The Possibilities: A Novel (6 page)

“Great.” Cully clapped his hands together. “Then I’m ready to go. Ready to sit around and think up ways to trick people.”

“I didn’t play tricks,” my dad said, tilting his head up and scratching his cheek. He loved being asked questions. “I reinvented dreams, made the ridiculous seem perfectly reasonable.”

“Dreams,” Cully said. “Ridiculous!”

“I’m just kidding with you, sport,” my dad said to him. “I made the resort money. That’s what I did. And it was a great job. You feel like you’re a part of this place. You’re building your home, caring for it.” I had never heard him speak this way about his job, and it articulated something for me as well, something that resonated with my own work. “And they need people like you who know it, who’ll nurture it. Who will try to be good and try to be honest.”

Cully looked down, proud, as if given an honorable task.

“I’ll talk to Dickie,” my dad said. “See where you’d fit. And then, as I said, I’ll leave it to you. You kids up next will be great.”

I enjoyed the conversation at the time, but not in the way I do now. I didn’t think that it would be something I’d return to. You never know what moments will be significant until after they’re gone. I return to this one because Cully was on the brink of something here. He was curious in his grandfather as a man, and he was excited about his own capabilities, his own future. I wonder if my dad thinks about this moment too.

I look at the cash on the bed, and it’s as if everything has been negated. He wasn’t on the brink of anything. He was selling dope.

“What was he doing?” I ask. “What the hell was he thinking?”

“I don’t know,” Suzanne says. “He was a kid.”

She wouldn’t think that if it had been Morgan.

“Thanks for helping with everything,” I say. “I guess.”

She shrugs. “After my mom died I found four bags of cremated pets in the back of her closet,” she says. “You never know what you’ll find. I’d rather score weed than dead Pomeranians.”

And I love her again.

“I just want to know everything,” I say. We walk toward the door.

There really is nothing else to do but know the things we want to know.

•   •   •

I LOOK OUTSIDE
the living room window at my quiet street, the empty second homes. When I’m off Main Street, sometimes I feel like I live in a ghost town, especially with the warmth this year and lack of snow. We live off snow. Our economy could simply melt away, the mountains undress. I look down at the driveway, the thin layer of snow that has begun to settle. What were you doing, son? Was it just a phase? Did I not provide enough, nurture you enough? What was the point of school and college, the point of all those extracurricular activities, the point of playgrounds? Did I give you too much?

“You girls hungry?” my dad asks.

“We’re going to go out,” I say. “Just real quick.”

“Not quick,” Suzanne says. “We are heading out on the town. I’ll have her back before dawn.”

Suzanne takes her sweater off the stool and my dad looks at me and widens his eyes.

“I’ll be home in a few hours,” I say.

“You up for meeting Mirabelle first?” Suzanne asks. “She might head to Relish.”

Mirabelle is a woman who hired a conductor to tutor her four-year-old when he picked up a stick and started waving it around. She and her husband are always offering their various homes to me: Maui, Park City, LA, making me feel like a Make-a-Wish kid. I’ve never taken them up on it knowing that these people collect people and soon enough I’d be trotted out at dinner parties as their “TV show friend,” and then I’d be asked if I could feature a friend’s new line of jewelry. I’ve learned my lesson. Just say no to these kinds of people. Not that I don’t get along with many of them and have fun when Suzanne asks me to join them all for drinks, but there’s a big difference between me and her other friends. I’m the only one with a job, something they find to be honorable.

We just discovered my son was a drug dealer. We just emptied his room. I don’t want to meet Mirabelle and endure her head-to-toe catty scans.

“Come on,” Suzanne says, seeing me hesitate. “It will be good to socialize.”

“I’ve been out of the house all day, socializing. Maybe if we could just get a quick drink.”

She is looking down at her phone. “Change of plan,” she says. “She just texted. Says to stop by the rink. Something I have to see.” She looks up. I haven’t put on my coat.

“You know?” I say. “I’m kind of beat.”

“Please,” she says. “It’s just the After-School All-Stars thing at the rink. Laurie’s chairing and”—she looks in the mirror by the bar and puts on makeup—“we can just drop by.”

This is so typical of her, to change plans and assume I’ll follow. I’m putting my foot down. Even though my problems have outperformed hers for a while now, I will not go to a sporting event.

“You girls go have fun,” my dad says.

“I’m just not feeling up to it right now,” I say. I try to make eye contact so he can help me out, but he’s looking at Suzanne with an intensity.

