Our Pond

The high beams fanned out into the darkness, illuminating the first tentative snowflakes of what the weather prognosticators were forecasting to be the worst storm Michigan had seen in more than half a century. Clay gripped the steering wheel a little tighter as he turned off I-75 and towards his grandfather’s cabin.

The cabin had been in Clay’s family for more than 80 years, and he was its latest, and probably last owner. True, if he had had any children, he would have passed it on to them, but considering how things were with his wife, that was an unlikely prospect.

Despite the February storm looming in the near distance and the imminent end of his marriage, Clay relished the drive. Just a little road hypnosis to get his head back on straight. He turned his old Bronco onto Sturgeon Valley Road, which would lead to other, no name roads and eventually to the only place he had ever truly felt whole in his entire life.

The snowfall was picking up steam, so Clay flicked on the windshield wipers and squinted through the flakes which slashed like white-hot blades through the wash of the headlights. The blacktop ahead had begun to accumulate a fine dusting, and he hoped the ice on grandpa’s pond had thickened some since his last visit.

As he drove, he silently reminisced about the times he had spent at the family cabin as a child. He was a quiet kid, hard to read. His teachers described him as bright but unenthusiastic. He regularly heard from his mother how much she loved him, but her hugs and kisses just left him confused. He didn’t know if he loved her, or even if he knew what love was.

Clay’s dad didn’t help things. He was away for much of the year hauling steel from Canada, and from thaw to freeze his home was Lake Superior, leaving Clay to figure out much of life for himself. That wasn’t so bad, though, considering when his father was home, his favorite pastimes were hitting the bottle and hitting his family. Clay remembered watching the tv miniseries of Stephen King’s The Shining when he was about nine and finding the Jack Torrence character very familiar. Clay got it the worst, but his little sister, Maya, got plenty. He quickly discovered that crying made things worse, and that getting sad or angry would only give the old man further cause. He learned from an early age to bury his feelings so deep he couldn’t feel them any longer.

As he drove, Clay considered the last Christmas they had spent at the cabin. The family’s old Chevy Cavalier was stuffed with gifts, and a 12-year-old Clay sat bundled next to a nine-year-old Maya as the family began the treacherous drive to Grandpa’s cabin. The paved roads were plowed, but icy, and the dirt roads were all but invisible beneath the pristine blanket of snow.

It was full dark when they arrived. The old cabin loomed above the carpet of blue-gray snow like a specter in the mist. Once inside, the stoves were lit, the fireplace stoked, and the children put to bed. He couldn’t remember what gifts he opened the next morning, but Maya was ecstatic over her new ice skates. She begged to go try them out. Clay’s father had started his drinking early (it was Christmas after all) and slurrily grunted his assent.

Twenty minutes later, Clay sat on a log at the edge of the pond where his father would go ice-fishing, watching his sister skate. The heavy winds of the night before had blown away the loose snow, leaving a perfect field of clear crystal. He was amazed at how clear the ice was. He could see the fish beneath the ice darting here and there in search of their own Christmas feast.

Maya’s movements were almost hypnotic. She would glide across the surface with effortless grace, leap into the air, and land, smoothly drifting in a new direction like a train switching tracks. Clay watched with quiet fascination as he began to doze.

Suddenly, he jerked awake at the high-pitched sound of the ice groaning, like high-tension wires snapping and falling to the ground. With a final, low creek, the center of the pond gave way, spilling Maya into the frigid water. She thrashed and kicked, moving further beneath the sheet of ice.

Clay remembered thinking that as preternaturally graceful as she was skating on top of the ice, below it all grace and beauty had left her as she struggled to stay near the surface, her new skates pulling her mercilessly towards the bottom. He stood above her on the edge of the old dock and watched his sister’s life slip helplessly away beneath the frozen sheet.

Awakening from his reverie, Clay turned onto the first of several dirt roads leading to Grandpa’s cabin. His cabin. He supposed if she were alive, it would be Maya’s cabin too, and in a way, it already was. She had become as much a part of that place as he was. Clay knew that things had changed for him that day. Nothing he could do would ever take away the feeling of longing that he'd felt since, regardless of how he had tried.

He married Jess when they were both only 20 years old, and he had tried to be good to her. Heaven knows he had, but the day his sister died left him feeling that the spark which he had last felt on that frozen pond was forever gone. Marrying Jess didn’t bring it back, so he tried other ways.

It was two weeks ago that Jess found the earring in his car. It wasn’t hers. No, Jess would never wear anything so gaudy. It was a wire hoop wound with fine, white string, and had two small ceramic feathers hanging from the bottom. A dream-catcher. A younger woman’s earring.

