Bridge To Happiness (35 page)

Two cords of haphazardly piled wood, tamarack and live oak delivered before I arrived, met me at the end of the drive.

With a husband and three sons, firewood miraculously wound up in the wood racks in my past life. I hadn’t thought about paying the delivery service to stack it until I first drove up from the city and voila! There it was, a huge mound of wood, lonely and confused waiting to be stacked.

Maybe that was part of my problem. I was, like the wood, dumped into a confused stack, in no order and blocking my own way forward. Worse than that I was just sitting around waiting, waiting for my life to change, waiting, waiting, waiting for everything to come to me. I had never been such a passive person.

When did I become so complacent and accepting of the world? Why was every decision I faced so difficult? Life was unsure now. I thought about that as I went inside and changed clothes, while I shoveled off the porch and a path to the wood box and rack.

With the wheelbarrow from the shed, I began to move the wood. Over the next hours I worked hard, my breath frosty and my nose growing numb, while I drank from a thermos of hot coffee and loaded split logs. I began to roll the wheelbarrow across the expanse of soft snow, leaving whimsical tracks and designs in my wake. Sometimes I walked in a useless circle just for the loop effect the wheels made in the snow. Before long I had painted a full landscape in the yard with wheel tracks. I signed my name across the bottom and drawing a huge daisy next to it, like I had done when I was thirteen and in junior high art class.

But soon the snow picked up and the yard graffiti was slowly erased, and the wood in the racks stacked up into impressively neat rows, the way I thought my life used to be, or wished it would be now. I played that mental if-then game with myself and fitted each log into its rack like a puzzle piece.

If I line up all the wood into perfect rows,

then my life will align perfectly, too.

My face was half frozen and I was sweating under my hat and clothes by the time I had finished, muscles sore, but endorphins flying high. As I stood back and looked at the wood racks, I was feeling great. My rubbery thighs however were not, so I trudged limply inside to take a long sauna and bath. Afterward, I ignored my natural urge to throw on some flannel pj’s at four in the afternoon and just eat a bowl of cold cereal by the fire.

Instead I dressed in jeans and a sweater and spent time making myself a full dinner. Just for atmosphere, I put Dean Martin on the stereo, singing along as I cooked, set the table, complete with folded cloth napkin and pewter ring, opened a nice bottle of red wine from an famous Italian director’s winery. I plated my meal like a chef from the Food Network and set down at the kitchen table to a spread of antipasto atop freshly chopped romaine,
Marsala
Bolognese sauce over rigatoni, and double baked garlic cheese bread.

I looked through the wide bay windows overlooking a great expanse of the Tahoe Basin and the veil of falling snowflakes. All that snow looked like the white dots on my mother’s old enameled roasting pan. The lake was only a grainy oval of gray in the distance, the mountains flanking it just saw-like shadows at the edge of the storm.

I hadn’t thought about that old roasting pan in years. I hadn’t thought about my mom in a while, but those moments when I did, I missed her achingly. I don’t know that May felt the same.

My sister had gone off to her great Ivy League college and stayed on the East Coast, a journalist who eventually married a National Geographic photographer and spent her lifetime traveling the world, never stopping long enough to have babies or spend time or holidays with the family.

Before Mike’s death, contact from May was rather like a fly-by-fruiting. She called, found out you were okay, talked for five minutes, and was gone again for months.

I should call her. The last I’d heard from her, she was off to South America. They had trains and five-star tours, but I doubt they had cell service near Machu Picchu.

Odd how time changed things, and my perfect round-peg-in-round-hole-Glamour-Magazine older sister grew away from mother while I, the misfit and rebel, grew closer. My mother and I found our strongest bond around the time Scott was born, and I understood quickly that it took impending motherhood and my own children to make me appreciate and understand my mother, who I had unfairly seen in my blinded and arrogant youth as hopelessly square and old fashioned.

The voice of reason and calm in almost any storm, the strong spine of our family, that was my mother. She and I used to play canasta for hours when the kids were young. I haven’t played canasta since she died.

Outside it was dark and pretty much invisible by the time I washed up my dishes and went into the living room, where the fire was burning a deep red-orange flame, and I turned down the lights and sank into the sofa, curled up my feet, and settled into a deep downy corner as the logs spat and crackled.

Sitting there with my wine glass, I leaned my head back against the pillows and closed my eyes. The only sound was my own heartbeat.

The storm lasted
another two days, with white-out conditions on the mountain and only a short break before another storm hit, so my sons didn’t come up that weekend after all. Molly was off with Spider (I was going to work on accepting that situation) and Mickey was happily ensconced back on campus, where he loved his graphic arts class and had plans of his own to go up to the local mountains on a boarding trip.

From the time he’d first gone off to school last fall, he called home regularly, Tuesdays and Fridays. I learned the sunny days in Westwood sent him constantly off doing something fun, especially with the mountains in one direction and the beach in the other.