“Hey, Suze,” he says, “those future plans—your husband’s lawyers should probably stop saying there’s no link between peak and base expansion. EPA knows otherwise. People will warm up to it anyway. The ones who’ll complain will be the same ones who just bought their condos at One Ski Hill.”

“I don’t talk to Dickie,” Suzanne says, finishing her glass. “He left me.”

My dad says, “I hope not because of the weight gain? Now, that’s not fair.”

Oh my God. “Okay,” I say. “Let’s go.” I put on my coat.

Chapter
6

We walk to her car, parked twenty calories up the street.

“Sorry, but will you drive?” She gets into the passenger seat before I can respond. I roll my eyes—my passive response—and get behind the wheel. I don’t mind. If anything I’m a good driver. I love to parallel park and I merge and change lanes quickly. If I skid I know to pump lightly on the brakes and turn in the direction in which we slide. Suzanne will slam on the brakes, causing us to spin like Michelle Kwan. When merging she will check the middle mirror, then lean toward the side mirror, then look back over her shoulder, the window of time she could have used to merge usurped by a big rig or a Miata, either of which would make her gasp, overcorrect, and start the process all over again.

She flips down the mirror and puts on more lipstick. She’s heavily madeup—her cheeks look like they’ve both been smacked, and her eyelashes are pointed like exclamation points. She has on her fur coat and stiletto boots that could be used to kill whatever animal her coat’s made out of.

I’m instructed to drive to the rink by the Village. I do as I’m told, waiting for Suzanne to tell me what’s going on, but she’s quiet and on edge for the entire drive, which I assume is due to two back-to-back blows directed at her body mass index.

I pull into the parking lot. “What is this again?” I ask.

“After-School All-Stars,” she says. “Raises money for their after school enrichment. Keeps them off drugs. I don’t know. I’m sick of kids. We’re always doing things for them, and they’re fine. Perfectly content with a spoon and a pan. Like MacGyver. Give them a twig, give them a marble, they’re all set. That’s how Morgan was.”

This isn’t how I recall Morgan being at all. She had a playroom packed with gorgeous wooden toys, Barbie cars, kitchen sets, doll houses, then later, a playhouse, a playground set, an art room, a trampoline. Give her a twig and a marble and she’d pitch a fit.

I look for a parking spot. “And you want to see this game because . . .”

“I want to support the cause,” she says.

“Don’t you need a ticket?”

I drive alongside kids walking toward the ice and remember taking Cully to a few hockey games, buying him a huge foam finger and endless cups of hot chocolate.

“I wonder if Dickie’s here?” Suzanne asks.

And now it becomes clear. “Please, Suzanne. He’s obviously here. And that’s why we’re here.” Why didn’t this dawn on me before? I find a parking spot far away from the action, but I can see the rink and well-dressed people pretending to enjoy the game. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” she says. “I got that text from Mirabelle. She said he was here and that he looked different. She used an emoticon that winked.”

“Well then.”

I have a feeling that we’re not going to get out of the car for a while. She flips the visor down to look into the mirror again, turning her head to the side, then she snaps it shut.

“Can we move up so we can see?” she asks. She moves in her seat as if propelling the car forward.

I reverse out of the spot.

“I doubt there’s parking up there.”

“We don’t have to park. I just want to see if he’s even here. I don’t want to get out.”

I drive to the front, knowing I can’t say anything. I had to come. I had to drive, and now I have to move. I owe her, not just for her help with Cully’s room, but also for this period in my life. I’ve been in the spotlight for too long. Bad things happen to other people too—it’s her time to shine.

I stop and turn off the engine and headlights, and hear a voice on the sound system saying, “He got it! Holzman did it again!” The outdoor speakers begin to play something I recognize but can’t name. I watch a kid speed down the center of the rink with his stick in the air.

“This is nice,” I say. “So the kids playing are the ones who benefit from the program?”

“Yeah,” Suzanne says, scanning the people. She is clearly not interested. “It’s not a full-length game. Just an example of where the money’s going. After this they’ll get shuttled to One Ski Hill for dinner.”

A group of teenagers come out of the indoor rink, trying to see what’s going on. “I feel so old,” I say. “Look at these kids. None of them are wearing jackets. It’s uncool now,” I say, as if I know. “Warmth is uncool.”

