His lungs felt as though they were bleeding but he wouldn’t stop. He had to keep going, to make it back down to the parking lot in this one run. The light was fading – there wasn’t time to go back to the top and do it again – and besides, Mitch had done it in one; he’d done it that day last fall when Tuck had gone to the factory to sign off on the new Titch prototypes. Mitch – who’d been more involved with the retail and networking side of the business – had taken advantage of the quiet phones and good weather to sneak a ‘recce’ of the route they could take for the short mountain film they were planning on shooting this summer, and he’d been flying high by the time Tuck had got back, a six-pack of beers on the desk in readiness for pressing the ‘play’ button and showing his old friend what he’d achieved.
Tuck had felt his stomach drop several times as he’d watched the video – impressed as Mitch had bunny-hopped the bike up two-metre-high boulders, springing on the back wheel like a pogo stick, using one fallen tree as a bridge to traverse a deep narrow crevasse, another as a barrier to stop the front wheel, flip the bike over in a somersault before landing on both wheels and continuing down the trail as though nothing much had happened.
And now it was his turn . . .
Tuck knew the first tree was coming up. His thighs were burning from the lactic acid build-up as he pedalled and bounced and hopped and balanced the bike from the top of the mountain to the bottom, but he refused to ever once let his foot touch the ground. He’d gone over the trick so many times in his head, watched Mitch’s clip over and over so that the neural pathways in his brain knew exactly what he had to do and when. He knew the question wasn’t could he do it, but did he dare . . . ?
The path was springy with fallen pine needles but the bike’s suspension was beginning to creak, a sure sign he was at the limits of its – and his – capabilities. He knew that a hundred metres or so from now, he would take a sharp left and the forest floor would drop sharply, a sudden chasm three – maybe four – metres wide, ripping open the stone bedrock. That fallen tree was his only way across to the rocks on the other side.
He slowed as he approached, coming out of the seat and momentarily forgetting the pain in his legs as his eyes took in what, until now, had been only a dare behind a screen. The tree was huge, the base covered in a dark, slippy-looking moss, the blond bark stippled with rough psoriatic patches. He couldn’t see to the bottom of the narrow gorge – not without getting off the bike – and he balanced for a few moments, hopping lightly in place as he worked out how to get the bike onto the tree. Mitch had come in from the left but the snowmelt had riven a channel that eroded the level. He looked at it from the right, where the land level was higher.
Barely giving himself time to think about it, he coiled his body tight and with a burst of power, pulled up on the handlebars, bringing the bike under him as he landed, hopping in place wildly for a few more moments as he tried to get his balance, now fully able to see the drop into the gorge from this vantage point.
A jet of adrenalin and anger shot through him as he stayed up on the pedals, weight forwards, and began inching over the ‘bridge’. The trunk was rutted and uneven but he took it slowly, keeping his eyes on a spot perpetually five centimetres ahead of the front wheel, not once looking down on either side. He felt a visceral sense of relief as he crossed it within moments, the pine floor carpeting the ground beneath the tree again, and he hopped down with joyous ease.
Allowing himself to sit back in the seat, he followed gravity’s pull down the mountain and the miles rolled beneath his wheels; he felt the silence like a weight on his back, his aloneness amplified beneath these thousands of hectares of giant pines, the whirr of the air slicing through the wheel spokes his only companion. He felt scooped-out and hollow. His friend was never coming back. Never again would he hear him whoop or yell, ‘Hell, yeah!’ down a mountain, never again would he have someone to share this love, this crazy, wild streak that made them seek out adventures on the mountains and in return, feel so wedded to this – their – patch of the planet. It was what had made this home, but everything felt different now he was on his own.
