Carry Your Heart (19 page)

“And you’re a lot happier,” she says. “Most of the time. You were miserable in the closet now.”

“Well, right now, it’s hard. Is that okay with you?” he asks shortly.

“It’s fine with me. But coming out of the closet wasn’t bad for you,” Courtney says. “Your parents are wrong. You’re not wrong. They are.”

“Whatever,” he mutters.

I don’t know what to say. The tension bothers me. I feel like I’ve been gone for long enough that I’ve lost my right to have an opinion.

You have to be selfish to be successful in this sport.
Mike wasn’t lying.

***

Driving back from Courtney’s, I pass Boulder. It seems like I never went to school here at all; it left such a fleeting impression on me. Sometimes I think I just dreamed up the place. I can see the sketchy outline of what it was like, but every detail evaporates until I remember nothing but a fog.

Life is such a mess,
Ryan used to say whenever Danny or I got too serious about things.

And Ryan’s life was never
such
a mess. He never lost races. He always had the turns down. But he’d tell us that, when we were both clawing to breakthrough, or when we were at each other’s throats over some stupid argument. He’d laugh and say
life is such a mess. Stop trying to put everything in order.

I had the biggest crush on Ryan when I was fourteen. So did every girl I knew. But nobody ever pinned him down. He was always bouncing along, looking for the next good time. Like a tornado, he never stopping blowing through his own life, knocking back everyone who ever met him.

My breath catches thinking of Danny and Ryan. I think of how they keep fading from mind. Every day I have less and less of them. There was a time when they were both my whole world. And now, I’m left with these pieces. And compared to what I once had, the pieces are so tiny, so infinitesimal.

Dad smiles at me when I come home. He’s nervous, I can tell. Half-disbelieving when I say I want to keep doing this.

“How were they?”

“Good,” I say smoothly. “Trevor’s a little bummed that Dean has to work. He can’t go home because his parents are assholes. Court broke up with Donovan.” I shrug.

He smiles. “And you have a new boyfriend?”

I smile. I’d spoken to him for five minutes and he’d heard it in my voice. I hope he doesn’t Google Hunter or me. Pictures of his daughter filed under
slut
and
cheating whore
might upset him.

“Yeah.”

“Some snowboarder?” he teases.

I smile. “Yeah.”

He hadn’t much liked the sound of Danny when I first mentioned him at dinner when I was eighteen. But he came to love him, too, like the son he never had. Danny spent two Thanksgivings with my dad and me. He had jump-started my dad’s old Ford thunderbird three times one weekend and begged him to get a new alternator.

That same weekend, one night after dinner, when we watched TV sleepily, he told my dad something that he never told me before. That he liked being with us. That being at home made him anxious.

We had sat in this very kitchen for hours. And now he was gone. There’s nothing that can prepare you for the way you feel when someone is gone—
really gone
and
never coming back.

Cold. Limp. Dead.

Where does all of that stuff go? His laugh, his eyes, his quiet stubbornness. Where does it all go? It can’t just disappear. That makes no sense.

My dad waves a hand in front of my eyes.

“Sorry,” I say.

“Where were you?”

“I don’t know.” I smile, shaking my head. “Thinking about Danny.”

“Ah,” his face softens. “He was a sweet boy.”

I nod. “Yeah.”

“Loved you a lot.”

“Yeah.”

I swallow.

“Good heart, too.”

I look at him, wondering if he’s actually trying to make me cry. “Yeah, Dad. I know. I…”

“He’d never want you to suffer your whole life,” my dad says softly. “He’d never want that for you.”

I nod. I glance out the big bay windows in our kitchen, look down the sloping hill to the valley and up the mountains. I needed Danny to breathe. And now I feel like I need Hunter that same way too.

Chapter Twenty-Three

I always spend holidays with my dad. It’s a rule. I always come back for holidays. My dad’s alone. Has been since my mother died. He told me he was happy alone, and I don’t remember him ever being any other way. A long time ago, I asked him why he didn’t get remarried. And he said, he had one love of his life and it was more than his heart could take.

