The Possibilities: A Novel (8 page)

His back is still to me and I know he’d be more comfortable if I left. That’s the whole deal with being a parent—you have to give them an answer and you can’t let them know you need them right back. You can’t let them know you’re in pain and that you work so hard so that everything will be okay without you. My mom never let me see her fear. She must have been so afraid to let us go.

“Remember your hair?” he asks. He glances back.

“What about it?” I ask.

“Your hair,” he says, letting his hands hover over his head. Then he turns to me with a face that’s recollecting something, pulling from the trenches of memory. “The way you wore it. In college.”

I shake my head and grin with one side of my mouth, recalling my hair I’d insist on blowing out, then curling. It was an aggressive bounty of bleached blond tight curls and stiff bangs. I wanted to look like Tina Kilpatrick on the Denver news and unfortunately, I did.

The week before Cully died he had cut his hair, and it made him look so grown up and handsome.

I’m about to say good night, but then I notice Kit’s black book on his shelf. “You’re keeping the calendar?”

He looks at the shelf. “I wanted to look through all of it,” he says. “Before I see her tomorrow.”

He looks like he’s questioning something in his head. “It’s an odd thing to leave,” he says.

“Ask her about it,” I say.

“You think she’ll really come back?” he asks.

“Why wouldn’t she?”

He looks up at me and then the confused expression leaves his face.

“What?” I say.

“There was something she said. We were talking about things—her dad, nature, you know.”

I pretend to know.

“I asked how her dad felt about her living here after college. She said something about him telling her that people in ski towns were prone to STDs. Wasn’t the outdoor type. She said she loved Indian Princesses, but while the other dads would be pointing out edible plants and berries, hers would be telling her that people like Ralph Waldo Emerson were fiscally retarded and there was nothing remarkable about men who got their jollies from drinking water out of a hoofprint.”

“Wow,” I say. “Sounds like you guys had a lot to talk about.”

“It’s just funny because Cully once said the same thing—about Emerson, about the hoofprint. Isn’t that strange?”

“Maybe it’s from a movie,” I say, but something in me flutters.

“Maybe,” he says.

“Anyway,” he says, “I’m off. Off to bed. Good huddle.”

“Good night,” I say. “Love you.”

“Love you more,” he says.

Chapter
8

I should have listened to Holly. Work was an incredible disaster. I had to interview a “terrain park specialist” named Bone, who, while in school with Cully, was known for taping pictures of gay pornography to the backs of tourists. After that we went on to visit B Beauty, where we had to test out and comment on the clever names of the lipstick colors—Shop Teal You Drop!
Ha ha!
I tried to do my job, make people want things they don’t need, little luxuries that will break and peel by the time they return to sea level. They will want lipsticks they already own. They will want a lipstick holder and other lipstick accessories, something I didn’t even know existed.

“Sarah, maybe more enthusiasm?” Holly said to me and pantomimed enthusiasm, which made her look like a crazed downhill ski racer. I rolled the lipsticks up and down, thinking that if this were a movie I wouldn’t be here. I’d be at home, perhaps. There’d be a shot of me looking at a picture of my son, a slow song in the background doing the work for me. Maybe I’d be gearing up to take his ashes to some exotic place he always wanted to see.

A book would jump ahead and then meander its way back to one of the many beginnings. Cully as a child. Me giving birth. In print my thoughts would be beautiful, understandable, and fluid. There would be themes. It would be deep. I would not be so acerbic. I’d be a sympathetic character—warm and lovable, fragile. Neither the movie mother nor the book mother would clock in.

I park in the lot above Empire Burgers, wanting to take a little stroll before seeing Billy. I called him as soon as I woke up, not really knowing why. Maybe it’s the same urgency that normal parents feel when they find their child has done something either good or bad. They want to confer and share so they don’t experience it alone.

I walk down the steps to the sidewalk, past the boys eating burgers and drinking beer, aware that everyone loves to people-watch and right now I’m people. I watch them back, narrowing in on a tribe of kids in bright, toxic outerwear. I remember Cully called these neon kids with their skinny jeans “skittles.”

I ate here once with him. He met me after a shoot. We noticed a lot of old people, then found out it was Senior Discount Tuesday. That’s all I remember. And that it was a really good burger. Cully had such a hearty appetite. Maybe he was stoned.

I’m patient with the tourist family in front of me and don’t bother to pass them. I look at their asses, all identically large and undefined like cumulus clouds. The father is studying the town map, holding his hands out wide, walking slowly.

“I’m telling you,” his young son says, looking at his phone. “We went too far. We passed it. Dad. Dad. Dad.”

“We passed it!” the daughter says. I’d say she’s around six. “I want to go home!”

You are meant to be lost, I want to tell them. The walkways are designed to confuse; there are inlets and levels so you’re always wanting to see what’s up, down, through, or around the bend. There are alleys, some which connect, some which end in parking lots—all so that you feel like frontiersmen, like you’ve discovered something off the trail, off the map. Tourists will spend more this way. I know the backstories, the histories, the plan of this place. I imagine the settlers and the whores, the pastureland, the miners and dredgers, the few wives and women, the Ute Indians, my ancestors and Cully, all in perfect, silent geological layers.

