Asking for Trouble (The Kincaids)

by James, Rosalind

  “You still don’t like oatmeal?” Alyssa asked, lifting the lid on the pot. “Even with fruit in it? Looks good to me.”

  “Nope. I didn’t like oatmeal before I did the show,” Alec said, “and I like it less now. People who say they like oatmeal are the same people who say they like tofu or wheat grass juice or bulgur wheat. Boringly healthy food is not delicious. Delicious food is delicious.”

  “So what does Rae want for breakfast?” Alyssa asked. “And how’s she doing?”

  “She wanted oatmeal,” Alec admitted with a grin. “Don’t tell her I said all that. She probably likes wheat grass juice too. I don’t want to know. But I’m making eggs. You want some?”

  “Nope,” Alyssa said. “I like oatmeal too. Thanks for making it, Joe,” she remembered to add as she dished it into a bowl.

  “No problem,” he said.

  “Uh . . .” She turned in a circle and looked around the kitchen. “Remind me where the brown sugar would be.”

  Joe opened another of the indistinguishable cabinets and handed her out a canister, and she got busy with a spoon.

  “Wow. Think you got enough there? How about a little cereal with your sugar?” Alec asked, beating a few eggs in a bowl and dumping them into a frying pan.

  “I like it this way,” she said, and added another spoonful just because he’d said it.

  “You’re going to get pudgy, you keep that up,” Alec said, pushing the toaster button down on a couple slices of bread.

  “No,” she said, holding onto her temper, because they were on vacation, and it was Joe’s house. She knew she was a little touchy today, a little jumpy, because of Joe. And that Alec was at his most brittle, his most annoying, because he was worried about Rae. “I’m going to get pudgy if I eat a bowl full of oatmeal cookies. Which I am not doing. Or if I hadn’t skied all day yesterday and wasn’t going to be skiing all day today. Not that any of that is any of your business.”

  “I’m just saying,” Alec said, “as your brother, guys don’t like pudgy women, so be careful.”

  That was it. One critical comment too many, and in front of Joe, and her temper was gone, out of her reach. She slammed her spoon down on the counter and faced her brother. “Alec. Listen to me. How I look is none of your business, and neither is what I eat. I don’t tell you what to do, so where do you get off telling me?”

  “I’m just giving you the benefit of a brother’s perspective,” Alec said, turning off the heat under his eggs and starting to dish up his breakfast. “What’s wrong with giving my little sister some brotherly advice?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe that I didn’t ask for it? Maybe that you still treat me like I’m fifteen?”

  “I do not do that. Do I do that?” Alec demanded of Joe.

  “Yeah,” Joe said. “You do.”

  “Thank you,” Alyssa told him.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I’m an adult, do you realize that?” she asked her brother. “OK, maybe I’m not rich. Maybe I’m not a CEO. Maybe I’m not a doctor. All I have is one lousy bachelor’s degree in Business from San Diego State, and I’ve never made six figures and I probably never will, let alone seven. I’m not you, and I’m not Rae. But I’m trying to be somebody, and you’re . . . you’re not helping.”

  “I helped you move,” he said, clearly not getting it at all. Not at all, and she wanted to scream. “I read your letter last night. What is that, if it’s not helping?”

  She shoved her bowl away with a bit too much violence, and Joe put a hand out to stop it as it skittered along the counter. “Yes, You did, and you paid my way for this weekend, too, and I appreciate all of that, and I hate that I resent you, when you’ve done all those things. But it’s . . . it’s hard to take the help, sometimes. Don’t you see, can’t you understand that it’s because you think you have to help? Like I’m so dumb and such a screw-up that I can’t do it by myself? All right, maybe I don’t have it all figured out like you do, but I’m trying. I’m trying to have the life I want. Maybe, if I were as good as you and Gabe, I’d have figured it out when I was twenty, but I didn’t. But I’m doing it now, and you telling me I’m doing it wrong . . . it makes it even harder.”

  “I wasn’t trying to tell you that you were doing it wrong,” Alec persisted. “I was just trying to help, and you’re being oversensitive about it, all dramatic, as usual. Can you just relax and take a joke?”

