GLACIERS
THE DEEP, METALLIC CHILL of winter seeps into my skin, settles into my bones—the cold cuts like a knife, but I don’t care. I’ve been walking around the park for hours.
Along the bank of the river, the water looks clearer than usual, flowing violently, as if it’s fighting so hard to keep moving, to avoid freezing. The sky is getting darker—the days are shorter all the time. In the distance the clouds churn slowly, deliberately, gradually turning from white to gray to black.
She did it. She changed her plea to guilty. Guilty of voluntary manslaughter. Ten years. State prison. She’ll be eligible for parole after five years—that was supposed to be a consolation. “It could’ve been worse,” Mr. Clarence told us. “Much worse.”
But how?
How could she do this?
Doesn’t she care about what happens to us?
Does she even care what happens to herself?
These answerless questions run on a loop in my head as I complete lap after lap around the park, my feet pounding against the frozen ground, getting nowhere, hating her. Hating her so much I don’t think I’ll ever be able to feel or think anything else for the rest of my life. I don’t remember leaving the courthouse. I don’t remember how we got home. I don’t remember if I said good-bye to Caroline. I remember I was still clutching that snowflake book when we sat Callie down in the living room. And when we told her, she didn’t say anything at first. I thought maybe all the progress we’d been making would be reversed and she’d stop talking altogether again.
But that’s not what happened.
She sniffed and tucked her hair behind her ears and said simply, “Okay,” as if we’d just told her we’d be ordering out for pizza, or something. Then she stood and walked into the kitchen. We heard some dishes clanging and the refrigerator door opening and closing. Water running. I looked at Aaron, as if to say, What the hell is she doing? And he shrugged and shook his head in that way he always does when he doesn’t give a shit. I set the snowflake book down on the coffee table, stood, and walked into the kitchen to find her ripping open a packet of hot chocolate and pouring it into a big mug—one with penguins, her favorite—the half-full bag of mini marshmallows open on the counter next to her. She turned to look at me. “Want some?”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. I backed out of the kitchen and into the living room. I put on my coat and scarf and gloves and walked out the door. Aaron didn’t ask where I was going and I didn’t tell him either. I came to the park. Dani texted me about a million times. But I turned my phone off.
I keep circling this giant boulder in the very center of the park. I examine it from all angles and it brings back all these memories of Aaron and me when we were kids—the boulder seemed even bigger then. We’d convince each other that we’d found fossils of baby dinosaurs embedded within the surface, or we’d jump off it, pretending we could fly. There’s a little ledge carved out of the side that used to be a good foothold for climbing, but now it’s the perfect height to take a seat.
I walk over and sit on that timeworn shelf. I pull my knees into my chest and let my back rest against the solid wall of ancient rock—no doubt deposited here by some glacier during the Ice Age, though I’m sure it doesn’t contain any baby dinosaur fossils. As the cold mass cradles me, shielding me from the wind, it makes me wonder if there was a moment when all of this could’ve gone another way. Maybe that moment was two million years ago—that glacier could’ve veered slightly and set a whole different path for the river our ridiculous town was built up around. It could’ve curved in the direction of the coast and turned this whole city into a wide, deep cut in the earth, with this boulder sitting at the very bottom of a lake, miles below, no one ever knowing it even existed. And then my parents wouldn’t have lived here, their parents wouldn’t have lived here, and all the ancestors before them, all the people who found this place, would never have lived here, and Allison and Paul would never have met, maybe never even existed. I wouldn’t exist either. And maybe that’s a reasonable price to pay not to be here in this mess, feeling the way I feel, right now.
Then again, maybe that moment was the day he left her stranded without her shoes at that restaurant when they were our age. Maybe if Mom hadn’t given him another chance. Maybe that was the day it all could’ve changed. Or maybe it was the fight between Dad and Aaron, the one that caused the grape juice stain. What if Dad had seen me standing there, scared, in the hall and realized how wrong he’d been? Maybe it was the day I found Aaron on the roof. Or maybe if Mom had left. Moved in with Jackie when Aaron was a baby.
It seems like there should be a specific moment in time. A clear event. A point in our history when they could’ve chosen another path. Something we could look back on now and know for sure, Yes, this is where it all went wrong. Or maybe it was all like a slow-moving glacier, the escalation, the damage it was causing underneath indiscernible to the naked eye. Maybe Caroline was right about people being like water—it does what it does and there’s no stopping it.