How I Came to Sparkle Again (10 page)

By midmorning, there was only one person in the FAR, so Tom came down from the Pneumonia Shack, the oldest and draftiest mountaintop patrol shack that was his domain most of the time, and told Jill to take a ski break, pick an easy run, and look for tourists in distress. Lisa had loaned Jill her rock skis for the rest of winter since she used them only at the beginning and end of the season, when the snow was thin and she didn’t want to trash her newer skis by scraping them on rocks.

As Jill rode the chair, snow began to fall, lightly at first, but as she neared the top, it thickened. When her feet hit the ramp, she stood and slid down. She hit a little bump, lost her balance, and recovered. She realized that she was locking her knees and that to stay balanced, she’d have to bend them. She’d have to soften.

She started down Meander, an easy run that had been a favorite warm-up in the past, and glided over and down hills and slopes that felt like old friends, places she had known as intimately as she had known parts of David’s body. She kept her knees bent and absorbed the shock of whatever came her way without losing her balance. She was surprised how easily her body remembered what to do. If only it were that easy to absorb shock and stay balanced in the rest of her life.

She reached an unexpected fork in the trail and couldn’t remember which way to go. This place she had known so well, this place that felt like an old friend, suddenly felt foreign and cold. She went left and had no idea where she was. Her legs began to burn and tremble. It wasn’t the run she remembered, and her own weak legs felt just as foreign. What little confidence she’d had was gone. She stopped and rested and tried to recall this run from her memory, but nothing looked familiar because she couldn’t see anything. There was almost no visibility.

Eventually, she figured that all roads led to the base, and even if she ended up on a black diamond run, somewhere deep inside her was a girl who knew how to ski it. She took it slow and tried not to worry about what might lie ahead. Instead, she tried to keep her mind simply on the sensation of floating in new snow. And she realized that was also likely the answer for this particular moment in her life—have faith in herself, take it slow, and try not to worry about what might lie ahead.

*   *   *

Mike really could understand why Cassie might have felt uncomfortable with all the sitters. It had nothing to do with them. Sometimes it just felt as though their mere presence painted over the little things Kate left behind, like when they put something back, but not quite back to the place Kate would have put it. Just little things like that. Little things that shouldn’t have mattered, but for some reason, they just did.

Uncomfortable with the stillness in the house now, he busied himself with chores. He pulled clothes from the laundry hamper and dropped them into one of two piles on the floor: darks and whites. He set the dial on the washing machine, and as the water began to fill the basin, he poured in a little bleach and detergent. In went the whites.

“This is not what I was born to do,” Kate had said to him one day last February, before they knew she was sick—at least before he knew she was sick. He wondered now if she had found the lump by then, if she had known something was wrong. Mike had just come home from a shift, and Kate was folding laundry on the bed. “I know we agreed that I would stay home to raise our daughter and you would work, but I feel like everyone’s slave, and I hate it. It is a waste of my life.”

“Are you saying you want to get a job?” Mike had asked.

“I don’t know,” Kate answered.

“Are you saying you’d like Cassie and me to pull more of our own weight?”

“I guess so. Yes,” she said.

“We can do that. I’m happy to do that. Kate, I really hope you don’t feel like you’ve wasted your life raising Cassie. She is who she is because of you. And she’s bright and happy and confident, she does well in school, and she’s one hell of a skier. That’s all you, Kate,” Mike said.

Her shoulders slumped. “Thanks,” she said, more like a resignation.

Mike felt crushed watching her deflate like that. He wondered if he’d done this to her, if it wasn’t any different from catching butterflies and keeping them in a jar, where they inevitably died just like the caterpillars, grasshoppers, and ladybugs he’d caught before that. Everything dies in captivity. He knew that.

He looked around at his house, at the washer and dryer. He had never thought of this as captivity before. He had put so much effort into making it nice. But then, he had put a lot of effort into making those jars nice, too—adding leaves and grass, a stone, and maybe some water, and then punching holes in the lid. He thought about Kate, bored and lonely in this house, doing chores. After that conversation, he and Cassie did all the laundry. He made an effort to help out more in other ways, too, and to show his appreciation as well.

