We’re a long way out on the lake when the ice breaks. It’s late, after three, probably. The sun is low in the sky. We’ve driven past a dozen men squatting on their three-legged stools over small round holes and staring into the blackness. We haven’t found our spot yet. We haven’t even seen Uncle Rick.
Everywhere I look outside there’s the lake and the sky, both the same grey-white, blurred together so you can’t see, way out there, what is lake and what is sky; and here and there in the middle distance men hunched on stools, dark silhouettes; and up close the dashboard, dark blue, covered in a thin layer of dust except for the handprints I left when Dad turned too quickly off the gravel road onto the lake, and I grabbed on, handprints like claws.
Earlier, Dad had asked Mom to come.
Mom said no. She always said no. She was doing some work, some financial stuff she needed to catch up on. She’d already told him it was late in the season, the ice might not be good; what did Uncle Rick say. Dad told her they knew what they were doing, they’d been doing it for years, they always assessed the risks before they went out. So she didn’t talk about the ice anymore.
Now she said, “I know how much you love it.”
It was after noon. We’d slept in, my sisters and I, and we’d been reading the coloured comics and doing Saturday morning chores. Mom looked over at us – Marla, Dawn, Janie – all in a row on the kitchen bench, eating brunch. Tallest to shortest. Oldest to youngest. Each in our own spot.
“Sam,” Mom said, “You could take Dawn.”
Sometimes they did that, one parent, one child. Every six months, it seemed, we had a family meeting about it, and it worked okay for a week, one or maybe two of us doing something alone with Mom or Dad, and then they forgot about it till the next family meeting. Or two of us wanted to do whatever it was Mom or Dad wanted to do with just one of us. So it never really worked.
Dad looked at me. “You’ll have to get ready quick. Uncle Rick and the cousins are probably already there. They won’t put up with any dawdling.”
Marla finished chewing and took a swig of milk. “No going to Jack’s without me.” Sometimes we stopped at Jack’s Drive-In for ice cream, if we were good. Marla couldn’t come today. She had a babysitting job down the street.
“No one said anything about Jack’s,” Dad said. “Hurry up, Dawn.” Dad got up and went outside. He looked grumpy. Probably we wouldn’t stop at Jack’s today because he was in a bad mood.
Mom said she’d pack a thermos of hot chocolate and some cookies.
In the truck, Dad hits my left shoulder hard. It doesn’t feel hard, not now anyway. He hits me again and I turn to look at him, slowly. It takes ages to move my head.
Janie and I cleared the table. Marla went to the bathroom to get ready for her babysitting job.
“Janie,” I said. I’ve piled the dishes into the sink and run water into it. I plunged my hands into the sudsy water. “Want to come?”
“Naw, I don’t want to,” Janie said.
“Dad’ll probably stop at Jack’s.” I didn’t know if he would or not, but it was worth a try.
“Dawn!” Mom poured hot water into a thermos. “Don’t push. She can go if she wants to, but she doesn’t have to.”
“But you’re making me go.”
“Not making you.” Mom looked out the window. Dad backed the truck out of the garage. “It’s a good chance for you two. You don’t do much together.” She twisted the cap on the thermos and went downstairs to the laundry room.
“I don’t want to go anyway,” Janie said again.
“I’ll give you a dollar,” I said.
His face is red and his mouth is moving like he’s shouting, but I can’t hear anything. I’ve gone deaf. His eyes are close to my face and bulging.
“I know something you don’t know,” Marla sang when she emerged from the hallway. Her eyes were dark with eyeliner and mascara, and her hair was done up in a pony.
“What?” Janie and I said. We were still doing the dishes.
Marla smiled in her teasing way and said, “Tell you later.”
“No, tell us now!” I said.
We heard Mom come up the stairs.
“Remember Mr. and Mrs. Pichowsky down the street?” Marla said in a loud whisper. She went to the back door and put on her boots and coat. “See ya!” she called out. “Bye, Mom.”
The screen door slammed behind her.
His lips are fat and his cheeks are rough and stubbly. He didn’t shave that morning. He doesn’t shave to go ice fishing.
“What?” Janie asked me. But Mom was in the kitchen now and I didn’t want to say. Mr. and Mrs. Pichowsky got a divorce last year and moved. We never saw the kids anymore. They stayed with the mom, who moved to Deepest Darkest Mill Woods. Nobody ever went there because it was miles away, and if you did go there you’d just get lost. That was what Dad said. Marla must mean that Mom and Dad were going to be like Mr. and Mrs. Pichowsky. Marla was just being cruel. She always did that, said a little bit of something, and then left. I wasn’t going to tell Janie what Marla meant. It was too mean.
Mom went down the hall to the big bedroom.
