Life at the Speed of Us

by Heather Sappenfield

  Dad was always out early to check snow safety. If there was accumulation, or if the night wind had howled, he’d be dynamiting cornices or avalanche areas. We’d hear the distant booms and I’d say, Daddy. Dad read snow like other people read the newspaper.

  Evenings were golden. The lifts closed. The patrollers finished sweep. The only humans were us and maybe Wash. Tara would usually stop by. Mom would fill her travel mug with coffee before she rumbled away in her snowcat, headed on her nightly journeys. Deer, elk, fox, ermine, lynx, mountain lion, and bear would emerge.

  Summers were best, though. We’d see only the occasional hikers or mountain bikers, but even they weren’t around till the Fourth of July. Forest Service closures for elk calving kept Crystal Mountain’s outer reaches off-limits till then, so the action stayed at Emerald West and front-side.

  One lazy summer afternoon, a moose strolled right past the cabin’s deck. Dad and Mom sat in comfy patio chairs, listening to insects buzz while I colored with markers between them. I was at Dad’s chair in a second, and we froze, Dad’s hand firm against my hip.

  “He’s a long way from marshland,” Mom said.

  “He’s headed to Secret Lake,” Dad said.

  Secret Lake was a retention pond just down the ridge that held water for snowmaking. There, Dad taught me to skip rocks. He was an amazing rock skipper, and he taught me to lean and cock back my arm, flick my wrist last for extra momentum. I got pretty good but could never match Dad’s forty-six skips along that mirrored surface, the rock stopping just shy of the pond’s far edge. I used to love to watch the rings of those skips merge, forming a new wave pattern till it rolled against the shore. Even then, patterns whispered to me.

  Another time, Dad reclined in a patio chair and I reclined against him, watching twilight gild Phantom Peak while Mom sizzled something oniony on the stove. She called, “Watch for the first star!” just as a rangy scrap of gray streaked between the patches of late-spring snow in the open stretch in front of the pines. Dad and I shot forward, peering.

  “Wolf!” Dad said. “I’d swear it.” He wrapped protective arms around me and leaned back.

  Every night, coyotes would yip in the dark. Some nights, we’d hear the mewl of a mountain lion. Or the similar mewling bark of a bear cub, and a mothering grunt. Foxes made a coughing noise. In fall, elk called for mates in squeaking threads that rode the crisp air. We never heard the raccoons, but they wreaked havoc if we left anything out, and porcupines consumed shoes, coats, helmets—anything with salt from sweat. Skunks we avoided by smell.

  And then once, as Mom ran in for a snack, I spied a guy standing at the forest’s edge with long black hair and a sleeveless deerskin shirt, pants, and moccasins. A bow was slung over his shoulder, and a knife rode his hip. I was playing with a kitty camp I’d gotten for my fifth birthday. I rose on pudgy legs. Yearning filled his face. Yearning for me. I backed toward the door, saying, “Momma?” Mom came out carrying a plate of cheese and crackers, and the guy vanished into the trees.

  “What, Sov?”

  I pointed. “Ute!”

  “Ute?” She scanned where I pointed. “There aren’t Utes here anymore, silly.”

  My chin quivered.

  “Come here and have a snack. Should we read our book about Utes before our nap?”

  I nodded and sniffled, but my boogieman had taken root. Sometimes, I dreamed about him, and I’d wake screaming. In them, he watched me from anywhere forests edged my life.

  Calves, fawns, cubs, me—all us babies in heaven. Mom gave me one extra year. Then I turned six, and school’s predatory world yanked me from those clouds and into a living nightmare.

  4

  I limped from Wash’s geriatric truck to our condo’s garage door, still groggy from a night in the hospital. My arm’s humerus bone had a compound fracture, three of my ribs were cracked, and my cheek was shiny with antibiotic cream. They’d had to put me under to extract those quills. In my parka’s pocket was a urine-sample cup holding all eighteen. They were long as my index finger, black on one end, white on the other. Each had two dashes of white with black in-between, like some kind of code.