  That was it. That was the kicker. “Really? I should just relax? That was a joke, that I’m fat and nobody’s ever going to love me? That I can’t get along at work, and I make bad decisions? Stop and think how you’d feel if you were me, and I was you. If it was you who was the baby, and the big . . .” She was tearing up now, which made her even madder. “The big disappointment to everybody. Would you want to be reminded of it over and over again? Would you want to feel like you were never going to measure up?”

  “I don’t do that,” he protested. “I do not do that.”

  “Maybe you don’t mean to, but that’s exactly how it feels, and you do it all the time. Every Christmas, but that’s once a year, and I just suck it up, but I’m tired of it. And now, it’s all the time, and I can’t. All I’m asking you is, think. Before you say something to me about my weight, or my loser apartment, or how bad I’m doing at my job, just think. Think about how I’m thirty, and I’m trying, and I know nobody thinks I’m as good as you and Gabe. Just try to think if what you’re saying is helpful, or if it’s just . . .”

  “Critical,” Joe finished.

  “Yes,” she said, picking up her spoon again and stirring her cereal with angry jabs, not wanting to look at her brother, because she knew she was about to cry. “Critical.”

  “Wow,” Alec said blankly. He picked up his breakfast, grabbed a knife and fork. “I’ll just . . . go up and eat with Rae, so we can get out of here.”

  He left the room, and Alyssa sat on a barstool in desolation, staring down at her cereal bowl and trying not to cry, but a couple tears dripped in there all the same.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to Joe, reaching for a napkin from the holder and giving her nose a defiant blow. “Sorry to have a tantrum and be so ungrateful, and spoil your vacation.”

  “No need to be sorry. I wondered if you were ever going to tell Alec to shove that thing he does. I know it’s a habit, but it’s a bad one. I’d have told him myself, but like you said . . .” He smiled at her now, just a warmth of the eyes, a faint upturn of the mouth, “not my business. It needed to be said, and you said it.”

  “You think he’ll forgive me?” she asked, and a couple more tears dripped, because she did love her brother, and she was afraid, despite Joe’s words, that she’d gone too far. He had helped her, and she appreciated it. It was just that it always came at such a price.

  “Oh, I think so. Matter of fact, I’d bet that once Rae’s done talking to him, it’ll be the other way around.”

  Which was how it turned out, to Alyssa’s astonishment. She was in her room, finishing getting ready for skiing, when the knock came at her door.

  “Come in,” she called.

  Alec came inside, his usual confident smile noticeably absent, and sat down on the other twin bed across from where she sat unrolling a pair of heavy socks.

  “I came to . . .” He took a deep breath. “To apologize for that thing about the oatmeal.”

  She looked down, finished pulling on her right sock and made a little business out of straightening the top. “That’s OK.”

  “No,” he said, “it’s not. You’re not pudgy. You look good. I’m just . . . used to telling you what I think, I guess. And teasing you,” he admitted.

  She nodded, started working on the other sock, resisted the urge to tell him it was all right, that she’d overreacted. “I’m glad you care about me,” she said instead. “But it’s hard sometimes not to compare myself to you.”

  “I get that,” he said.

  “Or Rae gets it,” she said, looking up at him, unable to kee
p from smiling a bit.

  He grinned sheepishly, ran a hand through his perfectly cut hair. “Yeah. She pretty much agrees with you. She says to tell you that when I do that, you should call me on it.”

  “So with both of us ganging up on you,” she asked, “you think I have a shot?”

  He smiled again, leaned forward and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “The Magic 8 Ball says, signs point to yes. And are we done here? We good? Because there is nothing I hate more than apologizing.”

  She reached for him and hugged him, felt his arms coming around her, and laughed a little. “Yeah. But tell Rae—good job.”

  Hidden Dangers

  Alec and Rae left soon after breakfast, Alec and Joe carrying Rae carefully down the steps to Alec’s car, Alyssa following with the crutches and another ice pack. She could see Rae biting her lip, trying not to cry out as Alec put her in the back seat and she swung her legs up, could hear the gasp that couldn’t help but escape her at the pain of the movement.

