Of course, I was still at the top of that hill. I was helpless, afraid to move. All we needed was for me to go down with the rest of them and then we’d really be in deep shit. I decided I’d better go for some help, although the chances of finding anyone seemed nil after the looks of that empty lodge. I was holding the real disaster at bay in my mind—Ian’s arm, maybe broken, certainly injured, the audition, the way we might have just changed the course of his and his mother’s lives—and was trying to concentrate on the more immediate one, namely, how to get three guys, two the size of refrigerators, back into the car and safely home. I stepped back into the deep snow to anchor myself, called down to them.
“I’m going for help!” I yelled, and was glad to see that Chuck was attempting to get on his feet. I struggled back the way we came, a few steps at a time, wondering what the hell I was going to do when I got there. I was beginning to hate the sound of that crunching snow, hated the twinkling, beautiful white, when I heard a roaring sound, a loud zipping roar, like a chain saw almost. It turned out to be a snowmobile in the distance, and when the driver saw me, it quickly headed in my direction. I waved my arms around, which was unnecessary, as he had every intention of heading my way.
The guy was with the ski patrol and was pissed we were out there, wondering how we missed the signs that the place was closed. Apparently, in addition to the extremely icy conditions, there was also an avalanche warning in effect. So, hey, look at the bright side.
I put my arms around the shaking Ian when we were back in the car. I saw his wrist before the patrol guy wrapped it, the bone sticking against his skin as if trying to make a getaway, the color turning quickly to a dark purple. The patrol guy told us to get to a doctor right away and have an X ray, but there was no doubt if you saw what I did that it was broken. The bone wasn’t the only thing that had been shattered. I felt the devastation in his trembling; I listened to it in the silence on the car ride home.
If our lives had been losing stitches up until that point, they began a serious unraveling when we got home. I thought of the time when I was a kid and I had pulled one enticing loop from the afghan Nannie was crocheting. I knew I had done something awful and irrevocable, but the more I tried to hold it together, the more it kept coming undone, until the yarn sat in a wrinkled heap. Fragile things become undone at a frightening speed.
I waited in the emergency room with Chuck. Bunny, amazingly in one piece himself, went in with Ian to see the doctor. It was evening before we got out of there. They dropped me off at home, so I wasn’t there for the moment that Ian walked into his mother’s house with a cast on his arm.
I had my own train wreck to deal with at my house.
“Where in God’s name have you been?” my mother said as I walked in. “I’ve been worried sick.”
I walked past her, went up to my room, and shut the door. So what? What was a little more trouble? I couldn’t stand to face anyone. After what I’d done to Ian’s life, I wanted to drop into a hole and disappear. My own shame made powerful punishment seem certain—it was already withering my insides until I felt I might throw up. I heard Dino in the kitchen. It’s that boy, I know it. I could hear the smirk in his voice.
I shut the door behind me, lay on my bed in my quilt. I wrapped it so tight around me. I reached out for the bear in the snow globe. I wanted to throw it against the wall, destroy it, but instead I put it under the quilt with me, tucked it right inside that cocooned place.
“Cassie?”
Mom knocked, then came in. She sat down at the edge of my bed. “Cass? What happened? Come on, talk to me.”
“Talk to me.”
“It’s awful. It’s terrible.” I started to cry. Since I met Ian, I was as bad as the faucet Mom left on when she was washing her sweater. Someone had turned on the emotion and now it wouldn’t go off.
“What?” She sounded like she was afraid and trying not to be. “Nothing is that bad.”
“Oh yes, it is.” I sobbed, just let out these heaves of helplessness. Mom held me.
“I’m here, okay? Whatever it is. Are you pregnant?”
“Holy shit, Mom. No,” I said through my crying. I swear, for parents it’s always about sex and drugs. “I haven’t been arrested for trafficking marijuana, either.”
“Okay, Cass, I’m sorry. You know, what am I supposed to think?”
I curled up tight inside that blanket. The glass of the snow globe was cold, and I blew on it to warm it up.
“Should I call Ian’s mom?”
“Oh, God, no,” I said. “Please don’t do that.”
Mom sighed. I peeked at her, and saw her just sitting with her chin pointed to the ceiling. She looked so tired. Thin, too. She looked like she was losing too much weight.
“Ian broke his wrist. It was my fault.”
“Oh, my God,” she said.
“It was my fault.”
“Oh, my God,” she said again.
“I know.”
I told her the story. She put her arms around me. I could feel her hot breath through the quilt. “Oh, Cassie.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“You didn’t cause it.”
“That’s not what Dino will think.”
“That may be true, but it’s not what I think.”
I came out of the quilt, just a little. She brushed my hair away from my face. She bent down to kiss my forehead. “I’ll always be here for you,” she said. But she didn’t need to say it. Right then, it was something I knew.
It started like a storm, low rumbling and then louder and louder still until the windows actually rattled and there was a crash of something being broken.
I told you she would ruin this! Did I not tell you she had to stay away from him?
And then my mother’s voice, too low to be heard, the rhythms of calm explanation.
My God. It is over for him! I could have helped him. Things could have been different for him than they were for me. How can I help him now? How?
I heard my mother then, clearly. His situation is different than yours, my mother said. He’s a boy with options. It’s not the same. You are not the same person.
I could have made things turn out differently. Look what you people have done. You’ve wrecked him. You want to ruin me.
His voice was gaining emotion; my mother’s turned pleading.
This is not about you. This is not about what happened in your life.
I am stuck here in this nothing city because of you.
Calm down, my mother said. She was trying not to get angry She was saying those words to herself as much as him, I could tell that, too. You made a choice to be here, my mother said. As much as I did.
You are all the same. You and that bastard Tiero. You want to see that I am a failure. You want to see me fall.
I am not doing this, my mother said more loudly. I am not talking to you about any of these things. And I will not accept this kind of behavior.
Where are you going? He was shouting now. I wondered what I should do. If I should do something. It felt bad; I knew this was bad. Should I leave? Call someone?
I’m just going out for a while. So that you can calm down.
Fine! Leave! Run away, you coward.
I heard her coming up the stairs then. She called for me to come with her, and I did. As we went out the door, we heard the shatter from his office. He had slammed the door so hard that the print above his desk had come crashing to the floor, along with a paperweight and a coffee cup that it brought down with it. I made a strange little list in my head as I buckled my seat belt in Mom’s car, as she turned the key with a shaking hand. All of the things that Dino had shattered. A wineglass. William Tiero’s picture. The painting of Wild Roses. Our lives.