One Beautiful Deep Breath

         Like everything else in this world, winter was cruel to the citizens of Jarvis Island.  Tonight, in the city, it’s snowing.  You can see it swirling thick in the halo of streetlights, and it crunches under your shoes on the sidewalk.  But back home at Jarvis Island, kids had to cross-country ski to school in the winter, because the snow was too deep to walk in, and we didn’t see the ground for three months of the year.  There were several winters when everyone at the Schoenberg home had to leave the house by crawling out my window onto the roof, because the snow was piled up over the front door.
         Anyway, when the lake would freeze over every December, all the kids of the island would get together to play hockey.  But it wasn’t really hockey…it was poor kid’s hockey.  None of us could afford equipment or anything.  We used broken tree branches for sticks and an empty snuff can for a puck.  And none of us owned skates, so we all just slid around and skidded and spent most of the game on our asses. 
         When I was thirteen, I finally gave up Ass Hockey.  On the first day of Ass Hockey season, I bundled up in every layer I owned and my Mom’s old, wool scarf with the dragonfly pin; I tossed a handful of paperbacks from Daddy’s fort into Mom’s old backpack, and set out over the lake.  No one had ever done it before as far as I knew.  No one had ever crossed the ice to Dunkard Island, but I was determined to do it. 
         I remember tucking an unruly sprig of hair under Daddy’s black and gold, knit, Steelers cap and stepping out onto the ice, shuffling my feet to keep from falling.  It was morning, but you couldn’t tell, because the sky was thick with snow, blocking out the sun.  The snow fell, swirling in all directions and even sweeping up off the ice in the wind.  The whole scene was like a sci-fi movie set on some faraway planet, and I was an alien visitor.
         I heard the kids laughing out on the ice a few hundred yards away, deep into the winter’s first game of ass hockey, but I ignored them all and just focused on the next step, knowing that none of those kids had the balls to follow me out this far.  Soon, all I could hear was the wind and the sound of my own footsteps.  When the snow calmed down, I looked up to see the majestic ice castle on the horizon that was Dunkard Island.  Everything everywhere was white, like a world of vanilla ice cream.  Thinking about ice cream made me regret that I’d forgotten to pack food.
         I was most of the way to the other island when I started to hear a low murmuring sound under my feet.  I stopped mid-step, and the ice made another sound like when you slide the palm of your hand across a window.  I waited for a spiderweb crack to be spun under my foot.  I held my breath.  It was not the fear, I don’t think, that had made me stop in that moment.  It wasn’t about dying.  I think it was just the uncertainty of that next step.  All the fragile things in life, how precious they are to us, because they’re so fleeting.  And that uncertainty is a kind of fear, I guess, but it’s also a kind of beauty.  That moment when you draw in a quick breath and it freezes inside you – that long, beautiful, frozen breath that you want to hold onto forever but you can’t.  It just slips away and leaves you all alone…standing on one foot.  My whole life with Tristan in one beautiful, deep breath.
         Then, my breath made a little puff of a white cloud that tumbled for a moment like a little kid and slowly faded into the wind.  Everything fell silent. When the wind whistled again, I finally set my other foot lightly on the ice.  I shuffled forward, and my feet kicked up snow.  When I eventually set my feet on the sheer white Dunkard Beach, I turned around to look back home but saw nothing but a blur of snow.
         I found a hidden spot in a snow-covered but extravagantly landscaped grotto in the backyard of one particularly lofty mansion that overlooked the far side of the beach.  The grotto looked like the ruins of some ancient civilization.  The flowers were gone for the winter, but tall, wrought-iron gates circled stone staircases with frozen streams of water that slid into frozen ponds surrounded by marble gargoyles and other massive figures.  I found a cushioned bench that looked out over the lake and swayed like a porch swing under a huge stone canopy.  For hours and hours, I lounged and read To Kill a Mockingbird like a Camper might in the luxury of a getaway grotto.