ICE

When I’m near him he turns to stone. He stands there, immobile, his face turned away from me, as if the sight of me would kill him. I know I should go away and put him out of his misery, but it’s hard to stay out of your own father’s way when you’re the only two people living together in a small, two-bedroom apartment.

A typical scenario goes like this: he’s standing in the tiny kitchen looking for something in the drawers, pulling them open one at a time then slamming them closed. I tip-toe into the room, trying to be quiet. When he hears me behind him he freezes, a drawer open at the end of his arm. He stares inside, at the messy heap of knives, elastics and plastic popsicle sticks that nobody ever bothers to use any more, as though he wishes he could crawl inside and shut the drawer behind him.

Sometimes, I try to start a conversation. I’ll say something simple like good morning. He might groan or nod, but that’s all. He never asks me how I’m doing or what’s happening at school. I think I could say anything and get the same non-response. I could say, Hey Dad, I tried heroin last night, or Hey Dad, I’m pregnant. It’s not what I’m saying; it’s the fact that I’m there, so near to him, that’s the problem.

Sometimes, he’ll look as though he wants to speak to me. His face will soften, then hesitate, then harden again. I can actually feel him shaking me out of his head, like some useless words that suddenly have no meaning.

Of course, it wasn’t always like this. When I was really young, before I had even started school, we did some neat things together. My mom worked downtown and my dad worked from home, so we were together a lot. My favorite memory is of the two of us sitting in the beat up vw van outside my brother’s school. We’d put on fake noses attached to plastic glasses and old wigs that my mother found at garage sales. We called it spying on my brother. When we saw him in the schoolyard we ducked below the dash or behind the steering wheel, giggling.

It never occurred to me then that the orange van, with its lime green and yellow peace symbols, was a dead giveaway.

YESTERDAY, I WAS at my best friend Nikki’s house when Tim called her to talk about me. He didn’t know I was there, listening in on the speaker phone.

“I really like Cal, I mean I really like her, but she’s so cool with me.”

I had to put a pillow over my mouth to stop him from hearing me gag. I don’t mind Tim. He’s okay. He’s kind of cute really. He has blond hair that he wears long and cut square around his face, as if he doesn’t realize the Beatles went out of style decades ago. He’s always blushing when I’m around.

“Do you think she’d go out with me?”

“Umm, I don’t know. She might,” Nikki responded, trying to pull the pillow off me.

There was a long silence, and then, out of the blue, in a voice I’d never heard Tim use before, he shouted into the phone, “I bet that bitch wouldn’t. She’s so cold and aloof, it’s like she’s made of ice. She never goes out of her way for me. Like it would kill her to give me the time of day.” Then the line went dead and I pictured him throwing down his phone so hard it sank to the center of the earth, all the way to China, where my brother and I used to try to dig to at the beach.

I was stunned. There was more than anger in Tim’s voice. There was hatred, real hatred.

Nikki didn’t speak to me right away, as if she knew I’d be embarrassed.

I was suddenly so cold I was shivering, even though it must have been a hundred degrees in Nikki’s basement. It was like someone had doused me with ice water.

WALKING HOME, I passed by the family with the disabled daughter. The father was standing on the porch, his head down, staring at his shoes. The mother was in the yard, trying to coax the girl out from behind the huge fir tree, a beach bag with rolled up towels looped over her arm. I could see the daughter’s head poking through the branches. She was laughing like a kid in the middle of a game of hide-and-seek, but her father wasn’t amused. His shoulders were slumped, as though he carried the weight of many hard years on them. I recognized the expression of shame that covered his face. Every time the mother called, “Come on out Carol, right now, or we won’t go swimming,” he winced.

I tried to smile at the father. I wanted to show him that he didn’t have to feel the way he did. It wasn’t his fault that his daughter was the way she was. It wasn’t her fault either. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. I pictured him running down into the yard and indulging his daughter, who was still squealing with delight as her mother tried to lure her out from behind the tree. Maybe if they pretended it was a game, they could corner her, the way my mother and father used to corner me and my brother around the kitchen table.

