by Jan O'Hara
“You can stop with the air quotes,” Oliver said. “You know how I hate that. And I won’t apologize for protecting my interests.”
“In the first place, I didn’t ask you to,” Bart said. “And B, I don’t really care if I lose, even if I don’t deserve to. It’s never been ’bout the money for me.”
“Easy to say when you’re still making bank.” Oliver hated how bitter that had sounded.
“Am I supposed to apologize for keepin’ my career going ’cause you took ill?”
“Took ill? Took ill?” Oliver clutched handfuls of his hair and resorted to pacing in a circle.
Bart slung himself into one of the benches. He propped his booted feet onto the back of the adjacent bench and crossed his ankles. “Besides, if you win in court and I ain’t workin’, you ain’t collectin’. Unless you’re gonna force me to liquidate the cabin, that is. And the Porsche. And the H-ride, which would be a ripe shame.” He examined his hands. “I love me my Hummer.”
“You should have thought of that before you blinded me.” And before you dumped me when I couldn’t be the old Oliver.
Bart pinned Oliver with his gaze. “How many times do I gotta apologize?”
“I don’t know, Bart. You could start with one sincere effort.” For a long moment their gazes tangled and held, and Oliver dared to hope. There was a naked vulnerability on Bart’s face, an expression of longing Oliver hadn’t seen in forever. Do it, buddy. Say it once and mean it, and this could all be over, Oliver thought.
In the next second, with a sweep of his lashes, Bart shut it down. “You’re my best friend—”
“Was,” Oliver said.
Bart dropped his feet to the floor and rose. He shook an accusing finger. “You’re my best friend and a right smart man. You think I wanted to hurt you? You knew the risks when you played.” He dropped his arm and twisted his mouth. “Hell, we all know it. Could be me next week, ’specially if Carter don’t fix his curveball.”
Oliver could almost resign himself to the blindness and concussion. They were part of the game. He couldn’t accept Bart’s asinine rationale.
“If you want this to end,” Oliver said, “admit you were distracted during the game. Take responsibility for your carelessness. Stop with the endless, stupid jokes.”
He expected Bart to argue about the characterization of his humor but Bart said, “A’ight.”
“You will?” Oliver said, hating how his stupid heart leaped.
“If you’ll apologize for putting me off my ritual.” Bart held up a hand as Oliver exhaled in frustration. “Now wait a minute. Hear me out. I was doing just fine ’bout Holly until you started in with your worryin’ right before game time.” In a falsetto voice he said, “‘You sure you’re all right, Bart, ’cause you done look like your heart’s broke. You weren’t yourself in warm-up, Bart. Were you thinking ’bout Holly and Mick knocking boots?’” He dropped his voice to its normal baritone. “Etcetera, etcetera.” He thumped Oliver’s chest. “You made me doubt myself, Oliver. Got in my head so’s I forgot to do my ritual.”
Oliver shook his head in disgust. “That’s your excuse?”
“You tell me. Five hundred and eleven games, two Player of the Year awards without once forgetting my ritual—’cause I never forget. Then you distract me, I got no time for my ritual, and I hit you with a cutter? Dude, that ain’t me.”
“This should play well in court,” Oliver said. “‘Your honor, I shouldn’t have to pay damages, because I didn’t lick my lollipops in the right order.’”
Bart clucked his tongue. “Now who’s doing the air quotes?”
Oliver clutched a handful of hair again. I need to leave, he thought. I need to get out of here before I lose my freaking mind. Oliver advanced toward the door, but Bart stood, blocking his way.
Bart had his hands on his hips and was addressing a spot on the floor. “You gonna stay up there all night, Mr. Voyeur, or you got something to contribute?”
“What the hell?” Oliver said. Bart could be a flake, but Oliver had never seen him lose it altogether. “Hit the juice a little too hard this morning?”
