Spring 2009

Ice

by Darlin' Neal

My mother died on a cold night when the stars hadn't been out too long. After awhile, when I started listening, beneath us, I thought I could hear a stream. I don't know how that whole night passed, but it did, passed until morning and through the next day—another night, another morning. Finally the police and paramedics came. Too late for my mother. Just in time for me.

In the hospital a nurse said that my name, Angelina, was right for me, because I must be an angel with God watching over me to live through the cold mountain nights, naked. A doctor put stitches in my cheek, neck and chest. He also said that I was going to be fine, that the main thing that'd gotten to me was the cold. The first thing I told them when I decided to talk was that they should listen carefully to find my mother's heartbeat. I told them the cold had frozen her and slowed her blood, but if they thawed her, it'd come back.

One of the nurses was Mexican like my mother, and she said, "ˇPobrecita! ˇPobrecita!" And whispered to another nurse that I'd been out in the cold for thirty hours. There, in the hospital where my father couldn't look at me without crying, and where I don't remember him coming to see me much, I told the nurses everything, how I'd gone with my mother to work that afternoon—up to the Sunspot Observatory, how driving she told me she was going to get back together with my dad and not divorce him after all. How happy we'd been riding in the car next to each other. She wasn't going to let roadblocks stop us. She knew a short cut. Her voice was a little thick and her breath smelled like the beer she'd been drinking with her buddies at the ski lodge. And, even though my heart gave a little leap each time we made a curve, I wasn't scared, because I thought I was getting everything I wanted—my mother and father back together and all three of us, happy. Even when we left the road, my heart had only given that little leap. Afterwards, there was nothing, no blackness, no dreams. Nothing until I woke with that tree in my face.

Before then time gets mixed up, but I know it couldn't have been more than a few days earlier, if not on the very day she died, that I got scared thinking about people dying and told my mother. We were sitting at a kitchen bar alone because my father had moved out for a couple of months. She'd said that we'd think of it as a house of women and spend some time having fun, having girl talk. About my worries she said all little children worry about that when they are around the age of eight and that I was an early worrier and she promised me that if she died she'd come back to let me know if there was a better place. If anyone could keep such a promise, I believed my mother would.

I was only in the hospital a few days but by the time I went home I'd missed the funeral. My father was living in our house. He'd been there waiting for us the night the car slipped over the mountainside. Days I didn't want to do anything but lie in bed. I'd watch the glitter of blue ice on the window because that winter it snowed in Alamogordo. It was unusual all that snow in the desert though it always snows in winter in the mountains where my mother died. And it had only started snowing since I'd gotten home, as if it'd followed me.

Through the wall I'd hear people talking to my father. At first I didn't try to make out the words of those voices, but I listened to my father because he sounded different to me. "Lucille," he'd say, or whoever's name he was speaking to. "I thank you." I've never been able to forget how funny that sounded to me—the way he'd say the name like an announcement, so stiff, and then, I thank you.

I knew the young priest's voice right away because he was handsome and one day my mother had joked and said that she'd keep going to church just to feast her eyes on him. And she'd said he had a voice to match, sexy, so that he could seduce even a nonbeliever into believing. I'd asked her what seduce meant. She'd said in that case it was drawing someone into something for the wrong reasons. I liked him but when he opened the door to see how I was doing, I pretended to be asleep, and in the sounds his movement made in his clothes, I knew when he crossed himself after he'd prayed for me.

After awhile the smell of all the food people brought filled my room and made me sick to my stomach and I started listening closer to their voices, crackling through the window if my father walked with them or met them outside, or muffled by the wall if they were in the kitchen. Some would talk about how we never know what plans God has for us and dying young must have been God's will with my mother. She was forty-four and when I heard people talk about that being young, I thought of all the grandmothers walking around and how my mother would never be one. They kept wondering if I remembered. They kept wondering when I'd finally talk about the accident, if it'd be better when and if I did. I heard quite a few people say I was a blessing from the start, coming unexpected and late in my father's life as I did. I had brothers and sisters, because both my parents had been married to someone else before but they were so much older than me that I'd never lived in the same house with them that I could recall. And it's strange to me because I know my sister and brother came to visit when my mother died, but I can't remember them being there, no matter how hard I try. Some people would make the comparison between my mother's dying and my living and offer it up as proof that her death was meant to be and mine not. I'd get jealous of some of the women because their voices sounded put on to me when they comforted my father. It wasn't anything they said, "How are you holding up?" or "I'm sorry" or any of that, because even then I could hear that no one knew what to say. What bothered me was the tone of their voices, absent of any pain, or too full of the grief when I knew in life they'd been someone my mother didn't get along with.

