by Polly Dugan
“Look at Gallagher,” he said. Leo’s closest friend at the station, Kevin Gallagher, had been a New York firefighter—a 9/11 survivor—before he’d moved his family to Portland. “Even after my worst shift, I’m lucky. That’s not a cross I have to bear.”
That’s what I thought about, Leo’s jokes and what he had to do to get through on the job every day, while the time on the mountain dragged and I waited. We had had a flawless day, nothing but blinding blue above and new powder beneath. Because of the exquisite conditions, Leo wasn’t ready to call it a day. Minutes after he had said to me, One more. This snow is too good. We never have powder like this—just one more run and I’ll see you at the bottom, babe, minutes after I tracked his orange helmet to the lift and watched it rise until I lost sight of it, the weather over the mountain shifted and the low clouds socked in, fast. I thought nothing of it. We had all skied in worse. One more run and he’d be done.
While I waited, I was glad to be warm and inside, my body having had its fun, and now having its rest. The boys changed out of their wet gear, got their games and books from the car, and ate. I kept checking my cell phone even though there was no coverage. The boys, by now used to their father often appearing when he did and not when he was expected, were busy and unfazed. But I kept looking and waiting for Leo to walk through the hallway in the lodge, back to me, maybe having done what he had as a teenager with Garrett: gotten lost skiing out of bounds to where they couldn’t ski back. They’d had to find the road and walk to the lodge. Everyone was frantic, while the boys had had an adventure. They were fifteen. I tried to think of what else could have happened. Maybe his delay was because he was helping someone else. But I started to think I should call the ski patrol office. We had season passes, and with Leo’s bracelet information, surely they could locate him. I had just told myself I would wait ten more minutes when I heard my name announced over the PA system with instructions to call a number.
“Mrs. McGeary, this is Richard Allen,” said the voice on the other end. “I’m the physician here at the medical center today. Can you tell me where you are?”
“Please, it’s Audrey,” I said. “What is it?”
“Can you tell me where you are in the lodge so I can come to you?” he said. “Ski patrol was contacted for an incident involving your husband and they’re bringing him down.”
Him. They were bringing him.
I called the boys over and minutes later, three men in identical gear stood in front of us.
“I’m Richard Allen.” He extended his hand. “And this is Nick, and Jeff.” He indicated the other two. Then the three of them all reached for chairs, placed them in front of us, and sat down.
“A group of skiers observed your husband skiing downhill very fast before he collided with a tree,” Richard said. “They contacted ski patrol and we responded.”
“How badly is he hurt?” I said. “Can he walk?”
“When we got to your husband,” he said, “he had no vital signs, and despite trying to revive him, we were unable to.” He leaned closer to me. “I’m very, very sorry, Audrey. I know this is a terrible shock.”
The boys and I sat there. I was waiting for more. I was waiting for Richard Allen to say but. But in a few months he’ll be fine. But he’ll be able to tell you about it himself in a few minutes. But I recommend he be more careful in the future. He was a very kind man, but he said none of these things.
Andrew started to wail and Christopher and Brian clutched him and the three of them attached themselves to me, no space between us. All I could do was kiss them and feel my body, heavy in the chair. My sons surrounded me like a small herd, which I tried to comfort and contain. They were all crying now, but Christopher and Brian still tried to soothe Andrew. I didn’t cry. Not then. My sons have lost their father.
“But you said you’re bringing him down,” I said.
“They’re bringing his body down,” said Richard. “We’ll call the medical examiner to transport him to the funeral home of your choice, or to the one in Hood River until you decide. Is there anyone else you’d like us to call? When you’re ready, we’ll go so you can identify him.”
“But he was wearing a helmet,” I said. “How could this happen if he was wearing a helmet?”
“He was,” Richard said. “We have his helmet. He was going so fast, there’s no way to know if he suffered a head trauma or another internal injury from the force of impact.”
Every day that Leo had gone to work, the possibility of his death hovered. That, I’d learned to live with, but not this.