But as he thought about it after Kate died, it haunted him. Kate’s life was short, and Kate’s life was over, and she had spent the last part of it feeling that she had wasted it. She left unsatisfied. He would do anything to give it back to her, even if she chose not to spend it with him again.

But maybe that was just a moment. We all have our moments like that,
he thought.
We all have moments when we look at the sacrifices we made instead of all we gained. It’s normal.

He hoped those times had, in actuality, been a small part of the big picture. They had been for him. For him, at least, the big picture was the three of them on a blanket with a picnic during the summer outdoor concert series a couple years ago, Kate leaning back against his chest, Cassie leaning back against hers. His girls. And there had been so many days on the mountain together. He used to carry a bag of M&M’s in his pocket and dole them out whenever Cassie got discouraged or Kate got irritable. She’d call him her sugar daddy and laugh, and the tension would ease. He remembered sitting next to Kate during Cassie’s second-grade talent show performance. Cassie had hopped on her pogo stick for the duration of a whole Disney song—not to the rhythm of the music. She’d just hopped and hopped with a big smile on her face. “I’ve never been so proud,” he had whispered to Kate. She’d laughed, but she had felt it, too. She had been the only other person in the whole world who could have possibly understood what he was feeling in that moment. Those moments were the big picture. Those moments where they were so strongly partners—family.

He carried the basket of laundry up the stairs to his bed, where he dumped it out. He folded the towels first and then the clothes, making a pile for each person. When he was done, he put his clothes in his drawers and put Cassie’s pile on her bed. He held Kate’s pile for a moment and actually considered putting the clothes away this time instead of back in the hamper as he had done every week since she’d died. He wondered whether he could fold laundry just once without thinking about how he had wasted Kate’s life if he just put her laundry away this time. In the end, he made a baby step by putting her pants away, but he dumped the rest of the pile back into the laundry hamper. He couldn’t stand thinking of her regret, but neither could he stand the sight of family laundry without some of her things in it. He just couldn’t.

*   *   *

After school, Cassie told Mike that she was going to a friend’s house to work on homework. He was dozing on the couch since his twenty-four-hour shift the day before had been relatively sleepless.

She went out the front door with her book bag but doubled back around to the shed, where she ditched her bag and found a shovel. She took it and walked down the alley, where she could remain hidden until she finally reached the edge of town. There, she cut through a pasture to the riverbank below.

The river still flowed in the middle, but the sides were covered in ice and snow. She stayed near the cut bank, where she knew she was on solid ground, and there she began to dig through the snow to the stones below. She tried to get a shovelful of cobbles, but they were frozen together. She chopped at the ground in hopes of breaking some of them loose. She desperately needed to hear from her mother. It had been so long since she had heard from her, and as Christmas drew near, her grief had heightened. She would not have believed it possible, but it was indeed worse.

A few cobbles broke loose and she dropped to her knees to examine them.
Please let there be a heart,
she thought.
Please, please, please.
But she didn’t see any or hear her mother’s voice. She dug for two hours and found nothing. Finally, she sat down and gave up.

She went home the way she came, traded the shovel for her book bag, and walked in the house.

Mike was awake. “How did the homework go?” he asked.

“Pretty good,” Cassie answered. “Afterwards we made a snowman,” she said, to explain why she was soaking wet.

“Oh, that sounds fun,” he replied.

She climbed the stairs and changed into dry clothes. Then she crawled into her bed, under the down comforter, spread her homework out in front of her, and tried to care about it.

*   *   *

“So, Lisa,” Eric began, “how was your date last night?”

Lisa stood in front of the stove, simmering freshly grated ginger in butter, the first step of her gingerbread recipe. “What makes you think I was on a date?”

“Tom saw you leave in your date jacket and waited by the window until you came home,” Eric said.

“What a stalker,” Lisa muttered.

Hans shouted from the other room, where he was finishing his birthday movie for the fourth time, “Who was Lisa on a date with?”

