The Possibility of Now

by Kim Culbertson

  “Here, set it here, thanks.” I move my Diet Coke out of the way. Mom has not emerged from behind her hands. “Thanks,” I say again. Maggie hurries away. The smell of the pizza makes my mouth water, but I don’t take a piece. I let it sit there and congeal until Mom finally takes a shaky breath, wipes beneath her eyes with a napkin, and takes a piece for herself, as if she hadn’t just sobbed in the middle of Ethan’s, as if we hadn’t said anything to each other at all.

  “Mom?” I try again.

  She concentrates on eating. “I’m really tired, Mara. Let’s just eat our pizza.”

  The next day, Mom and I drive into Tahoe City, not talking. She hums along to the radio, no sign of last night’s tears, but the air in the rental car feels dense, as if I could actually scoop out chunks of it and roll it in my hands. The storm has blown out, leaving a bluebird day, and my stomach tugs, wishing I could be up on the mountain. Geez, maybe I am turning into a ski bum?

  We pull into the empty parking lot at Commons Beach and get out. Snow covers both the park and the beach, and the lake is caked at its edges with ice, making the bits of blue jagged fingers look like broken pieces of mirrored sky. We pick our way over the icy parking lot to the snow-covered shore and stand watching how the white gives way to the indigo water of the lake.

  “I think you should come home, but I’m not going to decide for you,” Mom says finally. Surprised, I swipe at the hair the wind whips into my face. Mom tugs her beanie over her ears. “You think I don’t understand, but I do.”

  Over the years, Mom has told me bits of her childhood, how she lived in Colorado with my grandparents, how she didn’t end up going to college because she got involved with real estate. Even as successful as she is now, Mom has never hesitated to tell me she wished she’d gone to college. “You know that’s a regret of mine,” she tells me again now, watching the choppy water. “One I don’t want you repeating if I can help it.”

  “I still want to go to college,” I say. “This place hasn’t changed what I want; it’s just put certain things in perspective. Besides, I won’t be going to college if high school kills me first. That’s not a good strategy.”

  She shakes her head. “I just wish you would have talked to us, to Will and me, about how stressed out you were. Why didn’t you talk to us?” Her voice sounds young and afraid.

  I study the snowy mountains out beyond the water. “I’m not sure I even knew, Mom. I just wanted to do my best. You always tell me and Seth and Liam — Do your best. Be your best. Then, I just collapsed under all that best, you know, and suddenly I was at my worst.” I bite my lip to ward off tears.

  She slips an arm around me and pulls me to her. “I love you so much I think it sometimes makes me a crazy person.” I can’t remember the last time Mom held me like this; not in a long time. “But being your best doesn’t mean being perfect. It means doing right by yourself each day. It means having goals and being a good, hardworking person. That’s what Will and I want for you kids. We don’t expect you to be perfect.”

  “I might have missed that distinction,” I mumble into the collar of my jacket.

  “I know how much pressure you’ve been under. All you kids at Ranfield. I know how hard you work,” she admits. “I just thought you were handling it.”

  “I wasn’t.” How can two small words be filled with so much shame?

  She hears it and gives my shoulder a squeeze. “Honey, you have to learn to self-regulate. You can use your snowplow, even in San Diego. You didn’t have to run away.”

  I bristle. “Why does wanting a change have to be called that?”

  She looks apologetic. “I’m sorry — it’s just this place.” She sighs, staring out over the water. “It’s hard to be immune to its siren song.”

  “And you’re worried it’s going to dash me against the rocks.” She squeezes me tighter as if she could be like Odysseus’s crewmen, lashing me to the mast to keep me safe. I guess tying us to masts is part of a mom’s job description. It just feels like mine forgot to keep loosening the knots as I got older.

  “I have a lot of memories here.” She sighs. “Good and bad.”

  We watch the water for a few minutes, and from somewhere deep within me, a memory of my own surfaces. I’m not sure what reminded me, maybe the wide stretch of inky water, but suddenly the memory appears as if it happened yesterday.

  “Mom?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Remember when we were in Maui a few years ago? At the Hula Grill in Kaanapali?”

