Читать книгу The Luckiest Scar on Earth - Ana Maria Spagna - Страница 9

CHAPTER THREE

At the top of the lift, I took a hard right, sped past the regular Timberbowl crowd—pre-schoolers skiing without poles, city kids showing off, senior citizens cruising—then stopped at the top of Hardscrabble, the steepest run on the mountain, and took a deep breath. All around me, wet snow sailed like tiny bits of chewed paper, like the soggy dregs of frozen spinach, white instead of green. Behind me, somewhere above the fog, jagged peaks poked through the clouds. Ahead of me: only the finish line.

I shifted my weight and dropped over the edge.

I crouched low, lifted my gaze to choose my line, and made a series of quick pivots around the bumps, grazed through the crud, and landed on the hard pack to cruise down fast. At the halfway point, I passed a group of kids standing in line to practice the slalom course with Danielle, the coach. She’d been enthusiastic when I asked her about joining the team, and she only got more enthusiastic over time. Even my mom had shown some enthusiasm—and a half-smile hint of I-told-you—when I dropped the news. So I started racing again—parallel slalom—and I started winning again. As soon as I did, I began to feel more like myself, more settled and right, almost like I’d been missing a body part, and now I had it back.

Not long after New Year’s I told Larry I had a New Year’s resolution after all: to qualify for the national championships.

Now Danielle hooted and gave me the thumbs up, and all the kids turned to look.

“Char-lotte!” they chanted. “Char-lotte!” Like cheerleaders at the big game.

Three months to go, and everyone on the team was excited.

Well, almost everyone.

“There goes the superstar,” Seth yelled. He cupped his hands around his mouth and tipped his head to the sky.

Seth had to be the oldest guy on the team—he had wide bony shoulders and sideburns shaved straight, and he towered over the rest of the kids—and he had this creepy way of showing off for the rest of us like an NBA player dunking on the playground or Serena and Venus showing up to pound killer serves past my mom. Not that he wasn’t good. He handled the half-pipe almost as well as anyone in Colorado. But the way he looked over his shoulder when he landed made me cringe, made me want to prove something, launch into an easy three-sixty maybe. Only three girls rode snowboards at Timberbowl. Not one of us competed in half-pipe or snowcross even though more than twenty guys did. Instead we shared the slalom course with skiers, girls and nerdy boys, and I was the oldest of them, and definitely the tallest. They probably thought I was a show-off, too. No point making that worse. The best way to deal with Seth was to ignore him. But he wouldn’t let that happen.

I stopped to rest on a long pitch above the lift line and stood off to the side where the groomed run gave way to the dense wall of trunks. My foot in the used boot Larry bought held me steady in place. I stared down at where the top edge frayed at my ankle where the liner pulled away from the leather. Whoever used these boots last used them hard.

Another set of boots appeared, brand new, the latest style, tight fitting. Size eleven maybe, or twelve. I looked up at the too-perfect teeth, the soft side burns shaved straight.

“You’re pretty good,” Seth said. Add the too-familiar half-sneer. Sarcastic? Probably.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Where’d you learn?”

“Back home in Colorado.”

“Colorado? That’s where you’re from?”

“Uh huh.” I wanted this to be over, but if I raced off now in a huff, it’d seem like he got to me. I wouldn’t give him that satisfaction. I bent to tighten my binding, then instantly regretted it, since it only drew attention to my boots, beat and torn, threads unraveling as we spoke.

“You know there’s a petition going around?”

“A what?”

“Against the condos. Anybody who works here and signs it gets fired.”

“That’s not right,” I said. I thought about my season pass, the plastic card on a lanyard tucked into an arm pocket on my coat. Such a small thing, such a big thing. Without it, every visit to Timberbowl would cost forty-eight dollars, a screaming deal by Colorado standards, but more, by far, than my mom could afford.

“That’s just what I heard.”

He set his foot in his binding and headed back cross-slope to the snow park. He moved all casual and cool, pushing off with one foot and dragging his brand new Denton board skateboard-style while I turned to go down the hill.

