The Ground Beneath

by Stephanie Vercier

  “I’m good,” she says, not even a hint of labor in her breath. She’s shed her sweatshirt though, the tank top she now wears showing more skin.

  I have to make a conscious effort not to look too long at her and keep my eye on the trail ahead.

  We take short breaks at some of the viewpoints on the way up, Allison getting a few pictures of the mountain, but no selfies. She doesn’t take pictures of me or request that I pose with her. Even if it’s just because of Sheila, it’s still a relief. I’ve had my picture plastered on more than one social media account just so someone could get some views, maybe even carve out an online presence of their own because they’d been able to tag me in their pictures.

  “We used to do a lot of this stuff back home,” she tells me a while after we’d chosen to take the fork toward the peak and not the lake. “Every Saturday, we did a family hike. Dad would usually have his sermon done by then, but sometimes he saw things in nature that gave him inspiration to do some last minute tweaking.”

  “That’s actually really cool,” I say, wondering if my family might have done the same thing if my mother hadn’t died and my dad hadn’t checked out and gotten sick. “And it explains why you’ve barely broken a sweat.”

  She laughs. “That and I didn’t have a car back home, so I did loads of walking, to school and to church. Unless it was pouring down rain or we were buried in snow, that’s what I did. And… well… can you promise not to laugh at me?”

  “Laugh at you? About what?”

  “Just promise,” she says.

  “Fine. I promise.”

  “I don’t know how to drive,” she says with a shrug of her shoulders. “I’ve never even tried.”

  “Seriously?” I don’t laugh at her because I find it endearing. “I couldn’t wait to get my license, for the freedom it gave me.” Freedom to drive away from Mountainside and wish I never had to go back.

  “I know it makes me a bit of an odd duck, but I figured the time would eventually come when I’d want to, like when I’d be going to Central. But then of course things happened, and I just never got around to it.”

  I think about her husband, Wyatt, and how his death probably put the brakes on a lot of things in her life. I’m about to tell her I don’t mind driving her around whenever she might need it when she asks me a question of her own.

  “Maybe you could teach me… you know… to drive? It might be kind of cool… only if you have the time, if you don’t mind.”

  “Of course I don’t mind,” I say without hesitation. “I’d love to teach you. We could drive out to the middle of nowhere so you wouldn’t have to deal with Seattle traffic. How about tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow?” She laughs softly and shakes her head as we continue up the trail. “I think you have plans.”

  “Like what?”

  She looks at me like I’m crazy. “Like the game. You’re supposed to fly out tomorrow morning so you can be with your team in San Francisco.”

  “Oh… yeah. I guess I forgot.”

  “How could you forget? It’s a private plane, Hunter. Sheila has it all planned. ”

  “It’s not like I’m going to be playing. I’ll just be window dressing. Not like those guys need me there—they’ll do just fine without me.”

  “You really don’t want to go? Not even for moral support?”

  “I’ll be sitting on the sidelines when I’d rather hang out with you and drive into the deserts of Eastern Washington and teach you how to drive.”

  She appears to be studying me as we continue moving forward along the mountain switchbacks. “Sheila won’t be happy, and if she found out I was with you all day, she might think I had something to do with you not showing.”

  “So, you’d rather I go instead of hang out with you?”

  “I didn’t say that.” I catch the slightest tinge of irritation in her voice that makes me think I’d used the same tone with her just now. “I just don’t want you to put your career in jeopardy. It’s part of your contract to show up, even if you’re injured.”

  “Sheila fill you in on that?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Football and my career aren’t all I care about.” It comes out gruff, even to my own ear. And it’s not exactly true. As far back as high school, it has been all I’ve cared about, a way to stay focused and to forget the shittiest parts of my past. But, with Allison, it feels like that could change, like it already is changing.

  “I’m sure it’s not, but I don’t want to be part of the reason you don’t fulfill your obligations.”

