I’m sorry for breaking us apart, Sam. I’m sorry about breaking you. I’m sorry I’m not older. I’m sorry I ran away. I realize that you might not be able to forgive this and might go on without me. And of course I will try and understand.
All my love,
Luc
February 25; Donner’s Field, Weybridge, 7 miles from Carleton, Vermont; 17 degrees, sun and clouds, brisk wind
The bodybuilder twins, Howard and Mark Newcombe, have been told that their cooperation with the search for Luc Flanders will be factored into the length of their sentencing for vandalizing the Frost farm. They have no idea that Elizabeth Squires has been arrested and charged with assault.
“Right here. We dropped him right here,” says Mark, the wall-eyed twin, just as the patrol car reaches the end of London’s Field, a long pasture in Weybridge, just outside of the boundaries of Carleton. Jenkins brakes and a cloud of salty dust rises off the dry, winter-beaten dirt road.
Beyond them a long expanse of snowfield that, in bare patches, shows the stubble of straw. A line of carefully planted larch trees limns the far perimeter. It’s a cold, bleak place, like some end-of-the-earth place and yet located in one of the smallest states of America. Vast for Vermont, anyway, it’s a field big enough for a jumbo airplane to land. Out of the contemplative silence that is wrought by such a broad vista, Jenkins asks, “So you saw him walking down the road.”
“Walking, yes,” says Mark.
“Walking real slowly,” Howard interjects, and then does the rest of the talking.
“And you stopped and offered him a ride,” Kennedy says.
“Yes.”
“Did he say where he was going?” Jenkins asked.
“We asked him and he said he was on his way home.”
“Did you ask him where he lived?” Kennedy asked.
“He told us he lived near Dartmouth and we told him we could give him a ride part of the way south. To Bethel.”
“But then he asked to get out of the car?” Jenkins says.
“Right,” says Mark.
“He asked to get out in the middle of nowhere.”
“In the middle of nowhere,” repeats Howard.
“Why the middle of nowhere?” Kennedy asks.
There is an odd pause and then from Howard comes the hoarse, accusatory, “He probably would’ve stayed in the car if my brother hadn’t weirded him out with stupid talk.”
“Stupid talk?” asks Kennedy.
“Bodybuilder bullshit,” explains Howard.
“Did you try and sell him steroids?” Kennedy asks.
There is a brief pause and then Howard says, “Look, we saw him. We offered him a ride and then he wanted to get out.”
“Doesn’t answer my question,” Kennedy says.
“Yeah, we did, okay?” Mark says.
“But he didn’t want them,” Howard says.
“Anyway, he wasn’t going to stay in the car forever,” Mark says.
“Oh?” Kennedy asks. “Why wouldn’t he just take the ride and go the distance you offered him?”
“He got jumpy, what can we say?” says Mark. “Maybe he had figured out a destination. Maybe he’s somewhere like San Francisco by now.”
Pointing at the pasture and the distant looming shadow of Snake Mountain, Kennedy says to Howard, “And did you note which way he walked?”
“No, not really.”
“You didn’t watch him out of the rearview mirror when you were driving away?” Jenkins asks.
“No,” Howard says, indicating his brother with his beefy shoulder. “Because he kept opening his big trap!”
Jenkins waits a few moments and then proceeds. “And once again, how did he seem?”
“He seemed out of it,” says Mark.
“Like on drugs out of it?” Kennedy asks.
“No, more like . . . depressed out of it,” says Howard.
Kennedy and Jenkins glance at one another. “Okay, let’s head back into town,” Jenkins says.
May 16; Carleton, Vermont; 65 degrees, sun and high clouds, breezy
In early May with the last traces of ice still plaguing the slowly awakening land, a hay bale is found by a farmer at a place called Donner’s Field in Weybridge. Inside the bale is an entombment large enough to accommodate a person of six feet two inches who seemed to have dug themselves in with their fingernails. The arrival of spring could have allowed the body to plunge into the swollen river.
When the DNA samples are extracted from the crusty remnants of straw and matched to the DNA of Luc Flanders, a river search begins. A helicopter team from Maine flies over the Otter Creek, snapping photos with a special camera able to plumb turbulent river depths, scanning for human remains.