He’d tried to keep life the same – like doing this, right now. Like going to the ice-hockey qualifier the other week with the girls, so determined was he to make things feel normal. But it hadn’t been. Lucy had been bitching all night about her jeans feeling tight, even while she chowed down on buckets of junk; and Meg had looked drugged and spectral, like a hologram of herself. And neither one of them had made a sensible comment about the match or the team, gossiping between themselves about God knows what as he had sat there, feeling more empty than at any time since Mitch had died, feeling like a ghost in his own life, the black shadow trailing him everywhere, joined to his heels, stitched to his soul.
There was no new normal. He kept his routines the same. He hit the studio to work on the films every Tuesday and Thursday nights, but the sight and sound of his friend, alive still on the screen, was almost more than he could bear. He still went to Bill’s for drinks with the guys on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays but they all talked shit and he didn’t care what a single one of them had to say. As for Lucy and the baby . . . this baby they had never planned, never even talked about; she’d just gone and done it, like it wasn’t anything to do with him anyway, like it was going to make everything better. A Band-Aid baby.
He was so angry with her, most of the time he couldn’t bear to look at her; and his anger only grew that she clearly didn’t get it. He felt like she’d trapped him, played a trick and now she was falling apart, letting herself go, always looking at him with anxious eyes, wanting to know where he’d been on the one hand, pushing him away in bed on the other.
He knew he had to get his head straight. He was drinking too much and Barbara – always eagle-eyed anyway – was even more alert at the moment. Several times he’d caught sight of her watching him from her apartment window when he’d come home late. What was she doing? Logging his movements? He shook his head, feeling angry again – he was trapped, watched, monitored, assessed . . . and always found wanting.
He hopped down three stepped boulders, the bike landing with a groan on the last jump. The back wheel skidded out and he almost – almost – had to put a foot down to save himself from falling and he felt another spike of adrenalin in his hands, knowing he’d have to go back to the top and start again, failing light or not. His pride would demand it.
But he was so close now. Another 300 metres’ descent and he’d have done it. It would be another thing he could share with his friend, the only way he had to be close to him any more. Pushing Lucy to the back of his mind, he focused on the final hurdle – quite literally. He knew exactly where the tree was going to be. He would be able to see a waterfall just to the right of it, the path forking beyond it, taking the left back to the parking lot.
And so it was. The vista unfolded exactly as he’d seen it on Mitch’s Go-Pro and he readied himself, knowing that this was it – the pièce de résistance. Mitch had aced it, heading straight for the barrier as though it was a foam pit, not an immovable object that would catapult him into the air and hurl him, quite possibly, towards a broken back.
He gulped down air, his limbs fizzy with anticipation as he headed straight for the toppled tree, knowing he had to keep his nerve, just let the physics do the work – if he hit the tree dead on, he could somersault over it. Momentum was all he needed; that and self-belief.
Mitch had done it. He could too. He could! This was his homage to his friend, his apology.
He pedalled faster, eyes on the massive trunk that blocked the path. ‘Just believe,’ he told himself, only metres away, his fingers straining to squeeze the brakes, his will stopping them, knowing if he braked he’d still go over the tree anyway, but just leave the bike behind him.
But logic and instinct are two different things and as he saw the bulk of the tree – the weight of it, the utter immovability – his courage failed and his fingers automatically squeezed, the bike slowing dramatically and suddenly in that final stretch, so that when the front wheel nudged the trunk, momentum indeed carried him over, but somersaulting him alone through the air, the bike toppling back down on the wrong side of the tree.
He landed heavily, arm first, his body ringing with pain. He would have yelled profanities into the dusk but he had no breath with which to do so, for he was winded too and for several long moments he lay convulsed on the ground, his body twisted as his chest heaved, trying to get air back into his lungs.
By the time he did, the pain in his wrist and elbow were hitting a crescendo and he blinked his eyes shut, trying to control the deep throb in his bones. Was his arm broken?
He wiggled the fingers, just, and knew it wasn’t, but he was badly bruised, his joints sprained. He fell back and lay there in the pines, his skin badly grazed, his body wrenched and wretched.
He had failed. Again.
It had all been for nothing.
