by Audrey Bell
I shake my head. “No.”
She rests her forearms on the railing, looking up at the mountain. If you saw her, you would never guess what a ferociously competitive skier she is. She looks dainty, like a china doll, like a ballet dancer.
“After the avalanche, it’s all I could think about,” she confesses.
The mountain looks like it’s smoldering now. I know the earth must be shuddering as the snow moves, thousands and thousands and pounds of it cascading down ridges, slamming into old trees, breaking branches, smashing into rocks, changing the whole terrain of the mountain
You have no idea how much it weighs. How quickly it gathers and grows—weight and speed—this vicious moving force.
Hold out a hot hand in a snowstorm and watch the flakes melt. You can’t feel their weight at all. They barely last a second in your hands. They drip away into nothing; you wipe the damp remains on your jacket.
But, on a mountain, the snow is an ocean with unpredictable tides. You can’t see the waves, or feel them coming. But they do come. Just so far apart that everyone forgets about them. And so dramatically that there are few things that survive to tell you what they’re like.
They come out of nowhere, like a Tsunami on a flat lake or an asteroid on a clear day. The mountain sleeps under your feet. You feel like its master. Until the snow goes and you’re nothing but a flailing animal against its might.
Hold out your hot hands against the tumbling, living snow and it sweeps you away. Hold out your hands, and your whole life goes with them.
I look at Lottie, who I haven’t replied to. “It doesn’t happen inbounds.”
“I wasn’t afraid of an avalanche happening,” she says, clarifying. “It was just all I could think about. How afraid they must have been when they died.”
She wants to know what it was like. Everyone wants to know what it was like. Hunter asked the same question, and I never really answered it. There aren’t words for almost dying. You can’t conceive of it until it happens to you. And if it ever does, you don’t want to worry about conceiving a notion of it. You want to forget. Though, a part of you knows you never will. And, it’s useless anyway; there aren’t any real words for it. Nobody’s ever come up with one.
“It was so scary I wasn’t scared,” I say, finally. “That’s what my dad told me, anyways. Your body—it doesn’t have time to think about feeling when it’s trying to survive.”
She nods. “But you quit after?”
“I think I was depressed,” I say. “Scared. Anxious. Half of it was…facing everyone.” I try to describe what I was so afraid of. This, my brain answers. Talking about it. Wondering how many people were wondering why I got out. The only girl. Certainly slower than Ryan and Danny. How did I get out?
“Or just grieving?” Lottie suggests cautiously.
“I think being depressed is part of grieving,” I say.
“Right,” she nods. “Well, it put a lot of things into perspective for me. I stopped holding back. You know? It wasn’t even that I thought I would die in an avalanche, it was just—I realized I could die crossing the street. I had to hurry up and do what I wanted to do now.”
Lottie would make it into something good. Something valuable. A lesson. Identifying how precious time is, instead of deciding to stop giving a fuck, because it was out of her control anyways.
“You’re going to win big today,” Lottie says simply.
“We’ll see.”
“I’m sure of it.”
***
She’s right. I win downhill. I win big. Two seconds ahead of Penelope, who finishes second. I leave my medal on my bed, the whole race running through my head. One of those perfect moments. Where your body works better than it has before, just at the right time.
I take my excitement and try to put it away. Joe, Parker and I are going to visit the Kellers. And there won’t be room for celebration there.
Parker went to get flowers. Danny would be twenty-two tomorrow. It’s still his 22nd birthday, whether or not he’s around for it.
Danny Keller. You good, good man. I hear his voice clearly today. He was my first everything, really. He taught me how to kiss, how to make love, how to lie naked next to someone, and let the love take you wherever it led.
“I love every inch of you,” he told me, when I confessed my nerves. And he dropped kisses on every inch of my body, sincere ones. He made me believe.
Danny, Danny, Danny. Sometimes I got like this, where I’d just repeat his name like an incantation.
