I looked from the window to my bed and knew there was no way I was going to be able to sleep. Not now anyway. I pulled on my jeans and T-shirt, got into my outdoor stuff and headed down the stairs and out into the night. Then I started to run. I thought maybe if I ran long enough, I’d be able to calm down. I had to. It’s when I get all jazzed up, when I get antsy, that I end up in trouble.
There were a few paths around the chalet, and I ran on them. It was easy to put a circuit together. After that, it was just a matter of keeping my legs going and my breath as even as I could make it, concentrating on that, on my breathing and the rhythm of my legs. Just think about that, Rennie. Don’t think about anything else. Don’t think about things you can’t do anything about.
This was supposed to be the big thing I learned from Pete: Don’t worry about the things you can’t do anything about. Pete said it was a pretty simple idea, right? Well, duh. But it isn’t just simple. It is blindingly obvious. It’s why most people don’t bother to vote, right? It’s why they don’t care about crime in someone else’s neighborhood, but if something bad happens on their street or to someone they know, it is a different ball game. The world runs on people not thinking about the things they figure they can’t do anything about, never mind worrying about them.
So don’t think about Annie, I told myself. Don’t worry about her. She has nothing to do with you.
And then, like a mirage or something, there she was.
I came around the corner and onto a stretch of path that ran parallel to the back of the chalet. I had a perfect view of the massive deck that was an outdoor restaurant during the day. One of the doors opened, and Annie stepped out into the pool of light thrown by the security light, which automatically turned on when someone came within range and stayed lit the whole time they were there. Her apron and yellow gloves were gone. So was the white cap, and she’d let her hair down. Her black hair flowed over her shoulders.
Someone stepped out of the shadows. Derek. Clearly, they’d made up. Clearly, they’d arranged to meet. Annie threw herself into his arms. Derek picked her up and twirled her around. Her laugh was like little bells.
I didn’t feel like running anymore. I stayed in the shadows while I made my way back to the chalet. I didn’t want Derek to see me. He’d never stop teasing me. Or maybe he’d get mad, saying I was stalking Annie or something. I had stepped back into the light when I heard a man’s voice.
“Rennie? Is that you?”
It was Rod. He was standing in a doorway, but the door didn’t lead into the chalet. What I mean is, it wasn’t a door that guests used. Or staff, for that matter, unless they were looking for Rod. It turned out it was the outside door to his office.
He came toward me and took a good look at my face.
“What happened?”
“It was an accident.” That was my story and I was going to stick to it, no matter what, for Annie.
Rod caught my chin in his hand and held it firmly when I tried to twist away.
“Unless I’m mistaken, it looks like you had a run-in with a fist.” He finally let me go, and just in time too, because I started to get that feeling, the one that makes me tense up all over and signals my body to do something, do something now. “Puppy love. It can be a real bitch, am I right? Step inside, son. Let me see what I can do with that before your grandma gets a look at it.”
The very last thing I wanted to do was step anywhere near old Rod. Or listen to him call me son. And I wanted to slug him for calling it puppy love. In the first place, he didn’t know what he was talking about. In the second place, I know what they mean when they say puppy love. They mean it’s cute. It’s childish. Aw, look at that, he’s in love with someone twice his age. Or ten years older. Or four.
They also mean that what you’re feeling isn’t real.
“Trust me, Rennie,” Rod said when I didn’t go inside with him. “You don’t want Melanie to see you like that. She’ll worry.”
If I had to pick the one thing that made me do it, it was that last sentence. The thought of Grandma worrying about me made my stomach churn. It made me feel like I was going to throw up. I’d have done anything to avoid it, even follow Rod into his office.
TWELVE
Rod’s office probably looked terrific during the day, when the light streamed through the windows that ran along two whole sides of it. The other two walls were covered with maps, charts and schedules. Rod turned on his desk lamp and twisted it up so that the light hit me in the face.
“I think I can do something with that,” Rod said after another, shorter examination of my face. “Hang on. I’ll be right back.”
He disappeared through a door, and I heard him rummaging for something. I took a closer look around.
The maps were all of the same area—the Sierras around the chalet. One pinpointed all the ski runs, approved slopes, lifts and other ski resorts. Another was a topographical map that showed the elevations of the land. One map was covered with pushpins of different colors. They indicated places where there had been avalanches, and the different colors were for different years. A tiny strip of paper attached to each pin gave the date the avalanche had occurred. I noticed right away that some areas had seen plenty of avalanches, while in other places avalanches had occurred only once. Rod had it all tracked.
There were plenty of charts too. Staff duty charts, weather charts, planning charts, calendars marked up with different things that I guess Rod wanted to remember and hey, what do you know? A calendar that listed the upcoming avalanche-control blasts—when and where they were scheduled to happen. No wonder Rod was never surprised when a blast went off. He always knew when to expect one, right to the minute. I wondered if he got a kick out of seeing his guests jump when they heard an explosion. I probably would.
“Okay, take a seat, and let me see what I can do.” Rod was back with a small basin, a washcloth that was wrapped around something—half a dozen ice cubes—and a jar of something else.
