There aren’t many times I’ve been at peace in the last year. All of them have been when I’ve been doing this: my calling.
Everything else fades. We ride multiple loops—down past Brooke with her camera, a long hike back up through the deep powder. Taking turns to show off with what we do.
What is it—my third pass? My fourth? Just me, while Chase and Hanne wait further up the slope, watching from a safe distance, and Brooke waits below, filming.
I’m so deep in the flow, I don’t even react at first.
A sound, or a feeling. Or both of them at once.
My peace shattered by the sudden wrongness.
Behind me, the mountain roars.
“Avalanche,” Chase’s voice shouts from the radio at my shoulder. “Go. For fuck’s sake, go.”
I try. God knows I try. But I already know from the beginning: I’m not outrunning this mountain.
It’s like the dream. What a fucking stupid thing to think. But it’s true: I am out of control. Way out of control. What’s going to happen has already been decided.
Set in motion by another one of my stupid decisions.
Hanne is shouting through my radio, but her words are eaten by the sound of the snow.
Everything goes slow. I think of my crew, Chase and Hanne and Hunter. Of Brooke, who’s so close ahead of me now. I think of my sister, of my parents, of my nephew.
But their faces are like water in cupped hands.
When the white catches me, there’s only one face that stays.
Please, God. Please let me see her again. Just one more time.
I’m not ready.
I can’t die.
I can’t lose Raquel for good.
Raquel
Sarah is already waiting in the busy restaurant, her short-cropped hair and no-nonsense jawline visible through gaps in the tables. Damn. I try to make checking my watch subtle, tilting my wrist toward myself as I fold my camel-colored wool trench coat over my arm. 7:13. She’s been waiting for almost a quarter of an hour. A few minutes would be stressful enough, but thirteen…
There was a time in my life when I would never have been late for anything. When did I become such a mess?
My cheeks feel hot. When everything happened, it tore my life to pieces. A slow motion disaster that made me leave my career, my home, and my fiancé.
It’s not fair that it’s still happening now.
I follow the black-vested waiter to the table, giving an apologetic smile to Sarah as I clasp my purse to my lap and slide into my seat.
“I’m so sorry. A client kept me late. I was sure I’d be able to fit it all in…”
Sarah waves a hand, sweeping my words from the air. “Don’t worry about it. You don’t work for me anymore, eh?” The joke is strong over her Australian accent. “Not like I’m going to tell you off.”
I smile back, trying to look cool and composed. I’d planned to arrive before Sarah, to be waiting outside when she came. To be ready. And instead here I am, rain in my hair, feeling all legs. Somehow insubstantial. Like I might blow away and leave behind only my Burberry trench and Marc Jacobs purse. They’d felt like a defense, when I left for work this morning. Now, faced with Sarah’s solidity, they feel so… fake.
Sarah is the most solid person I’ve ever met. I don’t mean physically, though you can tell she used to play rugby at an international level. She’s solid because of something on the inside. Because she knows who she is, and what she’s doing, and why.
Smile. I take a deep breath, trying to control my expression as I tilt my menu toward myself. Polite conversation. I can do that. “How’s the Coupe du Monde going?”
Sarah shrugs as she fills my glass. “Off the record, fencing isn’t my favorite sport. But our athletes are doing well. And who doesn’t want an excuse to visit Paris?” She raises her wineglass to click with mine. “And to see you again. We’ve missed you.”
I try to hide the freeze of my smile with a sip of my water. It is good to see Sarah. But it’s not only good, and the not part of that hurts in my chest.
I still remember how I felt when Sarah told me I was hired. A resident sports psychology consultant at High Performance HQ. On the payroll of Vertex, the biggest extreme sports sponsor in the world. It felt like I’d died and gone to heaven. It was all I wanted. All I had worked for in those years after my college gymnastics career ended; the whole point of grad school, internships, professional qualifications. I loved working with the whole team—the world’s best athletes, the scientists who studied them, the other sports psychologists. “High performance consultants,” they called us.
Us. When I was still there.
“It’s good to see you too,” is all I say, because the rests of it is so complex. “I miss HQ.”
Sarah’s eyebrows rise, but she’s stopped from saying anything by the arrival of the waiter. She doesn’t talk again until he’s moved away with our orders. Under her look I try not to visibly lose my calm, finishing buttering my bread with careful, exact motions of my wrist. Sarah’s not quite old enough to be my mom, but she can still do The Look. The one that isn’t angry, it’s just disappointed.
Worse than that, it’s worried.
“When are you coming back?”
My breath catches in my lungs. I try to steady it out again, putting down the buttered bread and the knife so I can smooth my napkin over my legs. “Back to the high performance program?”
Sarah nods. “That. Performance consultancy in general.” Either or, she indicates with a shrug.
People think Sarah’s a jock, because she was an athlete in a sport that breaks bones. Then they learn she has a doctorate in psychology and more honorary degrees than you can name. Her eyes are sharp with intelligence where they watch me over her wineglass.
“I still consult,” I tell her as smoothly as I can, thinking of the hotel conference room earlier, all the people in perfect business attire. “I help entrepreneurs, mostly.”
