Chapter 41 What If You Fly?
What If You Fly?
Paisley
It’s been four days since the USADA paid Knox a visit.
Four days since Knox has spoken a word to me.
I’ve been keeping busy with the tourists, going to training, and torturing myself with the triple axel.
In the mornings, I get up, make breakfast for Knox and Jack, then wait until I hear a door open and Knox comes down the stairs in his running gear.
Most of the time, his hair’s still messy and standing up in all directions.
I like that. It looks bold. I’d like to run my fingers through it, every time, but he always hides it beneath a gray Vans hat.
When he opens the door and gets going, I take off behind him.
It’s always the same path: Into the Aspen Highlands, shortcuts through the firs, dark all around us.
I don’t listen to any music, as the sound of our steps on the snowy ground and our irregular breathing is music enough.
Knox knows that I’m jogging behind him, but he never talks to me.
He hears me, and sometimes, when the rise of the mountain gets to me, he slows down.
He acts like he’s catching his breath, but I know it isn’t true.
Knox could run this stretch without a pause.
But he always slows down when I do, and if things between us were over, he wouldn’t do that.
Gwen said I could stay with her and work at the diner. I refused. This here is everything I want to fight for until our time together is over. As long as I can fight, I will.
By the time I make it to the resort, Knox is already in the shower.
Normally I take a long shower myself so that he can eat breakfast in peace without having to see me one more time before heading off to training.
I want to give him time so that he can sort out his thoughts and recognize that he made a mistake.
I want him to apologize and for us to be Knox and Paisley again. Knox and Paisley.
But not today. Today I shower in record time and am downstairs with wet hair and two different socks on by the time he’s mashing his eggs into his quinoa-spinach bowl and mixing it all together. He always does that. Mashes everything together.
“Hey,” I say and sit down across from him. I pour myself a coffee and add some milk.
Knox doesn’t answer. He shovels a mountain of quinoa onto his spoon and doesn’t look at me once.
I rub my feet across the parquet. “I love your heated floors.”
Knox takes his bowl and his coffee, pushes back his chair, and stands up. He sits down on the couch with his back to me. Quinoa drips onto the cushions.
I follow him. “Have you spoken to your father already?”
Knox fishes a tomato out of his bowl and shoves it into his mouth.
Of course he hasn’t spoken with his father or else he wouldn’t head off for training so quickly and act like everything was normal.
It’s not. He was doping, got tested—which is going to turn out positive, of course—and can forget all about the Snowboard World Cup now.
He’ll be suspended for several months. The press will get wind of it.
Knox will get taken apart as soon as the results come out, and from one day to the other will be seen in a completely different light.
Of course he hasn’t told his father yet. Of course not.
“He’d rather hear it from you than from the press, Knox.”
“Tell him yourself.” These are the first words he’s said to me in four days, and I could puke. I could puke. “Tell him that you narced on me so that it’d be a lesson. Then you can tell me how he reacted. It interests me immensely.”
“Knox, enough. It was your fault, you know it, but because you don’t want to accept it and feel like shit, you’re using me as a scapegoat. Cut the crap.”
Knox turns so red I’m afraid he’s going to explode like a pinata at any second and it’s going to snow quinoa all over the place but then he simply gets up and leaves. I can’t believe it. The jangle of keys. The front door closing. The sound of tires moving down the driveway.
My pulse starts to speed up. How could he?
I go into the kitchen, fish the hidden Cheerios out of the cupboard, and throw them into the trash.
Then I take every single bag of chips, gummy bears, Pop-Tarts, and Twinkies out of the linen closet and throw them in, too.
Knox loves junk food and sweets. I am so angry, so furiously angry—he can take his guilty pleasures and stick them where the sun doesn’t shine.
Gwen texts to tell me she can’t pick me up.
Her mother has a doctor’s appointment, and she has to help out in the diner, so she’ll be late to training as well.
I go downtown on foot to take the Highland Express to iSkate.
I’m early, and close to the bus stop there’s a sports shop.
Just two blocks away, I see the festively decorated shop window flanked by two field hockey sticks.
A bell rings as I enter the store. It smells like sneakers fresh out of the box, just after you’ve pushed the wrapping paper aside.
A young woman with a long black bob is standing behind the counter, bent over some document or other. She looks up and smiles. “Can I help you?”
“Do you have any figure-skating things?”
