I made him go. My best friend. I made him get out, because I just wanted to be alone with my rage.
Turns out while I drank a decent share of a bottle of whiskey and then screamed at the sky, he was waiting outside in his truck. I know, because once I was done he came right back in and picked me up, dusted me off, and put me to bed.
Since then my back’s healed. It was just a bump after all. No harm done.
All the things that I actually did break that day were less tangible.
And more important.
I don’t call her. I can’t. Not if the price is not riding again.
I wish I was better with words, so I could explain to Raquel how I feel. How I love her. How I love boarding. How those two things don’t have to be in opposition.
How I love the good bits of her and the harder bits, both just as much, and I’d never ask her to sacrifice her happiness for me.
I made the right choice, I tell myself over and over again. The hardest choice. An unbearable choice.
But I had to. I can’t give up snowboarding anymore than I can give up breathing.
If I give up the faith that I’ll be back at it this winter, something inside of me will break.
Of course, something inside of me has broken anyhow.
But it’s what I had to do.
I tell myself that as I move around our house like a ghost, surrounded by the memories of our happiness. The one I had a second chance at. The one that somehow we fucked up again. Like it was never real—just another turn of the knife.
“We don’t have to do this right now, James,” the physio says finally, the second week that I’m just not trying. “Your recovery is going great. We can take a breather.”
He has to be kidding me. This is the only thing I have left.
“No,” I growl, no energy left to make it sound upbeat. “I’m doing this.”
And I will. I’ll run, and I’ll do weights, I’ll twist and squat and lunge and jump between balance boards until I’m fixed. Until I can do this one thing that’s left to me: the career I gave up everything else for.
I have nothing else to do. In this house that isn’t a home anymore I’m alone and lonely, trapped with my sadness and my anger.
Chase comes and sits with me in the evenings, staring wordlessly with me out over the mountains.
“You’ve still got the season starter in November,” he says one night.
I can’t remember what it felt like, to care about going.
Chase can’t know why I don’t answer. But there’s something in his eyes that I don’t want to see. I turn my face away.
“We’re going to invite Hanne over to stay,” he says finally. “You good with that?”
“Why wouldn’t I be good with Hanne coming?”
Turns out the reason not to be good with Hanne coming is that she’s less inclined to quietly put up with my bullshit.
It’s late September, and two days into Hanne’s visit, when I’m woken by a sudden light. I fumble my arm out from under my bed sheets, raising my hand between my face and the curtains.
“Wake up.” Chase. I peek blearily through my fingers to see him standing at the edge of the window, guilty of opening it.
“Jesus, man. What is wrong with you?”
“We’re staging an intervention.” Hanne’s voice comes from the end of my bed. I roll over onto my back, bracing on my elbows, and blink at her.
“What are you doing in my bedroom?”
“You’ve been in here almost all the time since I arrived. It’s not your bedroom anymore. It’s your cave.”
I glare at Hanne with her folded arms and thin lips before looking over to Chase. If I expected sympathy, it’s not there.
“Get the hell out.”
Something flickers over Chase’s face a lot like pain. Instantly I feel bad for it. I let a groan shudder through me, collapsing back and rubbing my hands over my face.
“Sorry. I just—it’s a bad time.”
“You weren’t this bad in the hospital when you actually broke yourself,” Hanne sniffs. She doesn’t do a very good job of holding her anger. Underneath all her bristle she’s always had a soft side, and now it smooths out her expression. She reaches one hand for me, squeezing gently just above my elbow. “Get up.”
“For what?” I snap.
Chase grunts. “Hey. We’re your crew. Don’t speak to us like that.”
I glare at him—at the ridiculousness of Chase calling anyone else out on speaking to their friends like that. “I’m sorry. Is that Mr. Grumpypants talking?”
The tension breaks. Chase’s mouth twitches from a grimace to a grin. Hanne only manages to hold back a laugh for a second and then it breaks out as a snort through her nose.
And I’m smiling, too. Despite everything, despite my dreams and my heart being broken in two, my friends can still make me laugh.
“Mr. Grumpypants is the stupidest nickname,” Hanne teases affectionately, turning to look at Chase.
“Why the fuck do you two know what my girlfriend calls me in the privacy of our own home,” Chase complains, but he’s grinning too.
I love them. I always have. But it’s easy to take the people you care about the most for granted. Chase and Hanne have been in my life since I was a teenager. Since all this crazy shit started, the boarding and everything that comes with it. It’s only in moments like these that I really see them, and my chest aches with just how much they mean to me.
“Sorry,” I say, the word coming out quiet. “For…”
I wave one hand at it all. My room. The whiskey bottle on the bedside table. My clothes thrown over the floor. All of this sadness.
Hanne’s gaze follows the sweep of my hand, and when it comes back to my face her expression is softer. Her smile is genuine for all that it’s pained. “You don’t have to apologize for being sad.”
Chase grunts. “We don’t want your sorry. We want you back.”
“After everything, I just don’t feel like…”
“You don’t have to see anyone.” Chase shrugs. “Just get up. Go for a walk with Hanne. I’m gonna make eggs.”
