First Tracks

by Catherine O'Connell

  He wheeled me to the hospital entrance and waited beside the wheelchair until Judy came to pick me up. A wisp of a thing with dark brown hair and bright blue eyes, Judy was the first person I met when I drove into Aspen fifteen years ago in a car so packed to the gills I looked like an Okie. I had arrived in town all alone with no clue where I was going to live or how I was going to support myself. Just knew I wanted to be a part of this town. I met her in the hamburger place where she was waitressing at the time, and she took me under her wing and has been my best friend here ever since. Aside from my twin, she’s the person I love and trust more than anyone in this world.

  She was uncharacteristically quiet on the drive into town, silent as we wheeled along the snow-covered streets, past the Hotel Jerome and the County Courthouse and the Catholic church, all prosperous landmarks from when the town had seen its first heyday. Or silver day as you might have it. Aspen was among the most respected silver trading bases back in the 1880s when the country was on the silver standard as well as the gold. One of the richest cities west of the Mississippi, its fortune had changed drastically in 1893 when Grover Cleveland took the US off the silver standard. The end game was that the valley’s population dwindled to below five hundred, a group made up basically of cattle ranchers and potato farmers.

  Aspen found itself in an entirely different heyday now, the kind that dealt with real estate and second homeowners versus precious metals, but this heyday probably wasn’t any less valuable than when silver had ruled.

  We continued through town along eighty-two and headed up valley toward Independence Pass. My A-frame sits about as far up eighty-two as you can go before the Winter Gate gets shut in November, closing the road off to all travel on the other side until the pass reopens at Memorial Day. It’s quiet where I live and that’s the way I like it. Actually, my neighbor on the other side of the highway is Kevin Costner, but he has security so it’s not like I could go over and borrow an egg.

  I knew part of the reason for Judy’s silence was that she was irritated with me. And it wasn’t only for getting myself in an avalanche. She wanted me to stay with her and Gene in their Red Mountain mansion for a couple of nights to make sure I was all right, but I’d declined. I’d already spent three days in the hospital and I just wanted to be home in my own surroundings to lick my wounds. Not the physical wounds, you know. My pain threshold is high, and I’ve had enough blow-ups while skiing to know the bruising of my battered body would pass. It was the psychological wounds that were troublesome, and there was no doubt in my mind that Judy knew that. She knew how incredibly close Warren and I had been. She also knew my private nature and that I’d talk about it when I was ready.

  Which I still wasn’t. Warren’s death had been at the forefront of my mind from the moment Neverman told me about it, through the long, sleepless night that followed, until the sun cast its morning shadow on to the mountains. Later that day, Meghan and Singh and Winter had stopped to see me after work. They were the three I worked with the most, especially Singh, but I sent them packing, begging off with the headache. Warren’s face and name kept resounding in my brain in a painful loop playing over and over again.

  We’d been ski buddies for as long as I’d been on patrol, which would be around ten years. I met him on the slow chair ride up Bell Mountain in the early season. He’d just moved to Aspen after getting divorced and retiring from his job as a bond trader. I’d volunteered to show him around the mountain and we’d been skiing together ever since. Hard pack or powder, we’d crush it. Easy Chair to Blondie’s. Northstar to Jackpot. International to Silver Queen. Anything and everything.

  Over time our friendship grew, extending further than just skiing. Laughing over lunch at Bonnie’s. Long hikes in the summer. Biking up to the Bells. Talking about just about anything – politics, sports, books. We were about as close as you could get without being lovers. In fact, it was better than being lovers because we knew we would never have to break up, never have to hate each other.

  At least that was what I told myself when he married Zuzana.

  And now he was dead and I might have something to do with it? Try as I might, I was coming up with zero reasons as to why Warren and I were skiing the backside of the mountain at three o’clock in the afternoon at a time when avalanche warnings were the terror equivalent of red.