  Alec shut the door so she could lean back against it, went around to the other side, handed her a pillow and the ice pack, and arranged a blanket over her. “Want your laptop?” he asked her. “Want to watch a movie?”

  “Yes, please. You’re spoiling me. I’m being a lot of trouble.”

  “Nah,” he said. “I normally don’t get to spoil you nearly enough. But now you’re helpless to resist, and I get to let loose with all my chivalrous impulses until you’re well enough to start in on me again about how you can take care of yourself and I can just back off.”

  Rae smiled, and Alyssa could see that Alec’s teasing worked for his wife, completely unlike its effect on her. And she knew why that was, too: because it was so obvious that Alec thought Rae walked on water. She felt a stab of envy that was neither sisterly nor very spiritually evolved at all. She was jealous of her sister-in-law because she was injured, and her husband was making a fuss over her. Great.

  She handed Alec the crutches once he had Rae set up, and he tossed them into the Mercedes’s trunk on top of the bags.

  “Well,” he said, “thanks for putting us up, Joe. We’ll have to try it again another time, and hope for a better outcome. You two have a good time today.”

  Alyssa could see his comment hovering on the tip of his tongue, and she went ahead and made it for him. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Joe will give me another Emergency Preparedness Quiz before he lets me ski, I’m sure. But I just want to say, I would have kicked your butt today. Think about that, driving home.”

  He laughed and gave her a quick, strong hug. “You would have, and I’ll admit it right now. Maybe there’s a little part of me that’s glad to save my ego from the battering.”

  “Bye. Drive safe,” she called, waving as they pulled away. Then she turned to Joe. “So, now that we’ve gotten rid of them, is it finally time for the fun stuff?”

  “You bet,” he said with a satisfied smile. “From now on, it’s you and me and the snow.”

  Three hours later, they were still headed endlessly up a mountain, Joe breaking trail ahead of her through powder snow as if he didn’t know the meaning of fatigue, switchbacking first one way, then the next, the cold air nipping at Alyssa’s cheeks while the rest of her heated up with effort to the point that she had to unzip her parka.

  “You drinking?” he asked, turning on his skis to check in with her for about the sixth time. “You all right?”

  She held up her hydration tube and waggled it at him. “Aye aye, sir. Oh, wait. That’s not the Air Force.”

  He smiled. “Good up here, huh?”

  She turned on her skis to look—cautiously, so she wouldn’t go screaming down the mountainside—and had to agree. The peaks of the Sierra rose to the south, tree-covered below, white crags above, blue sky broken by long wisps of white cloud. The whole thing looking like a postcard, but no picture, not even a video could have captured the feeling of it, the space and the air and the sound of the wind. And the solitude.

  “This is why you love it,” she said. “This—” She gestured. “Freedom. Even though it couldn’t be more different from sitting at a computer.”

  “This is it,” he said. “Route-finding, exploring, the challenge. And I get some of my best ideas up here. Lots of time to think, going up. Plus, you know,” and he smiled again, “skiing down, knowing you earned every foot of it. No grooming, no help. Virgin snow.”

  “Can’t wait,” she said happily.

  Half an hour later, though, Joe had stopped again. “I know I said we’d go to the crags,” he told her, “but we need to turn around now.”

  “Why?” she protested. “I’m fine.” A little blown, a little pushed, but fine. Settled and content to be here, enjoying the day, and enjoying being with Joe. “And we’re, what, only two-thirds of the way there?”

  He pointed to the peak above them. Well, to where she knew the peak was. “See that cloud?” he asked, referring to the shield of gray that had closed over the summit.

  “Yeah, but we’re not going that far.”

  “That’s wind,” he said. “That’s that storm coming in early. “I’ve been watching that cloud grow, and it’s going to be down here soon, and when it is, conditions are going to go south in a hurry. We need to turn around.”

  “It’s still pretty clear right now,” she said. Well, not really, but it wasn’t bad at all. “Can’t we go a bit farther? You said 2,500 feet down, and I’d love to ski 2,500 feet of virgin snow. I’ve skied in storms before. You don’t have to worry about me.”

