First Tracks

by Catherine O'Connell

  Putting the phone down on the bed, I made my way to the edge of the loft and swung my legs on to the ladder, thinking to go down and change the battery or at least unplug the nuisance. My legs turned to rubber and folded beneath me the moment my feet touched the floor. And then, with terrifying clarity, I realized the noise wasn’t coming from the smoke alarm at all. It was the CO detector. A wave of true terror swept over me as I knew firsthand how quickly carbon monoxide can disable. Growing increasingly confused, I thought of the phone lying on the bed ringing Judy’s number and then forgot about it just as quickly.

  There was no time for contemplation or decisions. I rolled on to my stomach and crawled through the kitchen like a snake. When I got to the door I reached up for the knob, but my hand was jelly and slipped away from it. I tried again with the same result. Laying on the ground, I realized my chances of survival were diminishing with each passing second. With one last Herculean effort, I pulled myself to my knees and gripped the knob with every bit of strength left in me. As the knob finally turned and the door fell open, a blast of frigid air blew over me. I crashed face first on to the deck, passing out on the icy cold of a snow pillow.

  FIVE

  This time I woke up in a tent. A plastic hyperbolic chamber tent to be more precise. And with a headache as bad as the one after the avalanche. As if in some kind of warped replay, Dr Larsen was standing beside me, this time on the other side of my plastic enclosure. When he saw my eyes were open, he gave me a doctorly smile and pulled up the plastic sheet.

  ‘Awake, eh?’ he intoned in a way meant to be cheerful. He applied a thumb to my right eyelid and shone that bright light into my eye again. He nodded affirmatively and repeated the same procedure with the left. ‘Well, Miss Westerlind, looks like you’ve dodged another bullet. Maybe I don’t want to be on a plane with you after all. One more visit to ICU and we’ll have to put you on the frequent flyer program.’

  Finding little humor in his comment, I asked the question I was tired of asking before even posing it. ‘What happened?’ My last recollection was being home in the loft and the alarm sounding. Once again the events between that moment and the present were nowhere in sight.

  ‘Your furnace must have malfunctioned. Carbon monoxide poisoning. It’s a miracle you made it outside. I understand the concentrations were very high.’

  Then the pieces came back slowly. Judy and Gene leaning over me. An ambulance with blaring lights. An oxygen mask pushed over my face.

  A nurse parted the curtain and indicated that the doctor was needed elsewhere. ‘We’re going to observe you for a couple more hours and then you can leave. But it’s better if you stay with someone for a night or two. CO poisoning can have some delayed effects like impaired coordination and I don’t think it’s a good idea to be alone.’ The mismatched eyes held mine longer than necessary to inform me just how serious he was about my safety. Then he let the plastic sheet fall back in place and left me to digest what I had just learned.

  I looked around the curtained cubicle and contemplated my recent run of bad luck. Within the last few days I had not only lost one of my best friends, but I’d knocked on death’s door twice. The feeling was akin to being kicked in the stomach. With nothing else to do, I occupied myself watching the monitors hooked up to my body. Pulse: 55. BP 120 over 80. Guess I was going to live. The headache was getting better by the minute.

  What wasn’t getting better was that I was freezing. The flimsy hospital gown combined with the sorry excuse of a hospital blanket and the cool whoosh of oxygen left me chilled. I climbed from the bed and dragged my attached cords out of the tent to the small closet provided for patients’ clothes and personal things. The sweatshirt I’d been wearing in the A-frame was on a hanger and I was puzzling how to get it on over the assorted medical paraphernalia when the door opened. The sweatshirt fell to the ground the moment I saw Zuzana McGovern enter the room. Her exquisite face was pinched, her nose red and raw, and her soulful blue eyes train tracks of red. It looked like she hadn’t slept for a while.

  ‘You’re OK?’ she asked, the remnants of a Czech accent coloring her voice.

  As reprehensible as it sounds, at that moment the only thing I could do was stare at her. It was like there were no words in my brain. After all, what does one say to the widow of someone whose death you may or may not have caused? Even if you had no idea how? We stood mutely staring at each other, each suffering her separate pain. I expected her to start screaming at me, but she just stood there looking vulnerable and broken. My voice came back to me gradually.