Sometimes I caught the sound of my name, heard people talking about how my staying in my room couldn't go on and my father would say, "It's the thing I can stand now least of all." What I remember hearing most often was that I was a brave girl.

Sometimes a woman, a neighbor or friend, would knock on my door and come in with a plate. All the food looked the same to me and I wasn't interested but they'd say, "Try it." Or "Tell me your favorite. I'll bring it. You need to eat." Sweetie. Honey. Baby. One day a woman said, "Pobrecita," like that nurse in the hospital had and I burst into tears thinking that's what my mother called me when I fell down or was sad. The woman held me in her arms and rocked me saying, "There it is. Let it out."

My father said, "Finally."

Then the clouds left and the brightest sun came out—so bright it was painful to look outside at the melting snow. Each day I noticed a robin was under the tree near my bedroom. It stung my eyes but I'd watch for him, and then watch him play when he finally arrived. I thought it must be the same robin, pecking at the thawing ground, and bouncing over the melting snow. Once I saw slush fleck from his claw, delicately and there were brief rainbow colors in it. That he came for several days straight seemed significant. I thought maybe the message from my mother was finally arriving and I kept watching him but nothing extraordinary happened, just that brief rainbow of colors following his dripping feet. I didn't know what to believe—that my mother had forgotten her promise or found herself unable to come back and tell me anything. I thought that perhaps she was still trapped somewhere like we'd been trapped in the car.

Mostly I just felt a horror when I'd hear pans clinking in the sink and find it was only my father in the kitchen, or mornings, when I thought I heard the shuffling of her makeup in the bathroom or when I went to their bedroom door and saw the empty space beside my father where she'd spent so much time sleeping. Mostly I just felt horror.My mother gone from all those places, gone and never returning, and that was all.

At night I'd hear my father crying. He sounded as if someone was squeezing him and making his breath come out in bursts. I'd get out of bed and walk through the hallway. I'd run past the door to the bathroom because there I could feel a breeze and it gave me the creeps. I felt that if I happened to walk past too slowly, I might be sucked in. Even though I knew it wasn't likely, I also knew anything could happen.

When I'd get to the doorway of my parent's bedroom, I'd stand there until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. Then I'd see the tangle of covers over Father's body. That was when I first realized he was a small man, seeing him curled in a heap like that.

I'd always listen to him sob until I could see and then I'd run to the bed and lie beside him in the indentation that once held my mother. I don't know how long this went on, how many nights I went to him. Sometimes I'd talk. I'd says things like, "There, there. She wanted to come back. She told me. She would have if she could." But I didn't talk much because it'd make him sob again and he'd say, "Angelina, hush." I'd kiss my father's mangled hand with its three fingers missing from an explosion in the War, and hold it in both my own and listen to how quiet it was outside with the birds gone to sleep and the cars all parked in the driveways. The main thing about those nights sleeping with my father is that when I crawled into bed, soon he'd stop crying and I'd feel such comfort and when he fell asleep I'd wait to feel my mother's presence thanking me.

When the night came that I no longer heard him, I got up anyway. He must have been sleeping heavily because he didn't call my name or ask me why I was getting out of bed in the middle of the night. I turned on the light in the kitchen. I looked inside and found the refrigerator full of so much food you'd need a catalogue to know what was rotting and what was still good. I closed it. In my slippers and robe I walked through the entire house and it felt unfamiliar, like I was searching for something in a strange home. It was odd how in being just the same everything became wrong and out of place. My mother's name on the Astronomy mailing label, her coffee cup with Cafe du Monde written on it still in the cupboard. I found letters and bills on the desk with stamps and her handwriting. When he got up that morning I said to my father, "Shouldn't these be mailed?"

He came to his knees in front of me, where he took my hands and squeezed, wrinkling the letters. He looked down as if he would say a prayer. Then he stared at me as if he would speak about important things, but instead jerked stiff, as if he might salute like he did his buddies on Holloman Air Force Base. He stood and said, "Yes. Why don't you take them out to the box."

