Unstuck

It was time for Aurora to shift into park and release her stiffening leg from the brake. Nearly a quarter of an hour had gone by since traffic came to a standstill on the northbound highway. As her grip on the wheel loosened, along with her focus on the road, the busyness that she had forced on her mind also made an abrupt halt. The trip to the mall this morning was to be the culmination of days spent checking holiday sales and making up a shopping list, but all of that was on hold now because of black ice and distracted drivers. 

The last thing she wanted was to be left alone with resurfacing voices and images she had tucked away to get through the holidays. Mounting tones of faint horn honking from one car to another—Eee-Eeeeehmp, Aaaaaht-aaaa-aaaaaht—formed a chorus that shifted Aurora’s thinking. She visualized her place among humanity.

I’m not alone. I’m surrounded by drivers in front of me and behind me, stuck in these lanes, people in stores and houses and at work, doing whatever they do to—in all directions—north, south, east and west of me. Her head made a slight tilt upward. Above me, people are tucked into planes and floating weightlessly within the space station. 

That left the territory beneath her car. She pictured tunneling into the pavement through dirt, groundwater, iron and raging molten rock—right through to the other side where people were asleep in their beds. It reminded her of the summer when she was eight, and she had been determined to keep digging deeper in her family’s garden until she reached China. In the end, she had literally dug herself into a hole that she could barely see out of. 

She grinned as she ran her fingers against the bumps of the steering wheel. “Well, I had all summer.” 

Looking past the wheel at the display, Aurora noticed that only a quarter of a tank remained, and she couldn’t afford to fill up the car for another week. She turned off her engine to conserve gas. She had to watch every dollar. A spending limit was assigned to each person on her Christmas list because months had gone by without work and her stimulus checks were coming to an end. Everything felt static. A stilling of the hum and rumble of the car's engine had signaled its surrender. An invading chill snuck in, overtaking the heat's void and wrapping itself around Aurora’s ankles. 

She was forced to face her realities. St. Francis was just off the next exit, but multiple lanes away. She hadn’t been to church in a while and kept promising to stop in and light a candle for her dad who had passed away the previous month. It would be her first holiday without him. No, wait a second. He was gone a couple days before Thanksgiving. 

And the thing she had tried to avoid returned with a phantom chirp in her ear.

“Dad just died.” Aurora’s brother had just blurted it out over the phone. They’d been expecting it, but when the news came, it shot a numbness down her body.

Aurora pushed her lower back deeper into the carseat. A raw ache gripped and twisted her throat. She glanced at her eyes in the fogging rearview mirror and saw the familiar anguish in their creased pouches. And she slapped her thigh hard. Grief is cruel. It’s insidious. Pools formed in the corners of her eyelids. She tried to gulp away the urge to cry, but a whimper escaped. 

I’ll be home for Christmas

You can plan on me

She had kept the radio playing on the car’s battery to distract herself. Biting down on her bottom lip while sucking in hard through her nose, the frigid air stabbed its tiny icicles deep into her nasal tissues, making her eyes smart and tear even more.

Please have snow and mistletoe

And presents on the tree

The words transported Aurora back into the stiff vinyl passenger seat of her dad’s Ford Fairmont, and she saw his stocky trapezoid hand tapping against the brown steering wheel to Bing Crosby. He grew up listening to Bing. 

Christmas Eve will find me

Where the lovelight gleams

I’ll be home for Christmas

If only in my dreams

Bing put his signature lilt on the word “my,” and at the same time Aurora’s dad took in a sharp breath and hummed along to that one flourish. 

Her dad’s name was Jack. She always imagined that he shared it with Jack Frost, because her dad was born in the wintertime. He had named her Aurora after the northern lights. Growing up in the Minnesota border town of Ogeema, her dad had often talked about nights clear enough to spot pulsating crowns of light dancing on the horizon. The lights appeared to undulate with an organic movement and he viewed them as beats from a heart. He had moved to The Cities long ago, but his hometown had sustained him, becoming one with his own heart’s rhythm. When he died, Ogeema pulled away from him, but by naming his baby girl Aurora, he had placed those beating lights within her heart. 

Her dad had once retold the Ojibwe story of the great spirit Manitou, who gifted the northern lights to the First People as they trekked across the continent’s glaciers in search of fertile ground and moving water. The wide arcs of light illuminated their footfalls along the sunless polar landscape, where one misstep could take a traveler on a deadly trip down an icy crevasse. 

