I assume it will be a message like any other. I’ve had a lot today. Long-term clients and new prospects are messaging me to congratulate me on my “move.” Some of them who are wealthy enough to own second homes in Jackson are suggesting in-person coaching sessions.
Of course it will be another message like that. So I don’t hesitate to open it.
The photos show a woman in her early twenties. She has a snow tan and a smile, just like Hanne did at that age. She’s standing with her skis at the top of a mountain. She’s in the middle of a slalom race.
She’s in a hospital bed, bruised and swollen, her limbs covered in casts.
All the air is forced from my lungs. My hand that holds my phone is shaking.
Hi Raquel.
I understand you don’t work with sports clients anymore but I’m hoping you would change your mind for me.
My name is Min-ji. Last year, I was in a bad accident.
I feel like I’m falling. My stomach drops. I’m filled with a whirling, aching emptiness, a hollowness that fills with a rising tide of terror and sadness.
I see JJ under the snow, his face blackened and icy cold, his precious eyes shut.
I want to get back to skiing, whatever that means. I just want to get back on the snow. But I’m too afraid. I know I can do it. But I need help getting back in the headspace. Someone told me you’re the best.
Please help me. I’m begging you.
I can’t help her. I won’t help her hurt herself more.
I can hardly help myself, pressing my fingertips against my eyelids. No matter how many tears I brush away, still I see him under all of that snow.
I sit in my car in the silent garage, trying to force myself to breathe slowly.
My hands are still trembling. I got most of it under control before started the drive to the house. It didn’t take long to gather myself. I have some control. And yet…
Here I am, still counting my breaths almost an hour later, feeling lightheaded and heavy-bodied all at once.
When I finally get out of the car, I hope to get time alone at the mirror to sort myself out. I click the garage door shut behind me, hefting the shopping bag from my hip to the top of the table at the entrance. It’s a relief to have the heavy weight from my arm after even a few steps.
I look a mess. I pat at some stray strands of hair, tucking them back behind my ear. Smoothing them down. If only my face were as easy to fix. God, I look like I’ve been crying. Which I have, but not that much…
“Are you okay?”
JJ’s voice makes me start out of my skin.
He’s standing there in his track pants and a compression top. They’re loose from all the weight he’s lost. He has that thin, slightly haunted look of a man who’s in pain, and has been for a long time.
He’s still so handsome he makes my heart stop, even after all these years. His wavy dark blond hair, close to honey; the golden warmth of his eyes. Even with his new pale skin, he takes my breath away.
“James.” I say his name like I can gather myself with it. “I’m—I’m okay.”
He steps toward me. “Steps.” Those awkward movements that he still has to think about, pain telegraphed in the twitches of his face he tries to hide but can’t—not from me.
“Did something happen?”
He can’t touch me. I know it as soon as he’s reaching for my face, when a stab of pain goes through my abdomen. The same one as before, burning upward into my chest where it turns to a frozen chill.
He can’t touch me, because if he does all these shattered lines just beneath the surface of me will be revealed. They’ll simply break apart, as they’ve been threatening to do for so long, and I’ll explode into a hundred thousand tiny pieces.
I tug back, and so does JJ, and it hangs as one horrible moment. I’ve been so angry at him. I’ve screamed at him and cried over him.
But that look on his face is betrayal. Such a pure, simple pain, that I would jerk away from his touch. My movement isn’t a physical knife, but I see it slice through him all the same.
“JJ…”
But he’s already going. Stiffly he moves past me, forcing the body that was once so beautiful to move. He used to jump off mountains. Now…
“Don’t worry. I won’t touch you. I’ll just take this.”
The words hit me just as I realize what he’s reaching for. The bag I brought back from town. It’s far too heavy.
“No! Don’t. You can’t.”
I recoil under the look he gives me.
“I can lift some fucking groceries, Raquel.”
It’s all coming up in me, the fear and the anger. My hands are shaking again. It makes the words come harsher than I mean.
“No, you can’t. I’ve seen you trying to lift ten-pound weights with the PT. You can’t lift that bag.”
I regret saying it as soon as I have, but no matter how much adrenaline is rushing through me, I can’t take back the words.
I see it in the moment before JJ turns away. I see the pain in his face, the deep-down hurt. I see the way his lips part in surprise that I would ever say that to him.
And then I see him turn, and the way he’s fighting to walk as normally as he can.
He doesn’t say a thing as he goes.
Raquel—Before
Before it happens, everything feels normal.
That’s what haunts you. It’s what turns the everyday against you.
It means that you can’t trust a happy moment ever again, because you realize that happiness is ice, and you can never tell at which moment you walk out from safety to a surface that’s too thin.
Ready to snap under your feet.
It doesn’t feel like today will be linked to the times I’ve had a call to say JJ is in hospital, or the times I’ve had to click away from videos that show him getting hurt.
It feels like today is happy.
We’ve been engaged for two months, living in our new home for six. It feels like everything is perfect.
