There was no moon, and the snowcat’s lights cast a wide circumference as Tara U-turned and rumbled down Sunset Ridge. I blinked at the image of me snowshoeing here that day, Hawking’s book playing in my head, and then at me returning the next day, with a breathing piece of time.
“They still have me front-side, after what happened at Sapphire East,” she said.
We rendezvoused with two other snowcats, and in staggered formation groomed upper Pride and the runs next to it. The cat’s rumble was a comforting rhythm, its motion like being rocked in a cradle. Time seemed to stand still, but when I glanced at the clock in the dash, two hours had passed in this otherworldly space. Then this weird thing happened: that lit circumference + the dark void = a tunnel to my future. Down that tunnel, I watched a movie of myself in that driver’s seat, grim-faced, determined, and steering into the dark.
Thing was, Hawking’s narrator kept playing as its soundtack, and Cairn’s equation kept scrawling against the lit snow.
“Briggs tells me you might want to drive a cat someday,” Tara said, breaking our silence. She snorted. “School’s not your thing, eh? I went to a school with nuns.”
I looked at her then.
“Yep, me and the sisters. I was wild, and my parents, desperate, sent me to them, hoping God would straighten me out.” She laughed. “It didn’t work. You know what finally worked? This.” She gestured beyond the windshield with her hand. “I’m addicted. It’s like I enter another world, eh?”
I felt lulled, and something about her words struck a chord in me. Before I knew it, I’d said, “Eh.”
The snowcat crested the run, Tara turned left, and a flash of movement at the forest’s edge sped my pulse. Moments later, Emerald West lodge’s outlines came into view. As we drew nearer, Tara sucked air through her teeth. One of the first-floor windows was shattered.
“I’m a magnet,” she said, and I suspected she was, in a way. She lifted the radio from the dash and called in the vandalism but kept rolling past the lodge.
“I’m forbidden to get out of the cat,” she said to my panicked look. “Besides, I need to get you home. Briggs’ll have heard about this and he’ll be worried sick.” The cat rocked a little, and Tara glanced in the rearview mirror, then the sideview ones. She looked at me and shrugged.
I shrugged back, hoping she couldn’t see the red climbing my neck. A snowmobile’s headlights appeared, like a star in the distance. It neared and Tara braked the cat.
“Tell Sov to go inside and keep the cabin door locked!” Dad shouted over the vehicles’ idling engines.
“You hear that?” Tara said, and I nodded. We idled there for a minute more as she watched Dad speed down Sunset Ridge.
She pulled up next to the cabin. I climbed out and waved from the deck as her snowcat lugged away.
Súmáí swung under the railing and onto its far side. My face must have been ghostly, because he stepped toward me like he thought I was afraid. “Sovern?”
I was at him in two strides, but the expression on his face stopped me from hugging him. He wore the liftie uniform, moccasins, and Dad’s hat, though the way he stood there, watching me … he wasn’t yet my Súmáí.
I inhaled his familiar scent and looked into his face. His brow furrowed at my strong emotion.
The wind kicked up and hurled ice bits. Our hair swirled, and his blew across my face. I longed to catch a chunk and put it in my mouth. He noticed my short hair and frowned at it.
I took his hand, went to the door, and keyed in the code. He followed me in and prowled around, ensuring the place was safe. He glanced into the dark bedroom while I loaded a bagel in the toaster, found the bag of little slices of butter in white paper that Dad and I always heisted from the lodge instead of buying sticks, and ran two glasses of water. I spread the butter on the bagel thick, the way I knew Súmáí liked it. I set the bagel on the table as he stood by the front window, keeping watch.
I sat down. Súmáí joined me and touched a daisy in the bouquet Wash had bought for the table’s center. I gestured toward the food. He shook his head, no doubt remembering the brownie, chips, and hot cocoa. But I knew now how hunger clung to you in his world, so I held the bagel up to him. He took it, sniffed it, and bit in. He ate the whole thing in seconds. I scooted the plate to him, and he finished the other half.
