Winning Chance

by Katherine Koller

  “Oh, no. Guess what I forgot.”

  “Me, too.” We laughed because we brought gifts, not birth control.

  More than anything, we wanted to put the icy road behind us and build a fire.

  Maurice was driving and it was snowing, but at that moment we were looking at each other, agreeing to let the stars decide about a baby. So we didn’t see what happened at all.

  A trucker was heading toward us with a load of pipe for a gas service unit east of Edson. Mountain routes were his specialty. His truck, a black Mack, had eighteen wheels. Chester, a trucker for fifteen years, sustained minor injuries.

  We became guardians, stationed above Highway 16. We were tethered to the earth by light, tangled in the stars.

  In the year we’d been suspended above Highway 16, we searched for a way to be free.

  In his counselling sessions, Chester said he saw us for a second—he woke up and veered off, hoping to glance off the left front headlight of the Mazda. Chester considered the angles again and again. The illumination wasn’t from his high beams, because they had steered right. Yet at his left, he saw us, face and eyes joined in mysterious light, the moment before impact.

  After months of classes and tests, Chester climbed back in his truck. One night at dusk he stopped at an alpine meadow and stretched out on his back in the autumn grass. Gradually the sky, like a mother, pulled over a comforter of stars. Chester, full of wonder, sank into the earth, muscles, fascia, skin, and bone. From that moment, he committed himself to stargazing. He collected books, an ultrasensitive telescope, and a new camera for night shots. He was looking for us.

  We kept track of him, too. But we also looked for love in winter. It was all we knew. Because it had kept us together so far, we believed that winter love would release us to the big beyond for all eternity.

  Maurice found her. For Maurice, life led to love.

  “See the pink toque? Look at her joie de vivre.”

  A young woman, loaded with gear, hitchhiked on the resort road as late afternoon snow wafted down and a silver car crept out of the congested Marmot Basin parking lot. The driver, Wendy, a woman my earthly age, slowed to a stop.

  We approved, and shone a little closer.

  “We need gas in town anyway,” Wendy said to her husband Grant.

  That word, husband, embodied an ache we carried from earth. As did the other, wife. We had still not let go of them. Even now. Especially not now.

  “And coffee,” says Grant. “This could be tough going. I’ll take the second shift.”

  “Merci,” the hitchhiker trilled, dark hair spiralling out of her pom-pom toque as she loaded her snowboard into the trunk. “I’m Chantelle,” she said to the boys in the back seat. “From Trois-Rivières.”

  Une belle Québécoise. That pleased Maurice even more. He whistled at the clouds, and they spilled lazy saucer-sized flakes down the curvy mountain road.

  Wendy’s boys marvelled at the weight of the snow. It’s puking, they taught Chantelle, and giggled with her as they watched YouTube videos of funny dogs on the way to Jasper. After pumping and paying for gas, Grant shared around a big bag of M&M’s.

  “Oh,” I said. “Look.” The night we became guardians, peanut M&M’s skittered and seeded the ice. Once the debris had been cleared, they remained frozen in, the only trace we’d been there at all. A great grey owl, hungry for the nuts embedded in the road, persevered a second too long. Knocked to the ditch by a truck carrying twin ATVs, her carcass, pulled by a lynx at first light, slid into the dark forest.

  After being with the cozy family, Chantelle decided to walk the rest of the way to her basement suite rather than redirect the station wagon off its path. The car skidded slightly at the train station crosswalk. Wendy didn’t notice, but I did.

  “Vous êtes des anges,” Chantelle smiled. “Angels in the snow!”

  “Stay well,” called Wendy, blowing back a kiss.

  “Vous aussi! Mountain people are ma famille.” But loneliness hooded her face as soon as she turned away. Her toque bobbed as she walked with her pack and board, but Chantelle missed her maman au Québec, “tu me manque.”

  Maurice noticed that behind Wendy, the truck driver gearing down to wait for Chantelle to cross the road was Chester.

  Chester lined up his long rig against the curb and parked. Wendy’s vehicle skidded again when she steered back into traffic.

  “Maurice,” I said, “we must move on. This may be our chance. Our task.”

  “Okay,” he said. “On y va.”

  We followed Wendy.

  The flurries blew from the northeast directly onto Wendy’s windshield. The heavy German-built station wagon, loaded with skis, repelled the road, not sticking as it should. The tires hydroplaned as if swimming in summer rain. Wendy slowed down. Snow swirled and horns honked as truck drivers passed.

  But not Chester. In his truck cab by the train station, waking after a much-needed nap, Chester prepared for the dark. Because Jasper National Park was a Dark Sky Preserve, Chester always spent the night there. He lumbered through the snow-dusted elk-bent grass with telescope and camera to dissipate the vision that haunted him nightly. Chester set up his tripod.

  Maurice, distracted, looked back and stirred the Jasper sky clear for him. Très gallant, my Maurice.

  I watched Wendy struggle on the Jasper Park road, and brought Maurice’s attention back. Grant snoozed beside Wendy, oblivious.

  “We could have been like them,” I said. The work of years and children had trod a space between Wendy and Grant, but I could tell that alone, they were lovers.

  “They could be like us,” said Maurice.