  Judy’s silence persisted the last few miles up to my turnoff. Luckily the snowplow had been through earlier or I would have had to walk in to my house since her Prius wouldn’t have been up to the challenge. As it was it was a rough ride down the snow-packed road with banks of snow higher than the car rising to either side of us.

  She pulled to a stop in front of my A-frame on its makeshift cul-de-sac. True to the architecture of its sloped roof, not a flake of snow clung to the building, but that didn’t preclude mountainous piles of the white stuff reaching up all around it. The Wagoneer was buried as well. I’d left it in its usual parking spot in town, but everyone knew the keys were always in it, so someone from patrol must have driven it home for me. The two feet of snow piled on the hood told me how much it had snowed since I’d gone into the hospital. For an instant I felt disappointed that I wouldn’t be skiing the freshie in the morning. Then the memory of Warren’s death settled back in, taking all glimmer off the prospect.

  Judy killed the engine – though you wouldn’t have known it since the engine was so quiet.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ I asked her.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Turn the car off.’

  She gave me a sidelong stare. I met those piercing blue eyes with a stare of my own. Judy may have been small, but her presence was huge and she was about as determined a person as one could meet. It was a battle to overcome her once she had her mind set on something.

  ‘Because I’m coming in with you, that’s why. Did you think I was just going to leave you in the driveway without making sure you get in all right? I still can’t get why you won’t stay with us.’

  ‘Look, I just want to be alone.’

  She must have caught on to how serious I was, because instead of insisting as she usually would, she touched my arm and said gently, ‘I’m sorry about Warren.’

  I bit my lip to fight back tears and repeated myself. ‘I want to be alone. You can understand.’

  She nodded and turned the car back on. ‘Keep your cell with you and call me if you need anything, OK?’ And then she realized the folly of her words. For one, my cell was buried somewhere overlooking the Castle Creek Valley, lost in the slide. For two, my cell phone was useless up here anyway. There was no service. I did have a landline, however, and through the wonders of technology, a satellite dish for internet and television, an object about as out of harmony with the environment as you could get. Sam probably would have written me out of his will if he knew I was going to get satellite service after he was gone, but a girl can only be so alone. Even so, he was probably flipping in his grave. Hypothetically that is. He had no grave. Per his wishes, his ashes had been scattered on Richmond Ridge atop Aspen Mountain.

  ‘You do have a phone that works in there, don’t you? I mean besides that mustard monster in the kitchen.’ She was referring to Sam’s original phone, a rotary attached to the kitchen wall with a cord that had given up ninety-five per cent of its coil over the years.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I bought a wireless to keep with me in the loft. I got tired of climbing down the stairs to answer your calls checking in on me.’

  ‘Keep it beside you, please. I won’t sleep tonight unless you promise.’

  ‘I promise.’ We kissed each other’s cheek, and I got out of the car and grabbed my ski boots and remaining pole off the back seat.

  ‘And Greta,’ she said in a soft voice. ‘I know how much this has to be killing you.’

  ‘Thanks,’ was the best I could do.

  I shut the door and trudged up the snowy walk.

  FOUR

  My sense of loss increased the moment I stepped into m
y house. The emptiness was profound. My eyes darted to the kitchen floor where Kayla’s bowls lay untouched since I’d had her put down two weeks before. When I saw the last of the water had evaporated, tears ran down my cheeks. I’d intentionally left the water in the bowl knowing that her tongue had lapped its last drink of water from that bowl and perhaps part of her was there in the cells that remained. One of the best avalanche dogs going, she’d saved more than a couple of lives over the years, including mine, and deciding to let her go was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. But as happens so often with Goldens, her hips were shot and it was only fair to put her out of her pain.

  Judy was already on me to get a new dog, but it would have been impossible to train a puppy during ski season, and besides Kayla and I had been together since I first started patrol. I wasn’t ready to replace her just yet.

  I hung my patrol jacket on a peg with the orange cross facing out from the black background, blessing the room. The house was freezing, as usual. Propane was expensive, so when I was out, the thermostat was set just high enough to keep the pipes from freezing. I cranked the temperature up to sixty-five and was rewarded by the sound of flames firing up in the old furnace followed by the soft flow of warm air.