I have no idea that my happiness is about to be shattered. It might take longer to break—months more for JJ and I to fall apart—but this is the first blow, the one from which the fractures spread, thin as fault lines over ice.
It smells of a barbecue. That’s a stupid thing to remember, but it’s so vivid in my mind. The smell of meat on the grill. The athletes aren’t due back for another half-hour, but we’re already getting ready. The final day of filming a Vertex promo video in New Zealand, and we’re all here: the athletes who are already done filming, the High Performance support team, the families who’ve come out here to overlap a vacation with work. We cluster in the bright winter sun out on the terrace, the mood bubbly with excitement.
There’s meant to be a wall between work and your personal life. It’s blurred when we work together like this. It’s as much a family as a team. For now I have my “family” hat on, holding Gus and Erica’s little boy on my lap. His dad is out filming still with JJ. His mom is chatting with one of the other coaches by the barbecue, her hand smoothing over the just-there swell of her pregnant belly under her jacket.
The weight of the little boy—Wes—is so right in my arms. I remember that, too. The still babyish smell of his hair. It makes something very old and primal in me glow. “Baby fever,” my mom calls it, but it’s not a fever. It’s a steady, warm yearning.
I sense my engagement ring pressing into my skin, and savor the feeling of excitement. We’ll be married next summer, and then we’ll start trying.
I laugh as Wes pokes his plush elephant hand puppet against my face.
“You want me to have an elephant hat?”
He laughs, a sweet burble of happiness, and it makes me melt. I remember how JJ looked when he whirled Wes up over his head before they left to film, making him giggle with that pure joy only little children have.
“Ewwephant,” Wes agrees, emphatically.
“Well, I don’t know about a hat,” I say. “But maybe…”
I
’m shifting my arms around him, trying to get the puppet over my hand, when I realize what’s going on.
There’s a rustle of people. Someone is running out from the building and across the deck toward Sarah.
A radio is going off, the crackling of words that surely I can’t hear, not from where I’m sitting.
Somewhere, I hear a siren that I’ll later learn is the air ambulance scrambling.
Which do I hear first? Someone saying what happened? Or the sound of Erica’s scream?
In my memory, it’s all one thing.
The smash as she drops her glass.
The look on her face.
The sound that she makes, which doesn’t seem to come from a human at all. An on-and-on screaming that starts and then doesn’t end.
I know. We all know.
In my arms, Wes starts to wriggle. He doesn’t know what’s going on. “Mama?”
She screams and screams, and Wes is starting to cry too, terrified.
“Mama!”
But it’s not his mama he’s lost.
Not his mama who…
Do you know the worst thing?
For one moment, I’m glad.
For one moment all I think is: thank you, God, for not letting it be JJ.
And then the guilt hits me, and the sick fear, and I tug Wes into the wrap of my arms as if I could protect him from everything that has already happened that he can’t yet understand.
JJ
Living with the woman you love, and knowing that she’ll never have you again, is hell.
All of it is.
Wake up in pain. Pop a Tylenol-3 to try to sleep through the night. Wake up again and lie there in the darkness, in agony when you move and in agony when you don’t. Wait until late to get out of bed because you don’t want to be reminded that getting out of bed feels like someone is cutting open your back, right along the spine, while someone else knees you in the gut.
At least you can shower yourself so long as you don’t drop the shampoo bottle. Feel a sense of achievement that doesn’t last. Hate yourself for feeling a sense of achievement over doing your own fucking hair.
Try to get dressed on your own, even though you can’t reach forward or bend down. Already standing up is so fucking painful you want to sit down, but that’s going to hurt, too.
Remember your ex is in your house. For one second, want more than anything to ask for a hug. Remember she hates you for something you did. Hate yourself. Hope you don’t see her. Hope you do see her.
Eat as much as you can, but you aren’t hungry. Probably don’t shit because there’s only so much Tylenol-3 a human can possibly metabolize before their digestive system goes on strike. Catch sight of yourself in the mirror. You usually try not to. There’s at least twenty pounds less of you than there used to be. It doesn’t look good.
Go do your PT. Ignore the physio’s recommendation not to do “too much.” Your whole life has been about doing what other people call “too much.” Their rules have never applied to you. Not then, and not now.
Try to do an ambitious stretch. Almost vomit from the pain. Wish you were dead. Think maybe you will be dead if it doesn’t stop hurting.
Consider popping another Tylenol-3. Remember the athletes you’ve known whose medals didn’t protect them from an addiction. Opiates don’t care if your initial injury is real. Don’t take the Tylenol-3.
Hate yourself for only managing to use ten-pound weights. Pain isn’t weakness leaving your body: it’s become who you are. Constant pain fucks with you. It makes you sad and mad and generally an asshole. Try to remember what it was like not to hurt. Fail.
“At least they’ve got you on the good stuff,” your dad says on the phone. Don’t have the heart to tell him that actually, if you break your spine, even “the good stuff” just isn’t that good. And you have to take it for it to work.
