Thin Ice (10 page)

“How was work last night?” Mom asked
.  I was passing through the kitchen.

“Fine,” I said
, and grabbed the car keys.

“I need the car today,” she said.

“Nope, sorry, I gotta go.”

I pulled out of the driveway before she could stop me and drove to
Krishna’s.

It was freezing outside
.  I stood knocking on Krishna’s door, shivering, wishing someone would hurry up and answer. 

There was no car in the driveway
.  Maybe nobody was home.  I went into the backyard, knee-deep in snow, and started throwing snowballs at Krishna’s window.

She came to the window and opened it
as a snowball headed toward her.  She got it right in the face.

I couldn’t help but laugh.

“Damn it!” she yelled.  “What are you doing?  You’re crazy.”

“Let me in.”

She shut the window.  I went and stood by the door.  I was tempted to return to the backyard about the time I saw her walking through the kitchen.

She opened the door.

“What took you so long?” I asked.

“You’re still alive.
”

“What happened to me last night?”
I sat down at the kitchen table.  “Can you make me some coffee?”

“
You were crazy.  You were insane,” Krishna said, preparing the coffee.  They used a drip machine.  “It was like someone unleashed a tiger into the room.  You were completely out of your mind.”

“What did I do?”

“You got angry at this guy who was saying a bunch of sexist shit.  I don’t think anybody knew him.  He was from Fond du Lac, I think.  Paul was there.  Did you see him?”

“
He was the one who got me out of the snowbank where I passed out.”

“
Paul did?  I think I remember him looking for you.  We tried to look for you.  We were going to call the police but were afraid we might get you into trouble.”

“I don’t remember any of this,” I said
.  “I don’t remember no matter how hard I try.”

I stopped trying
. 

When my mom asked me about going to work later that afternoon
, I told her I about the job.  She said she wasn’t surprised.  She said she had given up on me a long time ago.

I sat in the living room
, watching TV.  I heard what she said, but it didn’t register. 

Gay came over at some point
.  She told me something, but I couldn’t hear her.

“What?” I said.

“Look at this.” Gay set something down on the coffee table in front of me. 

I looked at it.
  “What the hell is that?”

“Um,” Gay said, hesitating
. “It may be too late to say this, but I don’t think you should drink.”

I stared at the brick on my coffee table.

“Are you saying I hurt someone with that?”

“Nobody has seen that kid you were pummeling last night
.  I don’t think you hurt anyone with this because I took it out of your hand.  I had to practically wrestle you to the ground to get it.”

I picked it up and turned it around, looking at it from all angles
. 

“I don’t remember anything from last night
.  I don’t remember going to the party.  The last thing I remember was losing my job.  Then waking up in a snowbank with Paul.  He took me home.”

“Maybe
don’t drink as much,” Gay said.

I had a vague memory of her telling me to drink
.  It seemed like such a long time ago. 

“Maybe some people
shouldn’t drink,” she continued.

“Whatever
.  I don’t give a fuck anyway; it doesn’t matter what I do,” I said.

Gay stood up and backed up from the coffee table
.  She backed up to the gold curtain that hung down to the floor.

Then she gestured with her arms
, and said, “What are you talking about?  You have all this.”

I looked around and tried to imagine what she was talking about.

“My living room?” I asked, baffled.

When she didn’t answer,
I thought about it.  I remembered the first time I’d met her.  Well, not the first time, but one of the first times.  She had gone rampaging through my house, hanging wine-soaked tampons from my chandeliers. 

N
othing she was telling me about how lucky I was registering with me at all. 

“Anyway, whatever
,” she said, when my incomprehension became clear.  “Can I organize your records for you?  Will you pay me?”

“Sure, go ahead
,” I said, and sat admiring the snow.  I pulled out a baggie and smoked some of it with her while I watched her work.

I didn’t see her again till later than night
.  By that time, I had forgotten what she’d said to me in the afternoon.

Between the
n and the time that I saw her again that night, I had smoked most of my pot.  I decided to drink the rest of a pint of whiskey that I had hidden away for times of need.  I put some Dylan albums on and sipped and chain-smoked. 

By the time
Krishna called, I was completely drunk.  I stumbled into the kitchen when my dad told me she was on the phone.

“Aren’t you supposed to be at work
?” he said.

I turned to answer him
but, since I was seeing two of him, couldn’t decide which one to speak to. I picked up the phone, and said, “Hello?”