It occurs to me now that my feelings about the struggling family are proof that I’m not aloof. I just come across that way. It’s my way of protecting myself from the outside world. Everyone has their own way of doing this. Nikki’s defense is to expand herself. She sprawls over everything, taking up twice as much space as she should for such a tiny person. I’ve often watched the way she’ll automatically grab two chairs, one for her torso and one for the overflow of legs, arms, bags, or rackets that she spreads around herself like tentacles. I guess it’s her way of saying, “I’m here. Just because I’m small doesn’t mean you can ignore me.”

At home, I’m the opposite of Nikki. I’m always trying to take up less and less space, to curl myself up like a hermit crab. I have the smallest bedroom, even though my father offered me the big one when we first moved here after the accident.

“Take it, go on, girls need room, you’ll want your space,” he coaxed. That was when he could still look me in the eyes.

“No, no, it’s okay. You take it,” I responded. The huge empty room made me feel like the breath had been punched out of me. The space was too vast. The polished hardwood planks looked like giant bridges that I’d be afraid to cross.

“I want the small room, Dad, really.” He didn’t persist, and I squeezed my stuff — single bed, desk, bookshelf, blow-up chair — into the tiny room at the end of the hall. When Nikki’s over she sprawls so badly I hardly have any space for myself.

THIS MORNING, I’M curled up on my bed going over Tim’s words. I’m remembering things that seemed innocent at the time: Tim pushing his way into the circle at recess and me pretty much ignoring him, Tim’s party where Nikki drank too much beer and spent the night buzzing around on top of the furniture like a bee. It was Tim who calmed her with orange juice and helped me walk her home. At the door to Nikki’s house I simply spat, You know you shouldn’t let people drink so much, and then slammed the door in his face. Tim’s eyes were always on me in class, like he was trying to inflict some kind of voodoo spell. I always shook him off by rolling my eyes past his face.

I decide I need a plan of action, so I call Nikki.

“Hey, is anyone going to the dance at City?” City is a community college at the tip of the island. They hold dances, which we call beer bashes, on a regular basis and we can usually get in even if we don’t have college I.D.s.

“Yeah, I think everyone’s going. Why? You want to go?”

“Do you think Tim’s going?”

“Ah-ha! Now I get it. You want to get back at him, right?”

“Something like that.” But she couldn’t be more wrong. I don’t want revenge. Revenge is for when you’re wronged. But I don’t feel wronged. I feel found out, exposed. I picture Tim telling everyone what he thinks of me, the whole gang suddenly looking at me like a cold, hard bitch. But the truth is that I want Tim to like me. His attention has been so constant. He’s been like a thought that tickles the corner of my brain, or a piece of hair that hangs in my line of vision, creating a blur that can’t be blown away. I want Tim to keep looking at me with that expression, that puppy dog look of adoration that I’ve taken for granted all year.

But then I hear the abrupt silence of Tim’s phone and the image of his gentle expression disappears.

I pick up the photograph of my brother, taken when he was in grade eleven, only months before his death. I run my finger over the glass, picking up a trail of dust. He was four years older than me, old enough to have looked after me when I was little. He never seemed to mind dragging me along to the park, to the pool. His patience was infinite. If he were still alive, he’d be twenty. I wonder if he’d still be my protector, if I could have gone to him and told him how I was afraid to be soft, to let Tim or anyone else in.

But then, I remind myself, my hard shell only formed the minute those two police officers entered the hall of our old house.

“Good evening, Sir,” they said to my father. “Are you the father of Nathan Cole? And the husband of Emily?”

My father’s knees buckled. My mother had taken Nathan to a swim meet across the Ontario border in Cornwall. Nathan had just gotten his driver’s license and he’d been begging my mother to let him drive. My father had given my mother an encouraging wink, to let her know that he approved. He used to let us steer the old vw van when we were little. He’d let go at the top of our street and call over to whoever was lucky enough to be sitting in the passenger seat, Okay, kid, take over. Keep her steady. My mother’s last words to Nathan before leaving home had been, We’ll see.