  She stiffens against me as if the memory comes suddenly to her, too. Every other year, we take a short trip to Maui. Just five or six nights because Mom and Will don’t like to be away from their work much longer than that. This particular trip I was thirteen, I think, and it was April. We’d spent most of the day snorkeling in the turquoise water near Black Rock, eating lunch by the hotel pool while Seth and Liam made trip after trip down the water slide, and then resting in our room until dinner, the boys watching a Harry Potter movie on Will’s iPad. At dusk, we had meandered down the slim promenade in front of the hotel to the Hula Grill. I walked ahead with Mom, and Will had Liam and Seth in tow, sunburned and tired from the day. We’d just been seated in the outdoor patio when we heard a voice behind us.

  “Lauren?” An auburn-haired man with broad shoulders and mirrored glasses approached. “I thought that was you.” He nodded amiably to Will but I noticed, before Will turned on his lawyer smile, that his face had darkened. He stood and shook hands with the man, his gaze slipping to Mom, who was watching the man coolly.

  I noticed she didn’t shake his hand. “Jason, you remember Mara. And these are our twins, Seth and Liam.” Mom motioned to each of us in turn.

  Jason’s eyes settled on me longer than on my brothers. “Well, look at you, all grown up.” He pushed nervously at his sunglasses as if they were slightly big and turned again to Mom. “Life in San Diego seems to be treating you well.”

  “Yes,” Mom replied, her voice businesslike.

  “Mom, I have to pee.” Liam wiggled in his chair, clutching the crotch of his board shorts.

  Looking relieved, Will hurried to pull his son’s chair out. “I’ll take him. Let’s all go.”

  “I don’t have to,” I started, but then noticed the pointed look Will gave me and followed my stepfather and brothers toward the bathrooms, leaving Mom to talk with the man.

  “Who was that guy?” I asked Mom when we returned from the bathrooms, the man nowhere in sight.

  Fiddling with the straw of her mai tai, she intently studied the menu. “Oh, just someone I used to know. Don’t the fish tacos here look amazing?”

  Now, leaning into her down jacket, the view of Tahoe in front of us a glacial and indigo mass, I say, “That was Beck’s dad, wasn’t it? That guy in Maui? That was Jason Davis. I saw him once here. He was fighting with Beck in the parking lot.”

  “That was so random,” she breathes, uncurling her arm and stuffing her hands into her pockets. “I’m surprised you remember it.”

  “I didn’t really, until just now. You and Will were both acting so weird. What happened with him?”

  She jumps up and down in place. “It’s freezing. Let’s go get brunch somewhere.”

  Over brunch, she fills in some of the gaps she has never shared before. She skied growing up in Colorado, even raced on her high school team for a couple of years, but had plans to attend college in Southern California. “I wanted to be a nurse,” she tells me, examining the tomato she’d speared on her fork. Senior year, she and her parents took a ski trip to Squaw Valley, and she had met Trick, a sponsored freestyle skier who had spent his childhood racing. Her expression turns dreamy. “He was three years older and just so cute and funny and … fun, you know? That week we went to parties and he taught me some tricks on my skis and we just, well …” She blushes, brushing a strand of hair out of her face. “We just had to be together.” For a minute, I can see exactly what she must have looked like when she was my age. />
  Like me. She must have looked so much like me.

  “At the end of that week, my parents had to drag me back to Colorado,” she says now. “But the second I graduated, I was on a bus to Tahoe. Forget college. Forget being a nurse. I had my skis and I had Trick waiting for me in one of the most beautiful places in the world.”

  My mom threw away her plans for a boy? She would have surprised me less if she’d confessed she had once joined the circus. “I had no idea. Grandma and Grandpa have never said anything.” We see my grandparents at least twice a year, but they’d never mentioned a word about Tahoe.

  “I asked them not to. Not that it was all bad. Bad things often start out great.” At first, she tells me, they had the best lives she could imagine — sleeping on people’s couches, skiing all winter, kayaking in the summers. “Trick trained a lot and I’d train with him. We were in great shape. And we had a blast. I mean, we had no money and that sucked. But we had fun.” But then, she says, she had started to realize what she’d thrown away. She started to think about enrolling in college.