Mitch could still beat him, even in death.
Meg stood on the porch, wrapped in her blanket, Badger sitting at the top of the steps by her feet, his ears up and watching a stag tread lightly just inside the treeline. She was lucky. At her elevation, the skies were clear, the sun at a low slant behind the ridgeline and the shy-peeping moon a sliver of its fullest self. Below her, Banff was in cloud, thick white plumes like a steaming, rolling sea on the valley floor, only the jagged peaks of Mount Rundle piercing through like mermaids’ rocks.
It was cooler up here than in town too, at least three degrees, and she clutched the blanket tighter, her eyes falling every few seconds to the digital alarm clock she had brought through from the bedroom. Seven ten.
She looked west towards the brighter skies, her eye line falling to where she had practised with an outstretched arm and closed fist. How accurate was his alleged fly-by, she wondered? A few minutes—?
Spot on.
Suddenly, her gaze hit on a diamond in the sky. At first she wasn’t sure – was it just a star? A normal, common-garden star? But no, it was travelling, moving fast, a tail of light streaming behind it.
She gasped as it sped through the air, knowing that was it – the International Space Station.
And Jonas was up there. She actually knew someone in that thing!
She laughed, the impulse surprising her as much as it did Badger as she shot her arm out, waving madly, knowing it was ridiculous, knowing he couldn’t see. But he’d sent her a smiley face, he’d said he’d be waving. Wasn’t it just too insane to think he was waving back to her right now?
She pressed her hands in a steeple to her mouth as she watched it draw closer. She couldn’t believe how fast it was covering distance, nor how brightly it shone, the sun demonstrating its almighty power with one last dazzling burst on the Space Station’s reflective panels before it sank below the horizon for another day.
She watched for another minute, feeling overwhelmed, as though she’d been part of something more – something bigger, cosmic – even if it was only as a spectator. It never would have occurred to her to look up, beyond her own world, her own life, that she might know someone whose world vision was so big, he’d needed to get off the planet to realize it.
Suddenly she ran inside and pressed all the buttons she knew to press, red lights turning green, dials flickering into life, that crackly static bringing the world into the bedroom. If she could see him, surely she could speak to him too?
‘Hello?’ Her eyes went to the sticker on the side of the rig. ‘This is uh, Volcano X-ray Four, uh, Dog, Dog, uh, Elephant, over. Calling Jonas Solberg. Can you hear me, over?’
She pressed the button on the receiver and waited but it sounded different from before – noisier, ‘dirtier’ somehow with lots of interference, too many voices leaping in and out of reception.
She looked at the frequency coming up on the digital display: 145.800 . . . where she had left it from the first and second times she’d spoken to him. Should she move it? When she’d moved it that first night, it had seemed to move through the airwaves, finding empty pockets, rather like tuning the TV in the days before digital.
No. Surely it was better to stick with what she knew? That was little enough! She tried again.
‘Volcano X-ray Four Dog Dog Elephant calling the International Space Station. Jonas, can you hear me, over?’
Still nothing. She stood up and leaned over the desk, her face turned up as she stared out of the window. She could still see him, the bright shooting star almost directly in front of the cabin – albeit hundreds of kilometres away.
‘Jonas, can you hear me? It’s Meg Saunders! Volcano X-ray Four Dog—’
‘I can hear you all right,’ he said suddenly, his voice as loud and clear as if he’d been in the next room. He appeared to be laughing.
‘Jonas? Is that you?’
‘Copy that. This is November Alpha One Sierra Sierra calling Volcano X-ray—’ He broke off laughing again.
‘Why are you laughing?’ she chuckled, bemused by his own amusement. ‘Over.’
Pause. ‘Your call sign—’
More laughter.
Oh, God. ‘Aren’t I doing it right? Over.’
A few seconds passed and he was back again. ‘You’re doing it perfectly,’ he said, but she could tell – somehow – that he was still smiling. It’s funny, she thought, how you can hear a smile in a voice. ‘It’s good to speak to you, over.’
