The Possibilities

by Kaui Hart Hemmings

  Now I realize how clueless I had been, that I took the wrong approach. I shouldn’t have backed down. What mother is content that her son parks cars after graduating with a degree in geology and a minor in environmental science? What does parking cars have to do with these things?

  Suzanne clinks my glass. “It’s okay,” she says. I’m embarrassed that she knows about all of this, about his and my failure. Morgan has always done everything right.

  “He was young and free,” she says.

  “He wasn’t though,” I say, but I won’t go on to defend him. I keep my thoughts to myself, knowing she’ll pity me further. I thought that Cully was on the precipice of action. Every morning we’d read the paper together, on the couch, side by side, trading sections. He was always so serious when he read the paper, as if searching it for ideas on what he could do, who he could be. His dark brows would be furrowed, his jaw flexed, and I realize now that I had been given glimpses of him as a man.

  “I want to work for the resort,” he said one morning while reading the business section. “I’m ready.”

  “Yeah?” I said, putting down the arts section. “Doing what?”

  He hesitated, and I related to the hesitation, reminded of the dread of telling adults what I wanted to do and feeling their slight condescendence.

  “Anything at first,” he said. “To get my foot in the door. Like Grandpa did.”

  “Sounds good,” I said, trying to measure my next responses. “He started out running the ski school.”

  Cully laughed. “That would be classic. If I ran a ski school.” He went back to the paper, but I could tell he wasn’t focusing on it. “My degree helps, like—I think it’s something they would want. I mean, it could apply to their business. And Gramps—he’s a good reference, obviously.”

  He had put thought into this. I wanted to hug him but played it cool. He looked over his paper at me and played it cool as well.

  That night he spoke to my dad at dinner, and again, I sat back, trying not to ask too much, to encourage or take away. I listened to him creep into the adult world, amused by his passion, which I hadn’t seen before.

  “The resort needs to be more green,” he said. “I feel like they’re just catching up. In Aspen they use biodiesel fuel in snowcats, they—”

  “So do we,” my dad said. “Have for some time—”

  “They have efficient snowmaking equipment, low-energy snow guns.”

  “Move to Aspen then,” my dad said. “Go find Hunter Thompson and trip out.”

  “He’s dead,” Cully said.

  “Well, scratch that,” my dad said.

  I could tell Cully was going down some kind of checklist in his head and wanted to tell my dad to back off a bit, but maybe this was good, like an initiation.

  “No, you’re right,” my dad said, “even though really the equipment only cuts a few million gallons of water. Say four million off of one hundred and sixty, a public-pleasing policy. Good, but it doesn’t have much impact.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Cully said, his elbows on the table, his hands alive. “It’s just a stamp to put on things. It’s easy. But if you do more, it all accumulates and saves the resort money in the long run.”

  My dad nodded. “I agree. Absolutely. I’ll leave it to you.”

  “Sounds like you’re ready to work,” I said.

  “So, what else do you do all day?” Cully asked. “Or what did you do?”

  “We found policy numbers and other things.” My dad smiled. Cully was beginning to get impatient. He wanted details. He wanted to be taken seriously.

  “Like what other things? Shit, it’s like pulling teeth.” His fork clanged against the plate, and I thought he was angry, but he said, “Whoops,” and laughed.

  “I did a lot of damage control,” my dad said. “Read the news. Stayed on top of how the public felt about us, then responded. I also wrote propositions. Development ideas. Then I’d sort of try to sell the ideas, these dreams to the public without them thinking they were being sold anything. It’s an honor to be here . . . We’re doing you a favor by letting you spend money here . . . That’s the message. What else, what else . . . ”

  “Dad, come on,” I said, even though we were all having a good time.

  “Were you proud of your work?” Cully asked.

  My dad considered the question, and instead of giving a jokey answer, he sounded serious when he said, “Oftentimes. Yes. I was.”

  I had to look down at my lap to not give anything away. All my life he had wavered back and forth between loving and hating his job. Through all the resort’s acquisitions and expansions he’d complain about the company clearing more acreage, appalled that the forest service would actually agree there was a need, only to come home from a day of skiing on that same acreage, declaring it beautiful, talking about the land as if he was a pioneer trying to sell off plots, and of course, everything that happened, he had approved it in the end. Only at home could he be the local.

  “Great.” Cully clapped his hands together. “Then I’m ready to go. Ready to sit around and think up ways to trick people.”

  “I didn’t play tricks,” my dad said, tilting his head up and scratching his cheek. He loved being asked questions. “I reinvented dreams, made the ridiculous seem perfectly reasonable.”

  “Dreams,” Cully said. “Ridiculous!”

  “I’m just kidding with you, sport,” my dad said to him. “I made the resort money. That’s what I did. And it was a great job. You feel like you’re a part of this place. You’re building your home, caring for it.” I had never heard him speak this way about his job, and it articulated something for me as well, something that resonated with my own work. “And they need people like you who know it, who’ll nurture it. Who will try to be good and try to be honest.”

  Cully looked down, proud, as if given an honorable task.