I sank into a leather armchair with a high back. Rod handed me the basin and the homemade ice pack.
“Hold that there for as long as you can stand it.” He pulled up a chair. “You want to tell me what happened?”
No, I didn’t. So I did what I always do when I don’t want to talk about something. I shrugged and looked down, like I hadn’t heard or didn’t care or both. It drove the Major crazy and usually ended up with him yelling at me even louder than he had to start with. If there was anything that drove him crazy, it was a “who cares?” attitude, and I gave it to him pretty much every day.
Rod wasn’t anything like the Major.
“I guess the real question is, what do you want me to do about it?” he said. “Keep that ice on there, son.”
I prickled at the suggestion that I didn’t know what I was doing.
“I can’t have employees punching guests,” Rod continued. “And I can’t have guests knowing that something like this has happened—no matter how it happened or who did what or who started it.”
Here we go. No matter who did what or who started it. It’s what adults say when they want kids to confess to something, like the answer is black or white, yes or no, like anyone really knows who started it. Was it the kid who said something about the way my mom died? Or who asked an even dumber question, like, Was she flattened? Was it me when everything went black around that kid’s head and my body took over from my brain and I hit him? Was it me because I was the one who begged Mom to take that side trip before we went home? Was it me because I nagged her and nagged her and nagged her?
It’s not your fault. That’s what they said every time I got into trouble because of some dumb kid with a dumb question. Or some jerk with a comment that made me want to knock all his teeth out. It’s not your fault what happened to your mother, Rennie. But you can’t go around hitting people and getting into fights. Because some kids fought back. If you ask me, some of them were picking a fight.
No matter who started it. Yeah, that really made
me want to listen to whatever Rod had to say on the subject of my life.
“I was in love with a girl when I was about your age,” he said. He was in the shadows, so it was hard to get a good look at him. Plus, he kept turning my head away from him so he could see the damage on my jaw. I, of course, had the light aimed right at me. I felt like a prisoner in one of those old cop movies, the ones that used to be in black and white before technology got hold of them. The cops are always in the shadows when they try to wring a confession out of their suspect, and the guy being wrung out is always sitting in blinding light from the only lamp in the room. The heat from the lamp always makes him sweat too. “It was the same situation, which tells me that some things never change. She was a few years older than me. A real beauty—tall and athletic, not one of those prissy girls who never wants to chip her nails or muss her hair.”
Like I said, I couldn’t see his eyes. But I could hear his voice all right, and it was getting softer, and he slowed down a little, like he was enjoying what he was telling me. Or like he was remembering.
“She was nice to me, but in the way a big sister is nice to her kid brother. That’s what I was to her. A kid. Even though, boy, my eyes just about popped out of my head every time I saw her. I was sure it was love.”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t. I get it.” I threw the washcloth and ice into the basin and started to get up.
Rod tossed the jar to me.
“What’s this?” There was no label on it.
“Take it with you. Put some on the bruise. It won’t make it disappear, but it will make it look less serious. You might catch a break with your grandma.”
It was worth a try.
“You want me to tell you who that girl was I had that crush on when I was your age?” Rod asked. He was leaning forward in his chair like he was dying for me to ask.
I shook my head. I didn’t have to ask. I already had a pretty good idea.
THIRTEEN
You’d think a guy who ditched two whole weeks of school to run away to the ski slopes would be relaxed, right? He’d be having a good time. He’d be skiing and hanging out and sleeping as late as he wanted. Right? I know that’s what I imagined when Grandma announced we were going skiing. But I couldn’t sleep. Again. I felt like someone had dialed the world back nineteen months and I was me right after the accident. I couldn’t sleep then either, not without seeing it—one minute we’re cruising along this windy road blasted out of the rock that rises all around us. Mom is driving, and she’s laughing and singing along to the radio. She loves that she decided at the last minute to rent a convertible. I love the feel of the wind in my hair, she says. She says it a couple of times. She knows the Major wouldn’t approve. The Major is always fussing about safety and not taking risks. That means keeping her encased in the best that German engineering has to offer. He doesn’t want her in a convertible any more than he wants her on a motorcycle. She knows it too. She keeps saying, What would your father say? and laughing.
The only constant is change—which means that nothing lasts forever. After one minute, there’s another one. And that next minute changes everything.
Every time I closed my eyes for months after that, I saw it happen again, and every time, I woke up screaming. I felt like that now, only minus the screaming. I’d dozed off in the heavy armchair that I’d dragged over to the window. I’d probably dozed off a couple of times. What not only woke me but got me up out of the chair at dawn was an angry voice. Derek’s angry voice. I had to look out the window. Maybe he and Annie were having a fight. Maybe they were breaking up.
Derek was down there, all right. But he wasn’t yelling at Annie. At first I thought he was mad at the taxi driver, who was standing patiently beside his cab, watching Derek struggle to stuff a massive duffel bag and an equally large ski bag into the trunk and cursing when one fit and the other didn’t. He pulled them both out and tried packing them at different angles. He was swearing and muttering the whole time. I knew because I pushed my window open so I could hear. Between the swearing, he kept saying, “Why didn’t she tell me?”