“Is there anyone you’d like us to call?” Richard asked.
Who should they call? I would have to call my parents, Leo’s parents and sister, my brother. So many people. Which was worse, making the call or getting it? It was a call no one wanted to get and I didn’t want to make.
“Yes, please,” I said. I gave them Kevin’s number, and Erin’s. “They’re close friends. Kevin and Leo work together.” Nick and Jeff stepped away and dialed.
And Garrett. It felt like the middle of the night here, though it wasn’t, but it would be late in Boston. When did I last talk to him? Leo had told me he’d called Garrett on Christmas Eve, from work, but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d spoken to him. That was a call I had to make. And our families. Erin could do the rest.
Nick and Jeff returned to their chairs.
“I reached Kevin,” Nick or Jeff said. “He’s coming with the medical examiner and will drive your car home. I’ll give him your keys.”
“Erin and her husband will be waiting at your house for you,” the other one said.
“We’ll have someone drive you all home,” said Richard.
My hands were numb, as useful as two dead fish at the ends of my wrists. “He was a firefighter.” I worked to move my lips. “He did what you do. He saved people. He had to do this too.”
Jeff and Nick both nodded. “Yes, ma’am. We know he was.”
Richard sat looking at his hands folded between his knees before he looked at me. “Take as much time as you need. When I hear from the team and you’re ready, we can go see him. In the meantime, is there a funeral home I can contact? One less thing for you to handle.”
“I don’t know,” I said. I kept kissing the boys. Andrew had wormed his way into my lap and curled up into a ball half his size. “I guess McKays? A lot of the Catholics use McKays, I think.”
“I know Matt well,” said Richard. “I’ll call him.”
They were like an envelope around us, Richard, Nick, Jeff, and the other Mount Hood Meadows staff that joined them as we moved from the lodge—don’t fall down, don’t fall down—to the private room in the medical center where they had Leo, to the car that took us home. I don’t know if their job was to keep us away from other people—how our news would have ruined their time at the mountain—or to keep other people away from us. I suppose people around us wondered why we moved as a pack—my family surrounded by officials wearing matching jackets—intuiting it surely couldn’t be good. I clung to the boys on the ride home, which was no longer the home any of us knew, shushing and comforting with words I mustered without thinking. On a very dark stretch of road on Highway 26, I hoped and waited for an instant head-on fatal collision. Bury the five of us together.
When we got to the house, the boys were asleep, and Erin and Mark came out to the car to meet us. Mark half woke the boys and got them all inside. Since we had taken my Subaru wagon to the mountain like we always did, Leo’s Land Cruiser—his impenetrable four-door, more than twenty years old—loomed alone in front of the car that had driven us home. Its appearance looked exactly the way it had when we left that morning, suggesting that Leo was home and waiting inside for us, and I fell against Erin, unleashing the agony I’d harnessed for hours for the boys’ sake—to not come undone in front of them—in waves of wild sounds I’d never heard before. We stood in the driveway, behind Leo’s car, and I leaned on her and wailed until she shepherded me into the house and upstairs. Ma
rk had put the boys in my bed, and they were all asleep again, and Erin helped me change, and tucked me in next to my sons. I lay there whimpering in the dark, with her sitting on the floor next to me, stroking my hair until I fell asleep.
Garrett
Leo and I had both grown up in Radnor, Pennsylvania, but we didn’t become friends until 1983, when we were fourteen, during our freshman year at the Shipley School. Leo had gone to school there since kindergarten, and my parents, content enough with the public education I’d gotten through eighth grade, had decided Shipley, for countless compelling reasons, was where I would attend high school.
Neither of us was big, but because we were both fast and accurate, we played varsity basketball as sophomores. That first year, when I was new to Shipley, Leo and I found each other through basketball, and because of him, within weeks I had shaken the stink of being the new kid. Once we were friends, it was like we always had been.