  “No,” he said, “we can’t. You’ve skied in storms in a groomed, patrolled ski area. You haven’t skied where the snow can change completely every hundred yards, where you can’t see ten feet ahead, where your tracks up are covered, and you don’t know where that ridge might be that you could ski over, right off into space. We’re turning around.”

  “Are you sure this isn’t about me? Would you turn around if you were with Alec?” she asked him. “Or is this really about you thinking you’re responsible for me, and you don’t want to risk anything happening to me, no matter how remote the possibility actually is? I’m not your little sister, Joe. I’m not anybody’s little sister. I can take my chances, and I’m willing to do it.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you’re willing to do,” he said. “You’re right, I’m responsible for you, because I know how to do this and you don’t. It has nothing to do with who or what you are. I’m telling you, turn around, because we’re going down.”

  She tried to be grouchy about it, but she couldn’t stay that way for long, because he was right, skiing down was fantastic. It was exhilarating to be alone up here with him, to have to find their own way, and it was unexpectedly challenging, despite his warning, to cope with the changing snow conditions. She hadn’t fully grasped, going up, how much of an effort that would be. She’d be in deep powder, the going easy, and seconds later would hit an exposed spot where the snow was packed and nearly icy, have to lean into a turn to keep her skis from shooting out in front of her. It pushed her to the edge, and there was no choice but to be right here in this moment, all-the-way alive and knowing it.

  Joe had been right about the storm, though. It was upon them soon after they had started their descent, the wind blowing a few tiny flakes at first, picking up force with every minute that passed, adding to the effort of their descent. Joe turned often to check on her, and she couldn’t be sorry about that anymore, because she was glad to have him finding the route. She admitted to herself that it wouldn’t have been easy for her to do it.

  Fifteen minutes, twenty, and the wind was stronger now, until the push of it against her body, the difficulty of picking out the shape that was Joe had her focusing on the task with every bit of her awareness, her exhilaration tempered by caution and even an edge of fear that, truth to tell, wasn’t entirely unpleasurable either. Until she saw the dark figure ahead of her, dimly viewed through the blowing snow, turning once more to check on her, taking an awkward slide int
o nothing. And then he was gone.

  She searched for him even as she focused on navigating the slope ahead, aimed herself toward where she’d last seen him. The seconds ticked into a minute, then more as she approached the spot with all the speed she dared to use, giving her plenty of time for her mind to run through possible scenarios, how she’d cope. If he had fallen and was hurt, how would she get him down? There was no ski patrol here, no sled, no way to call anyone for help.

  If he were conscious, she realized, he’d tell her how to do it. But what if he weren’t? She still couldn’t see him, and anxiety for him was doing its best to cloud her reasoning as she forced herself to think it through. She’d leave his ski poles looped around his wrists, tie them around her waist with the ski skins, she decided, and pull him on his back behind her. She’d put her hat on his head in addition to his own, his hood up to cushion his head while she did it. She could do it. She’d have to.

  She was sure she’d reached the spot where he’d gone down, and she still couldn’t see him, and there was a ridge up here somewhere with a drop-off. She couldn’t be sure this was the exact place, but she thought she remembered it. What if he’d gone over it, like he’d said? All that time she’d stood arguing with him, and conditions had been worsening, and now he’d gone over. Oh, God. Please, no.

  “Alyssa,” she heard, and whipped her head around, barely avoiding falling herself, and saw the dark shape to the right, low to the ground, because he was lying down, or sitting, maybe. But he was there, and he was conscious.

  She skied down to him, cautious because of that ridge, the hard-packed snow here in this exposed spot threatening to send her shooting straight off, just as he’d warned her. She found him pushing himself up to stand, leaning against a pole to get himself upright.

  “What happened?” she asked, coming up beside him and brushing off the snow that clung to his back, needing to touch him. “Are you all right? Are you hurt?”

  He smiled at her, snow clinging to the stubble along one side of his jaw, and she was flooded with relief. “Well, my pride’s pretty bruised,” he said. “I was worrying about you coming down that rough patch, started to check on you, missed seeing a trouble spot, and caught an edge. Took a hard fall and did some sliding, but I’m fine.”