The family stops in the middle of the sidewalk to gather around the phone. The little girl sees me and flutters her eyelashes and raises her hands above her head in a ballet first position. I don’t smile. I will leave it to other people to tell her she’s cute. My son was a shwaggy pot dealer and I’m off to tell his father.

At the crosswalk I go around the family. I pass Shirt and Ernie’s, almost to my destination, when I see the owner of the shop, Lorraine Bartlett, making a beeline toward me. I pretend I haven’t seen her and try to find my phone in my purse so I can do the Hi-I’m-on-the-phone walk-by, but she gets to me before I can get to it.

“Sarah!”

“Lorraine!” I say. “Hi there.”

She approaches with that dreaded look of reverence.

“How are you?” she says, her voice syrupy. She looks around like we’re on a stealth mission.

“I’m okay,” I say. “You?” I take a step back.

“Hanging in there,” she says. “Well, more than hanging. I’m doing well, actually. Pete got into law school. Danny found a new pet project—the garage, so we’ll see how that . . .” And so on. One question launches a thousand ships.

I cross my arms over my chest and grin. I look around, as if for help. I feel like a trapped bird.

She too had a son who was killed in an avalanche years ago. Cully was in eighth grade when it happened and her son was a senior in high school. His body was never found. Lorraine came over a few days after Cully died and tried to recruit me into grieving the way she had grieved, which was by wearing pins stamped with her son’s face and giving interviews to the local newspapers advertising her club, PAAD, Parents Against Avalanche Disaster, as if by not joining PAAD you were promoting avalanche disaster. While I seek common experience, at the same time I hate it, how it weakens my own pain, which I cherish. I cringed as Lorraine stood at my front door and said, “We need to stick together.” She kept walking, into my house, into the kitchen, lured by the glint of picture frames perched upon the shelf behind the wet bar.

“Please help yourself,” I said, before realizing it was the pictures serving as the magnetic field, and not the booze. I was disappointed, because for a moment I was thinking drinking might get us through. We could do shots, cry, laugh, in that order. I reluctantly went over to the bar, looked at the pictures, at Cully’s lovely eyes. I touched the photographs, pressed my finger upon him. I said something—I forget what exactly, something false and poetic like, “Sometimes, I feel like he’s just in the other room.” I regretted it immediately, feeling the flashlight of the heartache police chastising me for doing heartbreak all wrong. I started to hate Lorraine Bartlett for making me feel I had to somehow prove my sorrow.

“Our boys,” Lorraine said, looking at me, with a scary intensity. I forced myself not to look away, to furrow my brow and look at Lorraine’s small, milky-blue eyes, her stub nose. None of her features really went together. It was like she was designed by committee.

“They loved the same things.” She laughed quickly. “They probably would have wanted to go this way. Doing what they loved.”

I didn’t look away. I stared into Lorraine Bartlett’s eyes as if they were an oncoming truck.
Come on, freak show
, I thought.
You gotta swerve after a comment like that
, but she didn’t.
Doing what they loved?

Cully was at A-Basin, off the trails, with friends from work. It’s a place he’d go to all the time. Avalanches happen, yet he had the beacons, he had the poles, he had the experience and an ego that was intact. He was a mountain kid. He had outrun avalanches before. Lorraine’s son didn’t know shit about the back country. He took Basic Skills in fifth grade, which taught kids like him how to throw a ball. The point is, they were not alike.

I saw my son dead. The medic told me not to look just yet, to wait until they got him down, but I felt I owed it to him. It was the very least I could do—look at him.

It was like seeing an ancient artifact. He looked bloated, unnatural, some kind of special effect. The worst thing was that he looked afraid, and I couldn’t see how this expression could ever be thawed. This was the last feeling he had in the world, and to this day I imagine him as eternally terrified. He was not happy or thrilled. He was most definitely not doing what he loved, and I should have said to her,
Look, loony. Imagine me strangling you with a Ski Breck! T-shirt, something you sell, something you apparently love. “Boy, she sure loved T-shirts. She would have wanted to die this way!” I mean, the fact that someone loves chicken doesn’t mean they want to choke to death on a bucket of wings.
But I wouldn’t have said that then. I wasn’t angry then. I wouldn’t say it now because I don’t really feel that way—my thoughts just rumble and churn.

I remember that day Lorraine had looked as if she knew an important secret that I would soon learn. I couldn’t escape her awful gaze because she was holding my hand between her own as if warming a waffle. I caught sight of the pin she was wearing advertising the death of Jackson, and couldn’t imagine doing that with the image of Cully—wearing him as an accessory as if his twenty-two years of life had become no more than a cufflink. Jackson would have been a twenty-six-year-old, not a high school boy, and I imagined he’d be embarrassed by this pin if he were alive.