Traditional in thought borne out of the storytelling upbringing of his Ojibwe grandma and scientifically trained later in college, Aurora’s dad had spent the rest of his life trying to reconcile the two. Lore and logic. Faith and physics. Unlike the rest of the family, who dismissed her dad’s musings and theories, Aurora came to respect her dad’s hybrid beliefs, as outlandish as they sounded. In the weeks before he died, her dad had brought up Aurora’s own brush with death at 13, convinced in his belief that while her heart had stopped, she’d visited the afterlife. 

Aurora had yearned to reassure her dad of a life beyond this one, but that day sitting across from him, Aurora could recall only murky images and not the original sensation of her out-of-body journey decades earlier. She did remember, not long after her near-tragedy, her dad speaking up during mass from the pews of St. Francis to thank the Lord for saving his daughter’s life. It was the only time he had offered a public prayer. 

On some mornings following her dad’s death, Aurora began waking up to phrases, or fragments of phrases, that she would recite to herself, wanting to believe that they meant something. 

Today, Aurora had awoken with a start, hearing: “The king always wins.” 

She had never felt closer to her dad than after his passing. It was as if he was desperate to seek her attention. Whenever Aurora sensed him, she envisioned a thin, almost transparent cloth hanging between them both. Sometimes she would even reach out with her hands and try to pierce through the barrier with her fingers. His presence seemed to be just beyond a physics-warped fabric that separates and ties all beings together across life and death. Her being was bound tightly with his—no, not just his—even more souls were wrapped within his own and they rippled through. People all around, always. 

She was back in the Fairmont and heard her dad’s parka swish-swish as he turned the steering wheel. Then her mind snapped back to her own road. Aurora looked down and saw her freezing hands, with fingers and thumbs tucked into the palms for warmth, and traced the same geometric shape of her dad’s hands around her own. 

A sound pierced through Aurora’s back window. “What’s that?” She turned her torso to the right and tried peering out of the frosted side windows, to discern cars parked in the other lanes. “Is someone yelling?” 

She pivoted back to look out her windshield, but it was hard to tell if there was any movement ahead. Idling in front of her, a boxy truck enveloped in white billows of its own exhaust stole any possible view. Her mind turned to examining the phrase “the king always wins.” She pictured one of the many games of chess played against her dad. But the queen has the power in chess.

Was her dad signaling her next move? She’d been stuck for weeks and deep down she recognized the culprit as guilt and longing. But was it hers or his? She couldn’t pinpoint which direction in the mobius twist of the shared fabric. She wondered if atonement works both ways—if we exchange ownership of wrongs with each turn of the strip, forgiving ourselves, all while forgiving others. 

Her dad never named the reasons for the guilt he desperately wanted absolved while gasping for breaths in his hospice bed. Aurora had discovered later in a stack of his writings that he felt he hadn’t done enough to provide for his family or to encourage Aurora to tap into her heritage and find a place within Minnesota’s weave of cultures. For Aurora, her regret was that she had avoided the hospice in her dad’s last days, not ready to admit how sick he was—and it tortured her. She was seeking a chance to settle things—to allow her dad to rest—while she sensed him nudging her toward something and away from her stifled life in the Twin Cities.

Noises from outside grew louder and Aurora saw on her dash’s clock that over an hour had passed. Some drivers, frustrated with the traffic jam, had angled out of their spots and were starting to straddle lanes and shove other vehicles out of the way in an attempt to reach the exit. Aurora turned her key in the ignition. Click-click. “Shoot—car won’t start.” 

Then she felt a vibration. A Ram truck had begun sideswiping the length of Aurora’s car, and when it reached her front fender, its rear fishtailed on the ice and whacked her car into a semi-spin. Aurora found herself perpendicular to the highway, embedded in a crusty snowbank that lined the median. She heard muffled voices. Then a knock on her car window. 

The truck driver who had been waiting ahead of her was standing outside her door, talking to her. “Hey, ya doin’ OK dere?” 

After packing up her things, Aurora dropped a note inside her car with her contact information and accepted the man’s offer of a lift. On the way over to his truck, she spied its logo: Lovelight Wild Rice, Ogeema, MN. Wow, small world.

She hoisted herself up into the warm cab and was grateful for the heat, and for the company. By now, wheels were in motion on the highway, and the driver and Aurora were on their way. She amused herself thinking about the word “lovelight.” An appropriate word for the aurora borealis. Would it be crazy to head north to where the lovelight gleams? 

Her life was unstuck as long as she moved forward. She told the driver to go past the next cloverleaf exit, which would have whipped them around in the direction of Aurora’s home, and instead stay on course to her dad’s hometown. And to the lovelight that danced in its winter sky, in Ogeema—Ogimaa in Ojibwe—meaning “a king.”