I skidded to a stop beside Chair Two, broken down again, where I found Larry tinkering in the shed. Larry wasn’t supposed to be in charge of fixing it, but no one else could figure out how to deal with the ancient contraption. He’d started out loading chairs, but once the managers figured out what he could do, he worked in the mechanic shop about half the time. The new smell of Larry was gas and oil, not at all piney.

He turned to face me, and as he did, a kid behind me whimpered and hid behind his mother’s leg.

The scar could be scary.

“How’d it go?” Larry asked.

“Good.”

“Fast?”

“Fast.”

He fiddled with a thick stretch of frayed cable inside the shed.

“What else is new in the big world?”

I stood outside with my arms folded across my chest, globs of snow gathering in the elbows of my coat, trying to think of something to say, or maybe how not to say all the things on my mind.

Like what happened the day before. After school I came home to find Mom sitting at the computer, just like every day, scrolling through websites looking for jobs. She’d take anything, she told me, from data entry to dishwasher, but not much came up in this little town. She’d been trying for three months, and she seemed more intense than ever. She took notes on a pad beside the keyboard, made a couple of calls. When she thought I couldn’t see, she gave in and played solitaire.

Meanwhile I lounged on the couch and read a mystery novel off the stack from the library, an author whose book titles followed the letters of the alphabet. This was the world I loved second-best only to snowboarding, the imaginary world where there’s one thing that matters—who killed who—and there’s one right answer, and if you read carefully enough you can figure it out long before the end and you can spend the rest of the time hoping the characters you care about most figure it out, too. They always do.

Mom’s phone rang, so I answered.

“May I speak with Angela?”

Angela? Who did she know in town who used her first name? The voice sounded casual, over-friendly. If this was a telemarketer or a pollster, he was a really good one.

“May I ask who’s calling?”

“This is Geoff.”

“Geoff who?” I asked.

My mom reached over and took the phone back before I could get an answer, and something in the way she smiled for the first time all morning and twirled a lock of her hair gave it away.

All those weekends I’d been up at Timberbowl, I’d felt sorry for her home alone. Now I felt foolish.

Life in Colorado had been so predictable. Mom had a good job. We had a normal house, in a normal neighborhood, not a shabby apartment tucked between a trucking warehouse and a tire shop. She volunteered at the library on Tuesdays. She went to Bible study on Wednesdays. And she worked. Her job at New Life took up all the rest of her time when she wasn’t driving me to school or races or practice. Even after dinner, late into the evening, she’d be on the phone with Steve Carlisle, a calendar and calculator beside her on the kitchen table. Working, working, working. Now everything, absolutely everything, had changed. No job. No church. And Mom, apparently, had a boyfriend.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner,” she said after she put down the phone. “I’d been waiting for the right time.”

My heart raced, and I could feel my cheeks warming. I wasn’t sure if I felt angry or embarrassed, but whatever it was, I didn’t want it to show. I turned to look out the window. Drips on the inside pane zigzagged toward the sill. I swallowed hard and kicked one foot against the leg of the couch.

“We grew up together,” Mom used to tell me, but that wasn’t exactly true. We were never like best friends. We just tried to take care of one another. I wanted to keep trying, but she wasn’t making it easy.

“He’s coming over in a little bit.”

Great, I thought. “Okay,” I said.

I went to the kitchen and made myself a cup of cocoa with double scoops of powder to make it more chocolaty, and waited for the knock on the door, the first visitor to the apartment since we moved in besides Larry. I answered.

The man framed in the doorway against a backdrop of hazy sky—not quite white, not quite gray—stood shorter than me, tan and athletic, well-groomed, the kind of guy you see in ads for toothpaste or vacations in San Diego. He wore a tight white T-shirt for a band I’d never heard of. And over it? Get this: a sports coat. Nothing like what I’d expected. As if I knew what to expect.

“Charlotte, this is Geoff. Geoff, Charlotte.”

“Nice to meet you. Come on in.”

So far so good. I sounded normal, confident, at least confidentish, but when he reached out to shake my hand, my sweaty palm gave me away. His: dry and soft.

