The brutal reality is that we ride—that the people I love ride—and we accept the unthinkable risks, and we keep going.
I used to think it was because what riding gave us was so good it was worth the bad bits. Now that feels like a lie. What if we are just selfish idiots, blowing our chances at a happy, normal life for a few hits of adrenaline?
I hope you got what you wanted.
I was so angry at Chase when he said it, but now the memory holds the sickening burn of truth.
Maybe we are just ghouls, Dinkler and Ryan and I. Watching people risk their lives. Taking the benefit of it.
And disappearing when they pay the price.
It’s the most depressing lunch I’ve ever had. We sit, too few people in too many spaces, and are surrounded by all the ghosts of the plans we had. All the futures we felt so confident of that now we’ll never see. The first time I ate the food here I was blown away by it, but now the artfully arranged selection of local produce tastes like cardboard in my mouth.
There’s talk about the new future. The worse one. I’m too low to really feel excited when Dinkler says that he’d love for me to join them on another location—when I’m feeling better and my arm works again, of course. JJ wants them to keep going. And we’re used to a brutal attrition doing this kind of work. It’s not unknown for a snowboarding film to have an in memoriam at the end.
Hanne’s never accepted comforting lies. When they’re finally getting into the truck, going for handshakes and best wishes, when Dinkler gives his hopes for JJ’s speedy recovery, she says: “You saw him, Dink. I don’t think that’s going to happen.” She casts her eyes to the mountains which used to be dreams and now are nightmares, a jagged jawline broken beneath the sky. “At least not in the way he needs.”
It’s too much truth. We go back inside, somber and quiet, and the click of the door behind us is heavy with finality.
Hanne’s looking awful. How can it be only a few days? She’s skinny and pale, her eyes deep-sunken in darkness. The twitch of her lips is a horrible facsimile of a smile rather than the real thing.
“The sooner we get this done, the sooner we can get drunk.”
So we get busy. We pack up everyone’s boards, and I don’t bother asking how they got back here from that broken snowscape far away by the river. One by one we find the spare boots that have been left around. Avalanche backpacks, jackets, hats, gloves: anything that was left we begin collecting in the huge entrance hall, sorting it into piles.
JJ’s is too small. I stand before it, bile burning in my throat, and try not to notice what’s missing. His board. His jacket. The avalanche bag which wasn’t enough.
So much is missing and so much is wrong, here in the mess of equipment that JJ will probably never be able to use again. But there’s something else, too. Something that I can’t quite identify, a sickly note just out of hearing.
Hanne leans around the corner with two bottles of beer clutched in her hands. “I need to get started. Are you joining me?”
I am. Not that we talk, or really spend time together. Just silently, together alone, we clear up all of the things downstairs. When we finally get onto the second story Hanne pauses by JJ’s bedroom, her hand pressed to the wood.
“I’m going to …”
I just nod. Of course. He’s been her friend for years and years. I’m just the new girl, in the end.
All my things seem so small and unimportant. I’ve packed them up so many times I can be methodical about each piece of gear and each item of clothing. Once it’s done I let myself flop down on the bed.
Behind my closed eyelids the memories wait.
Chase’s face between my thighs.
His hand finding mine twisted on the sheet, his fingers curling through my own so he holds me as we peak together.
The heaviness of his breathing as his hand strokes over my skin in the close-together after, and we don’t talk about all the things we’re thinking.
It hurts. Even after everything, the pain goes on. The way he looked at me yesterday. The fact that he didn’t come to see me when I was injured.
He wasn’t there for me. Just like he said he wouldn’t be.
He was honest, when he spoke. I try to force myself to remember that.
But I remember lying with him in the darkness, his fingers curled in my hair. I remember his hand on my leg under the table. I remember the way he looked at me that night in the hot tub. The same way he looked at the mountains.
I remember the way he held on to me that first night in Bella Coola. Clutching. Desperate. Like he was afraid I would go.