  My arm was immobilized in a brace, plus a sling made of two wide straps that connected to my wrist. You’d think that big arm bone would command my attention, but those ribs didn’t play fair. Every tiny movement, every breath, translated as not one, not two, but three stabs of pain.

  Wash, baseball cap backward like always, pressed our code into the keypad next to the garage door. His name was actually Darragh Washington, but nobody could ever pronounce his Irish first name, so everyone called him Wash. His other hand balanced a foil-covered plate of cookies from Crispy.

  Dad stood behind him, right wrist in a cast. Tuesdays were his day off. Lucky timing, I guess. Dad never took sick days—hadn’t taken one since Mom died, and none for as long as I could remember before that. Now he squinted down the row of repeating condo garage doors, harsh and bright in the morning light. Side-by-side everything. Outside and in. Horizontal and perpendicular as graph paper. My prison.

  Dad, Wash, and I entered the laundry/mud room from the garage. A long hall to the front door ran along the wall inside. This hall led to the kitchen too, then to the dining room, and finally to the family room with its bank of sliding glass doors and a stubby deck that overlooked narrow Pearl Creek on its burbling path to Crystal Creek. I salivated to duck back there and smoke.

  Our dining room table and chairs were the cabin ones. Till Mom died, fresh flowers always colored their center. Pots and pans hung from an iron rack above the breakfast bar between the kitchen and dining room. Mom had haggled the lot from a garage sale, but it was really nice.

  Upstairs was another corridor. My bedroom and bath, then Mom and Dad’s. Their room looked out on the creek and tourist condos beyond. My bedroom looked across half the garage’s roof, a few hundred yards to the next mountain, scraggy with sage.

  This was Affordable Housing. Put up by Crystal Village to keep real working folks living in town. It was where we’d moved when I’d turned six, so I could get to school easy. I called it “the Condo.” Never “home.” When Mom lived, we were a two-ski-patrol family, always scraping by. A year ago, we’d become a one-ski-patrol family.

  Even so, Mom had made the Condo comfy. A few years back, the Facet, Crystal Village’s priciest hotel, had remodeled. Our hotels remodel about every ten years, Crystal Village being one of the swankiest resorts in the world. When they do this, they have a furniture sale, and regular folks flock to it. Mom bought an emerald-green velvet couch, leather armchairs, and a coffee table. She also bought my pine bedroom set.

  Dad eased his strained back into an armchair. I settled on the couch and itched to turn on a movie. Mom had rarely allowed TV or movies, but in her void, they’d become my third addiction. Gage, cigarettes, movies—each an escape. Wash set the cookies on the counter, opened the fridge, and peered inside.

  “This is sorrier than mine!” He pulled out something mold-blue in Tupperware and tossed it in the trash. “Looks like I’m headed to City Market. Any requests?” He opened the cookies and held them out to Dad and me. We shook our heads. He took one, bit in, and studied it, chewing loud. “How does a man who lives to bake burn every damn thing he makes?” He moved behind the couch and looked from Dad to me. “Well, you’re a pitiful lot.”

  I remembered my wail, saw the agony I’d put in Dad’s face. How he’d stared at Phantom Peak. That loneliness—just snowscape and me—swept in.

  Dad webbed his hand across his face, ran his middle finger and thumb from the outsides of his eyes in, till they met at his nose. “You’re a good man, Wash.”

  Wash snorted. “Tell that to the ladies.” He had this expression where the left side of his top lip curled up, creasing his cheek, while his left brow pressed way down. Even in the roughest times, it cracked me up.

  Dad and I smi
led. Wash must’ve said that a million times, yet he’d never gone on a date that I could recall. It was as if our ski-patrol family was enough. It wasn’t like he was ugly. He had a shrubby head of dust-brown hair seasoned gray, a twinkling gaze, constant stubble on his cheeks, and a smile that invited company. His features seemed squashed, as if someone had pressed on his head and chin, compressing things about an inch. It made his smile seem extra-wide. I thought it improved him.

  “Later,” Wash said, keys jangling. We listened to the garage door clank down. I pictured our garage, empty but for bikes, skis, snowshoes, and camping gear. Once, we’d employed that gear every weekend. But then that crunched Honda was towed away and never replaced, and everything stopped.