Lisa looked at them and shrugged. “No one. I’m not dating anymore. I went to the movies by myself.”

Hans walked into the kitchen and put his empty bottle in the recycle bin.

Eric popped the top of another beer. “Lisa just announced she’s not dating anymore,” he told Hans.

“You’re not dating anymore?” Hans asked.

“Nah. I haven’t figured it all out yet, but I was talking to Howard about it,” Lisa said.

“Uh-oh,” Jill said, and snickered.

Lisa continued, “And he said that like it or not, marriage is how a man shows a woman respect in this culture, and that by avoiding men who want marriage, I’ve also been avoiding men who will respect me. I’m afraid I might have to get married at some point.”

Hans and Eric thought about that silently, which made Lisa suspect it might be true.

Jill raised her eyebrows and looked at all of them. “I have firsthand knowledge that marriage doesn’t guarantee respect.”

“No, I know that,” Lisa said. “I just think that it’s possible that while marriage doesn’t guarantee respect, no marriage does in fact guarantee disrespect.”

“Define disrespect,” Eric said.

“Being regarded as just another vagina. Never being introduced to someone’s family. The last guy I dated told me he didn’t even want a girlfriend. He didn’t want romance. It was too intimate and he had just gotten out of a relationship. He didn’t want another relationship. He just wanted a friend he could have sex with. And I went along with it for a few weeks because I wanted sex, too. But unlike him, I wanted to sleep next to someone. And I wanted to wake up the next day and make breakfast together. I’d run into his mom at the grocery store…”

“Ah, so it was a local boy,” Eric said, looking at Hans, trying to figure out who it was.

“… and I’d say hello just like normal and pretend that nothing was going on, and I’d hope that she didn’t know that we were spending time together, because if I wasn’t his girlfriend, what was I? Just his whore friend? I don’t want to be a whore. I want to be respected,” Lisa finished.

“So, it’s a boundary issue,” Jill said.

“Yes,” Lisa agreed.

Eric said, “Yeah, I was having problems dating many years ago and then I figured some things out and have been able to avoid unpleasant situations.”

“True, that.” Hans nodded. “Last October, I was dating this smokin’ hot chick, and I was happy because I was getting laid, but then Eric saved me by telling me about the two critical questions.”

“The two critical questions?” Lisa asked.

“Yeah,” Eric answered. “Does she have hobbies? And does she get along with her dad?”

Hans went on, “Turns out the smokin’ hot chick had never known her dad and she didn’t have any hobbies either.”

“Good thing he figured it out then,” Eric said, “or working out her father issues with Hans would have been her new hobby.”

“No one wants to be another person’s hobby,” Hans said. “Now
that
is a boundary problem.” He paused and then said, “Tom would say that men’s strengths are physical, and women’s strengths are manipulating relationships, particularly to try to entrap men.”

“Yeah? Well, Tom is an ass,” Lisa said, staring them down.

Still, Jill considered what truth there might be in Eric’s philosophy. She and her father didn’t have a good relationship. After all, he believed she was going to the Terrestrial Kingdom instead of the Celestial Kingdom—a lower level of heaven than he would be in. It was impossible to have a healthy relationship with a dad who didn’t think you were good enough in God’s eyes. And Jill didn’t have hobbies, exactly, but she did have a career. She didn’t think David had ever been her hobby, but had she tried to work out her father issues with him? Maybe so. Unlike her father, though, David thought she was good enough. Or at least he used to.

“If ever there was a case for abstinence,” Lisa said, “Sparkle men are it.”

But at least the men in Sparkle didn’t pretend to be something they weren’t, Jill thought. At least they were direct about the nature of the beast, and women were given every opportunity to enter into entanglement with full disclosure or avoid it altogether. At least they didn’t pretend to be anyone’s husband.

Just then Tom walked in through Lisa’s back door. “Hey, Lisa, how was your date?”

“I was just saying that if ever there was a case for abstinence, Sparkle men are it,” she replied.