Then the leaves and soft yellow and deep red velvet of the rose buds came out and the irises were in bloom in the front yard. Flowers my mother left that would keep remembering their way back to us. I was helping my father water those flowers because we had two hoses out front when he told me he'd been thinking about sending me to visit Aunt Carmela.

When I didn't say anything, he said, "Angelina, talk to me."

I said, "I don't want to go."

"It won't be for long. Just until we're both stronger."

I looked at the mud splattering against the cement bordering the porch and rinsed it back down. I said, "You can't send me away."

"Angelina, I must."

The water puddled around the flowers. I turned my hose off and wound it up and walked inside the house. Father followed me. He said, "Angelina, understand."

He told me my aunt lived right on the other side of Texas, outside the wonderful city of New Orleans. He went to the bookshelf and pulled out a Road Atlas and looking at it I thought of New Orleans and how my mother had mapped out a trip for us there so we could go to Mardi Gras.

I refused to look when he pointed at pages inside. I kept saying, I won't go and he kept saying you must. I was calm and firm. He kept asking me to give him the reason I wouldn't even listen.

Days passed without his mentioning Aunt Carmela again and I thought he'd forgotten until one day he showed me my ticket and started taking me to stores to get new clothes. Do you like this dress he'd say or this cute shirt and I wouldn't answer. I'd keep on not answering until he would start throwing things in baskets or piling them into his arms. We'd go and pay for them and sit in the house not speaking. Then the next day we'd go again.

"Angelina," he'd say. "You can have anything you want."

This made me so angry, anything you want, when it was such a lie, that one day when he came home, I said, "All I want is my mother and you're sending me away just like you got rid of her."

I told him that he'd let them bury my mother alive when all they had to do was wake her up like they'd done with me.

All the announcement gone from his voice, he said, "You don't believe that."

"Believe?" I said. I told him to not forget that I was hugging her and if anyone had cared enough to listen they could have heard her heart beating and her tiny breathing just as I had.

"Enough," he said. He looked away as if it wasn't my words but something he was seeing that hurt him. I told him it was probably warm in the coffin and my mother had woken up in there and realized what he'd let them do. Where she died was in the ground, not with me in the mountains.

He sat in a chair by the plate glass sliding doors. He said, "Angelina, what has happened hurts us both. I'm not trying to make it worse but you need more than I can give right now."

His empty voice frightened me and I knew he hurt. I knew I was lying because I'd felt that tug of my mother slipping loose. I tried to take back my words. I said, "I know she really died in the mountains. I listened to her heart stop."

That night he talked with Aunt Carmela on the phone. He said that he just couldn't handle it all at once, my grief and his. He said he thought maybe the best thing for me would be to have a woman's comfort. I went to sleep imagining trumpets in a town, my mother floating through the streets behind me, while everyone alive was dancing.

I have a scar that runs in a nearly straight line from my ear to my chin. It makes its way jaggedly down my throat to the center of my chest. On the day I was to leave for Aunt Carmela's, Father caught me in his bathroom with my mother's makeup. Instead of getting angry, he helped me, told me it didn't really look bad and that if I wanted when I got back, we'd go to a doctor and see if it could be diminished or faded somehow. Maybe there was a doctor in New Orleans who would do fine work.

I rode the forty-five miles to the El Paso Airport in a lacy blue dress. My suitcase was packed full of clothes, every shirt, every dress, every pair of pants and all the underwear, new. I was finally going to see New Orleans. I was finally going to meet my mother's sister. I thought maybe I'd see a resemblance.

I wouldn't have known her from Adam or Eve but my flight attendant lead me right up to the desk where Aunt Carmela was waiting. The attendant inspected Aunt Carmela's driver's license and then gave me to her.

Aunt Carmela was a short woman with this belly, not really fat, but round. She had short birdlike legs that stuck out beneath her shorts. Not only did she not look like my mother but she was older, already with gray streaks in her curly hair.

"Well, here you are!" Aunt Carmela said as we walked through the crowds, past smoking areas, past bars with bright colorful lights that were bars but reminded me of churches because of all the painted glass and people. The only difference being the flashing lights and more intimate arrangement of seats.

Waiting for luggage, Aunt Carmela took my face in her hands and said, "Those eyes." And I thought of the lights from above shining on the black and I knew she was seeing my mother in my face.

When he'd picked out my suitcase, my father'd said it was one I wouldn't forget or have trouble seeing. It had large yellow flowers on a blue background and when Aunt Carmela asked, I told her I'd know it when I saw it. We ended up waiting so long Aunt Carmela thought it was lost, but finally round the crazy thing came.