We later learned that Nathan had been driving when an eighteen-wheeler spun out of control on some black ice on the other side of the 401 and skidded across the median to hit them head on. Our car was found upside down in the ditch. That’s how the memory of my mother and brother is fixed in my mind: the two of them dangling like upside-down puppets above the dashboard.

That night, the patch of black ice that streaked across the highway slipped inside me and coated my bones.

Nathan, I say to the picture, if you’re out there, please help me melt. Help some of what you were rub off on me. Nathan was warm, funny, and affectionate. He never passed me without ruffling up my hair or pinching my cheek or play punching me in the arm. He hugged me and adored me and I never ever felt afraid of anything when Nathan was alive.

“WHERE ARE YOU going?” my father asks as I walk past him to grab my jean jacket out of the closet. It’s so rare that he questions me I jump a little.

“Out with Nikki.”

“Out where with Nikki?”

“I don’t know yet, just around.”

My father stares in a way that makes me want to crawl into the closet and shut the door. I can’t let him in, not now.

Then he surprises me by saying, “Well, be careful,” rather sweetly.

“I will. See ya.”

Nikki’s mother drives us out to City College, remind-ing us the whole way there that no matter how late it is when we leave we are not to take a lift from anyone who’s been drinking. We are to call her and she’ll come right away, even if we tear her out of a sound sleep. Nikki’s mother and my mother were friends. I think she now feels obliged to shelter me a little.

“We will, we will,” we both promise.

In the back seat, Nikki whispers in my ear that Tim is definitely going to be there. She actually called him to find out.

“Did he ask if I’m going?”

“No, but he’ll know you’re going if I’m going,” Nikki says to encourage me.

Nikki’s mother reminds us once again of our promise to call her and then tells us to have a good time. I wonder if she knows what really goes on at these “dances.” She probably figures that, because they’re on a college campus, they’re safe. I’m sure she has no idea that you can buy weed and more in the washroom, and that security is two old guys who sit playing cards at a fold-out table, well away from the action.

Nobody asks to see I.D. and we walk in easily and find our gang. People have already begun to pile empty plastic beer mugs into a pyramid. I sit next to Tim, but he doesn’t look at me. Last time we were at a City beer bash together he spent the whole night fetching drinks for me and Nikki. We were supposed to ride home with him but we ducked into the washroom to hide, just for a joke. We giggled until we almost peed our pants picturing him looking for us. He kept texting us but we just ignored our phones. When we came out he was gone and we had to call Nikki’s mother.

Tim is drinking more than usual. He usually nurses a beer all evening because he’s the one who drives a bunch of people home in his Jeep. I’ve always loved to watch Tim drive. He seems to meld into the machine, his hands and feet working the pedals and gears gracefully, like a choreographed dance.

“Hey Tim, how many have you had?” I try to say lightly, tugging his sleeve. He shrugs.

“Dunno. What’s it to you?”

Nikki comes back with a beer for each of us.

“Well, cheers,” I say to Tim, knocking my plastic mug against his. He looks a bit stunned, like this may be a trick.

I carry on like that, trying to pay him attention when normally I wouldn’t. The music is so loud it’s impossible to talk. I have to communicate through gestures and expressions. But I can feel him softening a bit. I mimic dancing with my fingers on the table to ask if he wants to. He shrugs in response and we both get up.

We dance one fast tune. It’s a college cover band that’s playing top ten kind of stuff, some rock, some pop, even a little bad rap. At the end of this number the tempo changes to slow and Tim actually holds out his arms to me. I step into them. He’s stocky and I like the feeling of being little and wrapped up inside him. His breath is on my neck and his hand is drawing gentle circles on my back.

But when the song ends Tim just lets go and walks back to the table where he downs another beer. Nikki looks at us, confused. I’m sure she’s wondering when my delicious moment of revenge will strike. The pyramid on the table is getting higher. Some of the cups still have a bit of beer in them and they sway precariously.