  Depressed or not, I was hungry. I’m like that. I can eat through practically anything. A job loss. A break-up. My mother’s death. It’s close to impossible to ruin my appetite. I popped open the refrigerator and stared at my lack of choices. There was a bottle of Pinot Grigio, a six-pack of Heineken, a carton of 2% milk and a hunk of parmesan cheese. Saturday, the day of the slide, was my usual day for provisioning, and for obvious reasons I hadn’t made City Market. I opened a Heineken, cut off a hunk of the parmesan and matched it up with some Triscuits from the pantry. Searching to do something mindless, I turned on the television and settled into the Barcalounger.

  The chair was old and beat up as hell, but it was Sam’s chair and even though I had the cojones to put a satellite dish on his hallowed grounds, I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of the tired old piece of furniture where he spent his last days. Towards the end, he didn’t even get into bed at night. He just slept in the chair. If one was to call me sentimental, they’d be right. But I owed Sam big time, and if honoring his memory was one way of thanking him, then so be it.

  Sam was the reason I was able to stay in Aspen. The rents here are stratospheric and always have been. That’s if you can even find anything to rent. When I’d lost my housing at the end of the season years ago, and there was nothing available even close to my price range, I really feared I might have to pull the plug on the town I loved so well.

  That’s when I saw the ad in the Times for a live-in caregiver in exchange for a room. I didn’t exactly see myself as a caregiver, but I was trained in first aid, so I thought why not see what that’s about. Well, I gotta say, answering that ad was one of the smartest things that I’ve ever done in my life. Not to mention the most serendipitous.

  When I pulled up for my interview, Sam was sitting on the front deck of his A-frame with the snow still piled in the shade of the trees skirting the house, an aging ski bum looking at his last powder run. Even at eighty, he was still attractive, tall and wiry with some last bits of hair clinging stubbornly to the sides of his head and clear blue eyes that had seen more than a few good times. But he’d taken a fall in his kitchen the week before and was walking with a limp after pulling his hamstring. An earlier fall, just weeks before the pulled hamstring, had resulted in a broken collarbone. He’d come to the conclusion that maybe it was better if he didn’t live alone anymore.

  He’d been a presence in Aspen for over fifty years, since the salad days of the sixties when, according to him, the town revolved around three major activities – skiing, partying, and sex. And he couldn’t say in what order of priority. Though I suspect for him skiing won out. Most of his friends from those days were gone, either moved away or dead. He’d been self-sufficient his whole life and hated having to depend on anyone. Truth was, he didn’t need a caregiver, per se, but someone to run errands and eat with occasionally, someone to pick him up off the floor if he fell, someone to keep him out of the nursing home. What he really needed was company and, besides, he confessed, he didn’t want to die alone.

  We hit it off from the start. Luckily, he loved dogs so Kayla and I set up housekeeping in the loft while Sam kept his residence downstairs in the cabin’s only bedroom. And living with Sam was not only a sweet deal, it was liberating for me. For the first time since moving to Aspen, I wasn’t living under the onus of searching out housing at the end of every season. The set-up worked out great for both of us. He was a private person who loved having some time of his own, which allowed for me to work all day. And days when Kayla didn’t come to work with me he enjoyed having her around.

  He swore the only way he’d leave the valley was in a coffin, and that held true in the end. I got up one winter morning last year and there he was in the Barcalounger, a half-finished beer in the glass that I’d brought to him the night before, his last run over. Though most his friends were gone, the turnout for his funeral was large. He was a legend. And he never had a coffin and never left the valley. His ashes on the ridge made him part of the valley forever.

  When it came to his will, no one was more surprised than me that he left me the A-frame in a life estate. Well, maybe his two adult children were more surprised, but with the exception of his funeral, they had only surfaced a couple of times in the five years I lived with him. His only marriage had been short-lived and his wife had moved to Vail with the kids when they were not much more than babies, so there wasn’t much relationship between them. Sam blamed this partly on himself for not being the fatherly type and partly on his ex-wife for poisoning them against him.