I think of Cully with his baggy pants and sullen caps. I loved his pants. How slack they were. For some reason they put me at ease. Morgan never felt like a Breckenridge kid. She hated skiing, hated the way goggles made her look. Hated the snow, the layers they demanded. When we all went out together we’d have to walk slowly to restaurants while she teetered on heels.

Suzanne starts to text someone. The kids are doing the same thing. Boys and girls, some with their arms draped over one another, the majority of them talking or texting or just staring at their phones. Do they ever talk person to person, or just when they’re apart from one another? I should say to Suzanne,
Go away so I can talk to you
.

A girl with short brown hair, angled asymmetrically with ends like lightning bolts, walks in the other direction, pulling a backpack on what looks like all-terrain wheels. Suzanne lights a joint.

“Oh my God,” I say. “Don’t do that now.” I look out the back window and duck a bit in my seat. “What if we got caught?” I imagine Katie reporting it on the news or the incident being written up in the
Summit Daily
police blotter, next to all the bike thefts.

Suzanne holds it in front of me. I automatically shake my head, but then think
Why not?
and take a prissy little drag, then one that’s a bit meatier.

“That a girl,” she says.

“Wait,” I say. “Is this what I gave you?”

“No, it’s my own. This is the good shit.”

“Where do you get it anyway?” I ask, and hand it back, look around to make sure no one can see us. This is so bizarre.

“From my yard guy,” she says.

“Pablo?”

“No, that’s the yard yard guy. Leaf blowing and whatnot. I get this from Brian. He does more yard design. He’s really into plants and soil. Like, he talks to the plants and shit.”

She extinguishes the joint on the sole of her boot. “That’s all. Just a refresher. Why, you want to buy some?”

“No, I don’t want to buy any, I was just wondering how one even goes about buying this at our age and you know, with our lifestyle.”

“You wouldn’t believe how easy it is,” she says. “It will be legal here real soon. Mark my words.”

I flip my mirror down to make sure I look the same. My eyes seem smaller.

“And what do you mean ‘this is the good shit’?” I ask. “What was Cully’s?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Kind of shwaggy-looking. Not something I’d buy.”

“Why not?” I say, feeling absurdly defensive. I crack the window.

“It’s green,” she says. We look at one another, smiling a little. I feel like a young girl.

“No shit it’s green,” I say.

“I typically buy purple,” she says. “At least lately. It’s the strain that’s going around. These things come in trends. Just like anything. Fashion, food, even countries to adopt children from . . . Remember when Romania had its heyday? Can you imagine adopting from Romania? You’d get some angry gymnast with fetal alcohol syndrome.”

“What are you talking about?” I laugh. “Should we get out, or what?”

“No,” Suzanne says. “I guess not. I just wanted . . . I don’t know what I wanted. To see him.” She looks out into the crowd. “To see him, maybe talk, I—oh, God. Oh my God. There he is. Do you see him? Right there! Oh. My. God.”

“Where?” I search the crowd.

“Far right. By that heating lamp.” She points and gestures, which isn’t helping me.

“There are tons of heating lamps,” I say.

“Right below it. Right there. Next to orange guy.”

I scan the crowd for orange, seeing people dressed absurdly well to be out here, and then I land on him. He’s pretty hard to miss. Dickie’s an impeccably handsome man who exudes wealth and thorough showering. Black-silver hair, hard, square jaw, the lines on his forehead strong like cracks in ice. He always looks freshly pressed, smacked, and dry cleaned, and his expression is one of perpetual jocularity. He has his flaws—excessive teeth whitening, low attention span, the scent of a distillery looming about—yet he possesses a quality that makes everything he does seem right. He’s kind of like my father, I realize, but effortful.

“He looks good,” I say. I miss him. We were unlikely friends. Maybe because I was the only person who didn’t want anything from him.

When we met I was working at the
Summit Daily
, where I wrote for the visitor’s guide. Over dinner one night Suzanne told him about my old desire to be a reporter and Dickie told me to audition for
Fresh Tracks
, a new show the resort was going to air in the main hotels.

“You’d be perfect,” he said. “A local girl giving visitors the inside scoop. I’ll set it up. Give it a shot.” I was buzzed on the good wine and the new friendship and connections. Suzanne looked across the table at me as though everything was already taken care of. I know he helped get me the job, but both he and Suzanne have never made me feel that way.

