“Can you wash yourself?”
I stared at that washcloth. I didn’t want to use it.
“Sov?” Dad finally said. I could hear him struggling to keep control. You could kill a person in a thousand different ways—in self-defense, in revenge, in love.
My sight glanced off him, and I barely forced a nod. He put his hand on my shoulder, all awkward. He started to gather my clothes, and then I did move: I yanked the clothes right from his hands.
Dad looked at me like I was a wild animal, and then he shut the door behind him. Wash’s whisper slid underneath it. “Shite!”
I pushed aside the clear shower curtain and stepped in. Hot water felt ridiculously good, yet also like a betrayal, a decadent lie. Pink rushed past my feet toward the drain, and I heard Súmáí say my name. I felt his eyes on me that last instant and his legs beneath mine. I fell to my knees.
After a while, I wet the washcloth. I took the bar of soap, its Ivory scent releasing, conjuring the moment I’d sighted the soldiers down my arrow’s shaft. The soap banged against the tub’s bottom.
I squeezed my honeysuckle-scented shampoo into the washcloth, held it to my nose, and inhaled. I scrubbed. And scrubbed. Inside my belly button, Súmáí’s blood had pooled and dried. I left that.
Bookmark:
Albert Einstein
“God does not throw dice.”
43
I sat on the deck and leaned against the cabin’s wall, letting the sun drench me and rubbing my thumb over my amulet bag. Súmáí’s blood had dyed it red. The way it rested against my chest was a comfort. Warm March days had always been my favorite, but I strained to feel pleasure. Time was, Mom would have had some comfy patio chairs for us out here. But Mom was dead, and I wasn’t Mom.
I ran my tongue over my teeth. After Mom, I’d chosen not to talk to seal in the sound of her pulse in my memory and to save anyone else from being hurt by my words. Now I tried like hell to talk, but my mouth just would not speak. For the last five days, Dad had pleaded, “Please, Sov, tell me what happened,” but I could not make myself respond.
A snowmobile drew close and loud. Which of the guys was checking on me this time? One stopped by every hour. Mostly, I was sitting out here no matter the weather. This was where I’d first seen Súmáí, and inside the cabin felt confining. I scanned the clearing, waiting for the snowmobile to appear, wondering if Dad had inserted Visit Sovern on the schedule.
But really, I was lucky. Crispy would arrive bearing a constant supply of baked goods. Big John would just sit with me, his hulking presence a comfort as he told stories of what his sons had done. Even Tucker visited, never sitting, but saying hey. He wasn’t so good at improvising with a mute, and he usually left pretty quick. Tara stopped by, her black eye healed to a faint purple swoosh, and her forehead’s cut to a short red line. She had no problem with silence. We’d just sit and she’d pat my leg before leaving. One day, Sarge even made it over from Sapphire East. He’d sat in one of the leather chairs, not mentioning how he’d found me blood-soaked and hugging that charred trunk, how I’d fled from him. Instead, he talked about the trip he and his wife would take to the Mexican Riviera once the mountain closed. He left with a salute.
I couldn’t get my head around turquoise waves and white sand. I lived for Upward Dog spruce, yet couldn’t even consider laying a palm on one. To only be able to look at a world and not take my hand from a trunk seemed so limiting now. And to return to Súmáí’s world? I couldn’t do it. Me + anyone I loved = disaster.
Wash had slept in the cabin every night, leaving two hours after Dad. Mornings, he’d grin at me and say, “Man, all this beauty rest. Any lady crossing my path is toast!”
At least someone was sleeping. My bed was too soft and the room stifling. I hung my bow and arrow on the log wall over my bed, and I’d stare at it for hours, listening to how Dad’s breathing was so different from Súmáí’s. That difference seemed to mock me, hour after dark hour. Always, there was the distant hum of tires on asphalt and jet engines in the sky. Combined with snowcats, phones ringing, chairlifts gliding, music playing, and voices, voices, voices. Mostly in English. When I’d hear Spanish, my heart would lurch.
Mornings, I’d wash my face, brush my teeth, and stare at my scar necklace in the mirror like it held an answer. But no answer came. It was assurance, though, that none of it had been a dream.