When he sat on the couch the cheap cushions buckled under him. He tucked a pillow behind him and crossed his legs. I wasn’t about to sit beside him. I pulled up a kitchen chair, courtesy of Goodwill, its metal arms curving down toward a cold vinyl seat, and sat. Mom disappeared somewhere down the hall.

“I hear you’re a snowboarder,” he said. He chewed gum as he spoke.

“Yeah.” What else was there to say?

“Do you board?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I used to ski a little. Now it’s mostly tennis.” So that explained how they met. “Do you play?”

I shrugged.

“I used to,” I said.

He wore leather loafers, and jiggled one foot madly. I couldn’t help thinking how slippery those shoes would be on an icy sidewalk.

“I’m going to take your mom out to dinner, do you want to come?”

He wasn’t going to prolong this awkwardness, and I appreciated that. But no way would I go to dinner with them.

“No, thanks.”

I shifted in my chair and tried a fake smile just as my mom came back in the room. She looked disappointed, which didn’t seem fair, and I could feel my cheeks growing hot all over again.

“Are you sure you don’t want to come?” she asked.

“I’m sure.”

“I’ll get the car warmed up,” Geoff said, standing and heading for the door, giving us a little space. “I’ll be seeing you, Charlotte.”

Right away I expected Mom to ask what I thought of him. But she didn’t. Maybe she could guess. Sports coat? Loafers? Chewing gum? Seriously?

“You’ll be okay here alone?”

“Of course.”

“There are turkey burgers in the freezer. And have some chard on the side, okay?”

I rolled my eyes. “Broccoli. I can do broccoli, okay?”

I had no intention of eating broccoli.

She nodded slightly and squeezed my arm, picked up her keys and left.

Maybe we had grown up together. But now we were growing apart.

I stood outside the lift shack shivering.

“Not much,” I said to Larry. “Not much new.”

Larry stood inside coiling the cable with his huge orange rubber work gloves, the kind he’d used back when he worked on fishing boats in Alaska. “Get obsessed,” he’d scribbled in Sharpie on the back of the right hand. The left one said: “Stay obsessed.”

I sighed. There’d be no avoiding the topic.

“You’re not going to sign that petition are you, Larry?”

I knew he’d have heard about it by now, and sure enough, he didn’t miss a beat.

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“If you lose your job, we lose our season passes.”

“So?” Larry said. “Timberbowl’s not much. A good place to practice skidding on ice, maybe, but nothing to brag about.” He dropped the cable, stepped out of the shed, and stood towering over me. “The backcountry. Now that’s paradise.”

I’d always been the tallest girl in my class, the tallest girl on the team, the tallest bony-shouldered bean pole waiting in the lift line at any given time, but the top of my helmet barely reached the bottom fringe of his beard, furry enough to hide a small animal.

“What’s the difference between skiing a clear-cut and skiing at a lift area, Charlotte?”

“I don’t know. What?”

“Fifty bucks,” he said.

“And chairlifts,” I said. “When you’re planning to make the national championships, a chairlift helps a lot.”

“But you’d give it a try, wouldn’t you?” he asked.

“Give what a try?”

“Skiing the backcountry.”

“Riding, Larry. We don’t ski.”

I gazed out away from the ski area. All that untouched snow, miles of it, spread across open slopes like thick cream cheese frosting. The backcountry. Of course, it looked tempting. It also looked terrifying. From where we stood, you could see the places between rock outcroppings where huge lips of overhanging snow hovered. Cornices, Larry called them. Throughout the day, at Timberbowl, when a distant cornice let go, we’d hear the avalanche from miles away, like thunder—Boom! An avalanche could bury you in no time. Buck up, I told myself. If Larry could trust me enough to learn to snowboard, I could trust him enough to give the backcountry a shot. Besides, this might work in my favor.

“I’ll try it, Larry, if you promise not to sign that petition.”

He grinned so wide you might not notice the scar if you didn’t know where to look.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Be ready. First thing.”