Apricity

“Marching steps!” the skating coach calls, and I watch my little Kara trip over her tiny boots, blades catching on the ice. My heart skips a beat when she falls. She looks so small on the wide expanse of white ahead of her, so clumsy as the coach comes to an unnaturally graceful stop by her side. 

She wants to do this, I remind myself, clutching my hands together to keep from marching right onto that ice myself and helping her back up. She asked for these lessons, after she saw the skaters at the outdoor rink at Christmas. I can’t stop her from giving it a try.

Focused, she climbs back onto her unsteady feet and marches forward again. I cup my hands around my mouth. “You can do it Kara!”

She tips her head and looks at me, worried eyebrows twisting over warm brown eyes. The moment she sees me, trapped behind the big barrier, her face splits into a grin and she waves. Her smile is all radiance, like dawn. From the moment she was born, I knew that smile would crush me every day. 

I return the wave. “You can do it!”

Kara returns her focus to the ice, and she wobbles forward, marching, marching, marching…

*

And into a glide. 

Kara’s eight now, and it’s almost terrifying how quickly she’s improved. I stand on the edge of the rink for every lesson, every practice, and I watch her try to sit lower and lower on her spins, watch her kick into a jump, watch her lean into a spiral two, three, four times her length. Coach April says it’s “astonishing, really, how well she took to it,” and I can only rub my arms against the cold and hope she stays with it. 

What’s really astonishing is how much she loves it. Every day, she begs to go to the rink. On the days it’s not open, she pouts and puts her skates on anyway, walking around the house with her guards curling over the blades. Sometimes, if she can convince me to let her, she watches old reruns of the Olympics, cradling her boots in her arms. When winter comes, we wake up together at all hours for Adelina Sotnikova and Yuna Kim. Kara’s mouth rounds into a perfect ‘O’ and she stares, transfixed, as the skaters sink into spins, launch themselves high into the air, skip over their step sequences. 

She tugs my sleeve, pulls me in close. “I wanna go there, Mommy,” she whispers, careful not to wake Dad. “I wanna go to the Olympics.”

I kiss the top of her head and watch Yulia Lipnitskaya fall on her triple flip. 

The next day, Kara overrotates her waltz and tumbles to the ice. I try not to tense during that pause before she climbs back to her feet. I can’t help it, though, even when she gets right back up, repeats the waltz, and lands it perfectly, beaming at her coach. 

“She’s ready for testing,” April says to me when I’m helping Kara unlace her skates later. “Listen, Julie, I think she could go far. It’s hard to tell so early, but she has it. Incredible balance. Timing. She’s a quick learner, and she’s stubborn. I mean… we’re talking triples, if she sticks with it.”

“We’ll see,” I say. 

Kara kicks off her skates. “Look at my off-ice toe!” she says. She pulls on the bottom of April’s jacket. “Watch!” 

She hops a few times, kicks her foot down, and launches into the air for a double toe loop. 

April gives me a meaningful look as she applauds. 

She could go far. 

*

And she does. She has her double jumps in a couple years. Ten years old and kicking so high into the air my heart stops. Her spins rotate faster and faster every time. 

April refers us to another coach as we move out of her realm of expertise. Talia is less patient, more demanding. She makes charts and schedules for Kara to follow. Dietary restrictions. Off-ice training days. Kara sets her jaw and carries through, every time.

I gnaw my nails off watching her tests. She’s so small. So tiny and glittery out there in her sequined costume. 

The judges love her. Bird-like on her jumps, quick on her feet, centered on her spins. “Kara has excellent balance and musicality. Pass.”

Pass, pass, pass. 

Every test feels like a sentencing. At the very least, it dictates how the next six months will go. A pass means she celebrates, relaxes for a week or so and then throws herself into the next level with gusto. A fail means tears, lost appetite, extra practice sessions until she gets that spin perfect, until she centers those twizzles, until she stops popping the lutz. I try to help but I don’t know skating the way she does. Even though it’s expensive, I start beginner lessons so I can understand her language when she grumbles about how the tiny muscles in her feet aren’t strong enough for a balanced layback. 

Because with every test, I can feel her twisting further and further away from me. With every traveling spin, she skates another hair length away. 

