Reflections

The blizzard came and went as quickly as death, each layer of snow smothering out anything unlucky enough to find itself outside. We had prepared ourselves with emergency candles and back-up generators. Canned food aisles were desolate but none of us were empty handed. Our town was small and we relied on one another. We buried ourselves in knit blankets and slept soundly. Regardless, our deep seated feeling of safety did not prepare us for what the blizzard gave: a cold, clear look into the depths of life’s demise.

The sun was absent that day, replaced with looming grey clouds that swam against the dark blue sky. The news came like a lightning strike and I counted down the minutes until I heard the thundering of heavy handed plows coming down my one way street. They said 10-year-old Missy found her while she made snow angels on the pond. Her momma told everyone Missy screamed so loud it echoed, bouncing off the sides of our houses like screams in a padded white room. I imagined her mouth circling around a darkness, a small face shaking the silence of life.

Questions began to surface. What had happened? Of course, there would be no answers. The girl had no obvious story against her skin and she wasn’t going to tell anyone.

****

Three hours passed before I could see her for the first time and when I got there, there was a crowd. We huddled close together around the pond as the police chief walked near her, whispering secrets to his partner. We watched, holding mitten-covered hands and touching shoulders, giving each other much needed warmth. It was hard not to feel a chill in your bones.

She couldn’t have been more than sixteen, laying there, suspended mid-float, ice clinging to her skin like tears. She looked almost peaceful were it not for her eyes staring dead into the winter sky. She wore a white dress that exposed too much of her. Around her neck lay a broken heart necklace, the kind young girls give their best friends, as if to say our bond will never die.

She was barefoot and dirty, as though she had purposefully walked miles to end up on display. It became all the more strange once police reported no unknown car had been found anywhere in town. Her body gave no notion of foul play and it was easier to assume she did this herself, better than thinking of the alternatives. I like to think she walked miles from some lesser than holy small town down the highway. Her last moments in this world were a choice of hers and hers alone, done in some sick act of self preservation. I understood how carefully she must have dressed herself in her favorite dress, enjoying the silkiness of it against her skin, thinking of how good it could feel, to be remembered exactly as she wanted to be.

Except, for us, she was only remembered by what she wasn’t: a local, a girl with a name, a girl anyone recognized. Her face was as strange to us as the circumstances that brought her here. She had chosen our town and we had taken her in, each pair of eyes wide and watching.

****

It wasn’t until night-time that I could truly see her face to face. I went at midnight in an effort to be alone, to cross the lines of police tape without any interference. I held my flashlight tight and low, wary of anyone hanging in the shadows. The light hit the ice in a kaleidoscope of blues and whites, making everything seem mystical and inviting.

The closer I walked to her the faster my breath left my body. No amount of gossip could have prepared me. My gut twisted. My breath caught. There she was, frozen in the last moment of her life. I traced her body with my flashlight, each revealed inch of her making my heart pound. I stopped at her face and looked into her eyes. I don’t know if I saw relief or sadness. Perhaps it was both. Perhaps there was something in my eyes as well.

I felt sick. We were nearly twins, eyes a light brown, skin a slight shade darker, each of us some perverted version of the other, her of my past and me of her unclaimed future. The more I looked, the faster my blood rushed through my veins. The night fell heavy on my shoulders and I knelt toward her, my knees kissing the ice. The flashlight lit up her necklace like a spotlight. The cold, polished silver was a stark contrast against her warm-toned skin. I felt connected to her and she was telling me I had come up short. I couldn’t help but bring my cold fingertips to my empty neck, shivering. Where was my broken heart necklace?

Driven by some need to memorize every inch of her skin, my light slowly moved down her body. I stopped when I saw it. The scar on her lower right side of her stomach, strikingly similar to mine. Was it her appendix, too? Did she get it removed as a little girl, just like me? I imagined her the way I remembered it: scratchy sheets on a sliver of bed, white walls, eyes closed as we waited for the medicine to ease away the pain. Our eyes were open and staring now. Her at nothing and me at her.

I always thought my scar was the mark of a warrior. “You did it, baby,” I can still hear my father saying as I woke up from surgery, “You defeated the pain! You made it through the worst of it.”

My heart jumped. My eyes stung. Guilt made a home in my chest. I placed my hand above hers and tenderly breathed out an apology. I’m so sorry.

Anger flooded in, boiling hot, ready to melt ice. I would’ve given anything to plunge my bare fingers down, pull her close, and breathe my life into her. She would wake and say thank you and we would sob at the beauty of life.

Instead, I was sobbing there alone, tears falling on the floor between us. My knees were numb and my palms aching to warm her eyelids and close them gently. In my heart was a longing to bring this stranger some sort of peace. This stranger who could not tell me why she came here, why she showed herself to me in this way, why she looked like me.

Another glimmer of silver caught my eye and I noticed her bracelet, a tiny cross stuck mid-dangle. I wondered if her momma was the one who taught her God’s love and felt shame knowing my momma’s teachings never stuck with me. I always found myself with more questions than answers, questions that never made it further than the obvious one children always seem to ask: if God exists, then why do bad things happen? Here I was staring at a bad thing and didn’t feel the presence of any God.

Did she call out to God with her last breath? Or maybe she chose her momma instead.

I’m not sure whose name I would call.

****

I couldn’t stop myself from visiting the next day in the dead of night, my flashlight our only companion. It wasn’t long afterward that they removed her body, leaving only a cold and gaping hole. By then I had been with her for hours, been there long enough to know every inch of her I could, all the way down to the chipped pink nail polish on her toes. You couldn’t see it very well under the dirt, but if you stared hard enough, you could see the pink peeking through. I felt it was our little secret. I knew more about her than anyone and it seemed she had answers for questions about myself that I had only just begun to ask.

At night we met in my dreams. Some nights she would tell me secrets, like the way the summer grass felt beneath her bare body as she laid next to a boy she thought had taught her love. She was only fourteen and knew all at once she could never take that moment back. “I wish I hadn’t,” she told me and I understood. Oftentimes we had the same story to tell.

Other nights I was the one trapped under ice and she looked down at me. When I felt the need to scream, her mouth would open as wide and dark as a black hole, but there would be no sound from either of us.

One time I found myself jolted awake in a cold sweat, sun barely peeking through my curtains, my hand clasped tightly to a picture of myself at sixteen. I rubbed my thumb along the face hard enough to hear that faint, aching squeak. Brown eyes stared back at me and I knew she had always been part of me and I part of her. But no part of me wanted to know the truth about what happened to her.

I avoided the news at all cost, desperate to keep my version of the story pure and true. I left my house less and less until finally my door stayed shut. I’d see my neighbors stop and point at my dark windows, talking to themselves across my fence, casting the same stares they had given her months before. For days I would sit by my door and listen to their chatter.

“She hasn’t left the house.”

“I know, not since they pulled the girl out of the ice.”

“Do you think she knew the girl?”

“Maybe. I saw her picture in the paper. They looked kind of similar didn’t they?”

“Maybe she did it.”

I knew they didn’t understand me, just as I didn’t understand how they moved so quickly from the blizzard’s haunting gift. They couldn’t know she and I were the same: her, dead; and me, somewhere deep within, harboring some strange tie to an emptiness that could only be identified as the slow death of something important.

On our anniversary, we met in our usual dreamscape and she told me what I needed to do. At the break of midnight, I dressed myself in a white dress that caressed the tip of my knees and let the tiny silver cross dangle softly off my wrist. We smiled at each other in the mirror and touched our broken heart necklaces in unison. As I walked out my door into the dark silence of the blizzard, frost biting my toes and ice forming in my blood, I felt undeniably whole.