I always thought I was more like him. Especially this last year, I thought I could get used to not being tethered to anyone ever again.

He seems more worried this year. Like something is bothering him. There are stacks of paper on his desk and he’s usually so organized.

“Is everything okay?” I ask him one night after dinner, as he frowns over more paperwork.

He sighs. “Everything’s okay.” He smiles thinly. “I-I have to refinance the house.”

The way he says it makes me start. I swallow. “Okay.”

“It’s nothing to worry about.”

I nod. I know how expensive skiing is. When I had sponsorships, they covered most of the costs of competing, but not much else, and first semester’s tuition at Boulder, even in-state, isn’t cheap, not to mention the six months of physical therapy, the psychiatrist, the painkillers, and the fact that I don’t have a real job, and never really have.

I don’t have sponsors now. He didn’t say a word about the lodging and the new equipment. I can imagine how he thought it out already. Like, he was so pleased, he would just stretch to make ends meet, footing an enormous bill in an already tough year.

“I can get a job.”

“No, no.” He smiles. “You focus on your skiing, Pippa. Your sponsors will come back to you.”

“Dad, you shouldn’t go into
debt
…”

“I’m not going into debt. Just refinancing a little,” he says shortly. “I told you not to worry. So, don’t worry.”

But of course I do.
I have to start winning races. I have to get back to the point in time where all I saw was what I wanted and the people who were in my way. And I made sure that nobody could beat me in a fair race. I didn’t leave anything up to chance.

Hunter is somewhere over in France, in the Alps, searching for big snow. Something to jump off of. Different ways to fly. Whenever I call him, he’s unreachable. Whenever he calls me, I’m asleep.

I watch the DVD of the last video he did with Red Bull, forty-five minutes in deep powder all over the world. Hunter seems less aware of the risks than any of the other swaggering boarders he was with. Maybe it’s just because he’s taking the biggest ones, always catapulting down the mountain first, always trying to jump through a tree.

The camera hovers on his face on top of a steep, craggy mountain and he looks down with a little smile on his face, like he’s just seen something cute, mildly appealing—not like he’s about to drop into a death-defying descent at a forty degree angle.

And I watch as he plows through the powder, as it comes up in plumes around his board, as he seems to float, unhurried, but so, so fast, down these inclines, loose in the shoulders, just looking for a good time.

“If everybody could do it, it wouldn’t be so fun,” Hunter says to the camera, catching his breath at the base of the remote mountain. “Part of it is that nobody really comes up here. That you’re one of the first people to be doing it.”

It makes me nervous. Not just that there could be another avalanche, although there very well could be. But that half of the thrill is the fact that your average person would probably be killed trying something like that. And the flipside of that thrill is that even an extraordinary athlete could die, just one bad decision or one shaky leg, or one edge that catches. It always seems so impossible for anything to go wrong. It’s only when it happens that we realize how the chance of that happening was always there. That we’d been playing with fire all along, and until our hands were burnt, we didn’t even know it was hot.

Chapter Twenty-Four

The Lake Placid Challenge is the first big race of January. It’s a long flight to New York from Utah, and listening to Lottie recount Penelope’s time makes it feel even longer.

Mike tells us how in 1980, the US hockey team pulled off a major upset by beating the Soviets. “This is a place where anything can happen.”

I smile. “So, I’m USA and Lottie’s the Soviets?”

Lottie shoots me a glare. “We’re both the USA and Penelope’s the Soviets.”

“That’s really not the analogy I was going for.”

“I’ll be the Soviets,” I say, leaning my head against the window. “I’m into Russia.”

Mike rolls his eyes. He knows he’s going to have to start talking to us separately soon. Lottie’s getting sick of me knowing so much about her skill set, and I’m not wild about having Lottie watch my every fall and every failure. And I still suspect she reports my moods to Laurel. More than once, I’ve caught her peering over my shoulder at my text messages.

I know she looks down on me. I’m faster out of the start and my turns are sharper than before, but I still haven’t been consistent enough for her to worry. She thinks my comeback isn’t going to work. She doesn’t like it, but she still doesn’t think it will work.