“What are you talking about?” Suzanne looks at me with watery, disbelieving eyes. God, I should never smoke pot. I’ve never been good at it. Some people are pros. The ends of my eyelashes seem to have acquired tiny weights and the word
fingerling
keeps running through my head.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I meant that he doesn’t look different to me, like Mirabelle said.”

“What?” she says again, and I realize something has happened. She hasn’t even registered the comment. Either that or I’ve said “fingerling” aloud.

“He looks terrible,” I say. “Like a potato.”

“What do you mean? Look. Look at him.” She shoves her hand, palm up, toward the crowd.

I scan for Dickie again, then see what she’s shoving me toward. Shit. I see. He has acquired another mark of flair, and she is young and porn-bodied.

“She’s . . . she’s . . . she’s black!” Suzanne says.

I put my hand on my mouth so I can be positive that what I’m thinking doesn’t escape.

“What?” Suzanne says.

“I didn’t say anything.” I prop my leg up onto the seat.

“I’m not racist.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t like poor people, I admit that. But I’m not racist.”

I nod my acceptance.

“Where did he even find her?” She leans toward the windshield. It’s like we’re watching a movie at a drive-in. “I can’t believe he’s here in front of everyone. The Scovilles are here, Cindy Giacometti, Mirabelle—oh my God she must just be
loving
this. They’re all gabbing about it, I’m sure, those sluts. This is unbearable.”

For people I don’t know well, I still know each one of her friends thoroughly from the soap operas they create, which are later broadcast to me.

“Who cares,” I say. “Cindy Giacometti is miserable. You told me her husband says ‘Fuckwad’ to his reflection every morning. Ceri Scoville looks like that blond muppet from
The Muppet Show
. She’s like a cartoon application of herself. Or something. Why do they all get that same fish-mouth face anyway? And Mirabelle? She’s the biggest social climber I’ve ever met. God, someone rich comes to town and she swoops in for the attack!”

“Look at her,” Suzanne says. “Look at that . . . that girl. What is she, a masseuse or something?”

I look. The woman—the girl—reaches into her purse. Dickie yells something and she laughs, but not too much, which probably means she’s known him for a while. I feel so embarrassed for Suzanne, so sorry.

“He’s the one that looks bad,” I say. “No one is laughing at—”

“She looks like a TV host,” Suzanne says.

I open my mouth, stare straight ahead.
Deal with it
, I tell myself.
Let it roll right over you
. What does that even mean? I watch the woman put on lip gloss. She’s wearing knee-high boots with a mangy fur trim. Her breasts look powerful, like little generals. She looks trashy. I run my hand through my hair.

“I can see her lips from here,” Suzanne says.

“She just glossed them,” I say, feeling defensive of this girl.

“I had my lips done,” Suzanne says. Her voice has become calm and spooky.

“I had my eyes done, my breasts. I took Paxil to kill my appetite. I’ve spent thousands on Pilates. I’ve taken stripper aerobics, for Christ’s sake. Would have done crack whore toning.” Her voice breaks a little. “What was it for? What was the point of all that maintenance if I’m going to be traded in like a . . . like a frickin’ leased Honda?”

I remember when I went with her to Denver for her plastic surgery, how every woman who walked out of the office looked the same and reminded me of someone I vaguely knew. Do all wealthy men like that carp with boobs look? Or do these women get together and tell each other they look good so they can’t see straight?

“A lot of clients make the same requests,” her doctor said when I mentioned it. “Pronounced, taut cheekbones, full lips, square jawline, eyes that look awake.” I was glad Suzanne was just getting a little lift in the eyes. Her doctor’s face was not a good advertisement for his services. He looked like he was speeding down an eternal luge.

Dickie’s girlfriend is thin yet plumped, something I feel can never be attained again at my age, that thin, toned fullness. “You’re too good for him,” I say.

“No, I’m not,” Suzanne says. “That’s the whole point. The whole problem. It’s so unfair. What happens to us.”

Don’t include me in this,
I want to say. “We should go.” I turn the key so the radio comes on. “Okay? Let’s get out of here. Let’s just go home.”

“Fine,” she says. “Forget him, right? Let him have that happy ending, then trade her in after a year. Or less, I bet! Let’s go. Let’s get a drink somewhere. Hit up Cecilia’s. Let’s party.” She punches the air with her fists. “I don’t want to go home yet. My lonely house. It’s so cavernous. I want to drink in a small space.”

It’s a familiar progression: sadness, anger, sarcasm, need for total inebriation.

“I have wine,” I say, thinking of my dad at home.