  ‘Zuzana. I’m … so … sorry.’

  She tightened her lips and her head fell back in an effort to staunch the tears already welling in her bloodshot eyes, but the effort was for naught. Tears flooded over her golden lashes and flowed on to the flawless skin of her cheeks. She squeezed her eyes shut and reopened them, swiping at the tears with the back of her hand.

  ‘When I heard you were back in the hospital, I just had to come see you. I couldn’t wait any longer,’ she said when she finally regained control. There was a long pause, her next words spilling out of her mouth like a river that had just flooded a dam. ‘I have to ask you what happened? What were you and Warren doing back there?’

  The sting of the avalanche came back harder than ever, the empty hollow feeling of both grief and self-blame washing over me. No one in their right mind would have been on that slope in those conditions. I had no better idea of what I was doing on the back side of Aspen Mountain now than I did when I woke up in the hospital the first time. All I had was that tiny glimpse of Warren getting off the chair. Zuzana deserved to know the truth. But what that truth was still escaped me.

  ‘I honestly don’t know what we were doing there,’ I confessed. ‘The only inkling I have of that afternoon is seeing Warren unloading the Ruthie’s chair.’ My thoughts turned to wanting to call out to him, something I chose not to share. ‘I know that’s no help to you, but for the life of me, I can’t remember anything else. I wish I knew more, but I don’t. I’m so sorry.’

  And then she fell apart. At first I thought she might hit me, she looked so angry. She was shaking with her hands balled up into fists at her sides. But after a long minute, the fists loosened and she raised her hands to her face and started sobbing, her narrow shoulders heaving in a way that made me wish the carbon monoxide had finished the job the avalanche hadn’t. When she finally stopped crying, she raised her blond head and tucked the loose strands of hair behind her ears. She reached for the tissues set beside the bed and blew her nose noisily.

  Her voice was so quiet it was almost a whisper. ‘It’s just so hard to believe he’s gone.’ She placed a hand on her slim abdomen in her tight jeans. ‘Did you know we were pregnant? He was so excited about this baby.’

  Now I really wanted to die. It wasn’t as if she were dropping a bombshell. Warren shared the news with me when he learned a couple of weeks before. At first he seemed apprehensive about it. His kids from his first marriage were already popping out grandkids and here he was becoming a father again. But over the last week or so, he’d seemed to grow into accepting it. I mean, it wasn’t as if having another child could cramp his lifestyle in any way. Not with his kind of money.

  But not even his kind of money could replace a human being and give a child a living father. Knowing all about being raised without a father made it doubly horrific for me. To think this baby might never know its father because of my recklessness was intolerable.

  ‘You really don’t remember?’ she probed.

  My only answer was to shake my head slowly back and forth.

  ‘I mean, if I had some idea why he was there, I might be able to come to terms with it. Did he die because he saw some ski run he couldn’t resist? Was it a mistake on his part or was making his all-important first tracks on a run more important than me and the baby? That’s all I’m saying.’

  Once again, I was unable to offer an answer.

  She walked to the edge of t
he room and stood in the open door. ‘If you ever do remember, you’ll tell me.’ It was a command, not a request, although a justifiable one.

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘Not knowing is almost as bad as his death.’

  And then she was gone, leaving me in my misery, grief and guilt. Zuzana was the kind of woman I wanted to dislike, all soft and pretty and girly in many ways – like needing help buckling her boots and putting on her skis. In spite of her beauty and her neediness, I had warmed to her. She was clever, a great wit, and could spear you without you even knowing it – which she was prone to do from time to time – then look over with a wink and a nod. Warren loved her very much, as much as he loved skiing, which was no small statement.

