Her childhood was splayed out across the front porch. She stumbled across the tiled floor, lopsided with two suitcases. No path was carved among the bulging boxes, so her feet troded upon doll clothes and action figures. Clad only in flip-flops, every impact sends irritation up her heel, bouncing up to meet her brain, but her mind is too heavy with bitter thoughts, so the pain floats down to land solemnly in her chest. Her mother stands by the car.
She tries to pass her and put the suitcases in the car, but her mother shifts her weight to stand in front of her, arms crossed with hands crumpled in fists at the end.
They stand in silence.
The mother is waiting for what she expects to be said, for what she wishes to be done, but she won’t voice her request.
And the daughter, she knows what is expected, she knows what is wished, but to speak was to betray her position, to melt the sheet of ice she’s sculpted between them. The cool mist would remain.
Fingers stretched, building then dismantling a fist, until the mother could bear it no longer.
“It’s going to charity,” she blurts, giving the answer to the unasked question.
The daughter slowly blinks, her facial expression frozen.
The mother waits a minute more. She scans her daughter’s still body, her stern lips, looking for signs of dismay or surprise, insatiable for reaction.
But the daughter has been playing this game for seventeen years. She could write a gamer’s manual. She blinks again, even slower this time, as if the passing seconds were growing heavier on her eyelids. Her mother broke.
“Well, don’t you want to take anything?”
The daughter licks her lips, ever so slightly, then utters the one word that wouldn’t warm the chill. “No.”
The word took physical form, smacking her mother across the face, her mouth opening and eyes wide with her eyebrows stretching up to say hello to her hair. Her daughter pushes past her and loads the suitcases into her car.
“But you don’t have anything from home,” her mother says. “Just clothes and a toothbrush. You need to take something with you to Cambridge.”
“No, I don’t.”
“How will you remember all the things from when you were a little kid?”
“I do not wish to remember.”
“That’s absurd. We all wish to remember.”
The daughter rolls her eyes, and she almost says it, seventeen years of the battles between fire and ice almost were rained upon, but she didn’t. She could. She was stronger now. But still, not brave enough. And bravery conducted an unfair amount of strength.
“Please,” her mother said. She reached down and grabbed a teddy bear from a top of a pile. She thrust it towards to her daughter. “Please.”
It was the begging, like it always was. Maybe if she had said it, maybe if she had finally let the words tumble over her tongue, then she could walk out the victor. But her mother sliced through the sheet between them. She could feel the heat swooping towards her.
She grabs the teddy bear from her mother’s loose grip, and throws it in the back seat. She slams the car door shut, and searches for her keys.
Her mother knocks on the window. She grits her teeth as she rummages through her pockets, bypassing dirt-smudged coins and  gum sticks. She would not give the satisfaction of a reply. She shouldn’t. It would teach her a lesson. It might make it easier in the coming years.
She finally grasps her keys, and sticks them in. The engine starts. But she doesn’t take the car out of park. In the corner of her vision, she could see her mother saying something, but the window locks her words. She knocks again, harder this time.
She sits and listens to the rumbling hum. The pain gathered in her chest dissolves into it. She closes her eyes, and her world is composed only of the engine’s murmur and the occasional double-beat bounce of her mother’s fist. She reaches out one finger and rolls down the window.
“Honey, I love you. I know you’ll do well in Cambridge. I just do.” She waits, but her daughter doesn’t open her eyes.
“I love you,” she says again, and then walks back to the house. It is only after the door shuts with a slight click, and the dog barks, and shoes are kicked off in a causal manner that her eyes bolt open.
Only the teddy bear was there to witness her shaking words.
“That’s a lie,” She says, and her thoughts catch wildfire, caused by the flame her mother threw at her shield of ice.
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The teddy bear had an excellent view from the top, dusty shelf of the bookcase in the college dorm. There he could see the daughter staring at a science textbook, eyes still upon the words, as if she could see them but couldn’t read them. Over the past weeks, she’s brought a friend or two over, but they never last. Their words were woven with equations and theories. They received glistening A’s on their exams, proudly letting the paper lay on their desk and they reach for their binder, while she snatches the sheet and stuffs it away, too quick for anyone to glance at the lower letter.
Even an object made of stuffing could clearly see it wasn’t smarts in which she lacked, it was passion. When her friend would begin chatting about Newton’s law, and she would quietly but straightly say, “I don’t like science.”
The friend would let the pause fill the air, then be forced, just as she had often forced her mother, to ask the question. “Then why are you majoring in science?”
She did not reply.
Too late she discovered she was trying to catch fireflies, hands stretching out to ensnare a glowing hope, but it dims as soon as her palms encircle it, and slips through her fingers.
So she studied alone on nights where it seems like the moon is brighter than the sun could ever be.
Sometimes, she would glance over her shoulder to stare at the bear, with a severe look of contempt that bore into black glass eyes. He wasn’t all that spectacular, as far as stuffed animals go, conducted of cheap fabric and hot-glued features. She couldn’t remember when she got him, a souvenir from some forgotten fair. So he held not sentimental value, as her mother had hoped, but instead stood as a symbol for all that she had failed.