Those silences felt like truth, too. One that wouldn’t fit into words.
… That’s what was wrong. There wasn’t any of Chase’s stuff downstairs.
Nerves tickle in my tummy as I open the door to his room. It’s ridiculous. At least I resist the stupid urge to knock. I know he isn’t here. Dinkler and Ryan would have said. I would know. Even when it’s been bad, I’ve never been oblivious to Chase. Not ever.
He’s always been the person I’m most aware of.
The washed-out twilight creeping through the windows makes the space look more empty than it is. Not that Chase’s room ever looked lived in. It always reminded me of an army barracks: so few things laid out so neatly. Even his carefully ordered belongings were something, though. Now the room is lifeless and abandoned.
By the door sit his suitcases, neatly packed and tagged.
Maybe Chase came back after we argued at the hospital. Maybe he asked one of the staff to clean his stuff up and ship it.
It doesn’t matter. He’s gone now.
I stand beside his bed, reaching my hand out to stroke lightly over the sheets. Do we leave echoes, where we’ve been? Is there some trace of him still here?
Do you feel better now? Up on your high horse?
I don’t feel better. I feel like shit for being wrong. I feel like shit for not learning from the lessons over so many years. Trent, Peter … How many times did I have to learn it?
I guess this is what shame feels like. The ache in my chest and the burn in my throat. The shimmering over my eyes.
It all comes out when you’re drunk.
There are so many things to do in this house. The pool table. The hot tubs. The sauna. And yet Hanne and I sit alone in the den, curled in the seats the boys sat in only a few days ago. We’ve only turned on the smallest of the lamps, and in the gloom we sit together and drink.
Just like I found JJ, that night when he was looking at pictures of his ex. The one who’s gone to him now, despite everything.
It should make me feel better, knowing that sometimes people come back even when you don’t expect them to. So why does it ache in my stomach instead?
“I guess this is the end.” Hanne’s voice is small. She’s small. I’ve never noticed it before. She’s such a live wire, illuminated by all that vivacious energy. It’s only now that I can see her as she actually is: short, bird boned, all too vulnerable, a tiny woman curled in a huge chair.
My mouth is so dry the words don’t sound right. “You don’t know …”
Something like a laugh escapes from the collapse of Hanne’s chest. “I don’t know anything anymore.”
All I can do is tip my beer bottle up to my lips, letting the liquid replace the nerves. They fizzle the same way on my tongue.
“Chase …”
I’m frozen by Hanne’s voice. The bottle’s glass rim presses gently against my lip. The seconds crawl by.
“I thought he’d come. You know? I really thought he would. Despite everything.” Hanne brings up one of her bitten-nail hands to rub over her face. There’s a long pause before she finally turns her eyes to mine.
“He got you into the heli. Do you remember?”
I shake my head.
For a moment Hanne’s teeth worry at the edge of her lip. Once she stops her mouth tugs to the side, her eyes dropping to her lap where she picks at the label on her beer.
“He went crazy. I’ve never heard someone screaming someone’s name like that. Your name.”
It all tangles in my chest and curdles in my belly, a sickening roll that has nothing to do with the beer that I’ve drunk.
Chase, the man who didn’t come to me when I was lying in a hospital bed.
“He had to clear the snow from your mouth. JJ was screaming and screaming. And Chase was just holding you, and … He wouldn’t even let me touch you. I thought he was going to punch the heli pilot, when he took you away.”
Hanne is quiet again, and I have never been good at words.
“I am so fucking angry at him.” It’s only a whisper. Hanne’s fingers have stopped moving, trailing instead over the bottle’s glass. She doesn’t sound angry. She sounds like her heart is broken. “But I … Did JJ tell you what happened to Felicity?”
Felicity. That ink, curling over Chase’s pulse, sharing every beat of his heart.