And it’s hard, being a mother. It’s hard watching my daughter jump out of my grasp much too soon. She’s only ten, and already has a life schedule I can barely keep up with. 

The other moms are something else. I’ve never seen such a cutthroat group. Whispering behind my back. That lutz of Kara’s. She needs to be careful or she’ll break something. At least then my Phoebe will have a better chance of placing. They try to gossip with me too, but I don’t want to giggle and chatter about Phoebe’s sloppy camel spin. They’re just kids. It’s not our job to push them more than they already push themselves.

*

Kara falls. Twelve years old, and twenty stitches in her calf. The moms cluck and tut and fluster, but they smile behind their hands and I will never understand them.

After surgery, she gives me a tired grin that breaks something in my heart. Her smiles used to come so easily. Now I never see them anymore. 

“Seems like I might have underrotated that one,” she says. 

I try to laugh. “Seems like it.”

“How long until I can skate again?”

My breath catches in my throat.

Her blood was dark and red on the ice. I wonder if it stained. Not the ice, maybe, but something inside me. When I picture Kara at the rink now,  I can’t get rid of the image. Her blood. Dark and red. On the smooth, white ice.

 “Mom?”

“We’ll have to ask the doctor.”

And we do.

Two weeks while the cut heals, and take it easy for a month. Back to full training in six weeks. 

Six weeks, six whole weeks. It’s barely a blink, but to us, those weeks are everything. 

For her, they’re a tortuous time for recovery, off-ice drills and footwork.

But to me, those six weeks are a chance to catch my breath again. 

That fall… I never want to watch anything like it again. I could see the second she knew it was going wrong. Her arms unraveling to catch herself. Her ankle collapsing on the landing. Her left blade skidding across her leg.

I scrub her boot until it’s clean again, and then I scrub it more. She’ll be mad if her blades rust, but I can’t get the blood off. Bloodstains. They last. Like the sharpie Kara took to the living room wall when she was young. We pulled the couch in front of it, but the wobbly lines are still there. 

I scrub it until Dave pulls the boot out of my hand and wraps his arms around my shoulders. My lip wobbles and I clench my teeth tight to keep myself from crying. 

“Breathe.” His chest rumbles. “Breathe, Julie.”

I breathe. I breathe until I’m sick on air. I breathe until everything I’ve been feeling comes out in one sentence. “I don’t want her to ever get on that ice again.”

“It’s okay.”

“There was so  much blood—”

“She’s going to skate again. You know she is.”

“We could stop her.”

The thought sits in silence between us for a moment, heavy and dark and hopeless. Kara is a skater first, before anything else. She loves it more than life itself. Taking it away would ruin her.

“We shouldn’t.”

“No. We shouldn’t.”

We don’t.

*

The recovery went by too fast and now Kara’s sixteen years old and mastering her triples. We had to take a quarantined break for a year but she trained and trained and trained off-ice during that break and now she flies when she skates.  

She worries incessantly about her weight and I think her skating friends are a bad influence on her. I have to be thin to do triples, Mom. 

She loves Kamila Valieva and Anna Scherbakova and when we watch them skate her eyes light up. I offer to watch the Olympics with her and to my delight, she agrees, curling up next to me on the couch. These moments are few and far between these days, so I cuddle her close and try not to get too sappy about the Mommy-daughter time.

Kamila Valieva falls and falls and Kara winces every time. My heart weeps for that girl, covering her face in the Kiss and Cry. The best skater out there, and the pressure knocked her down. She reminds me of Kara. 

“I’m too fat to do quads,” Kara tells me later. 

I take a breath to stop myself from scolding her for that. Mostly because she’s not. She’s almost concerningly thin. “You’re no bigger than Kamila, and she does them.”

She gives me a scornful look, something I’ve found teenagers are particularly adept at making really hurt. “She was doping, Mom.”

“Well, what about Anna and Sasha?”

“Mom, all of the Russian skaters are tiny. Also, they’re all young. I missed my chance for the Olympics.”

“Can’t you compete in 2026?”

Kara just rolls her eyes and buries herself back in her phone. 

What do I know, really? I’m forty-six years old and I don’t understand half the things Kara gets excited about anymore. She brandishes photos of a man I barely recognize in my face and screeches about how he can’t retire from skating, not until he’s won. She rants about international skating coaches to her friends. The ISU heightens their age restrictions and she cheers so loudly in her room that for a moment I think something’s wrong.