One morning, I took the kitchen shears and, with no regard for symmetry, cut my hair the same length as Túwámúpǘch’s. When Dad saw it, I thought he was going to cry. Wash guided me to the bathroom mirror, shaking his head and saying “Shite!” He tried to repair what I’d done.
A snowmobile appeared around the pines’ edge. Wash drove, and behind him sat a guy in an orange down coat, sunglasses, loafers, and chinos. Wash bounded off the snowmobile and up the steps. “Got company, Sov.”
The man stepped onto the porch and pulled off his sunglasses. It was Handler. I braced.
“Morning, Sovern.” His voice yanked me toward this world’s reality. I trained my gaze on Phantom Peak.
“I’ll leave you to it,” Wash said. “When you’re finished, just head over to ski patrol, on the first floor of the lodge there.” He pointed the direction of headquarters.
“Thank you, Mr. Washington,” Handler said.
“Mis-ter Washington? That’s my father. Call me Wash.” He grinned in that crazy way, making me smile a little.
Handler chuckled. “Wash.”
Wash bounded off the deck, hopped on the snowmobile, and drove away. When quiet returned, Handler strolled to the wall and leaned against it, hands in his chino’s pockets.
“I’ve always liked these sparkling spring days. They seem to hold hope.”
Silence.
“I hear you’re not talking again. Don’t feel like I came to make you talk. I didn’t.” He settled on the deck beside me. “I came to check on you.”
He rested his elbows on his knees and clasped his hands together. “I’d hate to see you lose credits this semester. Prolong your high school experience, what with how you love it and all.”
I snorted.
“I’ve talked to your teachers. If you’ll email them, you can get your missing assignments and keep up while you’re at home.” He scanned around to see what home was. “My only concern is Spanish.”
I loosed a silent laugh. Handler watched me. He shrugged off his coat and laid it beside him.
“Also, I had an email from a scientist—Cairn Hart, at MIT. Apparently you met her here, on the lift?” He had my full attention now. “She wrote that you helped with her research, and she wonders if you might be interested in a summer internship.” He held my gaze and nodded. “Apparently she tracked me down because she’s worried she doesn’t have your email right. You haven’t responded to her email, maybe?”
I hadn’t even been able to look at my computer, let alone turn it on. Doing that would somehow wipe out the close sense I still had of Súmáí. Yet this news altered the light, and I felt pulled between two selves.
“I’ve seen a lot of sharp students in my day,” Handler said. “Some buy into school and some don’t. But I’ve never had an honor like this come along for anyone, let alone a junior. Your mother would be so proud.”
He looked out across Gold Bowl to Phantom Peak, and for a while we sat in silence.
He inhaled deep. “It smells so fresh up here. Must be a nice feeling, knowing this is home.” He took another breath and let it out. “Well, back to work.”
He rose. On his red golf shirt was the logo of a tomahawk. He strolled down the steps and across the groomed space to the right, his parka held against his hip.
I closed my eyes, and my zombie brain sparked toward solving Cairn’s equation.
Bookmark:
Niels Bohr
“Einstein, stop telling God what to do.”
&
nbsp; 44
Handler’s visit left me straddling two worlds, two selves. Cairn’s equation whispered in my mind while the rhythm of Súmáí’s pulse echoed against my lips. My need to seek Mom had calmed in Súmáí’s world, yet here it felt like hollowness. In its space, that scout’s voice rasped And? You? over and over, like a summoning drum.
After three days, I realized I had to merge those selves or go mad. First, though, I needed to see my world. I needed to confirm that Súmáí’s lay in its past. I needed to see how it felt to exist here with that knowledge. Snowboarding was the most efficient way to accomplish this.
My parka was gone, my phone in its pocket, so I zipped on my light Nordic skiing jacket, slid into my exercise tights—my snowboard pants had been banished to the lodge’s dumpster—and grabbed my snowboard. I walked through a bright March afternoon to the beginning of Always, ratcheted down my bindings, and took off, retracing my route from the day I’d discovered the spruce. My heart lightened at gliding, yet also grew heavy with how frivolous it seemed.