“No,” Bart said with elaborate patience. “I don’t do performance enhancers. I’m talking to the guy belonging to this—or did you think the hotel uses three-hundred-dollar cleaning rags?” From one of the benches, in an area cast in shadow, Bart extracted a hooded, black down jacket. He peered at the label. “More like five hundred. This is a good brand.”
Oliver looked around him wildly. “What guy?”
“Him. Are you blind?” Bart backed up as Oliver advanced. “Forget I said that.”
Instead of slugging him, Oliver moved until he occupied the space where Bart previously stood. He turned and angled his head upward, moving his neck until he had navigated his blind spot and could see where Bart pointed.
An Asian man loomed above, pressed against the underside of the roof. His feet were anchored on the horizontal wall plate, his body held at an angle which paralleled the roof’s slope.
Now he released the rafters. He pushed away from the wall plate, performed a mid-air somersault, and landed lightly on his feet, right in front of them.
“Cool,” Bart said, dragging the word out into two syllables.
Oliver tried to remember how to breathe.
The man shot the cuffs on his black, long-sleeved shirt. “I didn’t want to interfere until you worked things out, but no one’s legs could last that long. Has the world seen a more colossal pair of self-righteous twits?”
“I’m not real big on rhetorical questions,” Bart said.
“You have a British accent,” Oliver said.
“Observant,” the man said.
“Who the hell are you?” Bart asked without heat, as he peeled a stick of gum and popped it in his mouth.
“Meet Mr. Vince Lee,” Oliver said. “He’s one of my so-called clients. Rumor says he’s mute. Think I’d have preferred him to stay that way.”
* * *
✽
“You want help reconciling?” Mr. Lee asked them. “Or, as they would say in the army, are you too much in love with the pain?”
If you ignored the unkempt hair and the accent, Oliver decided, Mr. Lee had an Asian Clint Eastwood vibe going for him. Something about the way he bit off his words and narrowed his eyes.
“What you got in mind?” Bart said. “Don’t suppose it involves any women.”
“I know of two ways to resolve your interpersonal drama,” Mr. Lee said. “The first—the fastest—requires you to remove your jackets.”
Bart shrugged at Oliver and moved to comply.
After a minute, without knowing why he was going along with the charade, Oliver draped his coat over a wooden bench. With his pullover sweater and long-sleeved shirt, Oliver could tolerate the gazebo’s temperature, but barely.
“You move here, you here.” Mr. Lee directed them to stand roughly three feet apart in the center of the gazebo, with the apex of the roof over their heads. They were to face each other and place their feet in tandem, on the same floor plank.
“You put your hands like so,” Mr. Lee said to Bart, who put his arms out to the side, like he was walking a balance beam.
“Now you,” Mr. Lee said to Oliver. “Take this hand.” He seized Oliver’s right wrist.
“Yes.”
“Fold your fingers like so.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And clip Bart upside the head, till he’s maimed to your satisfaction.”
Oliver recoiled. “I can’t do that.”
“Why not?” Mr. Lee said. “You’ve done it in your dreams a hundred times.”
Oliver stared at his fist, which tingled with the unfulfilled promise of violence. “More like a thousand.”
Bart took a step back, his hands in the position of surrender. “Sorry, man. I get your eye-for-an-eye rationale and all that, but I gotta go back healthy to trainin’ camp. Just bein’ up here puts me in Smithy’s bad books.” He shuddered and address
ed Oliver. “You know what that means, bro.”
For a long moment, staring into Bart’s stupid, handsome, conceited face, under the weight of their shared history, Oliver was struck with a yearning to laugh, to bury the hatchet, to let everything go. Then he remembered how he’d faced everything alone, with only Shawn for company while Bart joked and played the clown. And that never again would Smithy kick Oliver’s ass on a professional basis.
The things you didn’t appreciate until they were gone.
“What’s option number two?” Oliver said.
Mr. Lee nodded as if he’d expected this display of weakness. “We use the philosopher’s approach—a metaphor allowing you to gain insight into one another, and reach understanding.” He paced parallel to the hearth, his head bowed as if he was searching for words.