Leo, and three of his friends who’d all been at Shipley since kindergarten and who played ball too—though not nearly as well as the two of us—took me in. We made five with Eric McGinnis, Ryan Wheeler, and Keith Donahue. We each had our own quirks, but for the rest of high school we were a unit. Eric refused to ever chip in for gas when Ryan, the first one of us to get his license, starting driving us all around, but as soon as Eric started driving, he started asking for gas money and Ryan shut him down right away, reminding Eric he was a cheap bastard and had been for months. Keith was the one we had to watch out for if we liked a girl. Once he got wind of it, she’d be the one he’d go for, with rare success, but he was on thin ice a lot of the time with us because he couldn’t help himself. We put up with him anyway, and never let him forget when he’d gone for someone one of us liked and failed bitterly.
As tight as we were in general, in spite of our squabbles, when Lisa Ponti died right after our junior year ended, it changed us and cemented us together in a way that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Lisa was in our class, one of the four Ponti girls, and was a superb golfer, a prodigy. All her sisters were too, but Lisa was on track for a golf scholarship, colleges and universities already fighting over her, and when she was killed instantly by a drunk driver, coming home from the course the Friday afternoon a week after school let out, in the car her parents had bought her for her birthday in January, her death froze everything in town and cast a pall over what should have been a carefree summer.
Without any discussion, like a flock of birds operating on instinct, the five of us packed sleeping bags, enough clothes, and our suits for the funeral, and lived together at Leo’s house for five days, in the McGearys’ basement rec room. It was an oppressively hot week, and Leo’s mom, Libby, fed us around the clock while we got through the days together. The McGearys had a pool but none of us swam, as hot as it was. Before Lisa’s funeral we waited, walked, watched a little TV, and played cards, and again for another two days after she was buried. Then we all went back home again.
Years later, I remembered few of the details, only the walks and card games and the waiting. There had been so much time to fill, I didn’t know how we had passed it with so little to occupy us. Shock had its place, doing its unseen work to make surviving possible when death could come and pluck any one of us bright young things out of our shining life. We had all liked Lisa, a lot, but not like a girlfriend. She was pretty and smart and cool—besides being the golf phenomenon—and any one of us trying to date her would have tainted our friendship, which none of us wanted. Even Donahue knew it, and wasn’t a dog for a change.
After high school, Leo and I drifted away from the other three, although our parents kept us updated. Last I knew, Eric had been living in Europe for years, and Keith had moved to Chicago and been divorced twice. Ryan still lived outside Philadelphia with his wife and four kids.
My family always spent every summer at our house in Surf City on Long Beach Island, and starting that summer after our junior year, through college, Leo came with us. His parents had a house in the Poconos, where he’d learned to ski as a little kid and where I learned as a teenager, after I started going there with his family. The summer between sophomore and junior years, my dad got me a job with Costello, a construction company, light stuff at first, and Leo and I both worked there the next summer, starting weeks after Lisa died. During the day we learned everything from framing to finishing these crazy geometric houses right on the beach that people dripping money could afford for us to build. On our breaks, we’d run and jump in the ocean to cool off, and got in this flirty back-and-forth thing all summer with a few of the badge checkers who always gave us shit because we were on the beach swimming without a badge—Not really, we’d say, we’re working, same as you—before we’d run back and change into dry clothes and return to the hot, sweaty work. On our days off, we went to the beach wearing our badges and showed them off to the checkers who’d harassed us.
One of them, Amy, on the days she didn’t work would walk the beach looking for sea glass, wearing her Walkman, and we’d flag her over and she’d sit with us, and sometimes we’d all swim before she resumed her walk. We’d always beg her to stay longer, playing desperate for her company. “You’ll see me soon enough,” she’d joke. “I’m going to nail you guys if it’s the last thing I do this summer.” That reduced us to raunchy laughter. She knew what she’d said, she was in on her own joke, but nothing ever happened with either of us and Amy. She was like Lisa, cool like that. Instead, we met other girls on the beach, and at night we went to where they were babysitting and hung out, or met up with them somewhere on the island—miniature golf or the arcade or the ice cream or pizza places—and drank and smoked and sometimes made out. A couple of times more than one girl seemed like she could be a summer girlfriend, but neither Leo nor I wanted that kind of ball and chain. It was summer and the island was full of so many girls, there was no way that was going to happen.