“Entrepreneurs,” Sarah repeats in a monotone.
I nod as smoothly as I can. “I help them with goal setting, visualization, performance anxiety…” It’s almost a smooth spiel. “There are really a lot of similarities.”
“Similarities between entrepreneurs and elite athletes?” Sarah isn’t even pretending to be convinced. She shakes her head slightly, leaning back to allow a suddenly appearing waiter to slide our shared appetizer between us.
“And it pays a lot,” I add with a forced smile.
I tried to make it into a joke, but Sarah is having none of it. She regards me steadily, and my stomach twists into a knot. She knows everything. All of it. She knows what happened, and what was lost, and what changed. She knows why a year ago I walked into her office in High Performance HQ and told her it was over—I was done.
She knows everything that happened, so she must know I can’t have changed my mind. Because what happened hasn’t changed. Because the past is fixed, immutable, and it’s left me like this.
Sarah sighs as she reaches out for a slice of cheese. “It’s just not the same without you, at the HQ. The summer program was a joke. You were born to do this.” She snorts as she pops the cheese into her mouth. “Not teach suits how to sell more equities. Or whatever it is they do.” She looks at me intently. “Don’t you miss it?”
I miss all of it. I miss coming into HQ’s huge gym, hearing the sound of the trampolines going. I miss the summer camp, setting up all the challenges for the athletes—the ice bath meditation and the improv sessions. I miss people relying on me. I miss the way it felt when the athletes I helped coach won gold, when they’d run to me afterward glowing with happiness.
I miss the way I’d see JJ, when he and his crew were at HQ. I miss the way he’d smile at me, secretly.
And I’m angry, because I had to lose HQ—but I didn’t have to lose him.
Sarah knows about all of it, but she doesn’t say a thing.
I swallow down my bitterness and force a smile. “There are parts o
f it I miss. But I’m enjoying this work, honestly.”
Sarah nods without agreeing at all. It’s more okay, so that’s how you’re going to be than anything else. I could almost think I’ve escaped, until she adds: “You have a gift, Raquel. You got those athletes to do things they never could have done otherwise. You made the best in the world even better. And I know how much you enjoyed it. The way you looked…”
Compared to now, she must mean. I fuss with the collar of my silk blouse.
With a sigh Sarah reaches for her wine, taking a large glug before setting it down and reaching for the bottle again. “We don’t get many passions in life. It would be a shame for you to give up yours.”
I shrug and hope it looks cool. It doesn’t feel cool. On the inside the gesture disturbs the fragile sutures over my heart. The wound that hasn’t really healed. The one I’m pretending isn’t there, as if I haven’t been walking around bleeding for a year and a half.
“I loved working with you. I just couldn’t justify it to myself. What we were helping them do.”
When I started working at HQ, I learned so much from the world’s best snowboarders, wingsuit flyers, surfers, mountaineers, and free climbers. I learned about perseverance, and commitment, and beauty.
And then I learned the final lesson: These risks will take away everything you love.
I can’t look at Sarah. I keep my eyes on the smear of soft cheese I’m shepherding onto some bread.
“I don’t want to live with those kinds of risks, Sarah. I want this life. I’ve chosen it.”
Sarah’s hand on mine makes me start. She squeezes my fingers gently, and when I meet her eyes—surrounded by crow’s feet from too many smiles and too much sun—they’re full of an uncharacteristic softness.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to upset you. You wanna hear the gossip, instead? We have this new wingsuit kid…”
* * *
Withheld number.
I look at my phone carefully as I sink against the closed door of my hotel room, letting a slow breath unfold from my chest. As if that could get all the stress away from me.
Who would be calling now? It’s eleven at night. My clients all know what timezone I’m in at the moment. None of them have big events tomorrow or the day after.
Two missed calls. The worrier in me wants to think that’s something serious. But if it’s an emergency, my family know my hotel room’s direct line. They’d reach me there the second anything went wrong.
There’s a voicemail, anyway. I can deal with it in the morning.
I can’t quite shake the wrong feeling, but logically I know it’s stupid. I’m just a worrier. I always have been. And I need to learn how to relax. I need to take care of myself. Don’t take this the wrong way, Sarah said when she hugged me goodbye, but you’re looking exhausted. You should take a vacation.
I can’t take a vacation. There’s too much work for that. But I can decide that tonight, just for now, I’m not available for a stranger dialing a wrong number, or a cold call from back in the States, or even a client.
It takes all I have to turn off the phone, and as I do I feel a little stab of something in my chest. But it’s stupid. It’s okay to be unavailable. It’s okay to need some time.
I slip my shoes off with a sigh, bending to neatly align them at the wall once I’ve put my purse down on the edge of the bed. It feels good to climb out of my clothes, putting them neatly back on their hangers before pulling on the white satin cami and shorts I wear to bed. I flick the switch on the electric kettle before padding through to the bathroom to let down my hair and take off my makeup.
When I come back out, I’m reminded how much I hate hotel rooms. Maybe not hate. It’s a strong word. But they feel so… so empty. There’s nothing to remind you of loneliness like being in one box surrounded by other boxes, each holding one lonely person.