  But when she was twenty, I happened. “You … surprised us.” She takes a bite of salad and chews thoughtfully. “You were such a beautiful baby, of course, but we were idiots about being parents. We didn’t even know who we were yet as people. We definitely weren’t ready for a baby.” She has told me this part of the story before, never hesitating to advise me, Don’t be stupid and have a baby too early like I did. Which feels awesome, naturally, even if she assures me she’d never trade me being born for anything.

  I set my fork down. “When did you meet Beck’s parents?”

  “When you were about six months, Trick and I met the Davis family in a baby group along with Logan’s parents.” As she picks at an egg in her Cobb salad, Mom explains that even though the other two families were much older and more professional, they all became fast friends, all of them skiers, all of them with a new baby. “And the Nevers already had Logan’s sister, so Jessica was so helpful. The expert.” She remembers it all for a moment, then frowns. “But we had a falling out with the Davises. You were almost three.” She gazes out at the water.

  “What happened?”

  She looks back at me. “Beck’s dad was doing really well in real estate up here, and he approached us and the Nevers with this no-fail opportunity. That’s how he sold it to us: no-fail. My parents had given us some money for a down payment on a condo.” She taps her fork nervously against the side of her salad bowl. “I told Trick no way was I going to use that money for something like that — so uncertain.” She looks ill at the memory. “But Trick gave it to him anyway. And we lost everything. The Davises weren’t even sorry. I remember the way Jason told us, like it was nothing. This just happens sometimes in real estate, he said.” She stares glumly into her salad. “The Nevers were lucky they didn’t lose the store.”

  I reach across the table and grab her hand. “I’m sorry, Mom. I didn’t know.”

  She stares out the window at the windy lake. “Trick got hurt a few months later.” She runs her hand through her hair. “Wow, that was a terrible year. But I met Will when he was visiting Squaw Valley on vacation and, within a few months, I moved to San Diego and put things back together. I got lucky.” She squeezes my hand. “We both did.”

  Untangling her hand from mine, she signals for the waitress. I eat the rest of my pancakes while Mom silently pays the check. Trick had gone behind Mom’s back and lost all their money. He’d gotten hurt. More than that, though, something broke between them that she couldn’t fix. My mother, the fix-it queen, couldn’t make it right. Watching me here must make her want to reach back in time and yank her former self out of harm’s way. I don’t blame her. Because I would do the same if I could.

  Josie shouts, “Hello, valentine!” and holds up a shiny red heart that fills the laptop screen. But it’s not just any shiny red heart. It’s been decorated to look as hideously overdone as possible, with bows and glitter and curlicue ribbons shooting out from all parts of it. She has also attached a tiny stuffed cat with pink jeweled eyes. So it doesn’t even look like a heart anymore. It looks like the cat is exploding with maniacal valentine glee.

  “Oooooooh,” I breathe. “That’s a good one.” Starting in seventh grade, Josie and I had agreed to be each other’s valentine every year by giving each other the most extreme valentine heart we could create in thirty minutes or less. That was the rule. “Are you sure that was under the time limit?”

  “Twenty-eight minutes, thirty-six seconds, thank you very much,” she says proudly.

  I hold up mine. “Okay, so supplies were limited, but, still, twenty-two minutes, eleven seconds.”

  She claps her hands together. “Very nice. Very … alpine.” Late this morning, I’d smothered a heart cut from a brown grocery bag with pine needles and cones and dozens of random ski stickers that Trick didn’t want anymore. Then I’d sprayed the whole thing in silver paint Trick found in the Stones’ garage.

  Josie sets down her heart. “How was the visit with your mom?”

  “Enlightening.”

  She frowns. “Good enlightening or bad?”

  “Both.” I fill her in on some of the things Mom shared with me. “And I got snacks and some cute pj’s.” I hold up a box of my favorite chocolate and the snowflake-spattered flannels Mom had given me for Valentine’s Day before she left this morning.

  “I’m glad you two talked.” Josie shifts on her bed and I notice a huge bouquet of red roses sitting on the dresser behind her.