Oliver blew on his hands and stomped his feet.
Mr. Lee stopped suddenly. “You,” he said to Oliver. “You look at baseball as you look at life. You try to control the uncontrollable by means of practice and statistical analysis and consistency. As you face the great enemies of aging, doubt, and entropy, you are overwhelmed. So when a friend joins the side of chaos, however temporarily, you extrapolate this to betrayal.”
It sounded reasonable to Oliver, if a little high on the woo-factor.
“You,” Mr. Lee said to Bart. “You recognize the forces of chaos and fight against them, too, though you’re more of a creative type than a disciplinarian. You see the two of you as brothers-in-arms. So you screwed up one time and things went south?” Mr. Lee shrugged. “That shouldn’t undo credit-earned. Because you’ve had Oliver’s back on many occasions, compensated for his weaknesses. Is that about right?”
“Hell, yeah,” Bart said. “That’s me to a tee. But, so…uh. You lost me at the solution part.”
Mr. Lee stood angled in front of the fireplace with his arms folded over his chest. He let go a pained sigh. “Yank your heads out of each other’s butts, turn ninety degrees to the left, and see what’s coming at you both.”
Oliver squinted at him. “Is this like ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’?”
“No, I mean turn ninety frigging degrees to the left.” Mr. Lee extended a sinewy arm and pointed into the area occupied by Oliver’s blind spot.
Oliver and Bart twisted simultaneously.
Oliver’s mouth fell open. He walked to the westward facing window of the gazebo where he could only shake his head in amazement. “Holy mother of home base,” he said.
From beside him, Bart said, “You can say that again.”
Another sixty seconds and there would have been no need for Mr. Lee to draw their attention to what was coming, because it would have been over them and around them—possibly under them, if it had a chance.
Stretching across the length of the valley, it looked like clouds were spilling over the mountains to form a boiling mass of advancing darkness. As it neared, the few visible lights in the valley winked out in rapid succession.
An advance gust of wind struck the glass under Oliver’s palms and rattled it as the gazebo’s overhead beams groaned.
“What is that?” Oliver asked. It looked like a horizontal avalanche.
“Guess you men aren’t from around here,” Mr. Lee said. “Gentlemen, welcome to the Rockies, home of sudden weather changes. We have ourselves a Canadian blizzard.”
Chapter 25
Shortly after Page returned to the ballroom, having helped Mrs. Patel to bathe and change, Gill came by to warn her about the weather advisory.
“Mr. Thurston recommends you keep everyone indoors,” Gill said, with a nod to the seniors, who were lining up at the buffet now that order had been restored. “The wind chill is something fierce.”
Since ice particles were being hurled against the second floor windows, reducing visibility to zero, Page couldn’t agree more. “Will the roads be passable tomorrow?” Assuming Oliver wanted her help, if they were going to keep their revised-revised schedule, it was critical to leave before breakfast.
Gill grimaced. “It’s not looking great, but Mr. Thurston says we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.”
“Gill,” she said when he turned to leave, “do you happen to know where Mr. Pike went?”
If Gill was surprised by the tension in her voice, he was too well-trained to reveal it. “No, ma’am. Did you try his phone?”
She nodded. Five times.
“Keep at it,” Gill said. “I have to go weather-proof the hotel, but I’ll come back and check on you. In the meantime, I’d probably do a roll call.”
“Good idea.” It would give Page something productive to do instead of worry.
Hopefully Bart had found Oliver, and the two were in a warm pub somewhere, drinking off their enmity, too soused to hear the phone. The alternatives were too discouraging or frightening to contemplate.
* * *
✽
There was no point in running for the hotel—that much was clear to Oliver. The Thurston might be only a mile away, but charging out into what was coming would be as good as committing suicide.
On the other hand, staying inside a glass house with a wall of wind approaching at full-speed, didn’t seem like much of an improvement.
The storm front covered the moon and stars, and they were enveloped in darkness. The wind accelerated to a howl, rattling and shaking the gazebo as if a wild beast held it in its grip.