  “I’ll talk to Dickie,” my dad said. “See where you’d fit. And then, as I said, I’ll leave it to you. You kids up next will be great.”

  I enjoyed the conversation at the time, but not in the way I do now. I didn’t think that it would be something I’d return to. You never know what moments will be significant until after they’re gone. I return to this one because Cully was on the brink of something here. He was curious in his grandfather as a man, and he was excited about his own capabilities, his own future. I wonder if my dad thinks about this moment too.

  I look at the cash on the bed, and it’s as if everything has been negated. He wasn’t on the brink of anything. He was selling dope.

  “What was he doing?” I ask. “What the hell was he thinking?”

  “I don’t know,” Suzanne says. “He was a kid.”

  She wouldn’t think that if it had been Morgan.

  “Thanks for helping with everything,” I say. “I guess.”

  She shrugs. “After my mom died I found four bags of cremated pets in the back of her closet,” she says. “You never know what you’ll find. I’d rather score weed than dead Pomeranians.”

  And I love her again.

  “I just want to know everything,” I say. We walk toward the door.

  There really is nothing else to do but know the things we want to know.

  • • •

  I LOOK OUTSIDE the living room window at my quiet street, the empty second homes. When I’m off Main Street, sometimes I feel like I live in a ghost town, especially with the warmth this year and lack of snow. We live off snow. Our economy could simply melt away, the mountains undress. I look down at the driveway, the thin layer of snow that has begun to settle. What were you doing, son? Was it just a phase? Did I not provide enough, nurture you enough? What was the point of school and college, the point of all those extracurricular activities, the point of playgrounds? Did I give you too much?

  “You girls hungry?” my dad asks.

  “We’re going to go out,” I say. “Just real quick.”

  “Not quick,” Suzanne says. “We are heading out
on the town. I’ll have her back before dawn.”

  Suzanne takes her sweater off the stool and my dad looks at me and widens his eyes.

  “I’ll be home in a few hours,” I say.

  “You up for meeting Mirabelle first?” Suzanne asks. “She might head to Relish.”

  Mirabelle is a woman who hired a conductor to tutor her four-year-old when he picked up a stick and started waving it around. She and her husband are always offering their various homes to me: Maui, Park City, LA, making me feel like a Make-a-Wish kid. I’ve never taken them up on it knowing that these people collect people and soon enough I’d be trotted out at dinner parties as their “TV show friend,” and then I’d be asked if I could feature a friend’s new line of jewelry. I’ve learned my lesson. Just say no to these kinds of people. Not that I don’t get along with many of them and have fun when Suzanne asks me to join them all for drinks, but there’s a big difference between me and her other friends. I’m the only one with a job, something they find to be honorable.

  We just discovered my son was a drug dealer. We just emptied his room. I don’t want to meet Mirabelle and endure her head-to-toe catty scans.

  “Come on,” Suzanne says, seeing me hesitate. “It will be good to socialize.”

  “I’ve been out of the house all day, socializing. Maybe if we could just get a quick drink.”

  She is looking down at her phone. “Change of plan,” she says. “She just texted. Says to stop by the rink. Something I have to see.” She looks up. I haven’t put on my coat.

  “You know?” I say. “I’m kind of beat.”

  “Please,” she says. “It’s just the After-School All-Stars thing at the rink. Laurie’s chairing and”—she looks in the mirror by the bar and puts on makeup—“we can just drop by.”

  This is so typical of her, to change plans and assume I’ll follow. I’m putting my foot down. Even though my problems have outperformed hers for a while now, I will not go to a sporting event.

  “You girls go have fun,” my dad says.

  “I’m just not feeling up to it right now,” I say. I try to make eye contact so he can help me out, but he’s looking at Suzanne with an intensity.

  “Hey, Suze,” he says, “those future plans—your husband’s lawyers should probably stop saying there’s no link between peak and base expansion. EPA knows otherwise. People will warm up to it anyway. The ones who’ll complain will be the same ones who just bought their condos at One Ski Hill.”

  “I don’t talk to Dickie,” Suzanne says, finishing her glass. “He left me.”

  My dad says, “I hope not because of the weight gain? Now, that’s not fair.”

  Oh my God. “Okay,” I say. “Let’s go.” I put on my coat.

  Chapter 6

  We walk to her car, parked twenty calories up the street.

  “Sorry, but will you drive?” She gets into the passenger seat before I can respond. I roll my eyes—my passive response—and get behind the wheel. I don’t mind. If anything I’m a good driver. I love to parallel park and I merge and change lanes quickly. If I skid I know to pump lightly on the brakes and turn in the direction in which we slide. Suzanne will slam on the brakes, causing us to spin like Michelle Kwan. When merging she will check the middle mirror, then lean toward the side mirror, then look back over her shoulder, the window of time she could have used to merge usurped by a big rig or a Miata, either of which would make her gasp, overcorrect, and start the process all over again.