And every day she slips away. Edging toward the far side of the nest. Soon, she’ll be stretching her wings to fly off, and I won’t be able to stop her. 

*

International competition is a different kind of stage.

Kara’s worked so hard to get here that I almost can’t believe it. There are so many skaters, all of them stretching and jumping rope and laughing. Kara sticks earbuds in “to keep from getting distracted” and zips up her jacket over her costume. 

I force her to pose for pictures maybe too often, but it’s either she endure that or endure me bursting into proud tears, so she tolerates the pictures until I let her go stretch with her teammates. 

Dave and I find our seats in the stands. No matter how many times I do this, it never gets warmer. Dave wraps my fingers between his palms and I lean against him as the ice is overtaken by practicing skaters. 

All of them are so good, unbelievably good, and for a moment I think maybe Kara is outmatched. But then she appears on the edge of the ice, she pushes herself on, and I don’t worry anymore. Out there, she looks at home. Her orange skirt flares out under her jacket. She hops into a double jump and lands it easily. She dodges the other skaters with expert coolness. 

And then the ice clears and the competition starts. 

So many skaters, so many ugly falls, so many last-minute saves. I can’t take my eyes away. The spins, so beautiful and centered. The angled, perfectly timed jumps. The beautiful costumes.

Kara’s name is called before I’m ready and I press my hands over my mouth as she rushes onto the ice, raising her arms as people clap. “You can do it, Kara,” I whisper into my palms. “You can do it.”

She pounds her fists into her thighs as she flies around the rink, and then she comes to a halt in the center, placing her toe pick into the ice and twisting her body into her starting pose. 

She looks beautiful out there. The orange of her skirt fades upwards into a delicate rose pink neckline. The jewels shimmer under the arena lights. The makeup she worked so hard on warms her cheeks with a rosy glow. Kara is swathed in a sunrise. 

April’s words from so long ago pop into my mind and I tear up. She could go far. And she has. She’s gone so far.

Her program starts and she dances across the ice. Featherlike. She touches all edges of the rink, leaps into the air. I applaud on every landing, tears streaking down my cheeks. Beautiful. My daughter is beautiful. 

Kara doesn’t like spins but hers are so lovely, everything perfectly in place. She catches her skate and brings it over her head, spinning and spinning and spinning. Her foot swings out and she hops over, into her step sequence. 

The skips and hops take her over the entire length of the ice. She dances. She trips over her toe picks and I gasp, but it was intentional and it takes her up and then down into the next part. She turns out of it (twizzles, they’re called twizzles, Mom) and slams her foot down for her lutz. 

Flying—she’s flying. I’ve been trying to hold on for so long, but she’s gone already. 

She soars into the next spin, crouching down and moving so fast, and then she rises, slows. Her toe pick comes down, and she’s done. 

I cheer so loud my voice breaks. She drops her final position and beams, skating in a quick circle before she begins her bows, to the judges, to the audience, to me. There’s that smile, right there. It’s always been right there.

*

Later, after the competition is over and Kara is off celebrating with her friends, I call April. I don’t know why I do it—it’s been years since we last spoke and I’m not even sure if her phone number is the same. But I call anyway and feel a rush of gratitude, and a bit of surprise, when she picks up. 

“Julie?”

The words come tumbling out before I even intend to say them. “I wanted you to know—Kara won. Silver, I mean, but she won. We’re in Japan.”

She gasps over the line and my heart soars with pride because that’s my little girl, Kara, second place in her first international competition.  “I always knew she could make it,” April says. 

The line crackles over her words and I press the phone closer to my ear, not wanting to miss anything. It’s been ages since we spoke.

“You know,” she says, “I was actually just thinking about her the other day. One of my students was telling me about this word, the sun’s warmth in winter. I think it was… apricity. And I thought right away, that’s Kara.”

The word rings true. My Kara. My warmth in winter, my beaming sun on the ice. 

EVA WINDLERis studying writing, literature, and publishing at Emerson College. A year ago she started figure skating and quickly found a passion for the sport. Now she goes to the rink nearly every day! This is her first publication and she’s excited to share her work with the world.