My Monday dawned cold and clear, and everything was feathery white or bright blue sky. I walked outside into that complete absence of sound that comes after a snowstorm. What was it Rio Paxton had said to me that day we were stuck on the lift? Twenty five percent of sound was absorbed by snow. As I stood there in the snow silence, I realized I felt good. There was some peace around me. Signs were all around that it would be an amazing day on the mountain.

The runs at Heavenly were like riding on
goosedown
, and not crowded. I even ran into some old friends at the lodge during lunch, a couple Mike and I had known for twenty five years, and we met again at the end of the day for a drink and nachos at the crowded bar nearby.

I came home a couple of hours later, cleaned up and threw on jeans and a soft sweater, and walked out to the kitchen for a bowl of ice cream. The message light on the answering machine was blinking like a railroad crossing. I pressed the play button.

The red digital number twenty two flashed on the small screen. There were twenty two messages? My heart stopped.

Now what had happened? I pressed PLAY.

“Hi, March. This is
Harrie
. I’m just checking to see how you are. Give me a call if you have time to talk. Enjoy the snow!” There was a long pause. “If you need to talk, I’m here.”

“Hi Mom. It’s Scott. Just checking to see if you’re okay today.”

Next was Phillip, then Mike’s brother from Vancouver, Ellie, MC, May from Peru, even Molly. As I listened, I looked at the calendar and wanted to throw up. I had forgotten, or blocked out the date. Mike’s accident was a year ago today.

I sat down on a nearby chair, then called my children, assured them I was fine and talked to each of them about their father, guided them toward some moment or memory I knew had been special, one that made them laugh. Only when I was certain each one of them was okay, did I end the phone call.

By the time I was done, my mind was running in every direction, complete chaos. I stood in the center of the quiet house and knew I couldn’t stand there a moment longer.

Peacocks screamed
and Aztec gods moaned from the long bays of slot machines lined up like neon dominoes. The jackpots rang while a woman’s excited laughter came from a busy corner. Waitresses wove their way across the casino floor shouting “Cocktails! Beverages!” and male shouts and whoops pierced the air like buckshot from the hottest crap tables. All around me was noise, loud, blissful, rowdy, clamorous noise.

In the first hour or so I’d won a couple hundred bucks at blackjack and spent another two hours losing it on a slot machine with singing Elvis
piggies
, then I became bored.

In the lounge, a band from the Eighties had already wrapped up one show, so I sat just outside at the lounge bar, drinking Tequila
Marys
with three olives and talking to the chatty bartender who kept me supplied with extra olives.

I had already planned to see a magician whose show was coming to the lounge later that week as my out-alone-at-the-casino-lounge-test, but tonight the music was upbeat and it was an
uncrowded
Monday, so when the midnight show started, I wandered inside, sat at a empty booth table in the darkest back corner and let them entertain me. This could be a new lesson. Maybe I could learn to drink alone.

By the time the show stopped, I had gone through the three drink minimum and more. I looked down at a colorful pile of plastic olive skewers sitting there like Pick-up
Stix
on the small table. Taxi time. Around me the lounge had emptied, and I could hear the clatter of the band behind the curtain clearing out their instruments. But I didn’t get up right away.

When I did stand, the room swam and so I sat back down hard and closed my eyes to stop the spinning, then leaned my head back against the padded leather booth. Somewhere in my tequila-fogged mind, I had the thought that this had been a bad idea.

How long I stayed like that I didn’t know, and I might even have been snoring when I thought I heard my name. I closed my mouth and swallowed dryly. My mouth tasted like a parade ground for an army of green pimento-stuffed olives.

“March?”

I didn’t have to open my eyes because I knew that deep silky voice. “Uh-huh.”

“Are you okay?”

“Uh-huh.”

Silence.
Snap, snap, snap!
Was he was snapping his fingers in front of my face? “I’m here,” I said, but I just wanted to stay where I was.

“It’s Rio.”

“I know.”

“Open your eyes.”

“Can’t.”

“Open your eyes.”

I put my finger to my lips and said, “
Shhhh
.”

“You can’t sleep here. Security will take you out. Come on. Let me help you up.”

“I’m not sleeping.”

“Come on,
darlin
’. Stand up.”

I smiled and opened my eyes. Rio’s face was just inches away. He really was too damned good-looking for one man to be. “Hi,” I said huskily. Why did I sound like Marilyn Monroe?

“Stand up,
darlin
’.”

“Okay. But only because you called me darling.”

There was a smile to his voice when he coaxed me up again and slid his arm around me.

“My purse.” I turned back around and almost keeled over.

“Whoa. Hang on.”

“I’m not a horse,” I said indignantly.

“I know. I’m sorry. Slip of the tongue.”

“You have a golden tongue.” I thought I heard him laughing.

“I meant a golden voice.”

“Hold still. I’ll get your purse.”

“But I forgot about my coat.”

“Do you have a claim ticket?”

“In my back pocket.” I turned around and his hand patted across my behind. He pulled out the claim check.

He took me by the shoulders and sat me down. “Stay there. Do not move. Do not leave. I’ll be right back.”