She hated him.
The teddy-bear was there to witness the phone calls. Every night, her mother would call. And every night, the daughter would wait as the rings vibrated. She wouldn’t pick it up this time. She could be strong. She could be brave. She could say what she needed to without using any words.
Every time, she picked the phone up on the last ring.
Every time.
“What’s your grade? That’s not good enough. Then try harder. I didn’t do all this work to get you into Cambridge just to have you flunk out. You need to work harder. This is your opportunity.”
Even though her voice had to travel through the phone, her mother’s voice still rang out louder than hers. After flimsy, scared excuses that she perfected over the numerous occasions in which she dropped beneath her mother’s radar, she slid out of the conversation. Her mother rangs up, and a beep sounds.
The phone keeps pulsing, begging, commanding to be put back in its case. The call is finished. It is over. But yet, it is not. She moves her lips, and she talks to the woman who can no longer hear her.
“This is not my opportunity. It is yours. You missed it. And now you want me to catch it.”
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The girl kept a brochure for a theater school in her lowest desk drawer. She took it out when no one was around, even looking around the area, as if her mother would jump out of the bed covers. But the bear on the highest shelf saw. She flipped its pages with gentle touches and adoring eyes.
The flow of classmates coming through the door trickled, then halted completely. Now it is just the girl. She’s the spitting image of her mother, minus the grey in the hair. But her face holds an expression of weariness that pulls at the bags under her eyes and laugh lines on her cheeks. Her mother would have said to use makeup to hide them. Never let anyone see that you are tired, that you are weak. Stand tall without fault. That’s what she liked to say. The girl let her face remain bare, though her breathing trembled throughout the day.
This night, the lecture on the phone was long. The mother talked of a promising start going to absolute waste. She talked of a picturesque childhood being ruined by the failures of her daughter. The daughter remained silent until the beep sounded again. And then she started to talk, more confident this time.
“There was no promising start, mother. Everything that you were proud of me came from your own fabrication. You made me enter the science fair for four years. You didn’t talk to me for three months after I didn’t make honors bio. And you didn’t attend the school play, the one where I sacrificed eating lunch some days to practice on the stage because you wouldn’t let me come for after-school rehearsals. But that’s okay, isn’t it, because you disapprove of friends. You said they were a distraction.” She says this quicker, and louder with each sentence. Now, her voice drops, and her head swivels as she connects eyes with the bear sitting on her bookshelf as she whispers, “You made it up. You made all of it up.”
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The theater brochure has moved to the top of the desktop. It lays there alone. Although she never attended to the bags underneath her eyes, slowly, they faded away. She was getting more sleep now. But they say mothers know everything, and even though it was impossible for her to see the tides changing, the girl picked up the phone at the last ring, just like always, with dread swimming in her stomach.
“You aren’t listening to me.”
“Of course I am, mum.” She responds.
“Wrong. Listen to me. You need me. I am right. You have to-”
The beep sounded. But it was the daughter who hung up the phone this time. She stares at it, for just a moment, but then turns again to look at the teddy bear.
“I do not need you.” She said. “I will not listen. You are wrong. I am right.” She’s shouting by the end.
She repeats it, again. “I am right.”
Then, she takes two steps forward, and her fingers clasp, they create a fist, and she swipes at the bear with her new creation. It falls, landing behind the bookcase.
She breathes. “I do not need to remember a childhood that wasn’t mine. You mean nothing to me. Nothing.”
Now, the teddy bear couldn’t see much from this vantage point, but he could still hear. And the phone ringing sharply hit him. But the girl did not pick up the phone. Not that night, or the one after that. The teddy bear might see darkness, but the she was finally able to see the light.
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Colors collided in front of the teddy bear. He was raised, and put back on top of the bookshelf. She was racing around the room, hiding failed tests. The theatre brochure was nowhere to be seen. The calendar was no longer on September but on April.
Footsteps, growing closer, could be heard in the hallways. Her mother then stood at the door.
“Dear,” she said, reaching for her daughter. “I’m so glad you made the right decision.”
The daughter stood, still and silent.
Her mother gave her a sad smile. “I know that you're still upset about theatre school, but it is must better to stay here. I can support your expenses here. And you need me. You couldn’t pay for school by yourself.”
The ice stays.
She tries, just one more time, with casualties. “Believe it or night, I was actually very much interested in science when I was your age. Just fascinated, really. But my mother convinced me it was better to be a realtor. So, we all must make sacrifices, but it is for the greater good.”
Her hand rests on her daughter’s arm. “Do you understand?”
And here is where fire and ice have their final battle. Two words, two paths. She mumbles it.
“Yes.”
The heat, the flames, overwhelm one person, and they take both mother and daughter prisoner.
“I love you,” says mother.
“I love you,” says daughter.
Two lies.
With each generation, the dream of the last is accomplished. But no one is ever happy. This is not a dream.
This is a nightmare.