Hanne waggles her eyebrows. “Mmm, Chase eggs. Careful. That’s how he wooed Brooke.”
Chase shoots her a mock-menacing look. “I’m not the one who should be careful.”
Hanne’s grin quirks. When she turns it back to me it’s softer. “Come on a walk with me.”
That bitter black bile spears up in me again. “Do you think I can? Walk. I can’t do anything else.”
Hanne’s eyebrows rise. “Don’t,” she says, the warning clear. “You matter to us. We’re not leaving you to drown in this.”
I look at them—pink-and-blonde Hanne with her determined jaw and the scar at the bridge of her nose. Chase, with his earnest look and the expectant way he stands behind Hanne.
“You need to get out of this bed.” Chase taps the frame with his toe. “Also, you probably stink. I’m not coming any closer to find out.”
“He stinks,” Hanne confirms.
“Watch it.” I shove my foot into her hip, making her jump up with a laugh.
“You can’t stop us loving you by being in a mood,” Hanne singsongs. “Chase tried it, remember?”
Chase can’t help but laugh.
“Just get up, okay?” Hanne smiles as she drifts toward the door. “I know you feel like crap. It doesn’t matter. We want you to be with us when you’re feeling shit.”
I finally shake my head. “I don’t deserve you.”
“After all you’ve done for us?” Chase shakes his head. “It’s what family’s for.”
“Go get a shower,” Hanne leans back around the door to order as they head out together. “We’re leaving in fifteen minutes.”
JJ
Most people wouldn’t choose a near-vertical scramble up a mountainside for a serious heart to heart. Most people aren’t Hanne.
It’s not like the difficulty of the trail is holding her back. She moves like a mountain goat, her breath
hardly any heavier than when we started. I guess she’s still been active this summer—boarding in the Southern Hemisphere, trying out bouldering up in British Columbia. Hell, I even saw photos of a horse trekking trip somewhere in the Midwest.
While I’ve been trapped in recovery, I’ve been doing a chunk of living my life vicariously through my friends’ Instagram feeds.
For the first hour or so, we talk about random shit. Mostly that means hearing again about all of those trips. There are other updates, too, like how she and Mike want to organize a summer sailing trip for the Vertex team next year, and how she wants to take me to visit her family in Norway again.
So when she goes in for the kill, it’s abrupt.
“What are you going to do about this?”
I pause, trying not to let her hear that my cardio fitness isn’t keeping up to this as well as hers. “This?”
Hanne raises her eyebrows. “Oh, come on.”
I look down and begin to climb again, watching as if I need to check where I’ll place my feet—though the trail isn’t particularly rugged.
“It’s already been done. It’s over.”
I can feel Hanne’s eyes on me, disbelief radiating from her.
“I love Raquel,” I admit, turning my face to look out over the view opening up behind us. “But that isn’t enough.”
“It seems pretty important to me.”
I act like I’m ignoring that. “I can’t give snowboarding up. You know that.”
“Of course not.” Her disdain for that idea is audible. “But I don’t think that’s what she needs.”
“She made it pretty damn clear that’s what she needs,” I snap back.
Hanne isn’t ruffled. Out of the corner of my eye I see her shrug. “I think you should talk to her.”
“I don’t need to talk to her.” I grit my teeth. “I’m happy with my decision.”
I’m stopped immediately by the light touch of Hanne’s hand to my elbow. When I look to her face her eyes are wide, her mouth soft.
“Really? Are you honestly telling yourself that?”
I can’t lie to her. I can’t lie to myself. It’s all on my face, anyway. How lonely I am. How much I miss Raquel.
“This is my life,” I tell her. “Boarding for Vertex—it’s everything. I can’t go and have some desk job somewhere.”
“Don’t be stupid.” Hanne shakes her head so sharply that strands of pink hair coming free from her topknot. “You’re being as bullheaded as Chase. It isn’t black and white like that.”
“I want my old life back,” I protest. “I want—I love her, Hanne. But I can’t change who I am.”
Hanne looks at me intently before reaching out to squeeze my shoulder. Her eyes are deep, the way people look when they’re sad, or full of love, or both. “The crash already happened, JJ.” She shakes her head to my opened mouth. “I don’t mean the avalanche. I mean Raquel.” She looks between my eyes carefully. “You can’t take that back, not any more than you can take back what happened to your spine. She already changed you. You can never go back to who you were before you met her.”
I’m struck dumb, left wordless by the obviousness of what she’s saying, the way she reveals myself to me.
“You’ve already changed,” Hanne repeats. “You just have to let yourself see that. What do you actually want, JJ? Because I don’t think she needs you to stop boarding. I think she needs you to think about the risks that you’re taking. I think she needs you to reassure her that you’ll still be around when your inevitable little sproglets are teenagers.”
I still can’t say anything.
Hanne sighs, turning back up the slope and beginning to walk again. “You’ve always wanted kids,” she says without turning back. “Don’t tell me you didn’t think about how your life would look once you were responsible for tiny humans.”
It’s all I can do to start walking after her. My normal feet have been replaced by two left ones as I stumble over the trail. I can hardly focus on walking.