“Are you read
y?  Come get me.  Ziggy’s home,” Krishna said.

“Ok
ay, I’ll be right over,” I said.

I turned around
. 

My dad was still waiting for an answer
.  “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

“You haven’t talked to Mom yet?” I said.

“No, why?”

“Never mind
.  I need the car,” I said.

“Your
mom has it.  You can’t use mine.”

Even though I knew he wouldn’t budge on this, I was about to try to convince him to let me use it, but then saw
Mom pull up in the driveway.  I had a feeling I was going to have trouble taking the keys away from her.  I heard the car door slam. 

It had warmed up a little, and some of the ice on the driveway had melted
.  It didn’t take her long to reach the back door.

She shut the door and began taking the scarf off her head, and taking off the woolen, blue
-and-white speckled winter coat.

“I need the car,” I said.

“You’re not using my car,” she said.  “No.”

“
You’ve got to be kidding me.  Why not?”

My dad stood behind me with his hands
in his pockets.  He stood about two inches shorter than me.  My mom was a whole head taller.

“What happened to your job, Jane
?  Do you need the car to get to work?  I can take you,” said my dad.

My mom shook
some of the snow off the coat in the kitchen before taking it to the hall closet.

I followed
her. 

“She quit her job,” Mom said, “so you don’t have to worry about taking her to work anymore
.  I wouldn’t let her use your car either.  You can smell the alcohol on her breath.”

If the rage I felt had a co
lor, it would have been orange, like the fire in hell.

The phone rang
.  I was prepared to knock them down in order to reach it first.  I didn’t want them telling Krishna that I couldn’t use the car.  That seemed humiliating to me somehow. 
How dare they tell me I can’t use the car?
  It felt like my car.

“Hello?”

“Jane?” It was Gay.

“Yea
h?”

“When are you picking us up
?  I’m at Krishna’s.  When are you getting here?”

“I’ll
be there soon,” I said. 

“No she won’t!
”

“Was that your mom?” Gay asked.

“Don’t worry about her.  She doesn’t tell me what to do,” I said, and hung up.  “Don’t you shout again when I’m on the phone with my friends.”

“Some friends,”
Mom scoffed.  She had put away her coat, and was heading up the stairs. 

“I am taking the car,” I said, and climbed the
red-carpeted stairs after her.

She had her purse tucked tightly under her arm
.  All I needed to do was grab it from her.  I tried, but she pulled it quickly in front of her.  I knew I could overpower her.  It wouldn’t be hard.  But I wanted to do this the nice way.

“I tell you what, Mom,” I
said, and headed back down the stairs for the living room.  “You give me the keys and I won’t light the house on fire again.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” she said
.  But she stopped.  She was taking me seriously at least.

“You
go ahead and try to sleep, but bear that in mind,” I said, and smirked.

She started toward me
.  I went into the living room by the coffee table where I had been talking to Gay in the afternoon.  It seemed like a long time ago, but it was only a couple of hours.  I had paid her the $20 I always paid her when she sorted my records.  My purse was still sitting there with my wallet out, next to the brick she’d left there.  I picked up the brick.

My mom stood at the door of the living room with her purse clutched under her arms
. 

“Do I need to call the police?” she asked me.

I saw my dad come up behind her.  He stood behind her in the hallway. 

“I don’t know, are you going to give me the car keys
?  If you give them to me, there is no need to call the police.”

My dad started to move in front of
her.  I saw those tiger-striped pajamas.  At that moment, the impulse to throw something took over.  I was drunk, but not so drunk that I had no awareness of what I was doing.  The floor swayed some, but not enough to explain the lack of aim.  I meant to throw the brick through the front window, but as the brick was leaving my hand, my dad lunged toward me, his arm extended. 

I could still feel the brick scraping the tips of my fingers as it left my hand
.  It struck my dad’s forehead, just above his eye, cutting him.

T
he blood.  There must have been some kind of mistake. 

I couldn’t believe how
quickly it had happened. 

Mom dropped her purse
.  I grabbed it.

“Where’s her keys?  Where’s her keys?  Oh my God.” It was freezing.  I found them at the bottom after swirling the contents around and around, dropping some of them onto the snowy pavement.  I stuck the key in the lock and rushed into the car.  It didn’t help. 

Somehow
, I’d thought if I shut the door, I could change something.  But nothing changed.