I could call Claire, I guess. But she’s at work. And she’s my little sister—even now I’m just thirty and she’s twenty-seven, I’ll always feel I’m the one who’s supposed to protect her. My best friend Meaghan is another option—but somehow I don’t feel like facing her always direct questioning.
No. I can look after myself. I have The Routine.
The routine doesn’t work. It never has. But in the year I’ve been developing it, I’ve done it every day. Maybe it’s madness to do the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. But I feel better knowing that I’m doing the right things, even if they don’t work. I can look myself in the mirror knowing that I’m trying.
I put a bag of chamomile tea in one of the hotel’s mugs before adding the hot water. Beside it on the tray, I lay out an herbal sleeping pill. A real one—that would be a bad idea to take every night. But what can be wrong with some valerian?
Anyway, I need it. As I wait to feel it, I unroll my yoga mat beside the bed and settle myself down to unwind from the day. As I sink into child’s pose I try to focus only on my breathing, allowing the rest of the world to fade away.
The routine. It’s important. Because otherwise—without the tea, without the pill, without the yoga—it would be even harder to resist opening my laptop just to look. To check. To see what he’s doing. With the routine, I don’t succumb to the urge every night.
Often enough, though, that hours later, as I lie alone in the huge bed, I can still picture him. Bella Coola. It looks beautiful. There are photos of him, Chase, and Hanne. Photos of a new girl, too. Brooke. A photographer. She’s cute, tall and athletic, with a head of wild dark curls and freckles smudged over her nose. I would be worried about her and JJ, if it weren’t so obvious in every photo that her and Chase are pretending that they aren’t sleeping together.
It’s weird, to see Chase pretending. I try to let myself think of that, rather than how happy JJ seems to be out in the snow. How handsome he still looks, with his golden hair and his wide grin, the way kindness radiates out from him.
I roll over with a huff, pressing my hands to my eyes as if I could scrub out the visions of him.
JJ made his decision. He’s moved on. The last thing he deserves is me lying here, one year on from our break up, still so angry about what he did to me.
Sure, JJ is kind. But I know what’s under the kindness. You don’t make it as a pro athlete without having some steel.
I could try to push all the thoughts of them away, but that’s a double-edged sword. Because beyond those thoughts, there are the other ones. Memories of when the insomnia first grabbed me. The times that I waited alone in the night, sure that the man I loved was dead.
He chose what mattered most to him. And I’ve chosen to move on.
JJ
Death is black and weightless, tossing me like I’m nothing at all, like I’m meaningless.
A speed I can’t see.
Snow in my mouth.
Shouts that won’t leave my lungs.
And then the impact, and the sound I’ve never heard before. The one that comes from inside of me.
Wrongness.
It matters more than my head above the suddenly still snow. It matters more than breathing. It matters more than the sounds I’m making, wordless shouting and screaming.
Hanne’s face, suspended above me, sparkling with tears.
“I’m here, I’m here,” she sobs, digging the snow away from me.
Chase doesn’t come to me. I can hear him screaming somewhere else.
It doesn’t matter.
Something is wrong.
I tell Hanne, I try to—and then the pain hits me, and that’s all there is.
Time loses its meaning.
A chopper’s rotors.
People moving me, even though I scream at them to leave me still, so that the wrongness doesn’t get worse, so that—so that—
I don’t feel the injection, just the rush of relief, the softening of everything.
Movement. Flying. People. Shouting.
I drift in and out of reality.
Sometimes I think I see her here
.
I need you, Kel.
But time twists, ebbs and flows, and everything hurts.
* * *
I’m so high, I don’t care a bunch of strangers are cutting me out of my clothes.
“Hi there, James,” a woman says, leaning over me. Her expression is no nonsense. “You’re in Vancouver. I’m Doctor Kim. We’re just going to get you some scans, okay? And see how we can help you.”
I can’t really speak.
The nurse comes back into view, smiling. “Are these the people we should call?”
He’s holding the next-of-kin card from the inner pocket of my jacket. I put it there years ago. It didn’t seem to matter much. Not because the chance of me turning up unconscious at a hospital was nonexistent. It’s happened plenty before. But because I’m basically always boarding with someone I know. Chase, Hanne, Hunter, some other guys in Breck or Jackson.
I can’t read the names on it, but I manage to grunt something like “yeah.”
On the way out the nurse murmurs, “I’ll call the fiancée first.”
It doesn’t really matter. It’s all blurring into one.
“Okay, James.” It’s the doctor again. “We’ve had a look at the images. Your spine has taken a pretty bad beating. I think we’re going to go in there and get everything cleaned up, make sure that it’s stabilized. We don’t want you getting more hurt, do we?” Her smile is tight, a thin layer of warmth. “Can you wiggle your toes again for me?”
I try.
The doctor’s face is frowning as she straightens up. “Thank you. Let’s go.” She touches my shoulder lightly. “You’re going to be okay, James. You’re in good hands.”
Hanne appears between my face and the ceiling tiles that are moving past above me. She squeezes my hand. Her hair is a mess. She’s not crying anymore, but only because it looks like she has nothing left. Like everything has been wrung out of her.
Crash: The Wild Sequence, Book Two Page 3