  What equation represented the Briggs family now? Dad – Mom = x? Me + Dad = y? We were variables, and I couldn’t fathom this simple math.

  Dad and I hadn’t been alone since he’d rested his hand over that nub I’d made in the sled. Now, alone pressed on us. He studied his cast. Pain had taught us habits that needed unlearning. Yesterday had been as low as a person could go. I shoved back the fury that hounded me. My mouth opened, but no sound came.

  “You don’t have to explain, Sov.” He laughed sadly. “Hmm, explain? As if you’ll talk.” He shook his head on a sigh. “I’ve considered ending things myself. Every day.”

  My mouth sagged. Never once that whole hospital night had anyone asked what happened. Least of all Dad. I had to force words. “I just needed speed.”

  Dad tilted his head. His eyebrows rose. “Speed? Well, that’s a relief.” He scrubbed his face with his hands.

  A vast distance seemed to stretch between us, and it felt like if I didn’t do something, it would double, triple, quadruple. I winced on a deep breath and I blurted this noise like a frustrated animal.

  “Sovern?”

  I eased my phone out of my pocket and speed-dialed Wash.

  “’Sup?” Wash’s crappy truck radio played ’80s rock in the background.

  “Get some flowers?” Each word triggered my ribs’ stabs, and I forced myself not to wince for Dad’s sake.

  “That’s my girl,” Wash said. “Any particular kind?”

  “No thorns.”

  Wash’s chuckle always ended high. “Gotcha.”

  I hung up.

  Dad + me = y. Time to start solving for y.

  “I’m sorry about Gage,” I said.

  Dad’s eyebrows rose.

  My gaze fell to my jeans’ frayed knees. Beside me, the couch dipped with Dad’s bulk, and his un-casted hand tugged my shoulder. “Come here, kiddo.”

  He leaned back against the couch’s arm, and I leaned against him. We were like a couple of statues.

  “You could have been killed.” He shook his head, and I thought he was scolding me about what happened in Shangri-

  La till he said, “A tree falling like that, and me losing you.”

  Poor Dad. Our ski down the mountain would be legend in the worst way. He sighed. Something seemed to release within him, and he relaxed. I searched the air for what he’d sighed out. I blew at the thing as if exhaling cigarette smoke, hoping to send it to oblivion. We listened to the fridge whir. The baseboard heater ticked. He spread his left hand on his leg, and I could feel him looking at his silver and turquoise wedding band.

  “How about we work on being us again?” He petted my hair the way he used to when I was a kid, and that just about killed me. I sat up, ran my palm over his crew cut. It resembled the long summer grass in the back bowls as it yielded to the wind.

  He snorted. “Like I said, we haven’t been ourselves.”

  I lay back against him and remembered that porcupine peering from his branch. How he’d transformed to Dad. How I’d pleaded with him to come down. My arm in its sling had settled slightly forward. As I mentally traced that tree’s bruise perimeter along my arm and ribs, I thought I felt a tingling there.

  5

  The wind banged Crystal High’s doors shut behind me. Until I’d started riding here with Gage—using it to make Dad crazy—I’d always walked to school. Despite resembling a giraffe, I loved walking. Craved it, actually. Even in a blizzard.

  I nudged back my hood and shook a tiny bank of snow from my hair. School smelled like four hundred wet jackets and had the unreal sense of shelter that happens when nature rages outside.

  Dr. Bell, the principal, stood before two giant stairs that stretched the entry’s length. The immigrant girls from Mexico or South America, most hauled here so their parents could work as maids or dishwashers or carpenters, huddled on those stairs with tear-striped faces. They still wore their jackets, and snow melted on their shoulders. Dr. Bell spoke slowly to them in mangled Spanish. They definitely had it hard, but they always seemed to have each other as they hung out there, loud with laughter or tears that seemed to press against my silence.

  Crystal Village had so many Spanish-speaking immigrants that my elementary school was bilingual, and I’d emerged fluent. Still, I resented those immigrant girls. In third grade, I’d come to understand that although they arrived in the U.S. stumbling over English, within a year they could read it better than I ever would. Ask me to write it down? No way. Believe me, in this world a person is defined by how well she reads. Can’t read? You must be dumb. Or lazy. Probably both.