I bite my thumbnail thinking of my dad refinancing our house’s mortgage. I need sponsors. I need to start winning. I can’t keep asking for him to support me.

Hunter is in Spain, now. With a head cold, according to an email he sent at 3 AM this morning.

We haven’t spoken in two days. The time difference, and the training out in Utah have made the few moments I have to myself scarce, and Hunter’s production schedule is out of his hands.

We make do with text messages and the occasional email, but they feel hollow and I miss him. It’s overwhelming to miss Hunter Dawson like this.

The old Olympic village, where all of the skiers are being housed is packed. It’s the first time I’ve had to see a lot of familiar faces since those nasty blogs started showing up, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the looks I’m getting are ones of disgust and judgment, instead of pity.

The bungalow where Lottie and I are staying is comfortable and we each have our own bedrooms and bathrooms. Laurel is nearby, too; I see her shouting at a muscular man to be more careful with her bags when she arrives.

Lake Placid is four days long—the first rounds for Grand Slalom and downhill on Thursday, followed by first rounds for Super G and Slalom on Friday. Finals are on Saturday and Sunday.

It’s a long, long slog—one that requires as much patience as it does skill. With hundreds of skiers, from fifteen year olds getting their feet wet at a qualifier to seasoned Olympians, Lake Placid is an event no one with serious ambitions misses unless they’re hurt.

Lottie needs to do well here. Mike’s attention has turned to her in a dramatic way. He just wants me in the finals. He wants Lottie to finish in the Top Five, maybe even knock off one of the reigning Olympic gold medalists here.

On Wednesday morning, the courses are set up and packed with skiers trying to get in one or two practice runs before the qualifying rounds start. Mike’s so intently focused on the Super G with Lottie, that he barely nods his head when I tell him I’m going over to check out the downhill course.

I stare down at the challenging slope. The terrain is intentionally difficult here, the kind of slope that forces you to really bend your knees.

I wait forty minutes for my run. It’s fast—really fast. East Coast mountains are slicker than West Coast ones. There’s less snowfall back here, and the less powder, the more slippery the slope.

I like the speed of it, though. It’s almost too fast. People will hit the brakes hard to prevent themselves from crashing out. I smile.
I’m not going to hit the brakes this time. My legs are strong enough to go full throttle.

On Thursday, Olympic gold medalist Lindsay Mangold is the first racer of the day in the downhill. I’m 36th. Part of the second heat of skiers, but I get to the course early to watch Lindsay.

She seems relaxed, perfectly at ease, and I’m mesmerized by her staggering power out of the start and her quick, seemingly effortless turns around the gates.

When she crosses the finish line in 1:39.05, I know it will take a miracle for anyone to top her in the first round.

Mike doesn’t have much to say to me before downhill. He massages my shoulders and gives me a squeeze. “You know what to do.”

And I believe him. I do know what to do. This is
my
course. The course I was born for. Everything about it, I love.

I feel good the whole way down. When it’s so fast, you can’t worry about your time, you know you’re in good shape. When you take each turn at a speed that feels like it’s at the brink of terminal velocity, when you just barely get your skis around the gate, you know that it’s going to be good.

I cross in a blur, struggling to get my skis out so I don’t crash into the barriers at the base of the slope.

I turn my head to the scoreboard. 1:39.95. I exhale.
Jesus
. Less than a second behind Lindsay Mangold. I turn, searching the crowd for a familiar face to smile at. I don’t see any. Just Laurel and Lottie. And their bitchy friends.

Lottie looks betrayed. Laurel looks pissed.

I smile at the scoreboard.
Fine
,
then
. You can make a lot of things up. You can post them all over the Internet. But you can’t change my time.

It’s the first time in a really long time that I feel like I could be good enough for something big in this sport. I swallow and smile, the confidence like a drug.

***

I make it through to finals in downhill and GS and manage to get Hunter on the phone. He sounds like shit.

“Hey,” he rasps.

“Are you sleeping?”

“Kind of,” he says. “On a bus to the airport.”

“Where are you headed?”

“Norway. Glaciers.” He yawns. “I have some fucking flu.”