quiet,” said Rory.

  I tilted my head and tried to see

  Ariana the way her classmates saw her.

  But I couldn’t.

  She wasn’t a mystery, or a rumor,

  or a quiet girl who sat in the back of class.

  She was my sister, and that’s all I could see

  in the vacated space.

  A shadow once occupied by my sister.

  Ariana

  I glance down at the phone in my hand.

  There’s a text from Row lighting up the screen.

  What if she wants me to be sisterly and strong?

  When Row scored the winning goal in the state finals,

  Dad’s face literally glowed, like he was so happy and so proud

  he didn’t know whether to cry or to scream.

  Instead he reached out to me, to Maribel,

  and pulled us in close. I wanted to feel happy

  along with them, but the muscles that held my smile ached.

  What would they say if they knew I was failing

  because I couldn’t get my act together?

  I lost track of time. I was supposed to

  graduate and go on and be normal. Like Row.

  I didn’t feel like anyone’s older sister. Not right now.

  Maybe I could go to the art show. Get my passing grade.

  Return home and then I would pull out the catalogs

  of college choices. I would ask Row and Maribel for help.

  We would sit down together

  and pore over pictures

  and no one would remember the day it snowed,

  when I failed to leave a note, respond to a text.

  When I disappeared for hours

  because I was scared of them finding out

  that I wasn’t well adjusted.

  I wasn’t normal.

  I wasn’t strong and sisterly.

  I’m just me.

  The light is starting to break through the trees.

  The snow has stopped,

  but the thick white clouds hover off in the distance.

  The countryside disappears

  at sixty miles an hour, and I lean my head

  against a window with finger smudges

  and nose prints, slipping the phone back into my pocket,

  turning the ringer to silent.

  Row

  The baby must have passed away

  just hours after Maribel returned home

  from her doctor’s appointment

  where our sister was said to be

  a healthy weight and size.

  Our sister’s heart stopped beating,

  like our mother’s, unexpectedly,

  on a day that was otherwise

  normal.

  I wonder what it was like for Maribel

  to hold on to something

  that had died.

  I wish that I could see Maribel

  to know that she will be okay,

  even after the cramping passes,

  the bleeding stops,

  after our sister is exhumed

  from her body.

  I look over at the closed master bedroom

  and hear nothing.

  No television. No voices.

  No crying. No shower.

  I look down the hall at Ariana’s door.

  The silence without her is deafening.

  I go to my room, close the door,

  and turn on a podcast about soccer

  just to fill the room with noise.

  But I wish it wasn’t just talking.

  I wish there was someone around

  who could listen.

  Row

  I remember our first snowfall together. Here

  in my room Ariana and I watched

  the way that snow tries to

  seclude us as neighbors’

  houses disappeared

  among snow

  drifts.

  “I miss

  her,” Ariana

  said after twenty

  minutes of soundless

  gazing. I remember her

  voice, the way it trembled

  with uncertainty. I remember

  the thick salty tears that welled

  in my eyes and when Ariana brushed

  her hand against my shoulder, I couldn’t

  hold them back. Neither could she. Neither

  could the sky that dumped clumps of snow. I

  remember looking out at the landscape and back at

  Ariana, seeing the extent to which people can change

  so quickly. The way flakes could pile up one speck at a

  time and transform the world before us into shapeless mounds.

  I remember the feeling of us, together, letting ourselves cry over snow.

  Ariana

  We’re supposed to have a backstory.

  We’re supposed to have a series of life experiences

  that have brought us to this moment in time.

  I’m sitting on a bus that’s headed away

  from the place where I live, because I’m failing

  art class, jeopardizing whatever future I’m supposed

  to be having, and not even questioning how the hell I got here.

  I’m just here. The product of a failed backstory.

  In German there is a word for experience, Erlebnis,

  which comes from the verb erleben,

  and translates as living through something.

  In English, we have no succinct word

  for living through something.

  Maybe it could have been different had I not been there

  watching my mom fall to the floor at a Starbucks,

  dropping her phone and clawing at her chest.

 
; The newspaper she held fluttered to the floor,

  the way a heart might sometimes flutter.

  Not because you’re nervous or falling in love.

  But like when you’re sitting at your desk

  in the middle of a trigonometry test

  and your heart unexpectedly flutters.

  I remember the wail of the steamer frothing milk.

  The barista on her cell phone. The paramedics

  scurrying around my mother. I remember I stood there

  in silence, frozen against an immovable display case full of crap.

  Like maybe if I stayed real still, time itself would slow down.

  But time didn’t stop. The world didn’t slow down

  with me. It kept on plowing ahead.

  In the aftermath of death, those of us who survive

  have little preparation for what we’re actually supposed to do

  with our lives from that point forward.

  Like the entire concept of having a backstory is erased.

  There is only before your mother died, and now.

  Each day is now.

  It feels neither farther nor closer to the moment she died.

  It feels like another day, of actions and reactions,

  but without anything to live through, without Erlebnis.

  Row

  I text all seventeen girls

  from the varsity squad

  to see if anyone is down

  for a pickup game of soccer,

  because when I’m on a field

  people listen to me.

  They pay attention.

