“But as a girl. Like you.
Who lost her mother.
“Someone you think you know,
but you don’t.
“Someone who isn’t going to love you
unconditionally.
“Someone you have to care for.
Feed and water.”
“Like friendships,” I say.
“Yep. Like friendships.”
Row
I wanted to keep us the same, Ariana and me.
Even after our world had already changed.
But maybe that safety. That lack of evolution.
It kept me from growing. From noticing.
From understanding
that you can’t control what you have.
You can only breathe and exist
in the present.
Ariana
Because part of me knew that to hold this painting.
To hang it against a wall. To create it. To dig down deep,
it meant letting go.
Not only of Mom, but of the part of me
that maybe wanted to remain the girl
who saw her mother die.
I had to let go of being solely defined by that moment.
I had to figure out what happens to the girl
after she leaves the scene.
Because no matter how many miles I traveled,
how many years have passed,
I am still that girl, living in a state of limbo
between the moment my mother lived and my mother died
and as a result, I’ve become the one hovering
between the moment of life and death.
But this painting, it’s my way of saying,
not to the world, but to myself, it’s time.
Time to take a deep breath, time to swim
and start to notice what kind of person I am.
Who I can be, not as a girl without a mother,
but as a young woman
who has lived through something
and continues to live through everything.
I unwrap the brown paper from the canvas
and take the painting and center it on the wall.
Then I leave it there hanging
and walk to the other side of the room,
where there are drinks and snacks set out on a table,
and a few of the other students are mingling.
“Hi. I’m Ariana.” I outstretch my hand,
and a boy still wearing his beanie and scarf
extends his hand toward me, nodding back at the wall.
“Dope painting.”
Row
We hear an announcement
that the bus is approaching the station.
“What if I can’t find her?
What if I do and she doesn’t want me?”
Kennedy nods slowly
but doesn’t respond.
She takes me in her arms.
An announcement
is telling me to board.
Kennedy squeezes me hard.
“It’s gonna be okay,”
she whispers,
and even though so many people
have said this to me
for my entire life,
it feels different coming from Kennedy.
This time it feels true.
Ariana
I thought that because of the snow, people wouldn’t be here.
But they are. The room is alive. Crowded and pulsing.
A middle-aged woman bumps into me. Wine spills on her shawl.
“Sorry,” I say to her, and look around for a napkin.
“Don’t worry about it,” she says. “It was my fault.”
She flips the shawl over her shoulder.
The stain lost in the draping.
I watch the parents studying their child’s work.
I see siblings growing restless in a room with too many people.
I see Rory and her brother. I see the multicolored-hair girl
in front of her caution tape. I see her wrapping herself
in her caution tape,
and I look toward the door, at the windows outside,
where taxicabs slow and some stop. Where strangers pause
in front of the gallery and consider walking in,
and I see Row, bundled in a thick puffy jacket
and sweatpants, reaching for the door handle,
wanting to be let in.
Row
I spot her immediately.
Her hair is limp and flat
around the crown,
and dark shadows
hang under her eyes.
But her mouth is stretched
across her face,
and she’s laughing.
It’s not the image
I anticipated seeing
of my sister.
But I’m not sure
what I was expecting.
She sees me
from across the room
and starts walking toward me.
She’s still smiling.
I don’t move.
I don’t want to ruin
this moment.
I had a lot of time
on the bus down here
to think about what to say.
Her face is neither
happy nor sad
nor perplexed.
It’s focused.
Determined.
As she approaches,
my lip starts to quiver.
I bite it hard.
Scrunch my face.
But I can’t help it.
There’s an arm’s length of
distance between us,
but her closeness feels
like she’s already touching me.
Then she’s there.
“I thought you left me,” I cry.
Her arms wrap around me.
Pulling me into her sweater.
Maybe people are staring.
Maybe they’ve stopped talking.
Maybe they’re trying to ignore
the weird girls who are hugging
and crying in the middle of this otherwise
ordinary event.
But I can’t tell
what is happening
in the rest of this room,
because Ariana is holding me,
saying, “It’s okay.”
After a moment, I wriggle
out of her arms, wipe the snot
on the cuff of my sleeve.
Ariana hands me a crumpled napkin.
I blow into it hard.
“Why didn’t you tell me
where you went?
I was worried.”
Ariana looks at her feet.
Mom used to have the same look
on her face after she missed
yet another one of my games.
The way Mom’s face changed
when I asked her
if she could make the next one.
It wasn’t a look of guilt or regret.
It was a look of truthfulness.
She wouldn’t make it,
because she loved
and was enlivened
by her job.
She wasn’t the type of mother
who would schedule around work
or drive her kids to practice.
I know that’s why I hold on to her
on the field. Because I want Mom
to be the person who showed up
to my games.
I want to feel her in my heart
each time I strike the ball.
Mom loved us, fiercely,
but she was a person
with hopes and dreams,
fears and flaws,
like her daughters.
I think about
what Kennedy said.
What would I say
to a girl who also
lost her mother?
I wish I had the right words
&nb
sp; to say.
People brush past us,
but we can’t change
how we feel just because
the room shifts around us.
“I’m scared of losing you.
I’m scared of us changing.
I know that you will someday
leave. I know that we both
will change,
but it’s scary.”
Ariana doesn’t say anything for a moment.
She hesitates to get her words out.
“I’m scared too,” she says.
“To let go, to become a person
whose life drifts farther away
from the moment Mom died.”
Ariana pauses.
