“No!” I cry, as if I’ve lost the last bit of oxygen in my scuba tank.

I look down, and—for a brief moment—seriously consider making a snow cone out of what has just escaped from the bottle, because I know I need every ounce of courage right now, but then I stop and watch the wine spread slowly through the slushy, sandy snow. It looks like blood, and it continues to spread in tiny lines as if I were drawing on an Etch A Sketch. I gasp when it stops moving: the image resembles a red rose.

I look up at the sun to clear my eyes and mind, and then back down, but the image is still there. When I cast my eyes toward the lake, the image fills my eyes—dancing sunspots—and the shoreline looks as if it’s filled with roses.

In my wine-induced haze, I ask myself, Am I seeing things clearly?

I know I am walking too quickly on the slippery shore, but I need to see if this is real or a mirage. I move toward Lake Michigan, the roses beckoning me, and walk out onto the frozen lake. It doesn’t scare me: I know how thick the ice is. My dad used to ice-fish out here, and my mind flits back to that happy time.

Suddenly, I hit a slick spot and go down, hard. My bottle of wine goes flying and it shatters on the ice, the wine exploding across the surface, leaving a grisly looking scene.

I can feel my back spasm again, and then my butt screams in pain—knowing there will be a large, unsightly bruise by tomorrow—and when I look up, the roses are gone. It’s just me, buzzed, sitting alone atop a frozen lake.

I think of all the romantic movies I’ve watched in my lifetime. Right now, a man—a firefighter or, no, a lumberjack—would rush out of nowhere to help me up. We’d kiss, I’d fall in love and he’d rebuild the cottage while I drank green tea. The Cinderella Complex, Trish used to call it: American women have been fed a myth that men will save the damsel in distress, that marriage is a fantasy to which we all aspire.

But what happens when the big wedding is over? Trish asked me before I married Nate. I hated her for saying that. I thought she was just jealous. But she was being honest.

I press my hands down on the ice to stand, but then I stop: I can see the lake undulate underneath the ice, fish swimming under the frozen surface. I feel like I’m at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, watching sea life through clear glass. The sunshine and intense blue of the sky fill my view of this underwater world with prisms of light and color, and I rub my mitten over the surface to clear the frost.