‘And you. And guess what? I can see you! I’m watching you right now! Over.’
Silence.
‘Can you see me waving?’ he replied.
It was her turn to laugh. ‘No, but I waved to you anyway . . .’ She could hear him laughing again. ‘Thanks for your email. Are you nervous about your airwalk? Over.’
Another pause. Another chuckle. ‘The spacewalk today? I am nervous, yes. It’s always a big deal. We have a Japanese cargo ship docking next week so we have to check everything’s OK. Over.’
Meg waited for the words to transmit to her, a bubble of static making her eyes dart to the display. She looked back out the window. She could still see the speeding bright dot, like a silver bullet, but it was moving away from her again, too soon, too fast. ‘It’s today? But I thought you said it was tomorrow? Over.’
‘Yes, it was when I wrote the email. Sorry, I’m already in tomorrow . . . We follow Greenwich Mean Time so it’s quarter past three in the morning on board here, over.’
Meg gasped. ‘Oh, my goodness, why are you still awake then? Shouldn’t you be sleeping? Over.’
‘Yes.’ His voice sounded distorted, someone else cutting over them. ‘. . . cause of the emai . . . ondered if you might make contact. It’s nice chatting with a familiar voice . . . ver.’
Meg’s mouth opened in surprise. He liked chatting to her? ‘I . . .’ Interference spiked again, buying her time. She changed the subject. ‘Have you done spacewalks before? Are they scary?’
She waited for his reply.
‘. . . veral times . . . airy moments. Once there was a meteor show . . . a bit close but it was fine . . . the end, over.’
And to think that she’d spent her day doing a stock inventory! ‘Do you have to do them regularly? Over.’
She chewed on her thumbnail as she waited for his response, her eyes tracking the bright dot, which was ever more distant in the sky now. A few minutes and he’d be out of range. Interference was picking up again.
‘. . . ot so much but we do general maintenance and any repairs that need doing, over.’
Meg chuckled. ‘You must be handy around the house then!’
She waited.
And waited.
‘Hello, Commander. Jonas? Can you hear me? Over.’
‘. . . Sierra Sierra . . . osing you. It’s the busiest time . . . py me? . . .’
Voices interrupted them like a crossed line on the phone: nameless, faceless people, some of them trying to speak to him themselves, saying his call sign – she knew it by heart now – others just chatting, yet more still calling out to the ether, reciting obscure codes she couldn’t understand.
She pressed her left cheek to the window glass, her eyes raking the dusk for the bright amulet, only just finding it as it sped away, growing fainter and fainter until finally it was out of sight again, chasing the sun.
‘Hey.’ Lucy turned from her spot at the stove and smiled as Tuck came in, his jeans muddied on the knee, his bike helmet in one hand. ‘Good ride?’
He nodded but the movement was brusque and she felt a pip of anxiety at the surly expression on his face.
‘I made fish pie. Thought we hadn’t had it for a while. It takes so long to prepare I usually don’t—’
‘Don’t bother on my account,’ he said, tossing the helmet onto the table and walking over to the fridge. He pulled out a beer, opening it with a fluid, unthinking motion of his hand on the cap as he positioned it at the edge of the counter. She had found it sexy when they first got together.
‘Oh, but I wanted to,’ she said quickly. ‘It’s your favourite and I thought we both deserved a treat.’
He looked perplexed by the sentiment. ‘Why?’
‘Well, the last couple of months have been hard, obviously and—’
Her voice trailed off as she saw his eyes flick over her – was that disgust she saw in them? – before he put the bottle to his lips and swigged.
‘I’m not that hungry,’ he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and sinking against the formica worktop.
Lucy opened her mouth to say something but stopped herself and went back to stirring the white sauce. He’d be hungry when she set this down in front of him, she thought to herself. He often said he wasn’t hungry when he was. He just didn’t know himself as well as she did, that was all.