Next thing I know, Tim is pulling Nikki up, coaxing her onto the dance floor. She looks back over her shoulder at me and shrugs as she follows him. I decide to go to the bathroom. When I come back they’re still dancing. I can barely see them tucked way into the middle of the dance floor, thumping away in the crowd to a heavy metal number. I’m completely alone at the table.

An image of my father, his face hardened by pain, flashes in my mind. I see him turning away, acting as though he has nothing to give me. I’m just a sixteen-year-old girl that he has no idea how to reach. He has no idea what I might need. Like the time I got my first period. He knew and I knew he knew because of the rolled up pads in the bathroom garbage which he would empty at night, as if to hide the evidence. He was going to leave all that to my mother, but she was gone. My reverie is interrupted by the huge crash of a table collapsing in the dark. Nikki is weaving her way back through the crowd.

“Hey,” she says. “Everyone’s up there. Why don’t you come?”

I know she’s right. If I don’t force myself to join in, I’ll be sitting on the outside forever. I need to find Tim and make him like me again. But when we get back to the dance floor, he’s dancing with some girl I don’t know. He seems so into the music, his eyes closed, his square hair banging against his face. I take a deep breath and move right up beside him. I’ll do whatever it takes. I’ll be attentive, I won’t turn away. I’ll be soft and sweet, and yield completely. If only Tim will open his eyes and fix me with that adoring look.

Suddenly, I remember when I was twelve and wanted to show my father that I could do a perfect dive. I wanted to show him how gracefully I could spring off the edge and slice into the water, like a dolphin. I was so anxious, I ran and dived in too soon, too close to the shallow end, and scraped my nose along the bottom. I didn’t want to emerge, for him to see the red streak along my nose that proved I had screwed up. But when I came up he had already turned to go home. I never did know if he saw me. It was the summer after the accident and he had already started to drift away.

I’m diving into the pool again now, beside Tim. I dance as though I really mean it, to make it clear to this other girl that Tim’s with me. Eventually she twirls away, not seeming to care. I tug on Tim’s sleeve to get his attention. He opens his eyes and looks down at me, a slight flash of recognition in his eyes. Then he’s gone again, bending and twisting to the beat of an old Rolling Stones hit, oblivious to everything. Or so I think, until he suddenly pulls me against him. He dances me around, leaning heavily on me. It’s obvious he’s drank way more than he’s used to. He keeps pull-ing me close then pushing me back, sometimes hard enough that I feel my ribs slamming into his. The music changes tempo and Tim and I just keep doing this weird dance around and around. If he’s looking at me at all it’s between half-closed eyes.

Finally, the band stops playing and announces a short break. Our bodies stop moving and readjust slowly to the pull of gravity. Tim is finally looking at me.

“Can I take you home?” he asks.

“Sure,” I say, hoping it’s just the two of us in the Jeep. It’ll give me a chance to make a gesture.

We walk back to the table holding hands. Nikki is there, watching us. She raises her shoulder slightly, to ask me what’s up.

“I’m taking a lift with Tim,” I tell her. I know I’m breaking our unwritten rule about never leaving without the other, but I hope she’ll forgive me.

“Okay,” Nikki says tentatively. She probably still thinks I’m up to something and have plans to dump Tim in the parking lot. She winks as if to encourage me and calls out, “See you guys later” as she heads to the bathroom.

Tim is finishing his last beer. I can’t tell how many he’s had. I hear Nikki’s mother making us promise to call her, but I can’t back out now. The anger in Tim’s voice over the phone is still fresh and cutting in my mind.

Tim stands abruptly, stumbling into the table. He reaches up, swaying, and places his plastic mug on the peak of the wobbling pyramid. Before I can back away, the whole structure collapses. The mugs tumble, dousing me with a shower of warm beer.

“Shit,” says Tim.

I almost scream something nasty, but don’t. “Never mind. Come on, let’s go.” I pull him along, trying to ignore the voice in my head that’s telling me it’s not safe to go home with him.