I toasted another bagel, careful to make sure he could see the bag. I brought the butter to the table and made a show of peeling off the paper and slathering it on. I had a brainstorm and grabbed a salt packet too and sprinkled it on top. He ate that second bagel and downed the water. I watched his Adam’s apple rise and fall.
I got some beef jerky and bit it. I handed a piece to Súmáí. He smelled it, took a bite, and pulled a face. Cow tasted miles different from deer and elk. He pointed at me, then the jerky, and mimed shooting an arrow. I laughed desperately at the irony. Then the memories of how much he loved my accuracy with my bow, and of him tackling me in the grass, disintegrated my composure. Before I realized it, I’d taken his hand. I stroked the bones across its back. I turned it over and felt his pulse.
His brow furrowed. I was wearing a V-neck blouse Mom had bought me ages ago, and his eyes glued to my scar necklace. I nodded and lifted my chin. He scooted his chair close and sipped air as he traced the holes.
I leaned across the table, took a lock of his hair, and put it in my mouth, relishing its silky texture. His eyes said Too fast! and then darted from my hair to my scars. The distant whine of an approaching snowmobile surrounded us. He moved toward the door.
I followed him onto the deck, wanting to tell him everything in Spanish, but I sensed that would alter, maybe even rob us of, the time we’d had in his world. Instead, I pointed from his chest to mine. I crossed my fingers. He cocked his head and crossed his.
He started to leave but turned back and studied me. I pressed my lips to keep silent, but then I couldn’t stop myself: I hugged him. I counted—one, two, three, four, five—before his arms lowered and he held me loosely.
The snowmobile grew loud, and he pulled back, squinting at me. I kissed his jawbone and that little V appeared between his brows. He swung beneath the rail and jogged across the snow. When he arrived at the forest’s edge, close to where my boogieman had stood, he turned, waved, and then disappeared.
The snowmobile rounded the pines, and I blocked its headlights with my palm. Dad and Wash dismounted wearily and trudged onto the stairs. Dad saw me and paused.
“We were fine,” Wash said. He walked past me into the cabin and collapsed on the couch. “They didn’t even steal anything this time. I’m zonked.”
I never slept that night. After Dad and Wash started a snoring symphony, I returned to the front window and peered out through the ice blooms till dawn. When Dad roused, I went into the bathroom and flushed the toilet so he’d think I’d just gotten up. It didn’t work.
“You sit by that window all night?”
I opened the covers and slid into my too-soft bed. Dad sat on its edge. My hand beneath the blanket made a little nub, and he studied it. “Sovern, don’t shut me out. I can’t take this anymore.” The expression on his face just about killed me.
“That liftie who helped us to the gondola that night …
Súmáí ? After I showed you how the trees worked … He was my … ” My relationship with Gage would be nothing compared to what I was about to tell him.
At first Dad’s face filled with relief at my talking, but his gaze sharpened as he heard what I said. I forced myself not to look away.
“He’s not from here. Well, he’s from here, 136 years ago.” I lost my momentum, and my mind seemed to scramble for footing in air. “I killed him! I killed seven guys, plus him, plus probably his whole village!” I covered my face and started keening.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Dad grabbed his phone from the nightstand. I wiped my tears and runny nose with the
back of my hand.
“Tucker, I’m going to be late.” He hung up and let out a huge sigh. “Start from the beginning.”
A knock rattled the bedroom door and Wash peeked in. Dad nodded, so Wash lay down in Dad’s bed, making a show of getting comfy beneath the covers to dispel the tension. I glanced at him and he made that not-smile, the left side of his lip curling up while his left eyebrow pressed down. I smiled despite myself, and Súmáí describing a smile like this rose in my memory: He made me laugh. I thought how Wash had no family, thought of Túwámúpǘch and the baby. I rocked.
Dad squeezed my hand. “Sovern?”
I was subjecting Dad to a slow death. I couldn’t kill anyone else. “I first met Súmáí at the spruce where I had my accident.”