“No?” My voice sounds like someone else’s. The room is so quiet. Too quiet. I can hear the rush of blood in my ears. “He said some shit went down with Chase’s family …”
Hanne’s shoulders swell on a slow inhale. She holds it, as if the air in her lungs might give her strength. Only when she finally sighs does she look back up to me.
“Felicity died. She had an accident. Chase was … Chase was the only one at the hospital with her. He’s never talked to us about it.” The shake of her head is a preemptive disagreement. “I think that’s why he couldn’t do it. Because it was too much for him that he lost her. And that now he might lose his best friend.” Her tongue darts over her lips. “And that he might lose you.”
So much silence. It rings in my ears and stoppers up my mouth.
The things that I said. The things that I worried about. And all the time Chase didn’t tell me. He never said, She died.
Even when I realized that she was gone, I never really thought about what it must have been like. In JJ’s hospital room I hated Chase for letting his past get in the way of his present, and now guilt washes over me for my callousness.
All the times I touched him, I never saw the scars I stroked.
“He was so different.” Hanne sounds almost dreamy, taking idle tugs from her bottle. Her eyes have moved away from me. They fix anywhere else but my face, sliding over the room as if she doesn’t see what’s really here. “Before she died he was such a happy person. That’s why we put up with the shit he pulls. Because underneath it all …”
My mind is whirring so fast I can’t respond. I’m frozen, the bottle weighing a ton in my hand.
That black, black ink over Chase’s closely-guarded pulse.
“Chase is one of the best people I’ve ever met.” Hanne gives me the saddest smile. “He just had a shitty thing happen, and he’s never really gotten over it. It’s been fifteen years. He was only nineteen when it happened. And it’s still there. That’s why … When I heard him calling your name. On that mountain. I didn’t …”
She sighs, raising her fingers to brush over the exhaustion at her eyes before she can face me again. “Chase loves us because he loved us before it happened. But I never thought he’d let himself care for someone new like that ever again.”
The world wobbles on its axis, a lurching shift which makes my heart skip a beat. When I find my voice it cracks from my dry mouth, shaken with the stutter of my pulse. “I don’t think he cares. Not anymore. We … When I saw him outside the hospital, we had a fight.”
Hanne’s sigh comes up from deep in her belly. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t be angry at him. He’s behaved like an asshole. Just that … That’s why JJ doesn’t hate him. That’s why I don’t. Because he’s not just a bastard, you know? He’s fucked up.”
I remember Chase at nineteen. I’ve seen the photos. He was so young. Just a boy growing into a man’s body.
And his sister died, when only he was there.
“Anyway.” Hanne’s abrupt as she pushes to her feet, reaching for my bottle with a waggle of her fingers. “I don’t think we’ll see him again for a while. Let’s get another drink, huh? I want to get totally smashed tonight.”
My reply is stopped by the click of the front door.
28
For a moment Chase stands totally still, surprise wiping his face blank. It’s the way that he looks when he sleeps. Unguarded. Open.
The beat my heart skips measures the opposite of time. Now and before, all crushed together. The same.
I know every inch of him so well. The muscles that band solid over his torso. The thick of his powerful thighs. That tattoo sleeve which comes into view as his jacket drops, uncaught, behind him. I know how that dark flop of hair feels running through my fingers, and the way his lips would curve on a smile.
Chase is huge. Fearless. I’ve seen him stare down mountains that would make most men cry for their mothers. I’ve seen him throw himself into the air and rely on nothing but his skill and his strength. I know how powerful he is, how in control.
I never thought anything could hurt him, and now I see how it has. How it always did. How underneath everything there’s been that pain, hidden away where no one can touch.
Chase’s lips have parted, but Hanne beats him to it.
“Not now.” All the things she said, and still she’s quivering with rage. “Not fucking now.”
At least anger brings her force back. She’s a whirlwind leaving the room, weaving an exaggerated arc around Chase, and in the space she leaves behind there’s only the clatter of the bottles being dropped into the unseen sink before the slam of her feet moves up the stairs.
I don’t see her go. I’m watching Chase, and Chase is watching me.