The powder snow of a week ago lay beneath three more storms. At the Always spruce, I peered up, and the porcupine in its branches made my pulse lurch. I scanned around and found the spot in the forest across the clearing where the Mom-bear had emerged. My sight traced where my hand had circled the spruce’s trunk, and I felt how sure I’d been that I could lift my hand from the bark and disappear. I felt again the surprise gravity beneath my feet, and then Mom’s paws compressing my chest like resuscitation.
At first, I could not find Mom’s slash on the trunk, but then I saw it, worn by years, the spaces between the slashes widened by the spruce’s increased girth. I traced my jacket, beneath which lay my own scars.
I descended to the road, retracing the path Súmáí had led me down, and closed my eyes to recall his nearness. It was a rare uncrowded afternoon, and I made S-turns, moving slowly, watching us walk down in my memory. Passing the spot where I’d clocked him with my head, I blinked back the sensation of that blow, and of waking him in dread and panic. At the road’s last bend, I heard the chairlift. My memory heard the dogs barking and the children shouting and laughing, calling Súmáí!
I steered to the side of the lift’s maze and removed my board. I strode up the adjacent hillside and surveyed the area. Our tepee had stood right where skiers waited on a blue board to load the chair. My vision traced where Chief Úwápaa’s tepee, Súmáí’s uncle’s tepee, Panákwas’s and Mú’ú’nap’s tepees had been, all the tepees in the village. I studied the open area where we’d danced and sung and told stories around the fire.
“Coward,” I whispered to my fear of pressing my hand against a spruce, of trying to return.
I strapped on my board, maneuvered through the lift’s maze, and almost choked as I slid forward, alone, to the blue board. I looked up, to where our tepee’s opening would have revealed sky, and saw the lift’s thick cable coming round. I watched the chair clamp on as it scooped me to sitting. It carried me out of the lifthouse and accelerated, ascending the bowl at fourteen miles per hour. To my right was our aspen grove, where Súmáí’s people assumed we’d married. The chair climbed higher. From this vantage, the sparseness of the trees stunned me. Two charred trunks jutted toward the sky.
At the lift’s summit, I headed down the east side of Gold Bowl and entered Eternity. In the aspen glade, I steered right of the rock I usually launched off and sat where Súmáí had made our bed. I felt his palm against my back, heard myself whisper Too fast! My shorter hair reached only the corner of my mouth, but I tugged a lock there and held it like I used to hold cigarettes. Gray and black chickadees hopped around in the branches above, issuing little squeaks and sending shadows across me. What did they really see? Had they witnessed that night? Had they heard our pulses, or the distant beat of my dance’s drum?
I finally rose, snowboarding along the path Súmáí always led me down, back toward his village. I turned off it early, though, and entered the maze for the lift leading up the ridge between Gold Bowl and Silver Bowl. The maze had only a few people in it, and I rode the lift alone. Gazing west, I relived our first hunting trip, me so sore and huffing along behind. Three months later, bloody, grieving, and weary from pursuing the scout, I’d still outrun Sarge easily. I’d sat for the last eight days, yet my limbs still held the fitness Súmáí’s world had forced into me. That, my bow, and my scar necklace were the proof I clung to. Proof I wasn’t insane.
I wished I hadn’t left my phone behind. That picture I took of Súmáí would have given me another scrap of him. Maybe it had captured a bit of his spirit after all. I looked down and right, estimating where we’d crossed this ridge while pursuing the scout.
At the lift’s top, I peered in the lifthouse’s window and raised my hand in a wave to the giant, shaggy-haired guy working there. Against the wall behind him, inside, leaned his beast of a board. “Towéiyak,” I said.
I glided as far as I could from the lift and removed my board, to walk across windswept Big Ridge to Sapphire East lodge. At the lodge, I strapped my board back on and glided down the road, keeping my gaze on the cliffs. At their eastern edge, I stood right where I’d shot the arrow that killed the scout.
And? You? His words would not stop repeating in my head, a relentless beat.