  “Then come with me,” I tell her, deciding there’s a win-win here. “I’m still the guy who pays Sheila’s salary, so I think it’s only fair I get to bring who I want with me.”

  She sighs but never slows as we continue upward. “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea. She was pretty clear that I wouldn’t be going.”

  “Well, I’ll make it clear that you are. If you’re worried about her getting all touchy about something happening with you and me, then I’ll do my best to ignore you, okay?”

  She offers a bemused smile. “Then what’s the point of me even going?”

  “The point is that I’ll get to see you. And maybe when Sheila isn’t looking, I’ll actually get to talk to you.”

  Another sigh as we round a ridge, the peak at the end of the trail getting closer.

  “If you can talk her into it, then I’ll be happy to go. I mean, I’m not going to turn down a free trip to San Francisco, or I guess Santa Clara if we’re being specific.”

  “Close enough,” I say. “And it’s settled then. You just made the thought of leaving tomorrow bearable.”

  A couple passes us going down, the woman saying, “Just a few more minutes. You’re close!”

  She’s right. We get to the peak less than five minutes later, a slight wind blowing as we look around at three-hundred-sixty-degree views of Mt. Rainier, St. Helens, Adams, Baker and Mt. Hood. Having lived in Washington State my entire life, having grown up in a town surrounded by mountains, I still find myself awestruck by this raw, natural beauty.

  “Wow,” Allison says, those gorgeous brown eyes of hers taking in everything around us, her excitement overflowing.

  “I told you it would be spectacular.” I move to her side and just a step behind her as both of us focus on Mt. Rainier.

  “More than that. This is the kind of thing I meant when I told you about my dad getting inspiration for his sermons. I mean, there’s nothing really like this is there, how big and beautiful our world really is?”

  “Yeah,” I say, though as amazed as I continue to be at the view—and of her—the really bad stuff that has happened in my life finds a way to creep into my periphery, to remind me the world can be small and ugly too.

  “All this beauty can be a little misleading sometimes,” she says, still looking ahead, her thoughts mingling with mine. “There’s that perilous side to it, all the havoc it can wreak, avalanches and eruptions, the kinds of things my dad is always trying to make sense of in his sermons. Kind of messed up, huh?”

  “Yeah it is. It’s the same world that took my mom and aunt away from me. That’s hard to come to terms with when you’re a kid.” I hadn’t planned on bringing up my mom or my Aunt Angela with Allison, but the words come easy, like it’s finally safe to really talk to someone about them.

  She turns then, away from the view, and up to me. “I know,” she says, placing her hand in the crook of my elbow. “I can only imagine what it must have been like. Were you close to your mom?”

  “I was, and my aunt was like a second mom to me. My dad and my brothers… well, all of us were pretty lost without them.”

  She presses her lips together and nods, then slides her hand away from my elbow and clasps her fingers with mine. “We should find a spot to sit. I packed us some sandwiches. And we can talk more, about your mom and your aunt.”

  I follow her lead to a large boulder with a cutout just big enough for two people to s
it side-by-side. We’re no longer facing Rainier, but our current view is just as awesome.

  “I wasn’t sure what you’d want, and the safest thing from Sheila’s fridge seemed to be peanut butter and jelly.” She pulls the somewhat flattened sandwiches from her backpack, along with bags of almonds, two apples and two bottles of orange juice. She’s already unwrapping hers while I just kind of hold mine and stare. “Doesn’t look good?” she asks.

  “No… I mean, yes. I don’t think I’ve shared a packed lunch with anyone since elementary school is all.” I can’t imagine any woman I’d ever gone out with wanting any part of something like this. When I’d mentioned hiking to Theresa a couple of years back, she said I had to be joking, that the only thing that would get her into the wilderness was a hotel and spa. “Thanks for making this for me. I didn’t expect it.”

  She takes a bite of her sandwich, then a drink of her orange juice before she says anything else. “No problem. Did your mom make your lunches? Mine did well into junior high, until I figured I should be more independent and make my own.”