  She flips down the mirror and puts on more lipstick. She’s heavily madeup—her cheeks look like they’ve both been smacked, and her eyelashes are pointed like exclamation points. She has on her fur coat and stiletto boots that could be used to kill whatever animal her coat’s made out of.

  I’m instructed to drive to the rink by the Village. I do as I’m told, waiting for Suzanne to tell me what’s going on, but she’s quiet and on edge for the entire drive, which I assume is due to two back-to-back blows directed at her body mass index.

  I pull into the parking lot. “What is this again?” I ask.

  “After-School All-Stars,” she says. “Raises money for their after school enrichment. Keeps them off drugs. I don’t know. I’m sick of kids. We’re always doing things for them, and they’re fine. Perfectly content with a spoon and a pan. Like MacGyver. Give them a twig, give them a marble, they’re all set. That’s how Morgan was.”

  This isn’t how I recall Morgan being at all. She had a playroom packed with gorgeous wooden toys, Barbie cars, kitchen sets, doll houses, then later, a playhouse, a playground set, an art room, a trampoline. Give her a twig and a marble and she’d pitch a fit.

  I look for a parking spot. “And you want to see this game because . . .”

  “I want to support the cause,” she says.

  “Don’t you need a ticket?”

  I drive alongside kids walking toward the ice and remember taking Cully to a few hockey games, buying him a huge foam finger and endless cups of hot chocolate.

  “I wonder if Dickie’s here?” Suzanne asks.

  And now it becomes clear. “Please, Suzanne. He’s obviously here. And that’s why we’re here.” Why didn’t this dawn on me before? I find a parking spot far away from the action, but I can see the rink and well-dressed people pretending to enjoy the game. “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” she says. “I got that text from Mirabelle. She said he was here and that he looked different. She used an emoticon that winked.”

  “Well then.”

  I have a feeling that we’re not going to get out of the car for a while. She flips the visor down to look into the mirror again, turning her head to the side, then she snaps it shut.

  “Can we move up so we can see?” she asks. She moves in her seat as if propelling the car forward.

  I reverse out of the spot.

  “I doubt there’s parking up there.”

  “We don’t have to park. I just want to see if he’s even here. I don’t want to get out.”

  I drive to the front, knowing I can’t say anything. I had to come. I had to drive, and now I have to move. I owe her, not just for her help with Cully’s room, but also for this period in my life. I’ve been in the spotlight for too long. Bad things happen to other people too—it’s her time to shine.

  I stop and turn off the engine and headlights, and hear a voice on the sound system saying, “He got it! Holzman did it again!” The outdoor speakers begin to play something I recognize but can’t name. I watch a kid speed down the center of the rink with his stick in the air.

  “This is nice,” I say. “So the kids playing are the ones who benefit from the program?”

  “Yeah,” Suzanne says, scanning the people. She is clearly not interested. “It’s not a full-length game. Just an example of where the money’s going. After this they’ll get shuttled to One Ski Hill for dinner.”

  A group of teenagers come out of the indoor rink, trying to see what’s going on. “I feel so old,” I say. “Look at these kids. None of them are wearing jackets. It’s uncool now,” I say, as if I know. “Warmth is uncool.”

  I think of Cully with his baggy pants and sullen caps. I loved his pants. How slack they were. For some reason they put me at ease. Morgan never felt like a Breckenridge kid. She hated skiing, hated the way goggles made her look. Hated the snow, the layers they demanded. When we all went out together we’d have to walk slowly to restaurants while she teetered on heels.

  Suzanne starts to text someone. The kids are doing the same thing. Boys and girls, some with their arms draped over one another, the majority of them talking or texting or just staring at their phones. Do they ever talk person to person, or just when they’re apart from one another? I should say to Suzanne, Go away so I can talk to you.

  A girl with short brown hair, angled asymmetrically with ends like lightning bolts, walks in the other direction, pulling a backpack on what looks like all-terrain wheels. Suzanne lights a joint.

  “Oh my God,” I say. �
�Don’t do that now.” I look out the back window and duck a bit in my seat. “What if we got caught?” I imagine Katie reporting it on the news or the incident being written up in the Summit Daily police blotter, next to all the bike thefts.

  Suzanne holds it in front of me. I automatically shake my head, but then think Why not? and take a prissy little drag, then one that’s a bit meatier.

  “That a girl,” she says.

  “Wait,” I say. “Is this what I gave you?”

  “No, it’s my own. This is the good shit.”

  “Where do you get it anyway?” I ask, and hand it back, look around to make sure no one can see us. This is so bizarre.

  “From my yard guy,” she says.

  “Pablo?”

  “No, that’s the yard yard guy. Leaf blowing and whatnot. I get this from Brian. He does more yard design. He’s really into plants and soil. Like, he talks to the plants and shit.”

  She extinguishes the joint on the sole of her boot. “That’s all. Just a refresher. Why, you want to buy some?”

  “No, I don’t want to buy any, I was just wondering how one even goes about buying this at our age and you know, with our lifestyle.”

  “You wouldn’t believe how easy it is,” she says. “It will be legal here real soon. Mark my words.”