Black Diamond Fall

by Joseph Olshan

  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 thinking, 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 around 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.

  At the bottom he glides into a wide swale and swivels around to watch Mike whipping down as gracefully as a swan doing figure eights on a pond. At one point Sam is shocked to see Mike tumble, but miraculously nail an acrobatic recovery, then continue to ski down. He almost wonders if what he has just witnessed is some sort of hallucination. When Mike is at the bottom of the final slope and traversing toward him, Sam exclaims, “Wow, that was close! That could’ve been the finale of your midlife crisis.”

  “Talk about a reversal,” Mike says breathlessly. “Me instead of you.” He grins wildly. “But then Gina wouldn’t be able to kick me out! She’d have to nurse me!”

  “Or bury you,” Sam says.

  And then he finds himself remembering Luc’s pale disconcerting gaze, the tottering way he walked into a room with his head bowed, the slight waddle to his gait, the one soccer game against Bowdoin that Sam had watched and Luc scoring a goal, and everybody jumping all over him, hugging him as children hug a father while Sam remained quietly in the stands, not wanting to attract attention but brimming with pride and just yearning to embrace him. Yes, he supposes this love, in all complexity and depth, does resemble love for a child (if he’d had one), but of course, it’s so much more. They are two people reaching to one another over a gap, or maybe climbing the face of Black Diamond Fall and losing hold and trying to save a fatal fall, and at some point just having to let go as, at some time in the future, someone will have to let go of him. But then there is the placid, surprisingly intimate look in Luc’s eyes when he is finally freed from the river, when he lies at final rest in Sam’s arms.

  “Why did he ask you to?”

  “Because he was afraid of being a suspect.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  McKinnon has put on a pale green T-shirt for this interview. They are sitting at the table, facing each other. The pan of eggs is on the stove, still uneaten.

  Kennedy decides to move on for the moment. “Did you know that your roommate and Elizabeth Squires had a dispute tonight outside this apartment?”

  Kennedy carefully watches the flicker of skepticism on McKinnon’s face; with her experience, she believes she can identify unalloyed surprise.

  He says, “I didn’t know they were even hanging out.”

  A text pings on her phone and it’s Jenkins. He asked for a lawyer. Headed to the station. She types ba
ck, Keep me posted.

  And then another text from Jenkins arrives and it makes Kennedy smile to herself. She turns her palms up toward the ceiling. “What would you say if I told you that the night Luc Flanders disappeared, Squires and Taft followed him back to Skylight pond?”

  “I think Taft would have told me if they had.”

  “Well, according to this text, he just told my partner,” she says, holding up her phone. “He did go back to the pond. As did she. I wonder why didn’t he tell you?”

  McKinnon recoils. “What are you implying? That he did something to Luc?”

  “I don’t know,” Kennedy says and notices that McKinnon looks perturbed. “Do you know anything about Taft’s past?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like that he has violent tendencies.”

  McKinnon blinks and frowns. “You mean he attacked people?”

  “Yes. Seriously hurt people. As in sending them to the hospital.”

  “No, I didn’t know that,” McKinnon says, looking spooked.

  “Any idea why, if both Squires and Taft were at Skylight Pond on the night of February eleventh, they never told you or anybody else?”

  “Like I said before, he was probably worried about being suspected.”

  “So let’s do a timeline of the evening of February eleventh, shall we?”

  “Okay.”

  “When did you guys get home from playing pond hockey?”

  “Just before six.”

  “And contrary to what you stated previously, Taft actually did go out again.”

  “Yeah, he did.”

  “Did he say where he was going?” McKinnon shakes his head. “That’s not a very convincing ‘no.’ Look, I’m not here to arrest you for illegal purchase of a banned substance—the steroids.”

  McKinnon looks astonished.

  “I could give a shit about what you inject into your body,” Kennedy persists. “Steroids are not my jam.” She deliberately uses a millennial expression. “So he went out to get the score. But do you have any idea why he went back to the pond?”