  Having taken my first bite of the sandwich, which is pretty damn good, I nod, swallow, then say, “Really good stuff, roast beef and sometimes egg salad. She used to make this thing for dinner she called cream tuna over toast. My younger brother basically gagged when she made it, but the rest of us loved it. After she was gone, we just bought our lunches at school and ate frozen dinners—it was never the same.”

  “I’ve never actually had a frozen dinner.”

  I’m still chewing my next bite when I ask, “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. My mom has always been into making things from scratch and knowing what goes into every meal.”

  “No frozen, processed food for you then, huh?”

  Allison tilts her head to the side, shrugging just one shoulder. “Nope. My mom was raised on an organic farm, so processed was a very dirty word in our house. I mean, the food was great—don’t get me wrong—but I’d just stand in the cereal aisle sometimes at the grocery store and wish I could have just one bowl of Lucky Charms. They looked so good.”

  I laugh. I can’t help myself. “So did you, ever?”

  She looks at me and smiles. “I bought a box on my own when I was a senior in high school. Wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, but I at least had my moment.”

  My laughter continues, but the talk of mothers and food is interspersed with images of my father who was never the same after my mother’s death, getting sick and then weaker with each passing year. There are flashes of other images, of things endured and hated, things I wish I could just forget. In Seattle, I’ve done my best to numb those things, but while you can make the past disappear for a while, it always has a way of creeping back.

  “My brother died,” Allison says, the words crashing into me, making me feel as though I’d missed whatever she’d said leading up to this. But I hadn’t missed a word. She hadn’t lost my attention. I just hadn’t expected her to say that.

  “You had a brother?” I ask.

  “An older brother. He died in the accident with Wyatt. They died together.”

  “Jesus, Allison. I didn’t know.”

  I should have.

  I could have found out.

  Even if I pretty much ignore anything that comes out of Coalton or Mountainside, how hard would it have been to look up the details of the death of a popular ex-high school quarterback? If I’d done that little bit of research, I might have known then that he hadn’t been the only one Allison lost. I might have taken Sheila’s warning about her fragility more seriously.

  She sets her sandwich on her lap and puts her hand on my arm, her touch electrifying even during such a somber moment. “I’m telling you so you know that I understand your loss. I loved my brother a lot, and…” she pauses, takes in a deep breath, then continues, “well… it’s not something you get over very easily.”

  “You can talk to me about it.” I put my arm around her. “I’m actually not a terrible listener.”

  Like a gift, her smile returns. “Like I said, I only wanted to mention it so you knew I’d lost a family member too. Losing Wyatt was hard—it was awful—but it’s not the same as a person you shared a house with, a person you sat across from every night at dinner. So, when you talk about your mom and your aunt, it’s something that I can relate to.”

  Neither of us says anything for a while. The wind has strengthened here, high on the peak, but the bright sunshine still warms us. I hope I’m warming Allison more, my arm wrapped around her, her head leaning on my shoulder. We eventually continue eating, and even though we aren’t supposed to, we throw bits of bread crust and apple to birds and chipmunks that look at us as though they’d expect nothing less.

  Eventually, other hikers make it to the top, but they keep to themselves. We’re turned away from them, and I feel anonymous, not like the Hunter Lawrence millions of people see playing football on TV, not the guy they’ll watch sitting on the sidelines with a Seahawks sweatshirt because he can’t play.

  “You’re the most real person I think I’ve ever met,” I tell Allison, wondering if I’ll be able to get through tomorrow having to basically ignore her because I don’t want to complicate her relationship with Sheila more than it needs to be.

  Her eyes widen, as does her smile. “You’re real too, Hunter, I think a lot more than anyone else knows.”

  Chapter Six

  ALLISON

  “He’s going after you,” Sheila whispers to me after we’ve boarded the private plane on Sunday, her insisting that she and I sit close together.

  “Hunter?” I ask, but of course she’s talking about him.

