My mother takes off her coat and wraps it around me. Her mouth is tight, her face is frightened and angry at the same time. It’s the look she used to have when we would cut ourselves, a long time ago, up north. She puts her arm under my armpit and hurries me along. My feet hurt at every step. I wonder if I will be punished for going down into the ravine.
When we reach the house my mother peels off my soggy half-frozen clothes and puts me into a lukewarm bath. She looks carefully at my fingers and toes, my nose, my ear lobes. “Where were Grace and Cordelia?” she asks me. “Did they see you fall in?”
“No,” I say. “They weren’t there.”
I can tell she’s thinking about phoning their mothers no matter what I do, but I am too tired to care. “A lady helped me,” I say.
“What lady?” says my mother, but I know better than to tell her. If I say who it really was I won’t be believed. “Just a lady,” I say.
My mother says I’m lucky I don’t have severe frostbite. I know about frostbite: your fingers and toes fall off, as punishment for drink. She feeds me a cup of milky tea and puts me into bed with a hot water bottle and flannelette sheets, and spreads two extra blankets on top. I am still shivering. My father has come home and I hear them talking in low, anxious voices out in the hallway. Then my father comes in and puts his hand on my forehead, and fades to a shadow.
I dream I’m running along the street outside the school. I’ve done something wrong. It’s autumn, the leaves are burning. A lot of people are chasing after me. They’re shouting. An invisible hand takes mine, pulls upward. There are steps into the air and I go up them. No one else can see where the steps are. Now I’m standing in the air, out of reach above the upturned faces. They’re still shouting but I can no longer hear them. Their mouths close and open silently, like the mouths of fish. I am kept home from school for two days. The first day I lie in bed, floating in the glassy delicate clarity of fever. By the second day I am thinking about what happened. I can remember Cordelia throwing my blue knitted hat over the bridge, I remember falling through the ice and then my mother running toward me with her sleety hair. All these things are certain, but in between them there’s a hazy space. The dead people and the woman in the cloak are there, but in the same way dreams are. I’m not sure, now, that it really was the Virgin Mary. I believe it but I no longer know it.
I’m given a get-well card with violets on it from Carol, shoved through the letter slot. On the weekend Cordelia calls me on the telephone. “We didn’t know you fell in,” she says. “We’re sorry we didn’t wait. We thought you were right behind us.” Her voice is careful, precise, rehearsed, unrepentant. I know she’s told some story that conceals what really happened, as I have. I know that this apology has been exacted from her, and that I will be made to pay for it later. But she has never apologized to me before. This apology, however fake, makes me feel not stronger but weaker. I don’t know what to say.
“It’s okay,” is what I manage. I think I mean it.
When I go back to school, Cordelia and Grace are polite but distant. Carol is more obviously frightened, or interested. “My mother says you almost froze to death,” she whispers as we stand in line, two by two, waiting for the bell. “I got a spanking, with the hairbrush. I really
The snow is melting from the lawns; mud reappears on the floors, at school, in the kitchen at home. Cordelia circles me warily. I catch her eyes on me, considering, as we walk home from school. Conversation is artificially normal. We stop at the store for licorice whips, which Carol buys. As we stroll along, sucking in licorice, Cordelia says, “I think Elaine should be punished for telling on us, don’t you?”
“I didn’t tell,” I say. I no longer feel the sinking in my gut, the held-back tearfulness that such a false accusation would once have produced. My voice is flat, calm, reasonable.
“Don’t contradict me,” Cordelia says. “Then how come your mother phoned our mothers?”
“Yeah, how come?” says Carol.
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” I say. I’m amazed at myself.
“You’re being insolent,” says Cordelia. “Wipe that smirk off your face.”
I am still a coward, still fearful; none of that has changed. But I turn and walk away from her. It’s like stepping off a cliff, believing the air will hold you up. And it does. I see that I don’t have to do what she says, and, worse and better, I’ve never had to do what she says. I can do what I like.
“Don’t you dare walk away on us,” Cordelia says behind me. “You get back here right now!” I can hear this for what it is. It’s an imitation, it’s acting. It’s an impersonation, of someone much older. It’s a game. There was never anything about me that needed to be improved. It was always a game, and I have been fooled. I have been stupid. My anger is as much at myself as at them.