It was no secret to me that Aunt Carmela thought her job was to get me to talk. Everyone thought I should be talking about what happened, and remembering good times. I didn't mind but when I went I started I would come up blank and thinking about what happened sometimes I'd find I'd walked in the wrong direction and gotten lost. My mother was an astronomer. Aunt Carmela spoke of this. She said my mother had been a brilliant woman, smarter than anyone else in the family. She'd taught me the names of planets and constellations, took me to look through telescopes at Sunspot where she'd worked or up on The Hill in Alamogordo at the Space Hall of Fame. She knew the movement of all the celestial bodies.

She'd taken me up the mountain to the observatory the day of the accident. I remember that day before my mother died in snatches. A painted ivory chest. Me, I'm small and I stand close and see the marks of a paintbrush, a golden floppy handle near my eyes. I reach and flip it up. Let it drop down. Click. Click. I wait breathless. Hear the water dripping from her body as she stands in the tub. She walks into the room, all legs.

Nylon brushes nylon as she steps near me reaching for jewelry on top of the chest. I know it's a necklace she searches for by the clatter and the jangle. I touch her leg, feel the silkiness of her hose, the moisture of her just-washed skin rising through, staying on my hand as I move away. Because she says, "Get on the bed. Sit up there and wait for me."

I love that big bed. The down comforter so thick my legs sink and get hidden in folds. The silk and lace of her slip slid from covering her face and drop over her body. She puts on a string of pearls. Tangled in those blankets, I want to be my mother.

My hand dries. I press it to my lips. It smells of sweet powder. She sees me and she knows. She takes a powder puff and dabs white, sparkling powder on my cheek.

I cup the smell, the softness, in my hand. I look in the mirror and laugh at my silly face—all white on one side. I don't wipe it off.

We are getting ready. We are getting ready to go.

Everything before she died comes to me as one day, everything heading toward that one moment and all that would follow. Outside in the evening mountain air, I feel the snow spilling into the tops of my boots, making the rubber cold and I want more. I want to wade through until I can not stand that icy cold.

My mother held my hand. She guided my steps. She opened the door to the observatory. And there, I became just as caught up in the warmth and polished whiteness of walls and the bodies of telescopes as I'd been in the snow falling outside.

Her fingers clicked and danced across a computer keyboard.

All the windows in the observatory. All that glass. And the stars.

And my mother saying, "Wake up, Angelina. Come see them closer."

She showed me old things I knew by heart—the rings of Saturn, the craters of the moon. She told me new things I cannot remember and then she said, Not a dream, Angelina. Not only a dream anymore. A long time ago to you, but not so long for me, a man walked around up there. Now it's a woman's turn. My lashes brushed glass as I peeked through the telescope. Everything soft and smooth and full. Everything it would never be again. I was seven years old.

In Louisiana, I wasn't sure which star was a planet, though I stared to determine brightness. There was already so much I was forgetting. Each night in bed I recited the names of the planets in our solar system, Jupiter, Mars and Venus… Aunt Carmela came to sit on the edge of my bed at night. I didn't want to say prayers, but I let her pray over me. She said, if you need to talk, I'm here, and then she shut out the light and closed the door and I listened to the cicadas.

At Aunt Carmela's my room was fixed all in pink and ruffles. A shiny bedspread, curtains with stripes running straight down them and the same stripes ran down the wallpaper at the head of the bed. In a vase on the bed stand were pink and pale blue flowers—fake little sprigs of flowers. All the wood in the room was painted white—the headboard, the dresser whose legs looked like cats paws. And on each knob was painted a flower. Only the flower was a richer pink, almost red.

It was such a sweet room, like too much candy, it made me sick. Mornings I hurried to get my clothes. I'd dress for school and be so careful putting everything back in its place. If I was in the room during the day, all that pink blew like sand and burned sleepiness into my eyes.

Late into the dark, with only the nightlight shaped like a rose, I never felt as lonely as in the day. From the bed, with the stiff covers scratching my chin, I could see out the window to the stars in the sky.

One evening I was taking out the trash and thinking of the bridge we had to cross when we came in from town. Everything I saw was making me tired. All the houses on the block had flowers in pots instead of in the ground and all of them the same, white clapboard, though the trim might be green, blue or red. Mostly it was blue. I was afraid I'd go to the wrong one on my way back to Aunt Carmela's. I missed my adobe and turquoise house in Alamogordo.