I
drove toward Krishna’s, as if picking up Krishna and Gay and going over to see Ziggy could change something.  The road looked weird, like it wasn’t real.  The darkness of the night, the Christmas lights, and the lake ahead of me, and the moon.  The moon. 

I pulled into
Krishna’s driveway. 

There were Christmas lights
up and down the fancy houses by the lake.  I could see a Christmas tree inside some of the houses, but not Krishna’s.  In the driveway, I honked. 

Sickness churned in
my stomach.  There was no way I was leaving that car and going inside that house; I was going to sit there and blast the horn.  If they didn’t come out, I didn’t care.  Let them rot.

They finally came out, both of them smiling
.  How could they be smiling?  How could they be so revoltingly blind?

But then
, why they wouldn’t be smiling? 

What was wrong with me?

They opened the door.

“Now that’s a ghastly moon,
” Krishna announced, as she came in, “not ghostly.”

Ghastly moon, ghastly night.  Maybe
Krishna wasn’t as blind as she seemed.  But then how could she smile?

Gay
sat in the front seat, and slammed the door, shivering in the cold.  She reached over and turned up the heat.

“How’d you finally get the keys away from your mom
?” Gay asked, her tone light and oblivious.  “Is she on the rampage or what?”

“You know what they say,”
Krishna said from the back. “Whatever Janey Lou wants, Janey Lou gets.”

“Don’t call me that
.” I turned and glared at Krishna, half-snarling.  “Don’t you ever call me that again.  Call me Jane.”

Krishna
’s eyes went from flippant and amused to shocked.  “Okay,” she said.  “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I said.

Nothing, nothing, nothing but the ghastly moon.  Nothing but everything.

“Guess she doesn’t like that name,”
Krishna mumbled. 

I pretended not to hear her.

“What did you do to get the keys, kill one of them?” Gay asked mockingly.

“Why did you say that?” I
asked sharply.  How could she know?

“No reason
.  Let’s drive.  Mellow the fuck out,” Gay said.

“Okay,” I said
. Nothing, nothing.  She knew nothing.  “I’ll mellow the fuck out.”  I focused on the road.

Gay and Krishna starte
d a conversation about something that had happened at Krishna’s.  Krishna giggled. Giggled!  Gay said, “That was unreal.  Jane, you should’ve been at Krishna’s.  Ames came over and demanded his arm back.”

“His arm?”
I spoke on autopilot, only half-processing the words. 

“
That candle arm,” Gay said. “The arm that held the candle.  The one that sits on her coffee table that she made from a mold of Ames’s arm.”

“I wish I
had
been over there,” I said.

Then nothing would be wrong.  Nothing, nothing.

“She broke up with him,” Gay said.  “Wait, she didn’t exactly break up with him.  She asked him why he was still coming over all the time.” She busted out laughing.

“That’s not what I said,”
Krishna protested. 

“You’re cold
-blooded,” Gay said.  “Seriously, Jane, you should have been there.  He came in the room and asked Krishna to turn her music down.  He was serious.  We were smoking a bowl and she turned the music down and he said ‘Can I have my arm back?’ We were like, ‘What?’”

“Yea
h, I should have been
there,”
I said.

There was silence for a few minutes
.  Gay stared out her window at the Christmas lights.

“I can’t wait to see Ziggy,”
said Krishna.  Ziggy.  What did he matter now?  Not at all.  Nothing.

Gay sa
id, “I know, neither can I.  Jane!  You’re going ninety!”

We were passing the park
.  A streak of Christmas lights zipped by on the right.  The park was veered off to the left.  I didn’t want to leave the park, so I swerved left to continue following it.  My tires spun out.  For a moment, I lost control of the wheel—

loss of control, controlling nothing, helpless

—then regained it.

“Slow down
, crazy.  Where are you going?!” Krishna yelled from the back.  Her voice was distant, as if she stood far away.  She reached up and put her hand on my shoulder.  The tips of her fingers brushed the skin of my neck, cold as icicles.  “Why are you turning here?  We’re going to Ziggy’s.  Go straight.”

“Never go straight
!” Gay shouted. “Go forward.”

“This isn’t funny,”
Krishna said.

“Slow down, there’s ice on the roads,” Gay said.

Were those Christmas lights or red-and-blue police sirens in my rearview mirror?

Police. 
“Oh my God,” I whispered.  Then something snapped within me, and I screamed. “Oh my God!  What have I done?”