I thought to myself while looking at Lorraine,
You grieve horribly. I am a classier griever than you,
and then,
Cully, I wish you were here to see this
, a thought that still crosses my mind daily. I’m so used to storing things to tell him at the end of the day, collecting anecdotes to hand over. I was thrilled when I had something out of the ordinary. He was my sounding board. He was my sound.

“I just wanted to say how proud I am of you,” Lorraine says to me now. She still has that look, I realize, as if she knows something that I’ll soon enjoy—like a surprise party. Tourists flow by and I feel like we’re a boulder in a stream. I wish I had a witness. I keep looking around for someone to side with me.

“I’m proud of you too,” I say, lightly.

“Your show,” she insists. “I saw you guys shooting this morning. I think it’s wonderful that you’re back at work. I know it really helped me. It takes a lot of courage, a lot of strength.”

Is she complimenting me or herself? I hate the unearned kudos. People get shot in the head and are called brave when they recover. People lose a son in an avalanche and they’re suddenly admirable. I’ve done nothing. I have no courage. Courage is only possible when you choose to do something. I didn’t choose to lose him. And I’m working because I have a mortgage and pride and a father who eats out too much and shops from the couch. I’m here because I need to try to reassemble, to cross the bridge, outwit the trolls. God, Cully loved that book—
The Three Billy Goats Gruff
.

“Do you want to grab some coffee?” she asks. “Now? Or whenever. I know it takes a while to fully heal, not that you ever do, but I’d love to tell you more about PAAD. I’m still very involved, and I think you’d get so much from it. And with your access to TV we could—”

With death, if anything, comes freedom. I grab her shoulder and say, “Oh my God. I think I’m going to have diarrhea.”

“Oh, God,” she says. “You better . . . the bathroom in the visitor center is the closest. I have a Pepto if you need—”

“I’m fine,” I say. “I gotta go!” And I run-walk back to my car.

“Yes, go!” she calls, rooting for me to not shit my pants.

It’s not until I’m in the car that I realize: her son is dead and I just lied to her. I ran from her. And she needlessly admitted to having Pepto.

“Why?” I say out loud. I still don’t know how to grieve correctly. I don’t think I’ll ever know how to express sorrow, or to show people that beneath all this is someone kind. I’m mistaking the good people for trolls—they are not who or what I have to conquer. I flip down the shade to check myself in the mirror.

“You again,” I say to my reflection. I look like someone superior, inferior, repulsed, misled.

I can’t take myself anywhere.

•   •   •

I PULL INTO
the parking lot behind Eric’s and see Billy parked, straddling a chopper, which amuses me. He looks like a teenager. I pull up beside him. He looks at me, then away, then back again, recognizing me this time. His cheeks move toward his eyes. He takes off his helmet. I wish I looked a little better. I feel self-conscious all of a sudden and about as sexy as a pioneer woman. I check my face in the mirror. I suck in my stomach.

I get out of the car, then walk to his side.

“Hey, babe,” he says.

I don’t protest “babe.”

“Interesting way to arrive,” I say. I look at him carefully and see Cully everywhere. The long legs, soft brown hair, the earlobes and stance. Large mouth, sharp ridge of nose, lean, friendly muscles. Those same dazzling blue eyes, that easy air and confidence that’s both alluring and intimidating. Billy’s eyes twinkle. It’s true—that’s what they’re doing, what Cully’s eyes used to do too.

He gives me a hug and I remember how much I loved being hugged when he had on his hard leather jacket, the pockets pressing into my ribs, belt buckle into my stomach. He’s wearing what looks like that same belt. I’d sit on his lap and he’d absentmindedly tap my leg with the long end he always left wagging. It’s as though he hasn’t changed clothes since I was twenty-one.

“How’s Durango?” I ask.

“The same, but different,” he says.

“Sophie?” I hope my voice sounds normal. I always ask about his fourteen-year-old daughter but never really want to hear about her. I don’t even think of her as Cully’s stepsister. I know Cully forgot most of the time too. He never wrote her name on forms when asked if he had a sibling.

“She’s good,” he says. “Going through this grumpy stage though . . .” I can see him stop himself from saying more. I don’t ask about his ex-wife, Rachel. Even though marriage didn’t work out for him, I was always jealous of the way there was no consequence for having a baby with me. He continued on his way, whereas my life was rerouted entirely.

“She’s with her mom in San Diego, visiting Rachel’s parents.”

“Is that yours?” I ask, looking at the bike.

“No,” he says. “I’m delivering it to some computer geek in Beaver Creek. He doesn’t even care about me riding it in winter. Idiot, but it works out that you wanted to see me.”

I walk over to the chopper. “It’s not winter. Tomorrow’s spring. This is really nice.” I run my hand along the seat.

“Thanks. I finally got him to scratch his ideas, then made him believe my ideas were his all along. I can’t see him riding this thing though. He’s more of a . . . scooter type.”