  She looks up and over to him, toward the front of the plane where his friend, Josh, is talking up the flight attendant. She’s pretty, her thick dark hair tied up into a perfect bun. She keeps bringing her hand to Hunter’s arm, briefly touching it before sliding it back down.

  “Yes, Hunter. And would you look at that?” There’s disapproval in her tone as the attendant turns to something toward the ground and bends over, her relatively short skirt tightening and showing the roundness of her rear. Josh nudges Hunter, but Hunter thankfully looks away. He turns to find me and then offers a smile.

  I smile back and tell Sheila, “He’s just a flirt—that’s all it is.”

  “And that’s why he insisted you come along with us? Because he’s just a flirt?”

  “What’s so bad with her coming along?” Mallory asks from the seat just across from us. Like me, she joined the passenger list last minute, taking Lisa’s seat, since her and Sheila are still at odds with one another. “She works for you, doesn’t she?”

  “You girls,” Sheila says, closing her eyes for a moment and shaking her head. “You don’t know all the ways getting mixed up with the wrong men can stunt your professional growth. I’ve seen women walk away from what could have been life-long careers because they’ve fallen for the wrong guy.”

  Mallory gives me a knowing glance. She witnessed me walking hand in hand with Hunter at The Hive and disappearing outside with him. She hounded me for details the next day, and I’d given her the fewest I could with her promise that she wouldn’t tell a soul, especially not Sheila.

  “You don’t give us enough credit,” she tells my boss. “Maybe we’re just messing around with them the way you think they want to mess around with us.”

  “Not Allison,” Sheila says quietly, turning all of her attention to me. “The wrong man will destroy you.”

  She reminds me of the way I’d been treated back home, coming to the same conclusion that I’m a fragile piece of china that might break into a thousand different pieces at the lightest touch. Maybe Sheila wouldn’t be so concerned if she wasn’t hell bent on proving to my parents that she could keep me safe and out of trouble.

  “How’s it going here?” Hunter asks us once he and Josh have returned to our section of the plane. His eyes eventually find mine, his slight smile conspiring.

  “No
t bad,” Mallory says. “We’re just pretty much discussing how you and all men are dogs.”

  “Damn, that’s harsh,” Josh says, turning back for another look at the attendant, her eyes flashing back and forth from Hunter and the captain she’s talking to at the front of the plane. Then quietly, as if they’re alone, he says to Hunter, “All you’ve got to do is ask her, and I guarantee you’re going to get laid tonight.”

  Hunter’s eyes leave mine for a moment, turning to the front of the plane, as if assessing this option. “Not in the mood, Josh—you can have her.” When his eyes return to me, his expression falls, surely realizing how wrong what he’d just said is.

  “Way to prove my point,” Mallory says, Sheila letting out a sound of disgust and shaking her head.

  “I didn’t mean…” Hunter replies before shaking his own head, seeming to ask for forgiveness in his eyes.

  I want to give it to him because I’m sure his response to Josh was an automatic one, that the Hunter I’ve gotten to know over the last week wouldn’t say what he just did. But the other part of me is hurt by it, enough jealousy ignited that I can’t keep looking at him, so I turn to the window and stare out at the tarmac.

  I think about our hike and how close I felt to Hunter, how difficult it was to say goodbye to him when he dropped me off hours later back at the condo. We hadn’t kissed yet, and neither of us had made proclamations of what our relationship was exactly, but my feelings for him were growing. I couldn’t help but to feel light and fully alive in his presence while at the same time remembering how brutally I’d been hurt by Wyatt, how love for someone can be the greatest feeling in the world while also powerful enough to lead to the deepest form of heartache.

  “Give the guy a break,” I hear Josh say, my focus remaining on the concrete outside of the airplane. “Men can’t say anything these days without being crucified.”

  “Oh, please,” Mallory snaps. “Men have been saying whatever the hell they’ve wanted for years, and it’s about time they did some self-editing.”