  The crazy thing was, they were about as unlikely a match as possible since Warren lived to ski and Zuzana tolerated it so she could lunch on the mountain in the private club and wear thousand-dollar ski outfits. She had grown up in Prague just after the fall of communism, and hadn’t had a lot of material goods, which seemed to have translated to an unnatural need for nice things now. Living in a city, she had never skied, and as much as Warren loved Zuzana and encouraged her to learn, he told me she just didn’t get it. She’d run through a phalanx of the best ski instructors money could buy, and couldn’t advance past the easiest runs on the mountain. Skiing just wasn’t in her DNA. She was so unsure of herself she always took the gondola down from the top of the hill so she wouldn’t have to ski the more challenging runs at the base of the mountain.

  But as poor a skier as she was, heads would turn at the beautiful blond without a helmet, her hair streaming behind her as her slim body and voluptuous bosom skied the same run over and over. As her latest ski instructor, Reese Chambers, once said, or probably said more than once, ‘With a body like that, she doesn’t need to ski.’ In light of Warren’s death, she wouldn’t have to ski anymore and now I wondered if she would ever brave the slopes again.

  I was dressed and had almost recovered from Zuzana’s visit when Dr Larsen came in to release me. As he stood above me going over a checklist, I couldn’t help but notice a sort of emerald glow in his green eye, enhanced by his green scrubs, while the brown one remained a deep chestnut color. He finished up and asked me if I had any questions.

  ‘Not about the carbon monoxide poisoning, but I’m really bugged about this memory loss from the avalanche. I feel like a piece of my brain has gone missing.’

  ‘That’s very common in a trauma situation,’ he said in an assuring voice. ‘Don’t sweat it. It’s your subconscious trying to protect you by blocking out an unpleasant event.’

  ‘I’m finding it even more unpleasant that I can’t remember it. How long before my memory comes back?’

  ‘Could be days. Could be weeks.’ Then to my dismay he added, ‘Or it could be never.’

  Never. That was a reality I didn’t want to face.

  The disturbing idea that I may never know what happened that day dominated my consciousness as he wheeled me to the hospital entrance. Before turning me over to Judy, who was waiting at the lobby for the second time in as many days, he reminded me it wasn’t a good idea to stay alone tonight. I told him I would keep his advice in mind. Looking me directly in the eye in a manner more personal than doctorly, he added, ‘Please be careful, Greta.’

  Snow was falling in a soft, insulating curtain as Judy and I walked across the parking lot, accumulating on our shoulders and in our hair and on our eyelashes before we even reached the car.

  ‘You’re staying with us tonight. No argument,’ she stated as we climbed into the Prius.

  ‘All right, one night,’ I pretended to concede, though truth be told I was glad not to be spending the night alone in the A-frame. Not only was I taking Dr Larsen at his word, the furnace issue had me creeped out and was one I preferred to confront in the daylight.

  We drove into town and turned on to the road up to Red Mountain and the homes of some of the wealthiest inhabitants of this planet. As we rose higher Aspen Mountain was directly across from us and you could see the end of the day skiers descending the lower part of the mountain. The upper half was buried in a cloud. The lingering effects of the CO left me feeling peculiar, and my heart was heavy at the loss of Warren, one memory that didn’t want to recede. But just staring at that mountain was a balm, leaving me feeling that if I could just get on my boards for a couple of hours, everything would be OK.

  While Judy chatted about what we would have for dinner – maybe some risotto and salmon with a good pinot noir – my eyes stayed glued to the mountain I loved so much and my thoughts turned back to the early days of my arrival.

  SIX

  After Mom died, and Toby left to pursue his dream of becoming an army ranger, I was alone in the Milwaukee house. At first I was angry with my twin for deserting me, but as time passed I came to terms with it. He’d been holding off on his own life for too long while Mom was ill. It was time for him to move on. I’d held off on my life too, dropping out of college the end of my freshman year while she battled breast cancer. When she lost that battle two years later, her death left me without purpose.

  Untethered and with no real direction, I took a job waitressing to both support me and to fill my days. Most of my high-school friends were away at college except for the ones who had married after high school and were already facing responsibilities that far exceeded their maturity, like having children. Waitressing was something to do, for the most part mindless, and the money was good. Most of the time the people were pretty fair.