  I drifted to the stairs’ far side. Dr. Bell was shorter than half the guys in the school, so maybe he wouldn’t spot me against the wall. We’d seen way too much of each other lately.

  “Sovern!” he called. “Glad you’re back!”

  I only missed one day, I thought and fought an urge to roll my eyes. I swallowed back my nicotine craving and studied the scuffed toes of my wet Converse. Mom would have been all over me for not wearing boots.

  A corridor of banging lockers and shouts waited at the top of the stairs. Freshmen and sophomores were in this first, bustling hall. I always marveled at that, since juniors and seniors, who had their lockers in the secluded back halls, were more likely to snag on mischief. People assessed my sling. Nobody talked to me. No doubt, I’d become the joke of the school after how Gage had broken up with me. Plus, in the last year, I’d earned a dangerous reputation.

  At the Student Union I cut through tables and chairs toward my locker’s hall. Handler, the school counselor, was talking to three wrestlers, coffee mug in hand. He saw me, said bye to the guys, and caught me on the diagonal.

  This time I did roll my eyes.

  “Heard you had a run-in with a tree.” He took a sip.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Handler wore dorky golf shirts with little logos every day. Mom used to be in his office weekly, plotting with him to ensure I had fair opportunities. I’d done testing and all, had dyslexia’s written proof. He’d encouraged her to get me into special education, so I could have “modifications.”

  “I know how that works.” Mom had shaken her head. “Sov’s brilliant. You know that. Once you’re labeled, you’re done.”

  “Times have changed, Taylor,” Handler said.

  Mom looked him straight in the eye. “How many dyslexic doctors or lawyers do you know? They keep their dyslexia a secret.”

  Handler had pressed his hands on his desk and his lips in a line. I stared at the beckoning door, open a crack. Mom would know. Dyslexia was hereditary, and Dad didn’t have it.

  Since she’d died, Handler’d been on me like glue. End of sophomore year, I’d pretty much walked around in a stupor. But in junior year, I’d plummeted, and every time I ditched, he’d text Dad. After a while, I used that to my advantage.

  Come December, Handler had caught me at my locker. “I know what you’re doing, Sovern, and I don’t believe you’re that cruel.”

  I’d started to walk away, even though I hadn’t gotten my books, and he’d stepped in front of me. His gold shirt had the logo of a big-antlered buck with Deer Hollo
w Golf Club embroidered beside it.

  “Life’s dealt you some difficult stuff. Don’t let it beat you. Think of your mom.”

  What do you say to something like that?

  Now he said, “Things okay?” and waved at Bonstuber, who stepped into the hall from his Bio room.

  “Uh-huh.” Left-handed, I opened my locker easy.

  Handler leaned against the lockers next to mine. “How’s your dad?”

  I shrugged. For some reason lying to Handler was hard. Maybe because he’d been Mom’s ally. He knew Dad from tragedies. Once a year, a Crystal High student would have an accident or incident on the mountain. Afterward, Dad, Crystal Mountain Resort bigwigs, the police, and the school hunkered together. They always worried students would flip out and start a bad-behavior epidemic.

  “If you ever need to talk, you know where I am,” Handler said.

  “No problemo.”

  He threw back his head and laughed because I’d actually spoken + I’d tossed Mom’s battle to get me excused from the foreign language requirement right there between us.

  Mom alive, my Spanish grade had been crutched into a C-. Current grade: D-. Like I said, I’m fluent, but I’d hardly talked the last year, so class participation was cero. And writing Spanish down? Not happening.

  Handler patted my shoulder and left.

  I drew out my Spanish folder, slid a pencil behind my ear, slammed shut my locker, and headed, sighing, toward the classroom in the opposite hall. I entered the Student Union. Before a bank of windows with a Crystal Creek view, Gage stood, taller than all the other guys, hands in his jeans pockets. Muscular in a way meant for anything but sitting, he wore his black skullcap like always, his brown hair brushing his shoulders. I stared ahead and forced back the fire in my cheeks as his gaze stalked me.