In a split instant Oliver knew that, just as he wasn’t leaving, there would be no rescue party coming for them until this was over.
I could die here, he thought. I could really die here, and I haven’t even told Page I love her. Not that he was sure she deserved the knowledge, given her back-door manipulations. Loving people and trusting people were two very different things.
“What do we do?” he shouted to Mr. Lee, hoping the man’s odd repertoire included winter survival skills.
From the fireplace came a terse order. “Push a bench in front of the door. And hustle.”
His dictate turned out to be prescient, for Oliver and Bart, scrabbling to find a bench in the dark, then move it into the proper position, were a foot from the door when it flew open with a wrenching groan. What little warmth the gazebo held was instantly sucked out into the howling night.
Once, hiking in the desert, Oliver had been caught in the thick of a newborn dust devil. Though it only lasted a few seconds, he had been left with stinging skin, a scrambled brain, and eyes that burned and ached for days. This was nearly the same sensation, except rendered at subzero temperatures and without the ability to shield his face with his hands.
Somehow, someway, though, they wrestled the door closed and barricaded it shut.
That had been more physical work than he’d done in a year and a half, Oliver thought, as he leaned against the bench, panting. He knew an urge to check his vision, but with what in this inky darkness?
“Say a prayer to the fire gods,” he heard Mr. Lee say. A sudden burst of light erupted at the back of the gazebo.
Oliver blinked and removed his snow-covered glasses. While he and Bart wrestled with the door, Mr. Lee had summoned a backpack from the dark, and managed to light a small lantern.
“You’re a genius,” Oliver said.
“No, I’m simply not stupid.”
Bart, for once said nothing, but raised his eyebrows at Oliver and pointed to the nearest window.
While they both brushed themselves off and donned their winter coats again, they stared out at the strange beauty. The snow hissed and whirled over and around them in an endless, abstract dance.
“As long as we don’t get a tree branch through a windowpane, we’ll manage,” Mr. Lee said. “But that’s predicated on you two helping, not standing around gawking.”
“So give us the plan,” Oliver said.
And Mr. Lee obliged by putting them to work.
* * *
✽
Between the computerization of the oldsters’ records and the Thurston’s busine
ss center, Page had been able to type and print off a Shastavista roster in record time. On the list were the names of forty-one seniors, two supervisors, one bus driver, and one rogue Southern ballplayer.
Currently missing, and what a non-surprise it was to see the tally: Oliver, Bart, and Mr. Lee, the last of whom she was beginning to consider a symptom of mass delusion, and not a real person at all.
Still, on paper she was responsible for him. So as the weather took an abrupt turn for the worse, she left Buck and the seniors in the ballroom and took the elevator to the top floor, where she began a painstaking search for the missing trio.
She checked all the hallways, the stairwells, and knocked on the doors to their respective rooms. She poked her head in the boardrooms, the darkened gym, even the kitchens. The only public area she didn’t inspect was the pool. But since its access lay outside, the staff had already closed the facility and put up a big sign proclaiming it off-limits.
After one last pass through their ballroom, Page ran down the stairs to the front desk, nodding to Mrs. Arbuckle as they passed one another. Mrs. A was entering the lounge in full regalia, as if nothing were amiss.
An abrupt pang of longing struck Page. This morning, during a moment of drowsy contentment in Oliver’s arms, she’d imagined one last night in Peak’s Bar, surrounded by Madeline, Oliver, and the oldsters.
Now she would be happy just to have everyone safe.
As Page stepped up to the front desk, and a Latina clerk she hadn’t worked with before, the lights flickered. What was that?” Page said.
“Power bump,” the clerk said cheerfully. “Don’t worry, we get those all the time.” The lights flickered twice more. “See? Bound to go with the weather, right?”
“I guess,” Page said, thinking all she needed was to be responsible for forty-odd people during a power failure in the Canadian Rockies. Also, was it her imagination, or had the lounge lights remained unaffected? Weird.