The kitchen filled with a silence that wrapped around them both like a cat curling around their legs. She glanced over at him and gave a small smile.
‘I’m going to have a shower,’ he muttered a moment later, putting the almost-empty beer bottle down and walking out.
Lucy stopped stirring as she heard the water come on, the sound of his belt buckle hitting the floor. She looked up into the sky, trying not to cry. It was a cloudy night, no moon to see by, and she felt upset that he hadn’t noticed her new top or seen that she’d done her hair and put on some make-up for once. Sometimes she felt he didn’t even see her, except to criticize.
But then she remembered the day in Room 32, the way he’d taken charge and looked after her and she shook her head, trying to banish her negativity. No. Didn’t he often cheer up after his shower? He was like most men coming in after a long day, needing some time to himself when he came in from work to recalibrate to family life.
The pie now browning in the oven, she was sitting at the kitchen table fifteen minutes later flicking through a gossip magazine when he walked in again, his wet hair slicked back, a grey waffle-knit jumper thrown over some checked baggies. She felt her spirits dive further. He looked sexy as hell, of course – he always did – but couldn’t he see that she’d made an effort tonight? What was she doing, dolled up and cooking his favourite meal, when he just sloped in effectively in his pyjamas? This wasn’t how she’d envisaged tonight going. And where was her little present?
‘Smells good,’ he said, coming over and planting a kiss on her forehead.
Lucy brightened, looking up at him in surprise. ‘It’ll be ready in about twenty minutes.’
‘I’m starved,’ he said, wandering over to the fridge again and pulling out another beer. She didn’t frown. Instead, her smile widened. She knew him so well.
‘So tell me about your day,’ she sighed, leaning one arm on the table and resting her chin in her cupped hand, all the better for watching him.
‘Not much to tell. I took a few calls about the Toronto Snow Show, spoke to a supplier about a polycarbon material I’m interested in.’
‘Oh, yeah?’
‘It’s got more flex.’
‘Great,’ she said brightly. ‘Mitch was always saying the one you had was too . . .’ Her voice faded out. She hated saying his name in front of Tuck now. It had a visceral effect on him, closing him up, folding him down like an origami square repeatedly made into a smaller version of itself. She changed the subject. ‘I saw Meg earlier. She was talking about starting up her own graphic-design business.’
‘Really?’ A sneer curled his lip.
‘I know, that’s what I said. A whole lot of aggro and for what? I tried telling her she doesn’t need the stress.’
But Tuck wasn’t listening; he was leaning back against the counter in his favoured spot, one ankle crossed over the other, his expression distant.
‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.
He glanced at her, as if realizing she was still there, then sighed. It was almost as though talking with her, just being with her, was wearying. ‘Nuthin’. I got a prelim layout today for Toronto and I’m not happy with where they’ve put us. I want a better spot. No one else has got anything like Titch in the market and thanks to Aspen, we’re flavour of the month.’
‘Well, you’re always my flavour of the month,’ she smiled, making sure to squeeze her elbows in and inject her already-impressive cleavage with even more oomph.
It worked and she marvelled that it really was like training a dog. Tuck’s eyes travelled over her as if for the first time this evening, noticing the new tenor of their dinner. ‘Is that new?’ he asked, his gaze on her décolletage but referring, she knew, to the more general vicinity of her blouse.
‘Perhaps,’ she said coyly, sitting back now and pulling away. He also loved it when she played hard to get.
‘It’s nice,’ he replied, always at his most handsome when his eyes began to shine like that. It had been the thing she’d never been able to resist – even when she’d wanted to. It had been such a cliché to fall for him. All the girls at school had and – stuck with her best friend dating his – Lucy had seen it as a badge of merit to remain impervious to his charms. To bemoan his immaturity had been the only way she had been able to think of undermining his cocksure arrogance, to deflect attention away from the humiliating fact that he’d never tried it on with her, and she’d made it a point of honour that she would never make a move on him. But that didn’t mean she hadn’t made her moves – he’d been the one she’d worn that dress for to the Prom, and that moment when she’d seen him notice her like that, had been the best of her life, better even than standing at the altar with him and saying, ‘I do.’ She’d felt like she’d really achieved something, getting him to fall for her.