  “Um, hello, roses!”

  She flushes. “Oh, well, no — those …” She waves her hand. “Whatever.”

  “Wait, Jo — those are from your parents, right?”

  She picks at some lint on her blue sweater. “Not exactly.”

  “Then who?” My heart is beating too fast. It shouldn’t matter who they’re from, but for some reason, it does. “You’re the color of a stop sign — tell me!”

  “Chris Locke.” She gets very close to the screen, her inky eyes huge. “I was going to tell you.”

  “Um, I hope so, because you got super mad when I didn’t tell you what happened with my crazy Tahoe boy situation.” There’s a metallic flavor in the back of my throat. Whatever this is I’m feeling — confusion, hurt, frustration — tastes like swallowing loose change.

  She settles back away from the screen, tucking her knees to her chin. “I know, but you always get so intense about that deal we made. You take that stuff too seriously, Mara. And this whole thing with Chris is brand-new. I wanted to make sure there was something there before I even mentioned it.”

  What is she talking about? We both made the deal. “I don’t take it too seriously. I know things change. You don’t see me wearing those green overalls I was obsessed with in sixth grade anymore even though I told you I’d never grow out of them.”

  “That’s different.” She sighs. “This feels different. You and I don’t always, I don’t know, do that normal giggly girl stuff. We mostly make fun of girls who do that.” She’s right. We do.

  I struggle to find the right words. “How did … it happen? How did Chris happen?”

  “I went to that twenty-four-hour dance-a-thon to raise money for Costa Rica.” Now she actually giggles. “And he was there. We just started … talking. He’s pretty great.”

  I stare at her dresser. “Those are some nice roses for just talking.”

  As she studies them, she can’t stop smiling. “Look, Mara. I’m just going to see where it goes.” She shrugs. “It’s fun.”

  My list brain racks up questions and they spill out: “Is he being casual, too? Is that the plan — to just see where it goes? Is it going to change what you want —”

  “Mara,” she interrupts, annoyance fading her smile. “I don’t know. I’m not making plans. I haven’t made a pro and con list or a spreadsheet for all possible relationship outcomes.” Because I’m not you, she doesn’t add. She doesn’t have to. I hear it.

  I
take a short, clean breath. “Okay. Well, if you’re happy, I’m happy,” I say, trying to mean it.

  Her eyes brighten. “Really? Thank you. Because, well, I am.”

  I give her the best version of my smile I can muster. Sometimes being the friend you’re supposed to be in a certain moment is harder than any chemistry equation.

  She unfolds her legs and leans toward the screen. “So … are you doing anything tonight?” she asks. “Like with Logan, maybe?”

  “He’s not back from Mammoth yet.” I fiddle with a loose string on the bedspread. “Not that we would do something if he was.”

  “The lady doth protest too much.”

  “Thanks, Shakespeare. This lady doth not need a boyfriend complicating an already overly complicated life.”

  “Maybe you should text him. Ask how his race was? You guys could hang out when he gets back. Lately, I’ve been going to more stuff here at Ran and it’s really nice to just hang out with people. Your most meaningful relationship shouldn’t be with your history textbook.” Her cell buzzes next to her on the bed. She picks it up and the goofy look she gets gives away the caller.

  “Say hi to Chris for me,” I tell her, motioning for her to take the call. I shut my laptop and look around me. The fire shifts with its dim glow, my clothes sit in even rows on the bookcase, and the pile of books beckons me from the floor.

  Happy Valentine’s Day.

  Trick and I move awkwardly around each other for the next few days. Like so many things with him, our fight before Mom got here just melts into silence, becoming part of the past. Trick might have once been a sponsored freeskier, but he’s an Olympian at avoidance.

  Early Wednesday morning, my phone buzzes. Isabel.

  check your email.

  I pull my laptop onto the bed. The subject line reads: Isabel has sent you a playlist! I click it open.

  Get your gear, download this playlist, and get your butt on the mountain. We’ll meet up after practice. Start this playlist right when you get on the funi and play it all the way through at least three times before taking a break!!