  Either way, they now had kids of their own, and I imagine he wanted his grandkids to have some memory of the grandfather they’d never met, since it wasn’t likely the estate would revert to Sam’s children in their lifetime. The whole life estate thing pissed them off since the land was worth millions that they wouldn’t see until I either died or moved out. Sam was sure that the second he went, they’d sell to some developer who would build a 10,000 square foot mansion on the land and slap an eight-figure price tag on it – something he didn’t want to happen. He’d already seen too many changes in Aspen and wasn’t going to add to them if he could help it. Guess he showed them all big time. One of the provisions of the life estate was that I didn’t change the exterior of the building in any way.

  His kids tried contesting the will, but it was ironclad. And so at thirty-five, I was muy comfortable in my ski shack and had no intention of going anywhere else well into the foreseeable future.

  I ate the better part of the Triscuits with the parmesan and washed them down with the beer while watching the PBS news hour and a couple other news shows I recorded daily, my bow to the real world I’d managed thus far to avoid. I shook my head at what we had gotten ourselves into, praying the country and the planet would survive the president, thankful to be living in the bubble that was the Roaring Fork Valley. The post-avalanche headache that had plagued me on and off since the spill started coming back, so I shut the television down and climbed into the loft.

  Lying on the mattress and box spring that served as my bed beneath the slanted ceiling, I propped some pillows behind my head and picked up the copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses that sat on the low nightstand. My latest goal was to get the college degree I’d never been able to finish back in Milwaukee, so I’d started taking classes at the local college. This semester’s class was Mythology. Snuggled under the sheets, beneath a heavy wool blanket and a down-filled duvet, I picked up the book and tried to put a dent in the week’s assignment, but found myself unable to read. The headache kept getting worse, making concentration difficult if not impossible. I put the book back on the nightstand and pulled the covers up to my chin.

  True to my promise to Judy, my wireless phone sat on the nightstand next to a brass la
mp. I turned off the lamp and closed my eyes. Warren’s face appeared behind the shuttered lids, his dark hair and freckles and coffee-colored eyes. The cheek-to-cheek smile that only produced a dimple on the right side. My mind was pummeled with the unanswered question of what I had been doing on the backside of Ruthie’s with Warren alongside me. Had he invited me to ski with him? Had I asked him? My initiating the run would have been unlikely. I was on duty and was supposed to stay in bounds, and besides anyone with a brain knew how dangerous it was. The riddle was painfully plaguing, almost as much as the loss of him. It had to be solved sooner or later if I was going to have any closure.

  And then a tiny glimmer of memory pierced the darkness. I was shutting the door to the shed when I saw Warren slide off the Ruthie’s chair. I remembered seeing him glance towards the ski area boundary and then head for it. I remembered thinking it wasn’t right and shouting his name. I tried to recall more, willed myself to push the memory farther, but the hole closed up like the iris at the end of an old cartoon and the memory went black again.

  The headache was getting worse, even with my eyes shut. I regretted ignoring Dr Larsen’s order of no alcohol for a couple days. Could one beer really cause all this pain? I pressed my hands to my forehead in an attempt to push relief into my tormented cranium. I was feeling more peculiar than just the headache, like some kind of poison was running through my veins. Maybe Judy was right. Maybe I shouldn’t have stayed home alone. Maybe I should have spent the night on Red Mountain with her and Gene.

  When the headache got intolerable, I reached out for the phone and pressed Judy’s number on the speed dial. The call had just gone through when a high-pitched alarm sounded, assaulting my ears and my already assaulted brain. The screeching sound was creating more pain in my head than the headache. Somewhere in the deepest recesses of my psyche I decided it was the smoke detector. But when I peeled my eyes open, there was no smoke. And there was no smell of smoke either. Don’t tell me this is all because of the damn battery, I thought.