“I’m afraid of being
a bad role model,
a disappointment
to you. I thought
you deserved someone
perfect, but I can’t be that.”
I snort. “Ariana. I know
you’re not perfect.
If you were perfect,
you would let me
listen to all of my
soccer podcasts on the way
to school.”
Ariana shakes her head.
“Yeah, not gonna happen.
But seriously,” she continues,
“I made an eight-year-old cry today.
I said things that hurt him.
It wasn’t all that different
from how I might have hurt
you and Dad and Maribel
after learning about the miscarriage.
Or not telling you where I went today.”
She pauses. “We have the capacity
to be cruel, if we let the pain consume us.
“But it isn’t an excuse. My pain
doesn’t give me the right
to inflict pain on someone else.
“I think the truth is,
I wanted to remain the same,
the younger me, frozen in the moment
with too many emotions I didn’t know
how to deal with when Mom died,
because I was too scared
to be someone different,
maybe better, maybe changed.”
I reach out and hug her.
She smells like
laundry detergent
and pancakes
and sisters.
“We both changed,” I say.
“But maybe sometimes
we couldn’t see it
in each other,
or in ourselves.”
She squeezes me so tight,
and I never want to let her go,
but I know I will have to, someday,
and when it happens
it will be okay.
“Do you want to see my painting?”
Ariana whispers.
I drop my arms and look around the room.
“Yeah. Of course. Why do you think
I’m here?” I smile.
Ariana
There is a girl around my age standing in front of my painting.
When we get closer, I see a tear running down her cheek.
We stand in front of the painting.
Next to the girl we don’t know.
And the more all of us stare at the painting,
the more I feel something.
Eyes stinging. A lump gathering in my throat.
Row wipes at her cheek, and so does the stranger next to us.
Maybe the stranger cries for her mother.
Maybe she cries for her sister.
Maybe she cries for a grandparent or friend.
But it is unmistakable looking at the painting.
When you know grief, you see it too.
In colors. In paintings. In the faces of strangers.
When the stranger senses us standing next to her,
she tries to quickly wipe the tears off her cheek,
but when she looks over at us,
she stops and goes back to looking at the painting
sinking back into her place of feeling
loss and grief and maybe
a sense of understanding.
Row
There’s someone from the gallery,
dressed in all black,
walking around the room,
going up to everyone.
The woman hands me
a sticky-note pad.
“What do you see?”
“Huh?”
She hands me a pen.
“Write it on a sticky note.”
She hands one
to the girl standing next to us,
another to Ariana.
I see Mom staring back
the various shades
of green.
Just like the way
she is on the soccer field.
Except so incredibly different.
Mom is a brushstroke.
Mom is a mix of brown paint.
“She’s everywhere,” I say quietly.
Ariana’s face is surprised.
Like she doesn’t realize
that I see her too.
Then she nods at her painting.
“She’s here.”
I rip off a bright orange
sticky note
and write,
Mom.
But the girl next to us,
the stranger,
she scribbles
something too.
She walks up to Ariana’s painting
and places her note on the wall,
next to the placard with the title that reads
TURTLE UNDER ICE.
She smooths down the note,
makes sure it sticks,
then moves on
to the next painting.
Ariana and I walk closer
together,
to see what it says,
until we are close enough to read,
I see hope.
Row
There was one winter
it got real cold
in California. So cold
that the ground froze.
The puddles. The ponds.
Bundled in layers of clothes
and thick jackets,
Mom, Ariana, and I
went outside for a walk.
We came across a frozen pond.
Beneath the ice something was trapped.
I pointed to the dark spot in the water.
“A turtle under ice,” Mom said.
I crouched down
at the edge of the pond,
the hard ground holding me.
“It lives there?” I asked.
Mom nodded.
“It doesn’t hibernate
or bury itself in the mud
or wander south
for the winter?” Ariana asked.
Mom shook her head.
“It stays put in its pond,
breathing underwater.”
“Will it die?” I said.
She kissed the top of my head
and squeezed my hand.
“The winter can’t stop
a turtle under ice
from swimming,”
she said.
I watched the cross-hatched shell
move so slowly under all that ice.
“No one can stop us
from swimming,” I replied.
Ariana
Maybe not everyone gets my painting.
Maybe they don’t see the ice.
Maybe they don’t even see the turtle.
I tried to paint it from memory. The refractions of light
under the ice, in colors of green and yellow,
reflections of red.
The large brown lump taking up nearly
the whole canvas. Like you’re looking down
on it from above. The way we saw the turtle.
But someone saw something that even I didn’t see
in the water, under all that ice.
Maybe hope is like a turtle under ice
breathing through its shell,
through its biochemistry, still alive.
Maybe hope waits for spring to come, for the ice to thaw
for the weight of the pond that encapsulates us
to melt into nothing.
But maybe we are not meant to wait for springtime.
Maybe, instead, we are meant
to break the ice
and be free.
Acknowledgments
This book was not easy to write, and this one in particular is the result of so much love, support, patience, and understanding of so many people. I am grateful to all my friends and family who stood on the sidelines as cheerleaders through this process, helping this book get here into your hands.
First off, thank you so much to my enormously supportive and patient editor, Jennifer Ung, who read some seriously wild versions of this novel—stuff that will forever be lowered to the bottom of a desk drawer—yet still believing in me and trusting that eventually the heart of the story would come through. The core of the story, the journeys of Ariana and Row, would not have gotten here without your focused attention and dedication.