“You’ve been driving ninety miles an hour, what the fuck do you think you’ve done
?  Pull over,” Gay said.

“Oh no, we have drugs in the car, and open bottles of booze
!” Krishna shouted.  “We can’t pull over!”

“Oh my God,
oh my God,” I screamed, putting my hands over my eyes.

Blood, streaming down my father’s face.  His shock.  Collapsing to his knees.  My mom rushing forward
.

“Put your hands back on the wheel!”
Gay and Krishna shouted.

Was he dead?

Gay grabbed the steering wheel.  “Just pull over.”

Had I killed him?

“No,” Krishna said. “We have open bottles and we’re drinking.  We have drugs.”

Dad?

“Throw them out the window.” Gay rolled down the window and started throwing things out of the car.

“Don’t do that
!  It will only make it worse.  Drive on the ice; they can’t follow you on the ice,” Krishna said. “It’s illegal for them to follow you onto the ice.”

The ice.  The cold, smooth, nothingness of the ice.  Yes, I would go there.  I would go there to escape the police and the memory and the blood, blood, blood—Dad!

My rigid leg jerked harder against the accelerator and we sped up.  Ninety-five.  One hundred. 

The car jolted beneath me, vibrating through my stiff muscles, blurring my vision. 

That was why my vision blurred.  Nothing else.  Nothing.

“I thought the police weren’t supposed to follow you,” Gay
cried.  “This is insane. Pull over; you’re getting us into worse and worse trouble.”

There it was, stretched out before me, shining with gentle luminance under the ghastly moon.  Smooth, perfect.  No flaws at all.

I couldn’t feel the accelerator pedal under my foot anymore.  I couldn’t feel anything.  I could feel nothing.

I could feel everything.

There had been so much blood.

The road cleared away, the last of the trees passed, and we were suddenly gliding out on the perfectness of the ice.  There was a moment of smoothness, where not even gravity could touch us.  We might have been floating in nothingness!

“Are they following us?” Krishna asked.  “They’re not!  It worked!”

Hydroplaning.  What a word.  We were flying through the vacuum of space—

The car juddered beneath me, bouncing over a ridge in the ice.  I slammed forward, then back, knocking my head on the headrest.  The back tires slid and the car spun, faster and faster, in a circle—then floated sideways, once more skimming across the perfect nothingness of the lake.

Gay and
Krishna screeched, terrified.

No—excited!

“Do it again!” Gay exclaimed.  “Do another donut!”

“Or a figure-eight!”
Krishna cried.  “Do a spiral! It feels like we’re flying!”  She threw up her arms, leaned back her head, and shrieked with terror, with excitement, with sheer joy.

Far overhead, the ghastly moon watched us.  It knew everything we did.  It had seen everything I’d done.  Nothing escaped it.

My foot was still stuck all the way down on the accelerator, my leg too numb to move.  But now my arms were lax and heavy, and the car spun again and again, whipping us from side to side, making the girls with me scream with delight.

I couldn’t see the shore.  We must be close to the center of the lake, where the ice was thin.  Out in the middle of nowhere, where no one could see us, and no one could hear us, and no one could help us.

And still, they shrieked.

My mother had shrieked.

But my father . . . my dad . . . my daddy, he hadn’t made a sound.  Nothing.

“Again, again!” Gay and
Krishna chanted.

Didn’t they realize how dangerous this was?  The car.  The ice.

Me.  I was dangerous, wasn’t I?  I hurt people.  Maybe killed them.  Him.

The wheels slid and slid and the girls shrieked and shrieked.

And beneath us, the ice cracked.

We’re going to die
, I thought. 
We’re going to go through the ice, into the freezing water.  We’ll drown, drown, drown in the cold blackness until there’s nothing left
.

“Did you hear that?” Gay asked.

“I can’t hear anything.  Why did you stop?” Krishna asked.  “Why are you crying? Would you chill the fuck out? Would you just chill? Don’t be so fucking emotional. Don’t be so fucking boring, Jane. Keep doing donuts. Come on!”

Boring. 
No, I certainly I wasn’t boring. I wished I was boring.

I leaned my head back and closed my eyes, my leg at last relaxing from the pedal.

The ghastly moon lowered.  The ice cracked.

The
y were screaming again; I could hear them, distantly.  They were trying to escape.

“There is no escape,” I wanted to tell them, as the car tipped forward, as the ice parted beneath us.  “Can’t you see?”

But I didn’t tell them.  I said nothing.