That first summer he spent with us, Leo had bought a unicycle and taught himself to ride it, so if we didn’t borrow my mom’s car, he’d cycle and I’d skateboard on our rounds. No helmets in those days. One night we went to Twenty-Third and the Boulevard, where a girl I liked from the beach was babysitting. While we were there, Leo rode his unicycle down the brick front steps of the house. I never forgot the place, which years later became a law office. Leo’s stunt was impressive, no question, but as soon as he did it, that girl stopped knowing I was alive. Without me saying anything, Leo knew it too, and that was the last time we ever spent any time with her.
After Lisa died, we never drank and drove on the nights we borrowed my mom’s station wagon and went to The Ketch, a bar in Beach Haven where there was always action. One night, when Leo was driving, I threw up all over the passenger door of the car. The next morning he pretended to be all wrecked and hungover, and, on his own, he finished the half-assed cleanup job we’d started the previous night, before he’d pushed and hauled me to bed. He told my mom I was still in bed because I was fuming and wanted to kill him.
After college graduation, I went to Europe for a year with a fraternity brother, Curtis, which was easy to do back then. He and I traveled together, until I took up with a girl named Katya for a few sweet months, before I left her for another girl named Estelle and a time that was far less sweet. Leo had gone back to working for Costello full-time, and lived in a cheap apartment over a pizza parlor in Ship Bottom.
That fall he met Audrey in Wilton, Connecticut, at the September wedding of Charlotte, Audrey’s best friend from high school, and George, a college pal of Leo’s. Charlotte and George had met in Scotland, at St. Andrews, during their junior year abroad. Audrey was a year older than Leo and she had a fat job in Portland at an ad agency. They danced together, to the exclusion of all the other guests, and stayed up for hours talking after the reception ended. After he got home, Leo found a note in his pocket that Audrey had put there: If you have good long distance, you should call me.
So he called her. And he went to Portland a month later and dr
ove up to Wilton to see her at Christmas, and flew to Portland again in February, and in March he left the East Coast for good and moved in with her. Leo was a hoarder with his money—he always had been—and so he had a cushion until he found a job.
We’d talked on the phone twice while I was abroad, and when he told me he was living in Portland, I gave him shit for following a woman.
“Fuck yeah, I followed her,” Leo said. “Before another man can. I’m not going to let it be anyone else but me.”
The next summer, after I’d returned from Europe and was at my parents’, he called me. Welcome home, let’s go out tonight, he said. I want you to meet Audrey. They had flown east to visit both sets of parents when he knew I’d be back. I hadn’t seen him in a year. When I got to the pub that was our old haunt, they were playing darts. After I hugged Leo, the way he introduced me to Audrey—with the combined giddiness of a boy and the confidence of a man—told me he was going to marry her.
She hugged me like it was a reunion instead of an introduction, and kissed me on the cheek. “Leo,” she said, “get Garrett a drink, and we’re going to sit while you play. Come on.” She linked her arm through mine and pulled me over to a booth, herding me onto the bench before sliding in across from me. She had moved, and moved me so quickly, since I’d walked in, it wasn’t until I was sitting that I had the chance to really look at her. She put her elbows on the table and rested her chin in her hands. She wore a red sundress, and a broad spill of freckles flecked her chest and trailed down under the neckline. She was blond, which I didn’t expect, because Leo had always gone for dark-haired women. I’d pictured her a brunette before that night, and in seconds I’d had to adjust my expectations to the woman in front of me.
Leo brought us our drinks, and they shared a look before he left us alone. “Come on,” she said. She drank from her beer and laid her palms flat on the table. There was nothing coy about her curiosity. I could tell that she had been waiting for this. “Tell me everything. So I can fill in the blanks.”