“Mr. Pichowsky went away, didn’t he?” Janie said. “And Mrs. Pichowsky went somewhere else.”
“Mmm-hmm.” Now I had another reason for Janie to come. If Marla was right and Dad was leaving, then for sure Janie should come today. To have one last visit with Dad.
“I’ll give you a dollar if you come,” I said again.
“A dollar?” Janie made a face. “That all?”
Dad yanks at my seatbelt, and I pull at it. I’m not just deaf, I’m slow and stupid. I can’t unclip the buckle. My body is weighing it down. The front wheels have gone through the ice, the truck is tipped forward, and I’m leaning into the seatbelt. My fingers are stiff and fat and useless. They could not take a five-dollar bill and fold it in half and half again if they had to. They could not do anything so delicate and so careful.
If I’d stopped to think about it just for a minute, I probably wouldn’t have said it. But it just came out: “Okay, five dollars.” Five dollars was a lot. But I really wanted her to come. I didn’t want to be alone with Dad. He was always grouchier when it was just him and me. He was scary when he got mad. And he never knew what to talk about with me so it was uncomfortable and we both ended up saying all the wrong things. I’d heard them talking once, him and Mom. He said he’d tried to talk to me and I just wasn’t receptive; and Mom said he had to get over it, he had to get over the idea that someone will be how you imagine them to be, and just accept them. “You can’t change people, Sam,” Mom said.
“Really?” Janie said. “Five dollars?”
“You can have my five-dollar bill.” I said. It wasn’t any five-dollar bill. I got it when I started babysitting last summer. It had come straight from the bank: it was crisp and smooth and flat, like a page from a brand new book. There was not a single crease in it.
Janie’s eyes lit up. “You mean it?”
I nodded. Mom came into the kitchen. I thought she would make Janie change her mind, but she didn’t.
“Show me.”
All of a sudden, the sound is turned back on. Dad shouts and swears. He looks angry. The wheels and now the hood are under water.
I went to our bedroom and pulled it out from under my mattress. “Here,” I said, walking back down the hall.
Janie took the five-dollar bill and looked at it closely, both sides. I counted. She didn’t say anything for at least thirty seconds. “Okay. I’ll come.”
She laid it on the table, lined it up lengthwise and folded it in half once, and then again. She slipped it into her jeans pocket and bounced around the kitchen, patting her pocket and making little dance steps with her feet and squealing. Then she tilted her chin up a little and smiled so her teeth showed.
Dad opened the screen door and called, “You ready, Dawn?”
Mom looked at him. “Last chance this season, like you said. Have fun!”
“Janie’s coming!” I said.
Dad looked from me to Mom.
Mom nodded. “She wants to. Just take them both. I’ll get my work done this way.”
Dad unclips his seatbelt, flings his body onto mine, and rams his shoulder against the door. He’s sitting on top of me now, all of him, pinning my legs to the seat. He pushes against the door again and it opens a crack. Ice cold water seeps in. He undoes my seatbelt and flings it to the side. The buckle whacks my cheek. He smashes my hip against the door, over and over, pushing me hard against it. The door opens a little more and water gushes in. He stops and takes a huge breath and looks into the back seat and makes a long, loud howl.
We piled into the pickup truck, me in the front and Janie in the little seat in the back. Dad backed out of the driveway.
“Looking forward to seeing your cousins?” Dad asked.
“It’ll be boring,” Janie said.
“Is that what your mother says?” He pulled onto the Yellowhead Highway.
“No, Dad,” I said.
“Are we stopping at Jack’s on the way back?” Janie asked.
Dad didn’t seem to hear. “Man, I hope Rick’s still out there. We were pretty slow getting going.” He tapped the steering wheel with one hand. He was already annoyed. “Hey, Dawn,” he said, turning to look at me. I hated it when he did that, when he turned to look at me and not at the road. I wanted him to watch where he was going. He wiped his forehead, pushed back his hair. “Mom said to ask you about your reading. How’s it going?”
For just a moment, I wished Janie wasn’t there. I hoped Janie wouldn’t pipe up that it had been weeks and I still hadn’t finished the book I’d started. Or that she was nearly done the Narnia books. I looked out the window at the fields covered here and there with patches of snow. “Fine, Dad,” I said finally.
Dad’s not angry. He’s frightened. Water fills the footwell. It rises over my ankles and up my calves to my knees and then over the seat. We’re sitting in water. I’m running out of air.
Dad shoves my shoulder through the gap in the door and out into the lake. He’s forcing me out of the truck, but I grab him, first his head, then his shoulders, and hold on as hard as I can. I don’t want to go without him.
“You know, I was never good at reading either,” Dad said.
“I didn’t say I wasn’t good at reading,” I said. I just took longer. I liked other things more.