“I just came to grab my stuff.” His voice is a steady dull tone, devoid of emotion. From the vulnerable openness of his previous expression he’s drawn something harder. “I’ve got a car. I’ll drive back tonight.”
He can’t drive twelve hours back to Vancouver. It’s dark. It’s been snowing. The highway threads through the forest-shrouded mountains for hundreds of miles. I know all of these things … and yet they’re not why I can’t stop looking at him.
They’re not why I say, “Don’t.”
The corner of Chase’s jaw bulges beneath his stubble. It still seems he might turn away. But instead he raises one arm, tossing his backpack onto the table. “Since I’m here, I might as well sign the photo releases for you.”
I don’t care about the releases. They’ve meant more to me than anything, and now they’re insignificant. Meaningless.
In this moment, work doesn’t matter at all.
His sister died. And he didn’t come. And if it doesn’t make it okay then—
Despite everything, my heart skipped a beat when he walked in the door.
Chase’s eyes remain fixed on me. “Go get the releases, Brooke.”
It would be easier to go. To do what he says, and to let him leave for the last time. This is the final thing I need from him.
It should be the final thing.
But I want him. I know it, even if I couldn’t admit it to myself in the hospital. Despite all the barriers I’ve pulled up around myself, all I want is Chase, here, now. I want him to hold me and tell me JJ will be okay. That it will be like it was. That everything’s going to be fine.
He’s the only one in the world who could make me believe.
So I take a deep breath, and try to be honest in the way we should have been all along.
“You didn’t tell me that you lost Felicity.”
Chase’s laugh is horrible.
“I didn’t lose her. I fucking killed her.”
His teeth are bared like an animal, the sick thing that isn’t a smile punching all of the air from my lungs. I feel so naked and small in front of his rage, all that relentless muscle wound so tight that it quivers with just-held potential.
With a sickly rightness it all clicks into place. The self-hatred in his eyes. The shame in the curl of his fists. Pain, as clear as
blood’s red truth spattered over the snow.
I’m not afraid of his anger. Not Chase, who’s always taken care of me in his own fucked up way. I’m afraid of his pain and I’m afraid of mine. I’m afraid of the truth that I finally see. I’m afraid of how I feel when I look at him.
My heart is breaking because I can see his is, too.
“I’m sorry.” My voice is a broken wisp of air. “I’m so sorry.”
“Too fucking late.” Chase’s shout is so loud it vibrates in my sternum. “I don’t give a shit if you’re sorry. You think you get to offer me some absolution from up on your high horse? I told you, Brooke. I told you I can’t be trusted. I told you I hurt people.”
“It was an accident.” I don’t expect the volume of my own voice, sure in what Hanne told me. The strength of my fight surprises me. “It wasn’t your fault. You don’t have to hate yourself forever. You don’t.”
Chase shows his teeth again, the snarl of a trapped animal. “You should be used to it by now, being let down. I thought Trent taught you that one early.”
The soft of his voice slips past my defenses, digging into my heart and stealing the air from my lungs.
“You could never just believe me.” Chase’s voice stays low as he steps toward me, his eyes fixed on mine. “It was never enough for you, was it? Me being honest. You had to see it for yourself. You had to pick and pick and pick until you saw me fucking bleed. Well now you’re seeing it, Brooke. What you wanted.”
He’s so close now that I can feel his rage over me. The pounding in my ears could be my pulse or his. I can see the shine in his eyes. The grit of his jaw. Each crack in his voice sends fractures racing through my own heart.
“It’s not what I want,” I protest, forcing my gaze to hold the overwhelming sear of his. “Chase. I never wanted you to hurt. I never wanted this.”
“I don’t even know why the fuck you care. It’s always been work for you, hasn’t it? You’ve never wanted me. Just my photo and my dick when it suited you. So why the fuck does it matter? You took my picture when I was bleeding. You have never given a single shit about anything but how I ride.”
Ride Page 23