There’s No Going Back Now

Stephanie lifted one skate from the ice and began her spin.

Glenn watched from the edge of the pond, her red scarf flashing each time she turned. Their friends clapped when she came out of it cleanly. She bowed, laughing, and pushed into another circle.

The crack sounded like a branch breaking.

Everyone stopped.

Stephanie looked down. A dark line raced between her skates. Before Glenn could call her name, the ice gave way, and she dropped through.

He reached the hole first. Her hands struck the underside of the ice several feet away, pale shapes moving beneath the cloudy surface. He flattened himself and drove his fist down. The ice held.

“Stephanie!”

Her face appeared below him. Her eyes found his through the ice.

Glenn pounded until the skin split across his knuckles. One of their friends grabbed his ankles while another struck the ice with a skate blade, but Stephanie had already drifted beyond them. Her red scarf caught beneath the surface. Then she disappeared into the dark water.

Long after the others dragged him away, Glenn could still feel her looking at him.

They recovered her body three days later.

At the funeral, people told him it had happened too fast. They said nobody could have saved her. Her mother held his injured hands and told him Stephanie had known how much he loved her.

None of it helped.

Glenn had planned to give Stephanie her ring at Christmas. He had hidden it inside an old pair of work gloves in his bedroom closet because she never touched them. Now the ring stayed there while Christmas passed, then New Year’s. He stopped answering the telephone. He stopped going to work. At night, he saw her hands moving beneath the ice.

Near the end of January, he returned to the pond.

Snow had covered the marks left by the recovery crew. Someone had tied Stephanie’s red scarf to the warning sign. The wind tugged at it. Glenn stood at the place where she had fallen.

“I should have stopped you,” he said. “I knew the ice wasn’t safe.”

The wind rose hard enough to drive him back a step. Snow circled his boots and climbed his legs. Clouds rolled across the moon, and lightning opened the sky from one horizon to the other.

Glenn shut his eyes.

“I’ll do anything,” he shouted. “Just give me another chance.”

The cold vanished.

When he opened his eyes, he stood outside the feed store in town. His father’s truck waited at the curb, his uncle behind the wheel. Across the road, Stephanie sat in her mother’s car. She turned, saw him and waved through the rear window.

Her mother pushed her arm down.

Glenn stared after the car.

He remembered that day. It had happened six years earlier, when he and Stephanie were still in high school. He remembered the borrowed coat on his back and the tear in the left knee of his jeans. He remembered how pleased he had been when she waved.

His father leaned out of the truck. “You coming or not?”

Glenn climbed into the back without answering.

For six years, he waited for the day at the pond.

He tried to change nothing else. He studied the same courses, worked the same job and took Stephanie to the same dances. At first, he laughed at jokes before his friends finished telling them. Soon, he learned to wait. On the night of the first summer storm, he hurried Stephanie into the cellar seconds before the wind tore a maple limb across the yard. She called him lucky. He held her until the storm passed.

He kept the future to himself. He had been given one chance and did not want to waste it.

When winter returned in their final year together, Glenn began watching the ponds. He measured the ice every morning before work and warned their friends whenever the temperature rose. Stephanie teased him about becoming an old man before they were married.

The week before Christmas, she found him kneeling near the place where she had died.

“You’re doing it again.”

He pulled the measuring bar from the hole. “It isn’t thick enough.”

“Nobody asked you to check it.”

“Then nobody skates.”

She studied his face. “What’s wrong with you, Glenn?”

He wanted to tell her about the funeral, the ring hidden in his closet and the sound her mother made when the casket was lowered. Instead, he looked across the pond.

“I had a dream about you falling through.”

Stephanie slipped her hand into his. “It was only a dream.”

Glenn closed his fingers around hers. “Promise me you won’t skate here.”

“All right.”

“Promise.”

Her smile faded. “I promise.”

The day she died arrived with heavy snow. Their friends called throughout the afternoon, but Glenn refused every invitation. At sunset, he drove to the pond alone.

No skaters crossed its white surface. No voices carried from the far bank. Snow had buried the warning sign to its lowest red letters.

Glenn waited until darkness settled over the fields.

Stephanie was alive.

He laughed, dropped to his knees, and pressed both hands against the ice.

“I did it.”

He drove to Stephanie’s house with the ring in his pocket.

She met him on the porch, dressed for Lyle and Trudy’s Christmas party. Snow gathered in her hair while she pulled on her gloves.

“You said you weren’t going,” Glenn said.

“I changed my mind. Everyone will be there.”

The snow thickened and hid the road beyond the end of her driveway. In the life Glenn remembered, they went skating instead. There was no party the first time.

“The roads are terrible,” Glenn said.

“Then we’ll drive slowly.” She kissed his cheek and opened the passenger door. “Come on. Maybe tonight will change our lives forever.”

His hand touched the ring through his coat. He pictured giving it to her in front of their friends. After six years of waiting, he wanted their married life together to begin.

Glenn drove.

Outside the city, the wind erased the tire tracks ahead of them. Snow rushed into the headlights and struck the windshield faster than the wipers could clear it. Stephanie held his free hand beneath the blanket they had brought for the hayride.

“We should turn around,” he said.

“But we’re almost there," she insisted.

“I can’t see the road for the ditch," Glenn said.

“Oh, Glenn, you worry too much,” she said.

Lightning flashed above the fields.

For an instant, Glenn could see the curve ahead; the guardrail was buried beneath snow, and beyond it, the black outline of Oliver’s Pond.

In an instant, their car slid sideways.

Glenn tore his hand from Stephanie’s and fought the wheel. The rear end struck the rail. The metal buckled, and the car rolled over the railing.

The car struck the ice, broke through it, and sank.

Water burst through the broken windshield. Glenn’s shoulder slammed against the door. The car tipped forward and sank, its headlights cutting two fading tunnels through the dark.

Glenn released his seat belt and reached for Stephanie. Hers was locked. She pulled at it as water climbed over her chest.

Glenn braced both feet against the dashboard and pulled at the belt until his hands slipped. Stephanie pointed toward the window, begging him to go, but he struck the clasp again and again.

No longer able to hold his breath. He swam through the broken windshield and kicked toward the surface. Air tore into him. He dove again before he could take a full breath.

The car landed on the bottom and stuck into the mud.

On his second dive, he found the rear window.

On his third, his hand closed around Stephanie’s sleeve, but the broken glass cut his wrist, and he lost her.

He surfaced without knowing how.

Glenn crawled onto the bank and lay in the snow, coughing up pond water.

Lightning crossed the sky. He waited for the wind to circle him and carry him back to the feed store.

Nothing happened.

He pushed himself onto his knees.

“Give me another chance,” he shouted. But even as he said it, he knew inside that there was no going back now.

Snow swept across the pond. The road remained empty.

His father’s truck did not appear, and Stephanie did not wave to him from the rear window of her mother’s car.

Glenn shouted until his voice failed.

He had changed the day of Stephanie’s death, but not the ending. Worse off this time, Glenn drove the car that brought her to her death.

He touched the ring that remained inside his coat pocket. He closed his hand around it and watched the place where the car had disappeared.

“There’s no going back now,” he told himself as he watched the tragedy occur over in his mind.

Snow fell over Oliver’s Pond, covering the broken ice. And the night ended,