‘I thought you’d like it. I felt like something new.’
She waited, pleased with herself for having teed up the perfect opportunity for him to reveal his purchase. ‘Yeah? I got you something new too,’ he’d say and then he’d scoop her up (well, no, maybe he wouldn’t pick her up at the moment, he’d need a winch) and they’d fall into the bedroom—
The kitchen timer beeped suddenly, making Tuck jump and shattering the moment.
‘Oh,’ she said, getting up to turn it off. ‘Is it that time already?’
‘What time?’
‘Seven eleven. Apparently—’ And she leaned forward, craning her neck to see out the window. ‘We should be able to see the International Space Station flying over now.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘But I can’t see a thing with these damned clouds.’
‘Space Station?’
‘Yeah, you remember that astronaut sent Meg the poem? Well, they’re quite the pen pals now and he said they’d be doing a fly-past tonight.’ She shrugged, giving up on the blanketed sky and peering through the glass oven door to see how the pie was browning instead.
‘Ten more minutes,’ she murmured, casting her husband a sultry look that was intended to convey how they could fill the time, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was examining his right hand.
‘Oh, what’s happened?’ she frowned, catching sight of it and holding it up for a better look – there was a nasty graze to the side of the hand and his wrist seemed swollen.
‘Nothing. I just fell earlier on the trail.’
She nodded but didn’t say anything – she knew it had been a bad ride. ‘Let me put some ice on it.’
‘It’s fine.’
‘Tuck, it looks nasty. It must have been a bad fall.’ She knew he hated her mothering him but she was right about this. ‘What were you doing?’
‘I said it’s fine. Leave it,’ he snapped.
Silence dripped down the walls like condensation and Lucy realized she was holding her breath. She had his hand in hers but it wasn’t the bruising and the swelling that had caught her eye. It was what was missing that held her attention.
She stepped back, heart jack-hammering as she turned and slid her hands into the oven gloves. The pie needed another few minutes to get a really good golden colour but she had to busy herself, to think through what she’d seen. Because if she was wrong . . .
He stepped out of the way as she lowered the oven door and lifted it out, the potato topping still blond but the aroma curling appealingly around the kitchen.
‘Where’s your watch?’ she asked lightly, glancing down at his left wrist in case he should be in doubt about what she was referring to.
But he missed the cue. ‘What?’
‘Your watch, you’re not wearing it. I know it’s not in the bedroom because I was in there earlier, tidying u—’
As she’d thought. An innocuous comment was nothing of the sort when he was in this mood, when he was guilty.
‘What is this, a freaking inquisition?’ he yelled. ‘Do I have to run everything past you? Do I need permission to take my own watch off? I just had a shower, for Chrissakes! I took it off, OK?’
‘OK,’ she said quickly. ‘I wasn’t accusing you.’
He double-blinked. ‘You weren’t accusing me? What exactly weren’t you accusing me of?’
She swallowed, the pie feeling heavy on her arms now as she stood there, the heat from the dish beginning to radiate through the gloves and burn her hands.
‘I wasn’t accusing you of losing the watch,’ she said carefully.
But she couldn’t help herself. Although she said nothing, she couldn’t hide that she knew what she knew, and she saw him realize that he had said too much; he had dropped himself in it and now she knew what had happened as surely as if she’d seen it with her own eyes – because that watch was waterproof; she’d bought it for him.
She remembered the crunch of glass underfoot by the bed, the fact that he’d found her in the room even though the door was shut with a Do Not Disturb sign on it. It had never occurred to her to ask why he’d gone there. But now, as the pie went careering into the wall and down the fridge, they both knew exactly what had happened in Room 32.