I do want kids. And I want to see them as more than teenagers. I want to see them graduate. I want to see them get married. I want grandbabies. I want all of these things that have always seemed so opposed to the path I’ve walked so far—the one where I risk my life for a living.
“We change,” Hanne says. “You’ve changed. You met Raquel, and now you need her just as much as you need boarding.”
The truth hits me like a fist.
In my chest there’s a great emptiness where there should be air. My mouth moves over nothingness.
I knew it. Of course I knew it. But to have Hanne say it…
Our whole lives together, boarding has been everything. She’s seen every step of my career. She’s been there for every triumph and every failure. She knows what riding is to me. My passion. My calling. My whole life.
And now she’s saying that it isn’t enough.
And she’s right.
The world wobbles around me. It’s too much. My head aches with trying to process it.
“I can’t lose you guys.” The protest bubbles up. “I can’t lose my sponsorship. It’s not like there’s money in riding small slopes.”
“We all know some of the risks we take are more negotiable than others,” Hanne corrects as she stops and turns back to look at me. “And you won’t know what Vertex will sponsor you to do until you talk to them about it.”
She twists back uphill, as if that’s all, but her voice comes down to me as she walks on ahead.
“And I’m the one who should be worried about losing you. You’re are all settling down. It will be just me and Hunter, soon.” She doesn’t sound excited about the idea.
I shake my head, bounding ahead in an effort to catch up with her. “You know what I mean.”
Hanne stops and turns abruptly, and I’m frozen by the fix of her gaze. She looks at me, really looks. The way only a sister can look at you.
“You’re never going to lose us,” she says. “We’re your crew. We’re your family. And if your adventure now has more babies and home time in it… Then we’ll be happy for you.” She nudges her knee against mine. “We love you alive more than we love you on any particular mountain.”
To say that Chase and I have a different relationship from the one I have with Hanne would be an understatement. He’s not normally a “talk it out” kind of guy. And after more than twenty years of being closer than brothers, Chase and I don’t have to use words so much.
We sit out in the darkness, and saying ten words have passed between us in the last thirty minutes would probably be an overestimate.
The porch chair is swinging lightly. I don’t know which one of us set it going. Maybe it’s Chase, with the stick he uses now and again to poke at the fire pit when we swing close enough. I watch that movement, seeing the sparks bursting into life as he bothers the embers. They fly up into the sky, phoenix-like, before disappearing into the stars.
Four months ago Raquel and I watched fire falling from the sky. Now everything is upside down.
I tug my jacket tighter about myself, raising the bottle of beer for another swig. The flickering firelight is caught in the bottle, dancing over the amber liquid.
Back in the house Hanne and Brooke are chatting, the sound muffled by the soft music they’re playing. Somewhere far away a dog barks.
When Chase’s voice finally comes it’s too low to surprise me, barely a murmur in the darkness. It could be more wind on the trees.
“You wanna talk about it, man?”
I shake my head, as if that might make her go away. The Raquel that I always see, always feel, no matter where I go. The woman that I carry with me, lodged inside of myself. We can be on other sides of the country and still she’s right here. The person I’ll never let go.
In profile, Chase’s expression is inscrutable. He stares at the fire, swirling his own beer around and around with the neck of the bottle caught in the loop of his middle and pointer fingers. The only sign that he’s listen
ing intently to whatever I say is the way the firelight shadows over the grooved lines at his forehead.
I grunt, letting my head flop back against the cushion. “I don’t know.”
There’s a pause before I feel, rather than see, Chase shrug.
“She loves you.”
It’s not what I expected him to say. It’s not that it’s not true. God knows at this point that we’ve established neither Raquel nor I can actually stop caring for each other. But for Chase to even talk about the L word?
I thought Brooke’s greatest skill was her work, but she’s equally talented in wrangling extremely uncommunicative damaged pro athletes, too.
Chase waits for me to say anything, and when I don’t he adds: “She loves you, and you love her.”
“It’s not that simple,” I say.
“It sounds pretty fucking simple to me,” Chase grunts. There’s another, longer pause, and I swear I can feel him digging the words out of himself. Struggling to be open.
“We don’t get forever. You’ve had a second chance. That’s…”
The ghosts of his past hang between us. I lean over and bump my shoulder to his, so that he knows that I’m here. That he’s understood, and that even if I can’t change the shit he’s gone through, I can make sure he doesn’t face it alone.
“Make the most of it,” Chase says, finally. “Just—be happy.”
I’m surprised by the loop of his arm around my shoulder, the sudden squeeze.
“I love you, man.”
I’m so shocked that he’s actually voicing it that all I can say is: “I know,” before we settle back into silence together.
Raquel
Somehow I get through all the weeks until November, though it hardly feels like I’m living.
I haven’t marked the season starter in my calendar, but I can feel it like a physical thing, weighing heavier and heavier on my mind as the date approaches.
JJ hasn’t been updating his social media much—and we certainly haven’t been talking—but through his friends’ accounts I can follow a rough outline of what he’s doing. I see that Hanne is in Jackson for a while, presumably visiting him. I see that he’s tagged in a photo of Chase out hiking.
Crash (The Wild Sequence Book 2) Page 28