“Súmáí?” Wash said.
Dad held out his hand, gesturing patience.
“It was the third time I’d traveled through the trees. The first time was a fluke. I fell, and when I touched that spruce getting up, it was late spring and there was Mom. The second time, I just had to know if the first was real.” I looked hard at Dad. “Can you blame me?”
He pressed his lips tight and glanced at Wash, who was pushing back the covers and sitting up.
“With that spruce that fell in front of us on Pride, and me crashing into a spruce in Shangri-La—”
“Shangri-La?” Wash said.
Dad waved away his question again, so I went on.
“I was curious, so I snowshoed over to check it out. Except
this time, when I put my hand on it, there was Súmáí.” I laughed and could hear my hysterical edge. “He was as shocked as me. See, he’d been traveling through the trees for … well, I’m not sure how long before me. He’d gotten quills in his cheek too.”
I paused to gather my thoughts. Dad’s mouth was set. Wash’s hung open.
“The next time, I still wanted to find Mom.”
I told them everything. About Mom and little-me on that blanket, about finding the Always spruce, about living with Súmáí’s people. When I said that Mom had been a bear, that she’d given me the scars, Dad studied the ones that showed above the loose neck of my T-shirt, but then he held up his hand and said, “No more about her.” Wash kept interrupting like he couldn’t get his head around it, holding out his hands like really?
I looked between Dad and Wash and tried to sound confident as I said, “He’s been traveling here to feed his people. They’re starving. Or they were, or they are. It’s hard to explain. They’re the last Utes in these mountains!”
Dad said carefully, “Are you talking about the vandalism?”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“Why doesn’t he ever steal any meat?” Wash said.
Dad usually never lost his cool, but he did then. “Wash, shut up!” He looked at me. “Go on.”
“I ended up back here because we were discovered by whites. They attacked. Súmáí … died.”
“That was his blood?” Dad said.
I looked at my lap and nodded.
“I asked you not to go there anym—”
“I know!” I buried my face in my hands. “I know. I know. I should have listened. I killed them all!”
“Killed them?” Dad said, like I had it wrong. “There was just a vandal here. That was Súmáí, right?”
I opened my mouth to argue, but then what Dad and I were actually disputing hit me: whether a Ute from 136 years ago had been here or not. The long night added up, and hysteria took me completely. I couldn’t stop laughing. Dad and Wash glanced at each other.
“Sovern,” Dad said, like gather yourself.
I tried to stop, really. I just couldn’t. And then the meaning of that movie at the end of last night’s snowcat-tunnel dawned on me: You could change the world.
Whether I liked it or not, Shelley Millhouse had already helped me.
“What?” Dad and Wash said at the same moment.
I reached out and touched the point in the air where their voices’ waves would have overlapped. That point had existed for one moment and was gone, like the point I’d imagined for Súmáí and me together in his world.
I spoke, trancelike. “Time is so much more than one line. It moves from past to present to future, yes, but also in every direction imaginable. There’s multiple universes, each with a past, present, and future, and they all overlap. A constant living and changing thing.”
Wash was staring, open-mouthed, like a kid in bed hearing a scary story. Dad just watched me.
I looked straight at Dad, pleading. “Remember how you said that spruce falling on Pride saved us? Well, the one from my accident, and that Pride one, and those two whirlwinds—all on February 22, of all days? They more than saved us, Dad. They chose us. Chose me.”
“Sovern, I wake up each morning and blast avalanches, rope off hazards and unsafe sections, do speed checks in traffic areas to avert collisions. I work to keep people from damaging themselves in a world I can see and touch. You’re destroying yourself in worlds I can’t reach. Please, stop!”
I traced my chest’s scars: Bear Necklace, Woman of the Trees. Finally, I understood my name. All the ways I was screwed up comprised me, this Sovern, who needed to travel through those trees. Who needed to seek adrenaline, and Mom, and Súmáí. I, not those other normal Soverns, was meant to figure this out.