Joe and Parker both look serious and introspective when I jump into the SUV. Parker offers me a small, sheepish smile. “I’m sorry about what happened at Lake Placid,” he says. “I was—out of line.”
“No worries,” I say softly.
“I…”
“Seriously,” I say. “No worries.”
He nods, accepting at least that I don’t want to get into it with him. And I don’t. I’m not angry anymore. He knew something about Danny that he didn’t tell me. But we’re all guilty of holding back something.
Danny grew up in a whitewashed brick house on the corner of a cozy cul-de-sac nestled at the base of the mountain. There’s a swing on his back porch. He used to sit there and do his homework, looking up at the mountain, making plans to conquer it.
Joe parks carefully. I feel Danny strongly here—more strongly than I’ve felt him in a long time. Like the place holds the memories of his life. Like both this house and this girl were imprinted with his marks, keepers of his memory.
That’s what will always hold Joe and Parker and me together. Even when we fight. Danny and Ryan. Making sure they don’t vanish into obscurity.
“Hi,” Mrs. Keller says cheerfully, swinging open the door. She’s gained weight since I last saw her at the funeral, her eyes deeply lined. She’s been cooking dinner for us—chili.
“Danny’s favorite,” she explains, and I know how hard it is for her to hold it together, because she still can barely speak his name.
Mr. Keller doesn’t get up to say hi. He sits with a newspaper, which he sighs at, folding and refolding. He puts it aside and nods. “Hey, kids.”
He looks even worse than she does.
He never wanted for energy. When we watched Danny’s races, side-by-side, I would actually cringe at the amount of energy he poured into screaming encouragement. He bounced the whole time, unable to contain himself. And when Danny did well, he’d burst with pride. “Didja see that? Didja see that?”
I remember it and my throat closes up. What had bothered me a year and a half ago now seems so sweet and so honest. He looks sapped, like someone had knocked the will to live straight out of him.
We sit down in the living room.
“How have you been?” Joe asks.
I’m grateful for his presence. He’s so easy to be around, such a calming force. He asks the right questions. About Mrs. Keller’s job as a second grade teacher and about the weather this time of year. He talks around the awkwardness in the room, until it’s gone.
Mrs. Keller wants to talk about Danny, though. She’s desperate to talk about it, and I sit back on the couch in their living room, holding a cup of tea, and just listen.
She tells us stories I’ve never heard before.
Danny learned to roller blade in the wide second-floor hallway, on the hardwood floors.
He used to crush up Oreo cookies and sprinkle them on top of yogurt and drop gummy worms in.
“He called it dirt and worms. It was his favorite snack,” she says, laughing with tears in her eyes. “His kindergarten teacher actually sent him home with a note about it, like I was some kind of abusive parent. You know, Dear Mrs. Keller: I’m very concerned that Danny’s been telling his classmates that you feed him dirt and worms. I think I have it saved somewhere.”
We laugh appreciatively.
Mr. Keller doesn’t. He sets his jaw, after two or three stories, and rises from his chair and we hear his footsteps on the stairs, down a corridor, a
door closing a bit too sharply.
“He can’t even talk about it,” Mrs. Keller explains softly. She shakes her head, pressing a hand to her mouth. “He thinks it’s his fault. I don’t know how you blame an avalanche on yourself. But, he thinks it’s all his fault.” She bites her lip shaking his head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to get like this today.”
She wipes her eyes and Joe takes her hand in his, comfortingly.
“He loved you guys so much,” she chokes out. “Would you excuse me?” She gets up, sniffling, and we’re left in a quiet living room, all of us stunned. We knew how deep the grief was, but it feels like it happened yesterday in this house.
Parker murmurs quietly. “This is harder than I thought it would be.”
“Yeah,” Joe breathes.
She comes back quickly, with a brave smile, photo albums stacked in one arm and a box under the other.
She smiles, tearfully, but genuinely. “He’d probably kill me if he knew I was showing this to you, Joe.” She laughs.
