Chapter 1 #3
I had an injury, sweetheart, and my knee doesn’t bend like it used to. I just decided I liked teaching better. I had my time and now it’s your turn. Grown-ups change, honey, sometimes they change a lot.
I had them all. I had them filed and labeled and ready. I had used them on adults and on teenagers and on the man at the bar in Coeur d’Alene who had not deserved any of them.
I had not, it turned out, filed one for Nova.
I opened my mouth again. The shape of the air in my chest was wrong.
The cougar on my fleece was looking at his loose paw.
The chiller was humming. The Disney playlist was rolling, indifferent and forgiving, into Let It Go a second time, because we had now been in this conversation long enough to loop.
Nova waited. She just stood there. Her unicorn patch caught the dim rink light. Her eyes did not move off my face.
“Nova!“ Kate called, from the lobby. “Coat, baby. Let’s go.”
Nova waited another moment. She gave me the chance to answer, and I did not take it. Her mother called her again and she turned, in her orange-guarded blades, and clack-clacked across the rubber matting toward the lobby and her jacket and the rest of her Saturday.
The rink emptied out by ten-thirty.
The Adult Beginners class had come and gone—four women in leggings and one man in cargo shorts who I was, on principle, never going to give up on—and the public skate hour after that had been thin, just like the Saturday public skate was always thin in November.
By ten-twenty the last of them had handed their rentals back to the kid at the counter, and by ten-thirty the kid at the counter had clocked out, and by ten-thirty-two I was the last person in the building.
It was my week to lock up. We rotated, Marcus and Tiff and I, and this was my week; every third week of the month for nine years, and I had come to count on it. I liked the empty rink. The empty rink was the cleanest version of my life. The empty rink did not ask me questions.
I made the rounds. Lobby first—wiped the counter, restocked the rental-skate spray, slid the till drawer shut and twisted the key and dropped the key into the drop-safe under the desk.
Bathrooms. Both stalls in each. Nobody. There was never anybody.
Once in 2019 there had been a kid asleep in the men’s room and I had called his mother and given him a juice box from the office drawer and that had been, statistically, the most interesting lockup of the decade.
The Zamboni didn’t need a run. I’d run it after public skate already and the ice was, for a Saturday at ten-thirty in November, in excellent shape, which was a thing I noticed because I had been noticing it since I was nine.
I ran it anyway.
I climbed up into the cab and turned the key and the old diesel coughed and caught and the rink filled with the warm familiar engine sound that I had loved, secretly, in a way I had loved very few things over the past nine years.
The smell of it. The vibration in the seat.
The slow patient lap of the blade across the ice.
I drove the perimeter once, slow. I did not think about Nova, and I did not think about Kate, and I did not think about Tokyo, and not thinking about all three of those things at once took the entire fifteen minutes of the run.
I parked the Zamboni back in its bay. I killed the engine. The building went quiet.
I walked to the panel by the office and I killed the overhead spots one by one. Soon, the only light left in the rink was the dim emergency amber from the strips along the boards and the green glow of the EXIT signs over the lobby door and the rear bay door.
I walked the boards.
I went the long way. I went past the penalty box and the home bench and the away bench.
I went past the spot where Theo had bowed an hour ago.
I went past the spot where Nova’s outside edge had been clean on the second cone.
I trailed my left hand along the top rail because my left hand was the one I let myself use for things.
My right hand stayed in the kangaroo pocket of the hoodie.
I stopped at center ice.
Not on the ice. On the rubber matting, at the edge of the boards, at the place where the centerline crossed under the glass. I had walked there without remembering having walked there, and I stood there in my doubled white trainers with my left hand on the rail, and I looked across.
The far rink glass, dim, amber-lit, picked me up like the rink glass does—half mirror, half window, the warped silvered ghost-version of you that lives in the building and only comes out when the lights go low.
For half a second.
For half a second, I want to say, because I want to be honest about this, because the inside of my head was already getting loud about it again. For half a second, the woman in the glass was not me.
She was, and she wasn’t. She had my face.
She had my long brown hair, but the hair was down—not in the low braid I had worn since I was fourteen, down, loose around her shoulders, the way I had worn it exactly once in my adult life, which was the night of the Tokyo free skate, which was the last night I had worn it down.
The dress was black. The dress was the black one with the silver beading at the right shoulder, the one my mother had bought from the costume designer for the half-price she’d cried for, the one I had not seen in nine years because I had folded it into a box in 2016 and put the box on the top shelf of my mother’s hall closet and not opened the closet since.
The sequins were catching light. There was no light in the rink to catch.
The sequins were catching light anyway, the way they had caught the Tokyo spots on the warm-up, the way they had caught the spots on the take-off, the way they had —
The reflection met my eyes.
She lifted her chin a quarter-inch. That's what I used to do. I used to lift my chin a quarter-inch on the long opening glide of the program, when the spots came up and the crowd quieted and the music was about to start.
She looked at me.
I looked away. I didn’t want to see her. I didn’t deserve to see her. I wasn’t worth anything.
And that’s what tore the world open. I have thought about this since, and I am as sure of it as I am of anything: it was the looking away.
The rink glass rippled.
It rippled like the surface of a deep pool when a hand has been laid on it from underneath.
The amber emergency light caught in the ripples and broke into something that was not amber anymore—something paler, something cold, something thin and high and silvered, the color of a sky I had never seen in this hemisphere and would never have been able to name from a paint chip.
The air pressure dropped.
My right ear popped. My left ear popped a half-second later. The chiller, which had been humming since seven, stopped humming.
The building went quiet in a new way.
I walked toward the glass.
My left hand left the rail. My right hand came out of the kangaroo pocket.
The whole inside of my body was the small bright forward-tilt of the moment before a jump take-off, the moment your body knows what it is about to do before your brain does, and I had not felt that forward-tilt in nine years and I felt it now, and I was already moving when I felt it.
The far rink glass—the panel directly in front of me, the one at center, the one that had just held the woman in the black dress with the silver beading—looked, up close, like the surface of a still pool seen from above.
Pale. Faintly silvered. The reflection had gone.
The amber light had gone. What was in the glass now was a long thin high sky in a color I did not have a word for, and underneath that sky, very far down, the shape of something that might have been a tower, or a needle, or a finger raised, white and gold and shining and so far away it was a rumor.
It smelled of cold water. It smelled of clean stone. It smelled, faintly, of something I want to say was honey or old paper but was neither. Some smells are not the thing they remind you of, just near the thing.
I pressed my bare right hand to the glass.
It gave.
It gave like water. It gave like silk. It gave, around the heel of my palm and around each of my fingers in turn, with a small cool patient yielding, and the cold of it ran up the inside of my forearm and into the hollow of my elbow and sat there like a hand had been laid against the inside of my skin.
There was no pain. There was, instead, recognition.
The cold knew me. The cold had been waiting.
The cold, in some long quiet way I could not yet name and was not going to be allowed to refuse, had been expecting me.
Somewhere on the far side of the glass, very far down, the white-and-gold needle on the long thin horizon caught a light I could not see the source of, and shone.
I stepped through.