are the ones we had as children.”
He turned his face away from me, absently brushed a lock of dark hair back from his brow. “Michael and I were in the same grade at school and shared several classes—used to even copy each other’s homework from time to time.” He smiled. “There was this girl in our English class—Alexandra Cantrell, I still remember her name—who joined us midyear when her parents relocated to Maryland from somewhere in the Midwest, maybe North Dakota.” He paused for a moment, then continued. “Man, she was beautiful. Long blond hair that she liked to wear pulled back into a French braid; tall and thin with a slightly athletic build; light blue eyes that reminded me of the way the sky looked just before dawn. She was smart, too—easily one of the brightest students in our class—and had this sort of innocent kindness about her that made you just want to be around her, even if you were only in the periphery of her circle of friends.”
“She must have been pretty popular,” I commented, and he nodded.
“All the guys went crazy when she got there. Most of them were too chickenshit to do anything about it, but the way they used to talk about her …” He grinned. “The general consensus was that she was untouchable, out of our league, although I don’t recall wondering whose league she might’ve been in.”
“Girls like that,” I said, “spend a lot of Saturday nights at home without a date.”
“I know that now, but I didn’t back then.” He shrugged. “It didn’t matter, though. I was less intimidated by her popularity than most of my peers. I hung out with her because she was a nice person and fun to be around. Michael, too. The three of us spent a lot of time together that year.”
“So there was you, and your best friend, and this beautiful girl,” I summarized. It wasn’t difficult to see where this story was heading.
“Right,” he said. “There were other kids, of course. Like I said, lots of people liked to be around her. But for the life of me, I can’t remember who they were. In my mind, what it came down to was the three of us.”
“Three is an unstable number,” I commented, and he nodded his agreement.
“There was a pond close to our house that would freeze over in the wintertime. We used to go there to skate and play hockey. I remember telling Alex about it one day after school, and her eyes lit up like a Christmas tree. ‘Take me there,’ she said, and so I did, neither of us bothering to stop home on the way. I don’t know where Michael was at the time, why he wasn’t with us that day, but he wasn’t. We took the school bus, Alex getting off at my stop instead of hers, and we walked two blocks down the street and cut left through the woods to the pond. It had snowed lightly the night before, and we walked mostly in silence, listening to the soft crunch of wet powder beneath the soles of our shoes.
“I remember how, when we came to the edge, she dropped her book bag on the ground and just charged out onto the ice without testing it first, trusting that it was thick enough to hold her weight because I said it was. And of course I ran out after her, planting my feet when I was three-quarters of the way across and sliding the remaining distance to the opposite side. I could hear the ice cracking and settling beneath us—we both could—but she never paused, never cast an uncertain look down. I gathered a snowball and lobbed it out toward the center of the pond where she was standing. It missed her by a good two feet, but she grabbed her chest and fell to the ice like a wounded soldier, lying with her face turned up at the sky, her arms and legs fanned out as if she were in the midst of making a snow angel. I went back out onto the pond, dropping down on one hip and using my momentum to slide into her. We bumped and our bodies did a half turn on the ice, coming to rest with our heads together, our torsos angled slightly away from each other. Laughing, I started to get up, but she reached over and put her hand on my arm. ‘Wait,’ she said, and so I lay there in the quiet of the afternoon, looking up at the blanket of gray above us. I could hear the steady beat of my heart in my ears, and I wondered if it was loud enough for her to hear as well. I began to say something, but she said, ‘Shhh,’ and so we lay there together in silence as the wind moved through the trees and the ice buckled and cracked beneath us.
“That was when I started to wonder just how strong that ice was. There’d been a warm spell the week before, and I counted in my mind the number of days since then that the temperature had hovered around freezing. Five—no, four days, I realized, and I wondered if that was enough. I could feel the chill of the frozen surface biting through my jeans, imagined the paralyzing temperature of the water just beneath, and considered the thin barrier that lay between. In my mind, I could suddenly see it giving way, the two of us plunging downward, the startled expression on our faces as our heads disappeared below the surface. I could see us reaching up to clutch at the edge of the hole, the ice there breaking away as we attempted to hoist ourselves out. I could feel the shocking chill turn to numbness, our bodies becoming slow and lethargic, the white plume of our breath dissipating over the minutes that followed until at last … there was nothing.
“‘We should go,’ I told her. ‘The ice is thinner than I thought. I don’t trust it.’
“She turned her body to look at me. ‘It’ll hold,’ she said, and put her right arm across my chest, resting her head on my shoulder.
“Suddenly, I was sure that it wouldn’t, that we were lying out there on borrowed time already, that it was prone to give way at any moment. I heard it shift again beneath us, and this time it sounded like the last warning. ‘Get up,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to go.’
“I remember her looking at me with a wounded expression as I nudged her off me so I could stand, like I was rejecting her instead of trying to keep both of us from harm. ‘What’s your problem?’ she said. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I don’t think she was intending for her words to come out so accusatory, so sharp, but they sliced into me before either of us knew it was going to happen, and once they had there was no taking them back.
“‘Nothing,’ I replied, backing away from her. ‘Nothing’s wrong with me.’
“I turned my back on her then, not caring if she fell through the goddamn ice or not, and walked off and left her there. I could hear her calling out to me as I trudged up the hill through the light snow—‘Jason, I’m sorry. Whatever it is, I’m sorry’—but I pretended I didn’t hear her, pretended it was anger I felt instead of something else.
“After that, we didn’t see much of each other for a while. She called me on the phone once, tried to apologize, but it was clear she didn’t know what she was apologizing for, and there was nothing I could say to explain it to her. Michael, of course, asked me about it, told me I was acting like a jerk and ought to get over it. But I just couldn’t. I’d close my eyes and think about the two of us lying there, one of her arms wrapped casually around me, and the ice suddenly breaking away beneath us, our muted screams for help tapering away into silence. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she asked over and over in my head, and I couldn’t look at it. All I could do was back away.”
I stood there at the institution’s fence and watched Jason struggle. I wanted to reach out to him but reminded myself of the boundaries between doctor and patient, how they needed to be respected.
“Triangles are curious things,” he said. “You can’t change the relationship between any two points without affecting at least one of the other two relationships. Michael and I had known each other our whole lives, but we’d known Alex for only a few months. I took it for granted that what we shared between the two of us would remain unaffected. But that didn’t happen. Maybe it was because of the way I’d treated her, which was unfair. In our small court of public opinion, the verdict was that she was the victim, not me, and until I could