“Score,” Joe says, grabbing an album and opening it and laughing. “God, he was such a cute little kid.”
He really was, golden-haired with those brown sorrowful eyes. Skinny and small as a child, he always told me how he looked three years younger than Ryan in elementary school. That Ryan protected him when they started middle school when Danny was still a scrawny little kid.
Ryan is all over the photo albums, gap-toothed at birthday parties, the same devilish look on his face. There they are picking apples in first grade, playing on a slip-n-slide in second. And there are so many pictures of the two of them skiing together.
I reach out and touch the pages, like I can touch their faces. Something deep in me breaks and I start sobbing in a way that’s violent and uncontrollable. I leave the room for a bathroom, brace myself against a sink, and fight to catch my breath.
How does anything die? How does it happen? How fucking scared was he? Did he know it was happening, trapped under all that snow? What did he think of as he died? Did he just fight? Did he hold onto some memory? Was there something he still needed to tell someone?
Danny—there are so many visions of Danny in my head—the things I remember, the way he moved. I’m playing a video in my head, interrupted by all of these childhood photos that I’ve never seen.
This was never supposed to happen. We were supposed to get married. He wasn’t supposed to die. And I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with someone else. And someone else wasn’t supposed to break my heart after a fucking avalanche already did such a number on it.
My fingers tight on the porcelain sink, I breathe, shudder, and get a grip. I look at my face in the mirror. I’m a goddamn mess, swollen and red-faced, and breathing like an asthmatic.
I close my eyes, catch my breath, and splash water against my eyes. It’s no use pretending I didn’t just have a mini nervous breakdown, and Parker reaches for me when I sit down on the couch. He pulls me against his body; I drop my head against his shoulder. I know that we’re hurting together, and somehow that makes it easier.
I could marry Joe when he makes Mrs. Keller laugh, describing Danny’s ineptness at making anything. “He didn’t know what order you were supposed to do cereal in. I swear to god, when we started living together at the lodge, he asked me whether you started with the milk or the Cheerios.”
It’s an easy, old story, but her laugh is real and it rolls through the kitchen, more comforting than the chili, than the company, than anything I’ve heard in a very long time. She still can laugh at him. Which he would have loved.
I don’t say very much. The things Danny said to me, when we were nestled in bed together, were so sweet and so deeply personally. I feel I should keep it to myself. Selfishly, I think those words were only for me. I’m the only one who knows them. I’m the only one who carries them everywhere I go.
Mrs. Keller has gifts for us—profoundly meaningful gifts. An old sweatshirt of Danny’s that still smells like him for me. T-shirts and his goggles for Parker. A few well-thumbed paperbacks for Danny. Relics of the person we all loved.
As we walk to the foyer to drive back to Tahoe, pack up our things, and disperse, Mrs. Keller grabs my arm gently.
She pulls me aside. “I have something else for you.” She looks at the boys. “Sorry,” she smiles. “It’s a girl thing. Just Pippa.”
“I’ll meet you in the car,” I tell Parker and Joe, following her upstairs. No, no. I can’t see his bedroom. Nausea rises in my stomach. If I see his bedroom, I’ll collapse.
She opens the door, just a few feet to the right of the landing. My breath catches. “I don’t know…”
“It’s okay, sweetheart,” she says. “I know.”
The tears come softly this time, against my will, as we step into the blue room. A plaid quilt thrown over the twin-size bed. A framed Los Angeles Lakers jersey. An untouched desktop computer, gathering dust.
“I found this a few months ago,” she says. “He’d always talked about having kids with you.”
I make a scared noise as she lifts a blue box from a bedside table drawer. She smiles bravely at me and I take it one hand.
“I guess he bought it when he signed with a sponsor.” Her voice shakes and I sit down on the bed. I hold the box like a baby bird, like it might break in my hands. I run my thumbs over its soft, velvet corners.
“Open it,” she whispers.
I do.
It’s beautiful. A small, elegant diamond in a square cut on a platinum band. He must have spent half of his signing bonus on this. My voice catches.