Jess was devastated. She brooded over her discovery for a week and a half. She had tried convincing herself that there would be a good explanation, and that he would say something that hadn’t occurred to her during those sleepless nights, something to redeem her husband of 15 years.

After ten days, she could agonize no longer. When she finally confronted him with the earring, he had no defense. Sure, he told her that it wasn’t what she thought it was, but when pressed, he couldn’t explain it away.

He knew that telling her the truth would devastate her and it would destroy him. He knew she wouldn’t understand. Nobody would, except maybe Maya. He had the idea that she might be the only person who would -who could- understand what he was going through.

Jess had had her theories, and Clay had sat patiently listening. His monthly solo fishing trips to the cabin, his frequent purchases of free weights, and now the earring. She thought he was having a midlife crisis. They had grown distant, after all, and it was even possible that he regretted getting married so young. Maybe he had some wild oats to sow, and she suspected he was sowing his oats in someone else’s field. So, he bought weights, got in shape, and went out once a month for the last year to sow, but he got sloppy. She was right about that; he had been sloppy.

So here he was. Driving back to the only place where he belonged, where he COULD belong. He pulled into the driveway at about 2:30 in the morning. He shut off the car and sat for a moment, savoring the feeling of warmth giving way to chill as the engine cooled and the vents went still.

With a sigh, Clay opened the driver-side door and crunched his way through the deepening snow to the back of the Bronco. He opened the tailgate, dragged the tarp aside, and hauled the firewood into the cabin. He trudged behind the cabin to the shed, where he retrieved his fishing rod and ice saw. Moments later, he was seated on the same old dock where he watched his sister drown, his fishing line dangling limply into the freshly cut hole in the ice.

He thought back to the look on Maya’s face that day, as she gasped only inches away from the air for which her lungs so desperately screamed, inches away from her brother. He remembered kneeling over her, the saw in his hand, the tip digging into the ice, when he noticed a change in her eyes. Eyes which had begun both vibrant and terrified gradually dimmed, until they could only be described as pleading. He lingered, his grip on the saw slackening, watching as the light dimmed and went out of her eyes forever.

That day, he had actually felt something. It was unlike anything he had experienced before. He had buried his feelings so deep and so long that he was astonished by how powerful a feeling it was. It wasn’t sadness or despair, but a quiet sense of satisfaction, completion at seeing the life leave his sister’s eyes. Nothing in that moment was buried, nothing was hidden. It was real and intimate and honest. He finally knew love.

Watching Maya die was truly a rare gift, something special that only he and she shared. No one else on Earth could comprehend what had passed between them.

He remained for another half hour watching her float silently in her ice-water tomb, her head grazing the glasslike surface of the pond. He knew that this special bond he and his sister had forged in their frozen sanctuary was a past, ‘done’ thing that he could never have again, and he felt empty. He wanted to feel again.

The boy long gone, the man Clay sat by the pond, stirred from his nostalgia by the breaking of the dawn over the glistening pines. He stood, stretched, and took some tentative steps onto the ice to check his line. Not even a nibble, which was understandable. The fish were well fed. He knelt to the right of his hole, wiping snow from the ice. By the crisp rays of sunlight peeking through the trees, he could just make out the other dream-catcher earring, bobbing up and down as the fish nibbled at the frozen flesh from which it dangled. He had really thought he would feel it again with her. He had been so sure. But he had been wrong before. None of them had made him feel it again.

He crawled over the ice, dusting away the snow and looked into the pale, lifeless faces trapped beneath the pristine, crystal-clear barrier.

“She will be different,” Clay thought as he stood and walked back to the Bronco. “I will feel it again.”

He heaved the heavy tarp from the trunk. Snow crunched beneath its weight as it struck the ground. Jess moaned and squirmed weakly against the plastic. Hours in the cold had robbed her of her strength.

Gripping a 25 pound barbell plate in one hand, Clay dragged the tarp onto the ice with the other. He carefully, lovingly unwrapped the tarp, revealing his wife clad only in her nightgown, bound with rope, her mouth covered with duct tape. He gently tied the barbell weight around her ankles. Her chest rose and fell, hitching with sobs and shivers. Her tear-streaked eyes looked up at him pleadingly.

“I knew it would work this time,” Clay said, a joyful tear falling from his cheek and freezing on the ice. “This will be special. Just for us and no one else.”

With the heel of his boot, he nudged the barbell weight into the gaping maw of the ice, and Jess was swallowed into the blue-black water of his grandpa’s pond. “Our pond,” he whispered through contented tears. With that he knelt, gazing lovingly through the frosted pane into the panicked, darkening eyes of the second woman he had ever truly loved.