I had never seen a heart collapse before the day I ran through the threshold of the old rundown barn screaming, barely breathing, face drenched with cold tears and freezing pond water. “She fell in. She fell in, Momma!. I can’t get her to breathe…”
Whether my mother had time to fully process the stream of words spilling from my mouth almost involuntarily or she could feel my heart beating inside her chest, I will never know. It was as if she was falling the way Mother turned downward, right knee sweeping over the hay that covered the wood flooring. As soon as she dipped, she rose, the tool belt on her hip knocking the brown paper box she was opening when I barged in like a raging bull to the floor. My father always said our mother was the fastest woman in the country, but until that day, I rarely saw her jog, let alone run. Yet, she rose from the creaking old floor like I was the sound of a starting pistol at the Olympics.
The smell of fresh accumulating snow fell upon us as we ran. Trying to keep up with the stride of Mother’s long legs was impossible, and the cold mountain air grew ever more stifling with each fall of my foot. Every molecule of air pierced my lungs like a thousand wasps trying to escape from my chest, but I could not stop running.
The sound of the ice succumbing to the weight of Marigold and I echoed through every hollow space in my body. “Green light,” Dahlia, the youngest of us three, shouted from the bank of the frozen pond. Knees bent, torso low, we both launched forward on our ice skates. We were at full speed halfway across the pond when Dahlia’s dainty voice squeaked, “Red light,” in the distance. I came to a full hockey stop about a foot behind Marigold, who was beaming ear to ear with excitement.
“I just knew you were going to win,” she laughed. “Your start was so much better than mine, and I was off bal…” she exclaimed, starting to take a step backward. It was at that exact moment we heard the first crack, then another, and in the blink of my eye, Marigold was falling. I could see the shock in her eyes as the cold snatched her body. Her arms flailed following a valiant but failed attempt to catch hold of the edge of the still parting ice.
For a long breath, I was frozen stiff. The sound of water splashing, ice cracking, and panicked cries of Dahlia clinched my bones and locked my joints. Yet, it was the hopeless gaze of defeat and the slowing of Marigold’s movements that brought back the blood flow to my limbs.
The icy breeze blowing off the mountains caught the tail of my peacoat as I lowered myself to the ice. Terrified that the shifting of my weight would do more damage, I inched to the ice slow like molasses draining from sugar cane in winter. As my knees touched the ice, Marigold’s body was going limp. Grabbing hold of the collar of her coat, I began pulling as hard as I could, trying to get some kind of grip that would help me pull the weight of Marigold up and onto stable ice. After what felt like a hundred attempts, exhausted, I managed to get her onto the ice.
My hands were numb from the cold before we even made it to the shore. It felt like forever that I was trying to resuscitate Marigold to no prevail before I grabbed Dahlia’s shaking hands and pulled her down beside me. “Do not stop! Please…I can’t, I have to get Mom, do not stop, you can do this,” I stammered, putting my forehead to Dahlia’s. Prying off my skates frantically, I took off toward the barn.
Mother never wanted to move when dad decided to drive the ice roads yearly. She was terrified. She always said she had faith in him, and she knew he was a supreme driver, but the ice roads were different. Yet, Mother would never stop any of us from following our hearts because she always followed her own. Thus, we moved just outside of Ontario, and two months out of every year, Father took to gliding across the ice.
Ice has always been a part of our lives ever since I can remember. My dad would travel back and forth from Oregon to Canada to do long hauls during the winter. He always had a deep-seated passion for adventure and thrills. He came from a long line of Tuscarora fishermen— his father and great-grandfather were both master ice fishermen.
My parents had met at a truck stop diner in Oregon while Mother was in college—talk about an ironic fairytale happily-ever-after. My father had stopped to refuel his rig and grab a bite to eat on his way to the Canadian border when she walked in with her track mates covered in rainwater and a smile that he said could light up the night sky like a billion and one constellations. They exchanged gazes, then names, eventually numbers, and countless hours sharing their past and present over phone lines.
After graduation, she packed up her apartment and moved in with him. Now and then, she would join him on a long cross-country haul, but never on the ice roads—he would not allow it.
When Marigold was born, she got her name from the bouquets of Marigolds Father would bring Mother after his cross-country trips. Growing up in southern Georgia, she said they always reminded her of home.
Muscle memory had taken command of my strides as I could no longer feel my feet. My legs burned as if they were beginning to freeze inside-out by the time I reached the top of the hill that overlooked the pond and the now dormant grove of fruit trees. I could see Mother almost falling as she stumbled frantically down the hill, yelling, crying— laughing.
“Mari!” she shouted, her voice echoing through the valley.
As I barreled past the pear trees we planted when I was seven, a couple of weeks after we moved here, I began to make out the shape of both Marigold and Dahlia sitting at the shoreline. Dahlia had curled into a ball in Marigold’s arm, sobbing quietly. Marigold sat stroking her hair. Her smile, bright as sunshine as she caught sight of Mother, who was now wiping tears away from her face like high-speed windshield wipers in a torrential downpour.
Like a blanket falling from the night sky, Mother dropped to her knees, leaning over the two of them, folding her arms to pull them closer, weeping an almost hysterical song of relief. With the only energy I had left, I fell to my knees to kiss the ground covered in what now felt like a comforter of warm snow.
That night, Father arrived home with the annual end of the ice road season celebratory chocolate cake in hand. However, this time, we greeted him with tears, laughter, and the warmth of a crackling blaze from the hearth glowing like new Marigolds beneath a sky of a billion and one constellations.
© 2023 All Rights Reserved, O’Dellshae TruVarsha Wiles Robinson El Bey writing as Egypt English. Enjoyed this piece? Check out my latest book: “My Mother Said Write” (2023).
