Under Ice

There was a patch in the ice where the snow had blown off or been scraped away, and the blackness beneath showed with unusual clarity, not merely bubbles and a dim frozen seam, but depth. I saw the river bottom, the pale, silted shape of bone-white branches gleaming in the dappled light, the pale wreckage of a wicker-and-wire pram, and a child under dark water, its gleaming face turned upward, its white dress waving in the current. A scream tore out of me. I lurched backward so violently I would have fallen if Lorenz hadn’t steadied me.

​

“Help,” I cried. “There’s a child under the ice.”

​

Heads turned. Strolch began barking, circling wildly as if he were chasing his tail. Someone began laughing. But Lorenz looked down, then back at me, and his face had become very calm.

“Stupid goose,” he said. “It’s a doll, nothing more.”

​

And as if he’d decided the only proper response to a goose was instruction, he began telling me more about Basketballspiel.

​

“Never panic,” he said. “That’s the first rule. Focus on quick passing and organized movement, not raw physicality or charging about stupidly. Don’t clutch at the ball like it's a frozen baby.”

​

He was still talking, and I was still staring down into the dark water, when I saw that, yes, it was a doll. A large doll, blue eyes staring up at me stupidly, lying among weeds at the bottom of the frozen blackness. But its pale, upturned face was so lifelike that my heart would not be reasoned with.

It seemed to move just then, its arms and legs twitched feebly in the cold water with the slow, deceptive stirring of the current beneath the ice, the lace veil lifting and settling, the bouquet fluttering in its little stiff hands as though in mock assent to some unspoken vow. It was one of those larger dolls meant to resemble a girl almost grown, its painted mouth pursed, its cheeks indecently bright, its glass eyes fixed on the world above with an expression of blank submission. A bride. A bride the size of a child.

​

I couldn’t have said why the sight of it rattled me so. It was just a toy, castoff, lost, or discarded in the river before the freeze. But it seemed to gather everything Lorenz had just been saying into one hideous image: the future, the children, the chosen world, whiteness, obedience, the girl made ready before she knew what any of it meant. Beneath us, the black current rocked its little veiled head.

“You see? You only frightened yourself. That’s what Ernst says. Panic is a form of feminine weakness. A man doesn’t lose his nerve.”

​

He said more, but I wasn’t listening. His words were muffled by the pulse in my ears and the hissing scrape of skates all around us. I heard Georg laughing behind me. Marija said, “Imagine screaming over a doll,” and then Klara asked whether I was all right. And another thin, tiny voice inside saying it’s the false bride from a false future, can’t you see? Strolch’s barking seemed to come from a great distance, though he was now scratching frantically at the scraped patch of ice, whining, his claws making a shrill, hopeless sound against the frozen surface.

​

The doll turned with a lazy rolling twist of the head in the current below, enough for the lace at its temple to float aside, showing a crack that ran from ear to chin, its blue eyes catching the pallid winter light. I felt, with a certainty beyond argument, that if I kept looking, the thing would lift its hand in a blessing or a curse.

​

“I want to go back,” I heard myself say, though my lips were so numb the voice scarcely sounded like mine.

​

Lorenz snorted impatiently.

​

“Then skate,” he said. “Nothing is keeping you here.”

​

Nothing. The word entered me like another kind of ice. (You have to leave. We have to go!)

But something was keeping me there. Not the doll alone, and not Lorenz, and not even Mareile’s shame. Something had fastened itself between the sight under the ice and the place in our womb throbbing with the words “our children.” The whole world had narrowed to a circle, black below, white above, and in the center the doll floated in her bridal dress like the answer to a question no girl should have been made to ask.

​

Klara was beside me then. Her face, so composed a little earlier, was pale beneath the cold, and whatever she saw in my face made her reach for me. “Mareile,” she said. “Come away from there.”

Her hand caught my sleeve. I stared at her dainty white-gloved hand on my coat, then further below to find the doll’s little bouquet still fluttering in its hands, the white blossoms nodding in the current as if the river itself were breathing vows through them under the ice.

​

I felt a distinct, horribly delicate pressure on my left hand. For one maddening instant, I thought the doll had reached up through the black water to take hold of my finger. The touch was light like that of a woman testing the size and weight of a wedding band before taking it home. But the touch was like a perfect band of excruciating cold, tightening on my fourth finger until the bone seemed to ring with pain.

​

Then I fell.

​

Backward and downward, I plummeted through white migrainous light, through coal smoke, damp winter wool, and dog fur, all shredding into the smell of the lake house, lemon oil, and beeswax.

I was on my knees beside the window seat, retching into the large vase we kept there. The room had gone gray with evening, though I couldn’t tell how much time had passed. I heard the canned laughter from the TV downstairs, and outside, music played, that stupid song Believer I heard constantly, Liesl singing along loudly.

​

For a long while, I could do nothing but kneel and breathe in broken, shallow pulls. Every time I shut my eyes, I saw the doll again under black ice, the little veil drifting, the bouquet in its hands, the fixed blue stare, not a child, not a bride, not even alive.

​

At last, I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and pushed myself upright against the window seat. I dragged myself back up onto the cushions and stared out the window. The lake beyond was still there, flat and indifferent under August haze, but thank God not frozen. A motorboat buzzed into the cove and glided to a stop near the reeds and grasses in the shallows.

​

Must be fishing for Largemouth Bass, I thought.

​

My fingers ached with cold. I looked down, expecting the ordinary tingling and trembling after a migraine.

​

But there, around the fourth finger of my left hand, was a ring of ice. It was wide, blackish in some places and milk-white in others, like frost blasted into a circle. For one bewildered second, I could only stare. Then I touched it with the thumb of my other hand.

​

It burned.

​

The thing was already melting from the heat of my skin, wetting the finger beneath, yet it did not slip free. I cried out and tried to pull it off, but at the first tug it seemed to bite colder, feeling for all the world like frozen lips circling my finger, sucking.

​

“No,” I whispered, though whether to the ring, the bridal doll, or the fairy tale land that had placed it there, I couldn’t say.

​

I tried to pull it off again. A bead of water slid over my knuckle. Then another. The ring softened wetly, lost its edge, and collapsed against my skin, meltwater that ran into my palm and down my wrist.

​

When at last the last of the water had gone, a pale white mark circled my finger, as if the flesh there had been lightly burned or deprived of blood. It was still horribly cold when I touched it. This wasn’t the kind of thing migraines leave behind.

​

I thought of Lorenz saying “our children” and the doll under the ice in her little white dress, waiting in the black water like a promise already spoiled. And I panicked, got up and scrambled through my drawers looking for gloves because I had to hide this, no one could see this, or they’d know what I’d done.

​

I collapsed on the bed and wept. I didn’t want anyone to hear, or see, or know any part of what I’d brought back.