Once in the Jeep, Tim seems to sober up. At least, he has no trouble fitting the key in the ignition and working the complex system of pedals and sticks to back us out of the parking lot. He still hasn’t really acknowledged me, not in the way I want him to. But there’s time. It’s a half hour drive and I don’t have a curfew. We could stop somewhere. My father doesn’t even notice what time I come home anymore.

“Let’s take the scenic route,” Tim calls across to me. The tarp isn’t up and the night wind pulls his voice away.

“Sure, I guess.” The scenic route means taking the winding road along the lake instead of the highway. I remind myself of all the times Tim has driven me and Nikki safely home.

We wind along, not speaking, twisting down toward the lake. I know that Tim’s silence is my fault. I’ve rebuked him too many times. If he were driving someone else, he’d be more chatty. He’d be laughing across the stick shift, making gestures with his free hand.

Tim takes an abrupt right turn onto a dark wooded road. It goes by fast, so I can’t be sure, but I think I saw a No Entry/Wrong Way sign at the corner. I must be wrong. Tim would have seen it for sure. He must know this as a short cut down to the lake. If I question him, he’ll think I don’t trust him and it will make things worse.

My breath catches. In the distance, I see headlights approaching. What if this really is a one-way street? Will the oncoming vehicle see our lights and stop? Or will Tim see the white lights and figure it out?

My father’s face flashes in my mind, again. I see him shrug and walk away. I see his head hung low. I see the way he feels he can’t help me. And in that instant, with the opposing headlights looming so close I think I can feel their heat, I understand my father’s shame. He isn’t ashamed of me, but of himself, of his inadequacy. How can he be father and mother to me all at once? And how can he take the place of Nathan?

I am Nathan in the front seat, staring helplessly at the approaching headlights, unable to maneuver around them. My mother is beside me, frozen in terror. Our hands reach for one another as the brakes screech. I see my father, receiving the news of my death from the local police. He crashes and falls to the ground. I hear him scream. It hits me, like the full force of a truck, that I am all he has.

“Tim, you idiot! You’re going the wrong way! You’re going to get us killed!” I yell, forgetting all my resolutions about being nice.

Tim jumps on the brakes and steers the Jeep to the right, sliding us to an almost graceful stop by the side of the road.

“You could have killed us! You shouldn’t be driv-ing — you know you shouldn’t. What the hell are you trying to prove?” I keep yelling, unable to stop. I know I promised to be soft and sweet, but the words won’t stop coming. It’s as though my anger is out of control, careening across the frozen space between us and ramming into him.

Tim’s head is down on the steering wheel. He pulls it up slowly. He looks shaken, tears starting to form in the corners of his eyes.

“God, Cal, I’m so sorry,” he says. “I just wanted to be alone with you somehow, to show you …” His words break off and I brace myself, waiting for him to turn on me, to yell at me the way he did on the phone, as if it’s my fault that he’s so messed up, as if it’s my fault he couldn’t see the sign at the top of the road. I see my father again, his characteristic shrug of the shoulder, his helplessness at not being able to undo the tragedy on that other dark road.

But then it happens. Tim looks at me the old way, his soft blue eyes gazing at me from under his bangs. He looks at me the way I crave, the way I’m afraid I’ll never stop craving.

“Cal, I feel so stupid.”

I know that he’s calling on me to help him, to give him a little something. He is calling on me to tell him it’s all right. I reach across and push the thick bangs away from his face, gently.

“It’s okay, Tim. It was an accident. Forget it. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.” I know I’m talking about tonight, but I’m also talking about something else, something way beyond this moment. Something that has to do with connections and how tender they can be and how deep the hurt can cut when they’re broken.

“Let’s get out and walk around. You’ll feel better. You shouldn’t be driving you know?”

“Yeah, I know. Pretty dumb, huh?”

Yeah, pretty dumb, I think. But I don’t say it. I’m just as dumb for taking the lift. I hop out and run around to the other side to help Tim out of the Jeep. Then we hook hands and look around. In the distance, moon-light is stretched out on the surface of the lake, like a long white arm. It’s the only light on the otherwise dark road. Without any hesitation, we turn and head towards it.