I gulped the warm March air and made for that solitary spruce’s charred trunk. I kneeled on the perfectly groomed snow and studied its twisted gray and black, the only remnant of a tree left in this whole upper part of Silver Bowl. I felt myself frantically hauling Súmáí to it, the hot wet of his blood. I flinched as I set him down too hard. Body vibrating, he said my name, and his eyes latched onto mine. His hair yanked from my lips.
I pulled off my glove and stared at my palm, squinting to discern flame in my life line. I had ignited that spruce by not heeding Súmáí’s warning. I couldn’t have known the tree would burst into flame, yet he’d warned me, and I’d stubbornly ignored him. And by igniting that spruce, I’d lit the grove of pines and started that long-ago fire that burned the back bowls.
I scanned Silver Bowl, now scoured of trees. A wide corduroy plain. White gold.
Cairn’s equation appeared across that white, in thick black numbers and symbols. I pressed my palm hard against my forehead, willing the battle within it to calm. Instead, I heard the spruce ignite. Loosing a growl, I rose and slashed angry turns into the run’s smoothed perfection.
At the bottom, I didn’t take the Silver Bowl lift. Instead I followed a road paralleling the frozen creek back to the chair that ascended the ridge between Silver Bowl and Gold Bowl. As I boarded along the road, I watched for the house-sized boulder by the pool. It appeared, three feet of snow on top, like a slice of cake with a last new layer bulging over its sides like frosting.
The creek was visible only because of its depression. I took off my board and postholed to the edge. Catching my breath, I scanned across the snow-blanket panorama. Einstein had discovered that this was how space-time looked, and the depressions in these contours created gravity. Was this what determined fate? Imprints like this creek across the fabric of time?
I navigated along the bank till I stood above the pool and crossed, imagining the three stones under my feet as I’d rushed to help Mom. Eight days ago I’d been in that world. Eight days and 136 years. I paused, head down and afraid. Seeing Súmáí’s drawing on the rock, knowing I could not travel through the spruce anymore, would transform him from that pulse against my lips to dead. “Courage,” I said, to calm my own loud pulse. I waded through the snow to the boulder’s far side.
There we were, edges weathered. Me in my deerskin pants, shirt, and necklace. The knot of our hands leading to Súmáí. Bows over our shoulders. Mom-bear beside me. The spruce beside him. The rising bird between us. I sobbed and laughed and pressed my forehead against Súmáí’s figure, as hard as I remembered him pressing the rock with that elk bone.
“Wife,” I
said.
After a time, skiers glided past, voices loud. I pulled back, wiping my face with my sleeve before I realized they couldn’t see me. I’d always have this drawing, at least. This, above all else, proved I wasn’t insane.
I started back toward my board, arms out for balance as I retraced my deep steps. I looked at the opposite bank, where I’d sewn Mom’s wound, prepared to face the guilt of the miners.
I froze. The entire stand of trees that had existed there was gone. Frantic, I peered down the valley. One charred trunk, like a sentry, was all that remained. How could I not have realized this before?
And? You?
The relentless beat of that scout’s voice became clear. Not only had I started the fire—that was awful enough—but I’d also burned Súmáí’s village. Me + anyone I loved = disaster.
Bookmark:
Stephen Hawking
“Not only does God play dice, but …
he sometimes throws them
where they cannot be seen.”
45
Grief has no equation. It’s just the negative value of what you’ve lost. Tears are proportional. If you can’t cry, they mass, crowding more and more space inside your heart till it’s a hard hot place. Cry too much and it sucks your heart emptier and emptier till there’s nothing but vastness. When Mom died, I couldn’t cry. Crying would have meant she was dead. In Súmáí’s world, I’d come to accept death, and now I cried nonstop.
Worry lines creased Dad’s face. He, Wash, or one of the guys stayed with me full time. A bunch of mother hens. None of it mattered. Nothing mattered. Till after a week, Tara showed up.
“About time we had that ride,” she said, and she led me to her snowcat.
I climbed in and shut the door.
“Buckle up,” she said.
Our eyes met, and she took a good long look at my pain. “I’m a woman used to silence, eh?” She chunked the snowcat into gear.
Life at the Speed of Us Page 25