“I wanted to give it to you in person, but…nobody knew how to get in touch with you. Everyone said you disappeared.”
“I did,” I whisper softly, my voice breaking.
She sits next to me. “I’ve been thinking of you like my daughter-in-law ever since I found it, because, that’s how things would be…that’s how things would be if Danny hadn’t…if…” Her shoulders shake. “I need you to listen to me.”
“Okay.”
“You have to live your life,” she says. “Danny would hate it if you never lived your life because of him. He’d hate it.” She squeezes her arm around me. “And—and Danny loved you so much.”
“I loved him, too. I still do,” I confess.
“But he’s gone, sweetheart,” she says softly. “You’ve got to chose life. The life that you have. While you still can. And you have to choose love, too. You can’t choose bitterness. You can’t choose anger. You have to choose to live your life. You have to give your heart to someone else.”
“I’m trying…”
“Don’t try,” she whispers. “Just do it. Let someone sweep you off your feet again. Believe that good things happen too. I know that it’s hard to remember the good things.”
“No, it’s not that hard,” I admit. “It’s all I remember, sometimes. Danny. The good things.”
“There are good things out there,” she says. “For you. You’ll fall in love again. And it won’t change the fact that you were the one and only love of Danny’s life. It won’t make me love you any less for making my son so happy.”
I hug her tightly and hard. “Thank you,” I say.
“Thank you,” she says back.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
I wear the ring on a silver chain around my neck. I tape it down for practices back in Utah. I feel released from a burden, somehow, knowing Mrs. Keller thinks I deserve the ring still. Knowing that she thinks of me as her daughter-in-law.
And Lottie and I are friend again, truly, deeply friends. She plays with the ring when she sees it, twirling it in the sun. I wonder how I questioned her loyalty; she tells me she’s sorry and confused as to why she resented me for coming back.
And freed of that jealousy, we both keep winning like crazy.
Sometimes I think of the ring as my lucky charm, taped in an X with medical tape over my heart, I touch the cool bump, and I let fly.
After I win four races in one we
ek, I get a drunken text message from Hunter. He flashes back into me like lightning.
kinda miss you
I roll my eyes. Kinda. I swallow. Kinda? I miss him terribly. Like I’m missing air or something. But I count what I have. I keep busy. I know what the stages of loss are. You have to keep busy or it will stop you in your tracks. I made the mistake of stopping once. I’m not going to do it again.
The Facebook photos of Laurel and Hunter are hard to take. Particularly the ones of them at a costume party, where she’s dressed up like…a playboy bunny maybe? And he’s Mickey Mouse.
“Stop torturing yourself,” Lottie snaps, walking into my room. “Death eater and douchebag are not worth your time.”
I laugh at her as she hands me an iced coffee. “How do you drink iced coffee in February?”
“I don’t like hot drinks,” she insists. “What is she supposed to be?”
“I was just wondering the same thing,” I say mildly.
“I can’t decide if she’s supposed to be a prostitute or if she didn’t know it was a costume party, so she came as herself.”
“High-end prostitute.”
“Not that high-end.”
“Why did we ever stop being friends?”
She laughs. “We’re both too competitive for our own good? I think we should go to meditation classes. Prevent the whole standoff girl fight from ever happening again. Alright, I don’t want to look at this evil shit.”
I sigh. “I still need to check my email.”
“So, check it and let’s go fucking backcountry it out.” Joe, Parker, Lottie, and I are finally headed out to the backcountry on a snow cat. I’m not nervous. I’m excited, and we took all the precautions, checking the snow report and talking to the director of activities at the lodge.
Should be a good day for powder.
I load my inbox impatiently, scrolling through an endless series of spam messages.
And then there’s something unusual.
Sponsorship Inquiry-Spyder
Hi Pippa:
My names Julia Thomas and I work in marketing at Spyder. We’re big fans of yours! Congrats on the comeback!