  My teammates. They see me.

  My opponents. They see me.

  The people in the stands.

  Coaches. Scouts.

  I am a player to be seen.

  I know it’s not the right kind of listening

  or the right kind of being seen.

  But being noticed, even if it’s not

  for the thing that you want to be noticed for,

  still feels all right, like you matter

  and there is someone out there who cares.

  I’m not saying that Dad

  and Ariana don’t care.

  It’s just sometimes I think they forget

  how to listen

  because after Mom died it was hard

  to hear anything other than silence.

  Row

  The snow is a real killjoy.

  Absolutely no one

  wants to leave their crackling fire

  or the warm cup of cocoa

  or the raucous game of Monopoly

  they’ve entered into with their siblings

  to lace up their cleats

  and tromp through the snow

  for a pickup game of soccer.

  Seriously, you’ll be fine.

  You’re definitely going to make

  the premier team.

  Just take a day off

  for once.

  You’re obsessed, 24.

  Twenty-four.

  My number. My identity.

  It’s what I’ve led them all to believe.

  I am Twenty-four.

  Not Row.

  Not Ariana’s little sister.

  Not a girl without a mother.

  I’m a number.

  A position.

  A series of county

  and state records.

  And I’ve done nothing to correct them

  because a large part of me wants to believe

  that this is who I am.

  A seriously talented,

  seriously obsessed

  soccer player

  who is singularly focused

  on the game,

  on the win.

  Except,

  with Ariana gone

  I know that’s not true,

  not even close.

  I am a person

  who is scared,

  who is empty,

  and who is alone

  without her family.

  Ariana

  You were robbed were the words

  a classmate once told me in eighth grade.

  We flipped through magazines her mother

  still subscribed to. Mostly about home decor

  and living your best life. We scrolled through our phones

  looking at photos of people we didn’t know,

  and then she asked me what my mom did “for a living.”

  “Nothing. She died.”

  That’s when she told me I was robbed. Like I hadn’t noticed.

  Like anyone who is robbed wouldn’t notice that their purse

  was yanked off their shoulder or that there’s broken glass

  by the back door and the flat-screen is missing.

  It wasn’t helpful to be reminded of this.

  Robbed of all the things my mother

  was supposed to teach me.

  I could learn from the internet the difference

  between menstrual cups, tampons, and pads.

  I could learn from a Google search home remedies

  on how to relieve cramps, and my questions about sex?

  There were plenty of sources for that.

  But what the internet lacked were any real lessons

  on how to navigate this world as a young woman

  who felt solely defined by her grief.

  My classmate changed the subject to whether or not

  I thought we were too young to date high schoolers.

  “You should ask your mother,” I told her.

  She shifted her body. Raised the magazine to her face,

  and never invited me back to her house.

  My grief makes people uncomfortable.

  It reminds even adults that we’re all going to die.

  That bad things really do happen to good people.

  I am not a walking disease because my mother died.

  I am not abnormal. I am not contagious.

  I am a human with grief. Just like we all will be someday.

  Because there is only one universal truth in this world.

  That we and everyone around us will someday die,

  and grief is all that remains in the aftermath.

  Row

  Snow,

  I text Kennedy,

  one of those friends

  who is always down

  for doing something.

  Except soccer.

  Because, as Kennedy puts it,

  “My two left feet wouldn’t know

  how to run down a field,

  let alone kick a ball straight.”

  “It’s not that hard,”

  I’ve told her.

  “It is for someone who has

  no desire to play in the first place,”

  she would always say in response.

  Of course I know it snowed.

  This house has windows.

  They are used to see out into the world,

  and sometimes reflections

  of ourselves,

  Kennedy writes back.

  Deep,

  I text.

  She sends over a photo

  of snow

  through a window

  with a faint reflection

  of Kennedy

  snapping a photo

  of snow

  through a window.

  Meta, I respond.

  But seriously.

  I stopped by on Thursday

  and the lights were on

  but no one answered the door.

  What’s going on over there?

  Kennedy writes.

  I thought about

  writing something

  meaningful,

  maybe vulnerable.

  People were real into

  talking about being vulnerable.

  I thought about sharing.

  And then I send

  an emoji

  of a pineapple

  and a snowman

  and an upside-do
wn

  smiley face.

  Friendships are like plants.

  They require care and watering,

  Kennedy responds.

  I snap a photo

  of the houseplant

  named Earl.

  Friends.

  I know your stepmother

  waters that, not you.

  Ariana

  Snow blankets the low, flat ground

  where underneath maybe there is land

  to sow seeds in or fields to play on.

  Maybe it’s land where kids play baseball

  or soccer or get lost in a corn maze.

  I wonder if my sister is just now waking up,

  if she’s looking out her window and contemplating

  what clothes she could wear in order to still

  play soccer in all this snow. Like there’s nothing

  in her life that will stop her from getting out there on the field.

  I want that depth of determination. I want to feel

  like nothing can get in my way. I want to chase after something

  the way Row chases after the ball.

  I remember watching the way younger girls

  follow my sister on the field with their eyes.

  The way they’d startle and then cheer when Row

  cuts a ball left and taps one, then two