4

I limped from Wash’s geriatric truck to our condo’s garage door, still groggy from a night in the hospital. My arm’s humerus bone had a compound fracture, three of my ribs were cracked, and my cheek was shiny with antibiotic cream. They’d had to put me under to extract those quills. In my parka’s pocket was a urine-sample cup holding all eighteen. They were long as my index finger, black on one end, white on the other. Each had two dashes of white with black in-between, like some kind of code.

My arm was immobilized in a brace, plus a sling made of two wide straps that connected to my wrist. You’d think that big arm bone would command my attention, but those ribs didn’t play fair. Every tiny movement, every breath, translated as not one, not two, but three stabs of pain.

Wash, baseball cap backward like always, pressed our code into the keypad next to the garage door. His name was actually Darragh Washington, but nobody could ever pronounce his Irish first name, so everyone called him Wash. His other hand balanced a foil-covered plate of cookies from Crispy.

Dad stood behind him, right wrist in a cast. Tuesdays were his day off. Lucky timing, I guess. Dad never took sick days—hadn’t taken one since Mom died, and none for as long as I could remember before that. Now he squinted down the row of repeating condo garage doors, harsh and bright in the morning light. Side-by-side everything. Outside and in. Horizontal and perpendicular as graph paper. My prison.

Dad, Wash, and I entered the laundry/mud room from the garage. A long hall to the front door ran along the wall inside. This hall led to the kitchen too, then to the dining room, and finally to the family room with its bank of sliding glass doors and a stubby deck that overlooked narrow Pearl Creek on its burbling path to Crystal Creek. I salivated to duck back there and smoke.

Our dining room table and chairs were the cabin ones. Till Mom died, fresh flowers always colored their center. Pots and pans hung from an iron rack above the breakfast bar between the kitchen and dining room. Mom had haggled the lot from a garage sale, but it was really nice.

Upstairs was another corridor. My bedroom and bath, then Mom and Dad’s. Their room looked out on the creek and tourist condos beyond. My bedroom looked across half the garage’s roof, a few hundred yards to the next mountain, scraggy with sage.

This was Affordable Housing. Put up by Crystal Village to keep real working folks living in town. It was where we’d moved when I’d turned six, so I could get to school easy. I called it “the Condo.” Never “home.” When Mom lived, we were a two-ski-patrol family, always scraping by. A year ago, we’d become a one-ski-patrol family.

Even so, Mom had made the Condo comfy. A few years back, the Facet, Crystal Village’s priciest hotel, had remodeled. Our hotels remodel about every ten years, Crystal Village being one of the swankiest resorts in the world. When they do this, they have a furniture sale, and regular folks flock to it. Mom bought an emerald-green velvet couch, leather armchairs, and a coffee table. She also bought my pine bedroom set.

Dad eased his strained back into an armchair. I settled on the couch and itched to turn on a movie. Mom had rarely allowed TV or movies, but in her void, they’d become my third addiction. Gage, cigarettes, movies—each an escape. Wash set the cookies on the counter, opened the fridge, and peered inside.

“This is sorrier than mine!” He pulled out something mold-blue in Tupperware and tossed it in the trash. “Looks like I’m headed to City Market. Any requests?” He opened the cookies and held them out to Dad and me. We shook our heads. He took one, bit in, and studied it, chewing loud. “How does a man who lives to bake burn every damn thing he makes?” He moved behind the couch and looked from Dad to me. “Well, you’re a pitiful lot.”

I remembered my wail, saw the agony I’d put in Dad’s face. How he’d stared at Phantom Peak. That loneliness—just snowscape and me—swept in.

Dad webbed his hand across his face, ran his middle finger and thumb from the outsides of his eyes in, till they met at his nose. “You’re a good man, Wash.”

Wash snorted. “Tell that to the ladies.” He had this expression where the left side of his top lip curled up, creasing his cheek, while his left brow pressed way down. Even in the roughest times, it cracked me up.

Dad and I smiled. Wash must’ve said that a million times, yet he’d never gone on a date that I could recall. It was as if our ski-patrol family was enough. It wasn’t like he was ugly. He had a shrubby head of dust-brown hair seasoned gray, a twinkling gaze, constant stubble on his cheeks, and a smile that invited company. His features seemed squashed, as if someone had pressed on his head and chin, compressing things about an inch. It made his smile seem extra-wide. I thought it improved him.

“Later,” Wash said, keys jangling. We listened to the garage door clank down. I pictured our garage, empty but for bikes, skis, snowshoes, and camping gear. Once, we’d employed that gear every weekend. But then that crunched Honda was towed away and never replaced, and everything stopped.

What equation represented the Briggs family now? Dad – Mom = x? Me + Dad = y? We were variables, and I couldn’t fathom this simple math.

Dad and I hadn’t been alone since he’d rested his hand over that nub I’d made in the sled. Now, alone pressed on us. He studied his cast. Pain had taught us habits that needed unlearning. Yesterday had been as low as a person could go. I shoved back the fury that hounded me. My mouth opened, but no sound came.

“You don’t have to explain, Sov.” He laughed sadly. “Hmm, explain? As if you’ll talk.” He shook his head on a sigh. “I’ve considered ending things myself. Every day.”

My mouth sagged. Never once that whole hospital night had anyone asked what happened. Least of all Dad. I had to force words. “I just needed speed.”

Dad tilted his head. His eyebrows rose. “Speed? Well, that’s a relief.” He scrubbed his face with his hands.

A vast distance seemed to stretch between us, and it felt like if I didn’t do something, it would double, triple, quadruple. I winced on a deep breath and I blurted this noise like a frustrated animal.

“Sovern?”

I eased my phone out of my pocket and speed-dialed Wash.

“’Sup?” Wash’s crappy truck radio played ’80s rock in the background.

“Get some flowers?” Each word triggered my ribs’ stabs, and I forced myself not to wince for Dad’s sake.

“That’s my girl,” Wash said. “Any particular kind?”

“No thorns.”

Wash’s chuckle always ended high. “Gotcha.”

I hung up.

Dad + me = y. Time to start solving for y.

“I’m sorry about Gage,” I said.

Dad’s eyebrows rose.

My gaze fell to my jeans’ frayed knees. Beside me, the couch dipped with Dad’s bulk, and his un-casted hand tugged my shoulder. “Come here, kiddo.”

He leaned back against the couch’s arm, and I leaned against him. We were like a couple of statues.

“You could have been killed.” He shook his head, and I thought he was scolding me about what happened in Shangri-
La till he said, “A tree falling like that, and me losing you.”

Poor Dad. Our ski down the mountain would be legend in the worst way. He sighed. Something seemed to release within him, and he relaxed. I searched the air for what he’d sighed out. I blew at the thing as if exhaling cigarette smoke, hoping to send it to oblivion. We listened to the fridge whir. The baseboard heater ticked. He spread his left hand on his leg, and I could feel him looking at his silver and turquoise wedding band.

“How about we work on being us again?” He petted my hair the way he used to when I was a kid, and that just about killed me. I sat up, ran my palm over his crew cut. It resembled the long summer grass in the back bowls as it yielded to the wind.

He snorted. “Like I said, we haven’t been ourselves.”

I lay back against him and remembered that porcupine peering from his branch. How he’d transformed to Dad. How I’d pleaded with him to come down. My arm in its sling had settled slightly forward. As I mentally traced that tree’s bruise perimeter along my arm and ribs, I thought I felt a tingling there.