Part of my own equation became clear, and I knew I’d say yes to Cairn’s email.
I covered Dad’s hand. “I can’t.”
Wash blew out his breath.
46
I settled onto the deck, leaning against the cabin’s wall, taking in the blue-bird day. Looking out at this world, it was hard to believe all the things that had happened. But then I imagined that sky overlapping an infinity of other skies, an infinity of other lands.
Súmáí had been here again. Had our few meetings been chance or fate? I looked to where I’d seen him when I was five, where he’d stood and waved last night. How many times had he traveled to find the right me in this world? Had his visits ending in vandalism begun as times when he was looking for me? The toll on his body must have been extreme. My body glowed full-time against darkness now, no matter how much salt I choked down. I held out one hand, and it cast a shadow half as dark as my snow boots.
The sound of steps crunched through snow and Dad appeared, wearing just his flannel shirt and uniform pants. His radio was belted at his waist. He walked to the deck’s edge, right across from me, and we were eye level. He still wore an exasperated expression from our talk this morning, but he just said, “Lunch?”
“No thanks.”
I listened to him opening kitchen drawers, running water in the sink, opening a cellophane bag. He came out carrying a glass of ice water and a plate with a sandwich and chips. He sat next to me and set the plate between us, chips close to me, hoping, no doubt, I’d have some. I wasn’t much of an eater lately.
We didn’t talk. I just listened to him chew or gulp.
Dad looked haggard and dark circles hung below his eyes. He reminded me of Chief Úwápaa. They both had their battles for what they believed was right. Chief Úwápaa looked out for the welfare of his people, and Dad looked out for me, but also for all his ski-patrol employees and all the guests schussing through the resort. They struck me as similar, too, in how they held on to ways of seeing the world that would soon be dead. For Chief Úwápaa, it was the Ute way of life that had existed for thousands of years. For Dad, it was his narrow linear perspective that the world before us was all there was, and the rest was magic.
“Wash keeps walking around shaking his head and muttering,” Dad said and took his plate into the kitchen.
As I listened to him clean up, I considered that maybe he and I were doomed. If Dad + me = y, then y = battle. We’d have to learn to love each other anyway.
He came out on the deck. “You don’t
slouch anymore.”
“Remember how Mom used to say we’d kill each other if she wasn’t around?” I said.
“I do.”
“I’m sorry I keep hurting you,” I said.
He tilted his head.
“I’m sorry for the things I’ve done,” I said. “For right now. For the things I’ll do. It’s our equation.”
Dad clamped his lips and sighed out his nose. He squatted beside me, pulled my head close, and kissed my forehead. “Me too.”
Just as he started down the steps, Gage curved around the pines on his snowboard. Dad paused, looked back at me with eyebrows raised, and walked to him. “Hello, Gage.”
“Hey, Mr. Briggs.”
I waited for Dad to say, “Aren’t you supposed to be in school,” but he just nodded to Gage and headed to ski patrol’s headquarters.
Gage turned to me. Under his arm was my parka. I shot to my feet and bounded down the steps.
“How did you get this?”
His face fell. “I thought you’d left it. A sign, you know, after standing me up and not calling for seventeen days.”
Sign, indeed. “Where was it?”
“Next to my back door.” Gage looked at me knowingly. Anyone familiar with him knew he used the back door to access the slopes and village.
I held out my hands and he passed me my parka. I pressed it to my face and smelled a perfume of smoke, yellow grass, and horse. As he unbuckled his board’s bindings, I unzipped my parka’s pocket and pulled out my phone. Dead, of course.
“Is that why you haven’t answered my texts?”
I raced inside and plugged it into its charger. If my Súmáí had died … how could my parka have gotten here?
My mind ran through scenarios. Maybe my Súmáí had come on another visit but was scarred from burns and worried he’d seem hideous to me. Maybe he’d grown old and had been trying to get the parka back to me for years. Or maybe he was giving me a sign, telling me to move on, to make a life with the person he’d become in my time, in this world.
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