Then, on the sixteenth of May, a young mother with a toddler on her back is walking along the riverbank and sees a raft-like pallet protruding from a crest of the turbulent water. The wood (yellow pine) is soaked dark and gelatinous and crosshatched in a grid and, she imagines, once sustained the weight of some heavy piece of machinery. Maybe last summer the pallet had been appropriated by a wood-worker for pleasure-river-riding with family and friends but then abandoned like a boat to nowhere—perhaps at the end of September when the days cooled off and the temperature was no longer warm enough for swimming.
The tall body, hewn and muscled from years of sport, is caught in the interstices of the wood, born up from the depths, still quite intact because it had frozen solid during the winter and slowly thawed in the river that for many weeks couldn’t have been more than forty degrees. Photos have shown her that Luc Flanders always wore his hair fairly long, and she can see the strands undulating like tendrils of aqueous plants near the surface. The angelic white face angled up toward her and those remarkable arctic eyes—wide open and milky pale under water— shocks her.
Kennedy is the one who calls Sam. She listens to him break down, the gasping, the high-pitched sobbing. She thinks deeply: What can I possibly say to comfort him? And then words come. “The winter preserved him, Sam. He still looks beautiful. Like a god under water.”
Sam drives up to Carleton. To a parking place along the Otter Creek and begins walking toward the cluster of police vehicles. At one point he stops, arrested by a conviction that he’s not alone. He glances out toward the perimeter of the just greening fields that roll up to the river and can see a rash of snowdrops in the wild. There is sense of a presence, of someone or something in possession of him, and the air becomes difficult to breathe. He puts his hand on his chest and tries to calm down. He’s thinking of the afternoon back in December when Luc arrived at his house wearing a funny-looking Christmas sweater and standing nervously by the broad kitchen window. Flicking his finger at the imperfections of the rolled glass that bent the light and warped the view of the snowbound landscape, Luc said he was too afraid and too conflicted to go on. Hearing the words, Sam’s heart turned over and felt squeezed and he had a similar difficulty in breathing. Interminable silence followed Luc’s declaration and Sam’s tacit acceptance, a silence most wretched because Sam knew it could be filled with words or tenderness or even an embrace that lasted a lot longer than the one that Luc used to say goodbye.
But surely there is some other memory to conjure up that’s more positive than this one. And looking at the river silvered in the sun, Sam remembers the time they visited Walden Pond as Luc sat next to him without his shirt, reading Thoreau’s lyrical passage about water being like an unbreakable mirror and watching Luc’s lips move and his eyes flitting over the page and thinking this young man is so incredibly alive and feeling such an abiding and tender love for him.
But there are no more thoughts in Luc’s head, no more regrets. He’s as sentient as a stone. And now he’s just downstream.
Sam pictures the sodden ankle-length coat undulating in the current. Himself walking into the water without th
inking, entering the same deep and primal rhythm that made him hobble down his snowy driveway to find Panda and carry her in his arms back to the house: the arms of the living cradling the limbs of the dead. If only he could enter the river, if only he could feel the freezing onslaught of its shallows and very methodically untangle the fabric that lashes Luc’s body to the entrapment of the raft. If only he could set him free, if only he could lift out of the water, the man he loves like a newborn child and the body, limp in his arms, as heavy as the world. Luc’s eyes would be open and still be that pale supernatural blue, staring at him relentlessly as though, even in death, they can look deep inside him and miraculously find their own reflection.
February 11, 2015; Black Diamond Fall, Utah; 20 degrees, brilliant sunshine
“You first this time,” Mike tells Sam.
“Okay.”
“It’ll be good enough the way it is.”
“I know. I’m not going for anything more. I know my own limitations,” Sam assures him.
Mike grins. “Consider yourself even lucky to be on a pair of skis.”
And yet reclaiming this very moment is what single-mindedly propelled Sam through rehab, made him work tirelessly at his own recovery. “Yes, I’m damn lucky,” he agrees.
“Not to mention, crazy.” Clearly on edge now, Mike grabs hold of Sam’s arm. “You have to promise me. This time you’re not going to do anything out of range. You’re not going to push . . . your own envelope.”