The bridge was in the opposite direction from the dumpster, not far from Aunt Carmela's. I don't know why I got to thinking of that bridge so hard. The only time I'd noticed the water it had been dark and shadowed by the trees. I started to wonder if I had ever actually seen anything down there, if instead the river was dry. All I could think was that I wanted to see that water. I dropped my sack of trash on the sidewalk in front of the third house from Aunt Carmela's and headed toward the bridge. The sunlight hung low, just above the tops of the trees and telephone poles that lined the street.

When I got to the bridge I looked down and sure enough there was water and, on it, speckles of light. The lights came through from the inside out. I lay down on the bridge, ducked my head, shoulders and arms beneath the slats of the fence and leaned so far forward I thought I might tumble into the rocks, but I couldn't reach anything. I crawled back out and walked to the end of the bridge and made my way down the bank.

Resting on a slab of cement, I cupped the light in my hands, watched it spill between my fingers. I could feel the light in my hands as much by itself as when I took water with it. I flattened my palms on the slab, near my face so I could keep watching that light trembling on them. In a while I heard Aunt Carmela calling, "Angelina!" I heard the wind in the trees above me, that water trickling. Altogether it was like a song and the air was warm, a lullaby of sound and air sent me to sleep.

When I awoke I started screaming because I thought I was blind. I stood and groped my way over the bank and to the top of the bridge. There, I held onto a post and cried until car lights blared on me and I imagined I could see my tears, glistening like the water but sharp, coming out of my eyes.

A car door slammed and it was Aunt Carmela who came running toward me, she whisked me into her arms and rocked, saying, "What happened? I thought you were lost or stolen."

It was in the car driving that I talked. Aunt Carmela drove me round and round. I told her that I remembered a stillness before falling, a quick sinking into emptiness. How it opened my eyes wide and took my breath away.

I told her what I always tell everyone first: When they found me I was naked because I'd taken off all my clothes to try and save my mother. That's what I always remember—that I was naked because I tried to save her, and maybe it doesn't make any sense, but I didn't feel cold anymore. I had awakened to darkness and something cutting into my cheek, neck and chest. As I moved away I realized what hurt me was the branches of a tree and the glass that spilled from my hair when I fell back inside the car. I put my hand to my face and it came away bloody and then I saw my mother beside me.

Some of the blood on me had crusted and it pinched my skin when I started screaming. I screamed until my throat was sore and I gave up the hope that someone would hear. And the screaming seemed to make my mother tremble so I calmed myself and said, "I'll take care of you, Mama." Then I took off my coat to cover her arms, my shirt to wrap around her head, my socks, my pants, my underwear. By the time I finished taking things off with which to stop her bleeding and keep her warm, I had nothing left but I wasn't cold any more.

It didn't take long to see that there was no way out. I couldn't get through the shattered front window because the trees were thick and the car smashed too small. Even if I had gotten out I couldn't have found my way to the top of the mountain and I didn't know where I'd find the road. I was also afraid that if I managed to leave my mother, some animal would smell blood and come and eat her.

I was so warm. I put my arms around her and we stayed there, enclosed inside the car with glass and sharp metal all around us, with the metallic taste and smell of gas, pine, blood and ice in my mouth. I remember wondering how that snowy place could be so warm. I became still before my mother did. The way I was holding her I could hear her heartbeat, so I listened to that, and started seeing only shades of light and dark, the growing, dimming and fading to black. The world slowed to almost nothing, but I could feel the last trace of life in my mother pulsing. It tugged me into sleep. When I awakened again, I felt tricked, because somewhere when I was dreaming my mother had given a final tug and slipped loose. I held on until men came with Jaws of Life that cut us free.

As they carried me away I heard a man say, "Be careful not to bend her." Even though I couldn't feel anything, I knew if they bent me I would break and I knew my lips were blue like my mother's and my skin as gray as her face. My hands were stiff and bent like claws. When they asked me questions, who I was, was I Angelina, and so forth, I didn't feel like answering.

Finally the voice that told everyone not to bend me, said, they knew who I was, not to worry, my father had had them go searching. Alive, she's alive, the man said when they saw me inside the car. It's a miracle she's alive. No one said much about my mother. In the ambulance I could tell the man didn't want me to look on the other side where my mother was lying. He sat between us and kept telling me I was going to be okay.