Free Circle Nine by Anne Heltzel Page B

Dream Girl. Amanda is not that girl.
    The room around me looks brighter in the last evening light and from outside, the sunset has washed away all traces of the ugliness that just happened here. It makes the stone walls glitter like a thousand tiny prisms, and I am blinded by the beauty of it all. The breeze carries in the scent of freesia, and as I soak up these very nice things, I am happy again and unworried.

I am five or six. I am opening a gift; it is my birthday. I tear off the wrapping and toss it aside.
    Say cheese,
says a woman. Another woman who looks like her, but older and wrinkled, stands behind her. She wears a fudge-smeared apron. She waggles her tongue at me and flops her fingers behind her ears, making a silly face.
    I smile at them both.
    The flash of a camera.
    I pull out the ice skates. They’re white with pink laces, for a figure skater. I can’t wait until after I open the rest of my gifts. (There is a large stack of them on the wooden table where I sit.) I slip on the skates right away. I teeter to the door, and the older woman shakes her head at the scratches my blades leave on the floor.
    I slide down the narrow pond-bank on my rear. The snow is cold through my jeans. I didn’t stop to put a snowsuit on. Then I am on the ice; I am skating, faster and faster, and the wind is hitting my cheeks in sharp painful gusts. I laugh; I am freer than ever before. I slip and I fall; I get up and do it again. I try turns and jumps. I am becoming bolder. I can’t get enough of this feeling.
    I slip and fall again. This time, the blade of my skate catches in a rut when I go down, and my ankle is twisted. I feel strong arms lift me up. They carry me back up the bank to the house, where I am deposited on a sofa in front of a fireplace. The younger woman wraps my ankle with thick gauze, brings me hot tea with milk and sugar. I am allowed to open the rest of my presents: a carousel music box, a silver charm bracelet. I love coming here; this place is peaceful, happy.
    I want it, this memory and all the rest, despite the way it hurts.

It was an accident,
he tells me when I ask where Amanda has gone. She was upset. He couldn’t control her. He tried. He says I was there. That I held her hands behind her back, and he pushed her to the ground. He says I was jealous. That I watched him press his body weight against hers. He says he was trying to make her be quiet so he could comfort her, but holding her down didn’t work. Amanda has always been was always strong and feisty. It is was a joke among us that I am the porcelain baby, she the snorting bull, Sam the circus master. I don’t remember who came up with that joke. I don’t remember any of this happening.
    They got into a fight. Amanda has been had been edgy lately. Things were tense between Sam and me, Sam and Amanda, me and Amanda. Three’s a crowd. She told me she wanted to leave. She wanted me to come. But it’s not my fault I couldn’t. She knows knew I can never leave Sam. I can’t ever leave Sam. He knows my mind like it is his. And then she was gone into the fog. I don’t know what happened after that.
    He says he shouted her name. That he ran outside after her, and I stood just outside and watched them running, and for once, he stresses this part, we didn’t care who saw or heard us. Things will be bad, very bad, without Amanda. He tells me that, and I know it to be true because I feel it myself. She is was our double-sided tape. He says he couldn’t stop her, that she shot ahead and he found her a half mile away. There was a cluster of people around her body. He had to fight through them to see her. She was hit by a teenage boy driving a Jeep Cherokee. She must not have been looking while she ran.
    It happened,
he tells me.
That is what happens when you choose Circle Nine instead of staying here, where it’s safe.
    I’m not going anywhere, Sammy,
I say.

Since Amanda died, it’s as if I have been granted permission to see into another