Annoyed, Sam gently wrenches himself out of Mike’s grasp and says, “Of course I won’t.”
Mike looks at him steadfast with his one gold eye and one blue eye. An always-unsettling gaze. “If anything happens out here . . .”
“Nothing is going to happen out there!”
Mike hesitates as though debating whether or not to say, “Gina said she’d throw me out.”
“She wouldn’t throw you out.”
“You don’t know her,” Mike now mentions the huge row he had had with Gina the night before he and Sam flew out to Utah. Gina had accused Mike of encouraging Sam’s continuing delusions and having a midlife crisis of his own.
“Well, I’ve been through my own midlife crisis,” Sam says. “I know what I can do. And what I can’t.” And whom I can and cannot love, Sam thinks but does not say.
Giles Flanders had staunchly opposed Sam attending the memorial services. He argued that such events are supposed to be comfort for the living, and that Sam’s presence would cause him pain. While Sam understood this, he felt the need for his own private memorial and requested—via Janine Flanders—a small quantity of Luc’s ashes. Luc’s mother naturally wanted to hold on to every last molecule of her son. But by then Sam had consented to the parents reading Luc’s sabotaged, penitent emails that professed the depth of his devotion, emails that begged reconciliation. And when Eleanor read them, she knew she could hardly deny the proof of how deeply her son had cared for the older man. She made a decision and kept this decision from her husband.
Eleanor and Sam finally met in Hanover, New Hampshire, at a café largely populated by Dartmouth undergrads. When Sam arrived a few minutes early, he wondered if perhaps they should have gotten together elsewhere. Surely these students streaming in and out of the coffee shop, talking about trivialities as much as the demands of their classes, would be sore reminders of Eleanor’s loss. When at last she came in the door, and before she spotted him at a table toward the back of the café, Sam watched her taking in the young people, her face tightening slightly. He caught her attention with a gentle wave, and seeing him, she started a little. And as Eleanor moved toward him, the first thing he noticed was that she had Luc’s pale, spectral, unsettling eyes. Only at first was this oddly comforting rather than disturbing. As though perhaps some part of his life was still captured, was not yet given away. But then the sadness invaded.
When he stood up, she gave him a quick, impulsive hug, sat down opposite him and muttered something about having trouble finding a parking space. He commiserated and said that it was always difficult to find parking in the middle of the academic year. “Do you come to Hanover much?” she asked a bit nervously as she placed her handbag carefully down next to her, the handbag that surely contained the measure of Luc’s ashes that she’d brought with her.
“I don’t. I’m not a big fan of Hanover,” Sam confessed. “But it may be because I’m not a big fan of Dartmouth College.”
“How so?”
“For one thing, they approached me about teaching a course, the history of architecture. I came in for the interview and was treated dismissively. But then I happen to have a friend who was about to be hired for a professorship in the English Department. He was suddenly turned down because of one person’s objection. He’s a minority and also gay.”
“Oh yes, I do know about that,” Eleanor said. “My husband was actually on the hiring committee. And Giles was very angry about that, too. What amazed me was that it was a woman who got in the way of the hiring. Rather than some homophobic man,” she said as though wanting Sam to know she was and would have been accepting of Luc’s sexual preference. And that her husband certainly was.
“But Giles is no longer with the college,” Eleanor informed him. “I don’t know if my son ever mentioned . . .”
“You mean, the drinking?” Sam filled in.
Eleanor nodded with noticeable embarrassment. “Giles has never been able to get a handle on it. It affected his teaching. He’d had several warnings before they let him go. And then of course . . . losing his son.”
“I’m sorry to hear he lost his job.”
Eleanor shrugged. “It was meant to happen, I guess.” Then she looked at Sam intently. “I suppose you also know how Giles was a father. I suppose my son told you about that, too?”
My son. The use of the phrase sounded deliberate and Sam figured she had difficulty saying the name aloud. “We spoke a fair amount about . . . his father.”
“They never really were very close.”
At a sudden loss for what to say, Sam glanced out the window. Then turning his attention to Eleanor, he said, “Just so you know . . . between us, it wasn’t really like father and son.”