  The snow was hypnotic, limiting visibility, and Wendy strained to see the lights of the vehicles ahead. She dropped her speed again.

  Then Wendy whispered, “I need you now.”

  I’d been called. I moved my light closer as the last vehicle behind her sped past.

  The boys in the back seat wrestled. I blew in their ears. They settled down under jackets and blankets. This made Maurice beam. He had yearned for a little family, too.

  Wendy pulled off the road. She peeled her palms off the steering wheel. Grant awoke to the sound of her gulping air, near panic. He held her hands until she regained her breath, then checked the tires, but nothing was wrong. Wendy got out and rotated her neck. She lifted her shoulders and dropped them suddenly to release the tension. She sucked in long breaths of cold air and slowed her breathing with long exhales. Grant walked her around the car, then took the driver’s seat.

  “She feels like he’s saving her again,” I said.

  “That remains to be seen.”

  “Yes, but she believes it.” Grant’s hand had pulled Wendy back to him in dark seawater, in the labour room, on the ski hill. Wendy breathed deeply. Three hundred kilometres to go.

  “It’s worse where they’re headed,” Maurice said, looking beyond at the blizzard.

  Maurice’s gaze trailed back to Jasper. “I’ll be with Chester.”

  “What? We vowed to stay together. We promised.”

  “He’s calling me. Afraid of what he will see.”

  So I had to concede. Our joint light wrapped around our star, our two strands separated and projected down to our earthly work at different points on Highway 16.

  It hurt to be apart from Maurice. I dropped crystal tears on the black ribbon of road ahead of Wendy and Grant.

  My falling teardrops stippled the ice, and the tires stabilized. Grant drove the speed limit and sailed on for home. Wendy gazed out to the stars, behind the snow. Although she couldn’t see my light, it touched her face, and her neck finally relaxed. Since the snow had faded and the kids had conked out in the back seat, they didn’t stop for more coffee or supper but kept driving through Hinton, Edson, Evansburg, and Entwistle to Edmonton. The path we took in reverse. They were al
most home. At the lights of Stony Plain, on dry road, I left Wendy.

  I joined Maurice back in the mountains as the moon crawled up behind the peaks. Chester focused his telescope to capture the moon in its perigee, but what he saw yet again was the look between us before my little red car burst into flames. We were a breath away from destruction.

  Warmed by a bowl of soupe à l’oignon gratinée, her mother’s recipe, and drawn outside by the moon, Chantelle approached the telescope on the grassy trail. She put her hand on Chester’s shoulder and s’il vous plait asked if she could look, the instant before we exploded for the thousandth time. Chester moved away from the lens, and he heard bells in the pitch of Chantelle’s voice. Not the screech of tires, crunch of metal, then awful silence.

  “Magnifique,” Chantelle said to the bright winter moon, her round eyes looking up at Chester. Chantelle was younger than him, nomadic like him, and incredibly fit, which he was not. She was the first to witness his wonder at us, now fixed as a brilliant still shot of love in his brain. No horror movie, no collision, no fire.

  Maurice sent a shooting star over the mountains, under the moon, as applause. Chantelle and Chester clasped hands in delight.

  Gazing at the mountains reaching for the dark blue sky, Chantelle dreamed of a log cabin in the snow. The path of the falling étoile filante conjured a semi-circle of children with rusty hair like Chester, a big black dog, de la soupe simmering on the stove, a round of Brie, and a telescope in every window. Chester’s vision matched Chantelle’s, but included the trade of his long haul truck for an astronomy course and a Parks Canada uniform.

  At the same instant, Wendy stroked Grant’s hand and the station wagon slipped on a patch of black ice. Grant knew that on ice the only choice was to wait out the skid and keep the wheels straight. The exact moment that Chantelle looked back at Chester, the silver station wagon landed off kilter. Wendy cried out, startling the boys. I heard her thumping heart as if it were mine.

  In that moment Chantelle’s wide smile illuminated Chester’s face, and his eyes, hers.

  The light between them also severed the strands that attached us to earth and rocketed us, entwined, to the highest heavens, way past the Milky Way, the round Brie moon, unspoken words, face and eyes, snowflakes on lynx fur, multi-coloured M&M’s. We cast our hope into the abyss below, to the outskirts of the city on Highway 16, in the bouncing station wagon where Wendy and Grant looked at each other.

  Acknowledgements

  These stories were developed with the gracious help of my first readers, Margaret Macpherson and Laurel Sproule. The Writers Guild of Alberta Mentorship Program introduced me to Myrl Coulter, a wonderful new writing friend who worked with me on a handful of these stories and encouraged me in the art of short fiction from beginning to end.

  “The Exchange” first appeared in Epiphany (Fall/Winter 2016); “The Care & Feeding of Small Birds” was printed in chapbook form by Loft 112 in Calgary in June 2017; “Sunset Travel for Single Seniors” was published in Room 40.3 (Fall 2017); “M & M” was featured in Grain 44.2 (Winter 2017); and “Belovèd by the Moon” was included in The Prairie Journal 70 (Fall 2018).

  Many thanks to the Alberta Foundation for the Arts for a marketing grant for this collection.