  But one January night that all turned on its head. Nothing I could do was right and all the customers could do was complain. The service was slow, the table was drafty, the food was bad. Everyone I served seemed determined to be unhappy. In retrospect I can’t say I blamed them. January in Milwaukee is gray and windy and damp and bone-chillingly cold. Like twenty below cold. Milwaukee in January is a miserable place to be.

  But amid all the dissatisfied customers, there was this table of three well-dressed couples who had just been in Aspen. They were talking about how charming the town was and how the snow was powder soft and how the sun came out nearly every day. That it was probably the greatest place in the country. That if winter was always like Aspen winter it would be their favorite season.

  I’d skied in Wisconsin when I was a teenager and joined the after-school ski club. And, as cold and gray and frostbite-threatening as skiing could be in the Midwest, I’d loved it. But when Mom got sick and couldn’t work anymore, there wasn’t extra money for luxuries like skiing. I’d missed it terribly.

  After dialing in to what they’d said about Aspen and how great it was, I couldn’t stop thinking about it the rest of the night. With Mom and Toby gone there was nothing to keep me in Milwaukee, and I really longed to experience something more exciting in my life than the bland Midwest. I’d always been a reader and had been enamored of far-off places in books, places I’d never seen but only dreamed about. Though Colorado was less than a thousand miles away, that was far away for me. My mind was set to take on the first adventure of my life.

  When my shift ended, I took off my apron and announced to my boss, ‘I’m moving to Aspen.’

  And that’s how it happened. One chance encounter changed my entire life. Just like that I picked up and left. Well, not really just like that. I had to pack up and make arrangements to sell the house Mom and Toby and I had shared for most of my life. Which turned out to be so mortgaged to the gills that there was little equity in it.

  But there was some money, so the day the house sale closed, I headed west with all my worldly goods in my car and my savings of forty-two hundred dollars in my wallet. After twenty-four hours of windy, icy, snow-scrubbed plains, deep-cut canyons and slick mountain passes, my ten-year-old Corolla chugged into the small town on the western slope of the Rockies known as Aspen, Colorado.

  It’s no exaggeration when I say it felt like a dream. I was Dorothy arriving in Oz. It was just after dawn and the sight of Vi
ctorian buildings and miners’ shacks and brick vintage buildings rendered me awestruck. The mountains encircled the small town like a possessive lover pouring down to her very edge. The snow-packed streets radiated Christmas card charm in the morning glow, a century-old courthouse and church sidling up to the main street. If there was heaven on earth, I’d found it. I knew then and there, I was never going back to Milwaukee.

  However, there was one little curveball I hadn’t foreseen. Actually, a big curveball. As things turned out, I wasn’t the first person to decide upon making a life change by moving to Aspen. Amid the millionaires and billionaires existed an entire culture just barely getting by in order to share in this little piece of heaven. Some were seasonal ski bums, some of them more hopeful, looking to make Aspen a home. Whichever the case, housing was in short supply.

  It didn’t take much asking around to realize that I was swimming upstream if I thought I could just land in paradise and start a life. I walked into several real estate offices in search of a place to rent, and they shook their heads and choked back laughs. There was nowhere for someone like me to live. Was my dream to die so quickly? I was totally demoralized, but when I’m demoralized I also get hungry.

  I stopped for lunch in a restaurant named Little Annie’s whose western-clad front suggested it might be affordable, and it almost was. Sitting at a table drumming my fingers as I waited for my meal, my mind was working on how I was going to be able to stay in this newfound paradise. And it was coming up with no answers. My hamburger and Coke arrived and the server lay them on the table in front of me. When she asked if she could get me anything else, I lost it and burst into tears. For the entire time my mother was sick, I’d never cried. Not once. I’d only cried at her funeral. But suddenly the pressure of not having a life, of not having anyone or anything, of lost hope, had broken me. Trying to make it in this place that appealed to all my dreams was like trying to make a one-nighter into a marriage. But if I didn’t stay here, where was I to go? I was twenty-one with nothing and no one.