“I understand,” Eleanor said simply, and Sam wondered if she really did. But then her eyes filled, and while he felt he should reach forward and grasp her hand, he didn’t. She wept quietly, unnoticed by the students, in a private, acute moment of grief, and Sam found himself remembering the narcotic daydream he’d had on the plane home from Utah: about meeting Eleanor Flanders at the art opening and lying about the loss of his own son. And now here they were. This conversation didn’t seem all that different from the one he’d imagined. Maybe that narcotic daydream had been some kind of premonition. Because after all, part of the great loss he was feeling was a bit like that of a parent mourning the death of a child.
At last he said, “Maybe I should’ve kept the father and son bit to myself. I can see that it upsets you.”
“No,” she said, managing to collect herself. “It’s not that. If anything, I’m glad to know some of what it was like between you and Luc.” The spear of pain now brought on by hearing Luc’s name passing her lips was stunning. She continued. “It’s just that I was thinking . . . well, two things I was thinking. The first is: I am looking at you like the last landmark of his life . . . I know Luc was probably thinking about you at the very end. And then I’m also thinking, maybe even regretting, that I didn’t tell Giles that I was meeting you today and why I was meeting you.”
Sam nodded. He understood the implication: that Luc’s father might have stepped in and tried to prevent the meeting. He couldn’t help glancing nervously at her handbag.
“I’ll not be telling him what I’m giving you,” Eleanor admitted at last, her eyes glassy with tears. And then looking at him with Luc’s unsettling gaze, she reached down to the floor and closed her fingers ar
ound the leather straps of the bag.
The cloudless weather, the quicksilver sparkling of far-flung Black Diamond Fall, mirrors the bluebird conditions of two years before, but the snow is better now, deeper, safer hopefully, but they can’t really know for sure. It amazes Sam how everything around him, the mountains, the icy crevasses, look exactly as they did when he last saw them as he was ascending into the rescue helicopter. These rock formations have born witnesses to many lifetimes of snow travelers and skiers whose attempts to master these descents were perhaps fugitive ways to prove to themselves that they were spirited and skillful, strengths that over time will prove to be more and more fleeting. He’s doing this run against the advice of nearly everyone he knows.
“So are you ready?” Mike asks.
He’s referring to the ritual that Sam has insisted upon. He takes the small wooden box out of his backpack, notices that one of the soft edges has been nicked by the avalanche equipment stowed next to it. He slides it open to the small tightly wrapped plastic bag whose granular contents are the size of a walnut and whose color varies between white and gray. Looking out over the contours of the Wasatch Mountains that hem them in, he lifts the bag out, carefully undoes the tie and waits for a breeze. He holds the bag up, rustles the contents and is letting the ashes fly when Mike says, “Why are you doing it that way?”
He’s right. Some bits fly back and sting Sam’s face and he actually laughs. But most of the ashes catch the wind and are carried aloft like heavy motes of dust. He closes his eyes for a moment, thinking how Luc had always wanted to ski this slope with him, thinking how ironic it was that they’d never actually skied together. And then the odd, breathless feeling comes over Sam, a firm pressure just below his rib cage, almost like a body thrust upon him.
This time he’s first. But fear isn’t there the way it was before, just anticipation, an edgy, adrenalized hyperawareness. It occurs to him that he has less to lose now, not that he wants to lose it, but that he’s had a good run so far, and if he’s taken (earlier than expected), he’s fifty-one years old now; it’d be hardly the tragedy of a young man like Luc Flanders perishing in his prime. But with this recognition of mortal inevitability comes a certain kind of detachment that allows him to assess risk without worry, to begin his descent as he would some twisty, narrow steep trail back in Vermont, getting freshies with a bunch of his buddies before the crowds wade in, cutting into a perfect untouched icing of snow and whooping it up as skiing becomes sailing and zigzagging between trees trussed up with powder. Here at Black Diamond Fall, there is one headwall that scares him, but Sam is down it almost before it even registers, and his mind synced to his body, he turns quickly with great precision and soon he’s in the wide-open face, taking a traverse before executing a few more turns. At one point he catches an edge and, trying to recover, feels the weakness in his once shattered left leg and a shooting pain, and all he can do is pray that he can hold it together. Soon the ride is over and he’s safe below.
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