“Christ. What I mean is, I had to work at it too. Reading isn’t everything.” He smacked the steering wheel and looked out the window. “I just wanted us to have a good time together, you know?”
“I know, Dad,” I said. “It’s okay.” I felt sorry for him. I didn’t know why, but he seemed to get angry all the time. I looked down at my jeans. They were brand new Levi’s, bought with my own money. I was wearing them for the first time. I was excited when I got them, but now when I looked at them I felt sad.
Dad pulled off the highway and onto a gravel road. It was huge, Lake Wabamum. The sky was grey-white and the lake was grey-white. We were in a gigantic grey-white dome. The sun was low in the sky. Dead grass poked through the patches of snow near the road.
“Look at all those guys! What was your Aunt Helen talking about, not to go on the ice so late in the season? She doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about! I sure hope she didn’t talk Rick out of going. Aunt Helen, your mother, they have no idea.”
“Uncle Rick always waits for us, Dad,” Janie said quietly.
He squeezes my fingers together so hard I think they’ll break, but he keeps squeezing till I let go, and then shoves me out into the water.
It’s not cold. It’s just like nothing. I shut my mouth tight to keep the water out.
Dad dives into the back seat and grabs the buckle on Janie’s seatbelt. The inside of the truck is full of water now. Janie’s hair is wet and floats around her face. Dad unclips her and pushes against the door. Her face and hands are pushed hard against the window, her hands banging at it, her lips flattened against the glass.
Dad followed the gravel road along the shore for a while and then turned onto the packed-down snow where the others had driven onto the ice. He turned so hard I grabbed the dash.
“Knowing my luck, Rick’s probably come and gone, we took so long getting here,” Dad griped. “I’ll just drive around for a bit till I find him. Did you remember the hot chocolate?”
I nodded.
“Mom packed cookies too,” Janie said.
“You can have those if you get bored.” He stared at the lake. “I’m sorry if you get bored. People are just different, you know? We can’t help who we are. It no big deal, eh?”
“Uncle Rick’s there, Dad, look,” Janie said.
“Where? For Christ’s sake, where?” Dad said. He drove forward slowly.
I looked too. We’d passed ten or twelve men, some of them in pairs, hunched over holes. They were dark shapes in the white-grey globe. I couldn’t see Uncle Rick either.
“Keep going, Dad, he’s out there, I can see him,” Janie said. “Past that guy with the dog.”
Dad drove on. And then I heard a loud crack, like a gun going off, and the front of the truck tipped forward. It was like those dreams where everything is in slow motion and sounds are muffled and all the people have gone and only we are left. The truck tipped forward, and then the front wheels were in the water.
The men said they helped me out, but nobody did. I got up on my own, when I finally found the hole. After Dad pushed me out of the truck, I floated up and hit the ice from underneath. Over and over, I kept hitting ice. It took the longest time to find the hole.
I wasn’t in the hospital for long. Just overnight. My new jeans had to be cut off. It seemed like the wrong thing to be sad about, so I didn’t tell anyone. My hip was bruised. And my right shoulder and my cheek, where the buckle hit it. The bruises were there for a long time.
The funeral was on Thursday. Janie’s face had make-up all over. She didn’t look like Janie. Her lips and cheeks were red, from the make-up. She looked like a baby, with her smooth, soft skin, but she also looked grown up. Like she was sixteen instead of nine. Her hair was washed and neatly combed. They even put make-up on Dad. I looked at their chests for the longest time, waiting for them to move up and down.
I asked Marla, when Mom wasn’t near, what she meant about the Pichowskys, and she said she didn’t remember. But her face turned bright pink, so I knew she knew.
Marla said we were living in a flower shop, with all the potted mums that filled the living room and the kitchen, some green, some purple, dark glum colours. There were so many we had to put some on the floor. We were in the news, too, the radio and the newspaper and the television even, and Mom said, over and over, at least he was doing something he loved. I wanted her to say the other part, what she talked to Aunt Helen about, that she was angry with Dad for going, after she and Aunt Helen had told Dad and Uncle Rick it was late in the season and the ice was rotten. She never mentioned that on the news.
I wanted her to say more about Janie, too. I’d seen her in Janie’s room, holding a crumpled blue shirt of Janie’s up to her chest, then pulling it till it ripped and crying as though she was going to break open, right down the middle, like the shirt. Just once she mentioned Janie, to one of the reporters who stayed asking more questions. She told the reporter that Janie was just a little girl. An adult has a choice, she said, but a child –. Then she saw me and Marla lingering in the doorway, as we so often did in the early days after the funeral, lingered near her, and she stopped talking and told the reporter to go. I kept waiting for her to say something, to a reporter or me or Marla, anyone, about getting Janie’s clothes back and finding the five-dollar bill in her jeans pocket, soaking wet. But she never did.