The taxi driver finally stepped to the trunk and offered his help.
“I can do it,” Derek snapped at him.
“If you want to catch your bus to Denver…” The driver’s voice trailed off.
Denver? Derek was going to Denver? What was going on? Had he and Annie broken up?
But that didn’t make sense, not after what Annie had said yesterday and what I had seen last night. Unless…had Annie agreed to go back to India with her uncle?
Derek stepped aside, gesturing elaborately at the gear he’d been trying to pack into the trunk.
“It’s all yours, pal.”
The taxi driver examined the cases and the available space before stowing the duffel bag effortlessly to one side of the trunk and sliding the ski bag in next to it. It was like watching Cinderella slipping her dainty feet into those glass slippers after her stepsisters had tried and failed to stuff their ugly dogs into them.
Derek looked back at the chalet. I ducked out of sight, but I could hear him just fine when he said, “I’ll show her. I’ll show her if it’s the last thing I do.”
The taxi door slammed, and when I peeked out again, the taxi was turning onto the road for town.
Derek, it seemed, was leaving Annie. But it didn’t feel right.
I don’t remember falling asleep after that. I don’t remember dreaming either, but I must have been, and it must have been a good dream, because when I woke up, the sun was bright in the sky, and I was smiling. I’m not kidding. I could feel it. I had a great big grin on my face.
Then I remembered Derek and the taxi. He’d taken his ski gear with him, and the driver had said Derek had to catch a bus to Denver. Derek was gone. Maybe that’s why I was smiling. But I still didn’t get what had happened, and it still didn’t feel right.
I turned over in bed and saw a note folded into a little tent on the bedside table. It was from Grandma. Rod was taking her for a drive to see the sights, and she hoped I would be able to amuse myself for the day.
I showered, changed and headed downstairs to get something to eat. I’d decided to take a look through that little round window into the kitchen and see how Annie was doing. Was she crying her eyes out over Derek like some girl in a chick flick? Or was she glad he was gone? From what Derek had said, the breakup wasn’t his idea. He was angry with her because she hadn’t told him something. He’d threatened to get even with her. That had to mean Annie had changed her mind and dumped Derek, not the other way around. I hoped it was because she’d realized what a jerk he was. I worried that it was because she had agreed to go back to India with her uncle. But she’d had an argument with Raj too. She’d accused him of lying to her.
Annie wasn’t in the kitchen. She was in the hall outside the kitchen, listening intently to what another woman was saying. The second woman was wearing an apron and a hairnet, so I guessed she worked in the kitchen with Annie. She pressed an envelope into Annie’s hand. Annie frowned and opened it. She unfolded the piece of paper inside, read it and smiled. She tore off her apron, thrust it and her yellow gloves at the other woman and ran down the hall to the back door.
“What do you want me to tell Chef?” the woman called after her.
“Tell him I’m sick. Tell him I’m contagious. Tell him I died. I don’t care. Derek has a surprise for me. He says I have to go and get it right now.” She grinned and disappeared out the back door, leaving the other woman staring after her before casting a fearful look at the kitchen door. She gazed at the ceiling with her eyes closed, as if she was praying, drew in a deep breath and went inside.
I took off after Annie.
She had vanished by the time I burst through the door and into the yard. It had snowed again overnight, but a lot of people had been out already this morning, so the tangle of footprints was of no use to me. I ran up the steps to the deck to get a better view.
I couldn’t see Annie from up ther
e either.
Where was she? What kind of surprise had Derek left for her? Nothing nice, I was sure of that. Not the way he’d been talking a few hours ago. Whatever it was, he wasn’t going to be around to take any blame for it. He was probably halfway to Denver by now.
What I didn’t understand, though, was Annie’s reaction to his note. She’d been happy when she read it. She’d been thrilled. All smiles. She’d been willing to face Chef ’s anger and punishment when she eventually went back to work. She’d raced off to find out what Derek’s surprise was. In other words, she wasn’t acting like someone who had just dumped him. She wasn’t acting like someone who’d been dumped either. I got the same feeling I’d had before. It didn’t feel right.
Then I spotted her. She’d put on her skis and was heading away from the chalet. Away from the main lifts too. Heading out-of-bounds.
Maybe it was Grandma’s influence. Maybe it was what I’d read and heard about the dangers of being out-of-bounds. Or maybe it was just a case of the heebie-jeebies. All I knew was, what didn’t feel right all of a sudden felt very wrong. Look at it, Rennie, I told myself. Add it up.
Derek took off in the middle of the night. He was angry. He swore he would show her even if it was the last thing he did.
The morning after he made his angry exit, Annie wasn’t upset. Just the opposite. She was excited. She was happy. She couldn’t wait to get her surprise from Derek. That meant (a) Annie didn’t know Derek had left for Denver, and (b) she didn’t know he was out to get her. Instead, she was acting like he was waiting for her somewhere so they could elope or something. She didn’t know she might be headed for danger. And the only person I could think of who could warn her was me.
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