Welcome the PT. Smile and shoot the shit because it’s not his fault he has to deal with people who are in pain all the time. Try to hold it together because something about this friendly, sporty guy makes you want to punch him in the face, no matter how understanding he is. Maybe because of how understanding he is, because that means you’re the type of person who needs understanding. The type of person who’s about out of their own patience.
Try to be friendly. Try to be positive.
Try not to show him you’re starting to cry when you’ve only been stretching in the pool for two-and-a-half minutes and you already hurt so bad and you remember the time when you could run for hours, when you had a different life.
You’ll get there, he says, turned away as if he’s looking at the towels when really he’s just giving you space. I promise you, you’re gonna get there.
Don’t believe him just as much as you believed it when you shouted at those doctors: you don’t know me.
Because you’re gonna get there, right?
You’re gonna make recovery your whole life.
You’re going to be who you used to be.
Think that’s just about possible, until the woman you’re still madly, crazily in love with you draws back from your touch like it burns.
She’s right. I couldn’t lift the bag. Just like I can’t do anything else. Like I can’t put on my own damn shoes, or reach for something that’s across my centerline, or take out the trash. Like I can’t sit still long enough to be driven in a vehicle, let alone drive my own like an actual adult. Like I can’t do anything, anything that has given my life meaning.
Snowboarding. Making love to Raquel. All of that is gone.
“JJ,” she’s saying behind me. “Wait.”
I can’t tell if she’s softening or not. I don’t care. Won’t care. Because believing that she feels anything soft for me at all is a trap. It gives me hope, and that hope is just a serpent in the grass that’s gonna turn around and bite my ass.
I can’t hope, and then lose her, again. Not when she’s my everything.
“Forget about it,” I growl back at her.
“You think I can forget about this?”
Why is her voice raising? When she’s whole and fine and perfect and here just to let me go, just to get rid of the traces of our old life as fast as she possibly can?
Like I’m something she wants to forget. A bad dream she’s trying to wake up from.
I shouldn’t shout at her. But it feels good. To let out all of this black bile that’s been building up in me.
“You can forget about this anytime you want. You can just turn around and walk straight out of here. You’re not trapped.”
“You want to talk about being trapped?” It’s easy for her to catch up with me. I hate the way she comes and stands in front of me, walking easily on her good spine and good ribs and good legs. “You have to be trapped to be here with me. You didn’t want me before.”
I laugh. It feels more like crying. “Didn’t want you? I’ve always wanted you. I want you as my wife, I want you as the mother of my children—”
“Not enough,” she snaps back. “Not until you lost what you really wanted.”
The words fall like rocks, and I can see her shocked by them, too. Just as much as I am. That she’d say that.
I heard it from that doctor in Vancouver. I heard it implied in the voice of the first PT I interviewed, when she talked about getting me back to everyday function, but went quiet when I spoke about boarding.
Her fingers flutter, like she’d reach for me, but I won’t have her touch me. Not like that. Not with pity.
I jerk away, around the kitchen island, grabbing a hold of it with white knuckles as pain punches along my spine.
“I haven’t lost it,” I managed around grit teeth, after I’ve grunted out pain.
Raquel shakes her head, her mouth downturned, her brow lined. “Look at you, James.”
I don’t want to. I don’t want her to, either. I don’t want anyone to see me like this.
“Look at me what?” Now I’m really shouting, clutching onto the edge of the quar
tz countertop as I turn to her. My breath is coming faster over the pain that’s building in my spine. Just an argument and it’s killing me. “Look at the broken man? Come look at the cripple?”
“Don’t use that word. It’s horrible.”
“What right do you have to tell me how to talk about myself?”
She’s pale and hard-lined, drawn back in on herself. We’ve both always hated confrontation. Both avoided it and avoided it until it breaks out like this—sudden and vicious, both of us writhing around in pain, hurting each other in the process.
Unfortunately, that tiny voice in me which can see so clearly what we’re doing, that feels so fucking bad about it?
It really is only tiny. It’s dwarfed by this ache inside of me, this discomfort with simply being here, being alive, being trapped in a body that after all these years can’t do the things that make me myself.
The things that are at the core of who I am.
She takes a deep shuddering breath, her hand coming up to her face for a moment, nervously twitching at her hair.
My beautiful Raquel, pale and twitchy, and I hate that I’ve done this to her, hate that I’ve ruined everything, hate the mess that my life is.
The mess that I made.
“I’ve not lost it,” I say again. I try to make it as hard as I can. Like a promise. Like a statement of truth. So why is my voice rough as if it’s about to crack? “I’m going to get better.”
“All you want is to get out there so you can hurt yourself again!”
“Of course I do. You took everything else, Raquel. I have nothing else left.”
“You’re never going to snowboard like you used to again, James!”
My real name echoes in the silence after the rest of the words.
Together we rock back from the impact.
Raquel’s hand has come to her mouth. It flutters there, as if uselessly trying to catch those words and draw them back.
Crash (The Wild Sequence Book 2) Page 11