She nods. “Over there in the corner, by the changing room.”
“Thanks.”
I look at two dresses that are so beautiful and so expensive that they will always be my I’m-just-going-to-look-at-you pieces.
There are a couple of E-spinners with a forward-shifted pivot point and integrated rubber band for bounce safety on sale.
E-spinners look like shoe soles and are made for practicing take-offs and spins when you’re away from the ice.
I grab a basket and put them inside, shortly thereafter a pair of knee pads.
Thanks to all the unsuccessful axels my legs are full of bruises.
The pads are followed up by a pair of beige gloves and two new pairs of tights and leg warmers.
It’s wonderful to be able to spend the money you’ve earned yourself. It makes me happy.
Just as I’m about to turn around and head to the register, I feel a hand on my bottom.
It grips tight. Real tight. I freeze. Warm breath brushes my ear.
It smells of licorice candy and herb-flavored booze.
I know that smell. I know, I know who’s behind me and die before I even hear his repellent voice.
“You’ve gained weight, Paisley.” More pressure on my bottom. “Do you think you can afford that?”
A tingling sensation in my hands causes me to drop the basket. The things spill out over the floor. I look for the saleswoman. She’s disappearing with her papers into the back room. No.
I don’t want to turn around. I don’t want to, if I do, it’ll all be real. He will be real. But when his hand begins to move upward, I have to. Turn around.
I knock his hand away and look into his face. Ivan Petrov. He laughs. Thin lips. Straight smoke-yellowed teeth. An unkempt beard and dark eyes where hate has made its home.
I don’t say anything. I’m paralyzed. All the thoughts I’ve been thinking over the last few weeks—I’d be stronger than Minneapolis Paisley—all of those thoughts were lies.
Hi, here I am: small.
Full of fear. With quaking legs and the terrified face of a doe.
Ivan takes a pair of skates off the shelf and runs a finger along the blade. “Did you think I wouldn’t find you?” He puts the skates back and laughs as he strokes a sequined dress. “Did you think you could hide behind that snowboarder? I’ll always find you, Paisley. Always.”
He lets go of the dress and takes a step toward me.
I think I’m going to die. There’s no way I can stand this, standing here, right in front of him, listening to his voice.
I thought I had left it all behind me, had left him behind me, but when you realize that your throat is prickling and you want to cry, then you know it’s still an issue.
Ivan Petrov is an issue for me. He always will be, because I cannot forget what he did to me. The scars on my skin will always remind me of the pain. My life is not a piece of paper full of marks where you can just erase the terrible pictures. What happened, happened. And that remains.
He bends down toward me, his lips close to my ear. I dig my nails into my thighs. “Do you think he’ll still want you when he knows how hard, how often I fucked you? Do you think he will, Paisley?”
After all the beatings, all the abuse and courage Ivan took from me, this line is the humiliating crown. I feel disgusting. I feel used.
“I didn’t want that,” I manage to say. “I never did.”
“Oh, Paisley.” He runs a finger down my temple, twirls a strand of my hair. “I know that. But do you think that plays any role? Who’s interested in what you want?”
Me.
His hand lands on my crotch. I struggle for air and push him away. He bangs into the mannequin with the skating dress. It falls over, and the saleswoman comes out of the back room.
Her glance lands on the mannequin, before she moves from Ivan to me. “Is everything okay?”
I don’t respond. I run. Past the tables, past the hockey sticks and ski poles.
Out the door and straight down the street, past Vaughn, the guy who sings about reindeers and Christmas elves, two, three, four streets, straight downtown.
Past the bell tower, past The Old-Timer, past William, who wants to tell me something, but I’m too quick, and onward, ever onward, past the last houses until I’m completely alone.
I run until I’m out of breath, I run until I can hear the tall fir trees whisper my name and can find a place to hide beneath them.
I sit right down in the snow, my back against the trunk.
My bottom becomes wet. I take heavy, quick breaths and only now do I recognize where I am.
In front of me, the icy sheen of Silver Lake glitters in the sun.
My heart wants to weep. I was so happy in that store, was smiling while placing all those beautiful things in my shopping basket, was just so happy that I could buy them for myself.
Now they’re on the floor and I’m sitting here, hardly able to catch my breath.
I’m panting, slamming my palms against the snow and screaming.
The scream echoes through the mountains.
I don’t want it to be over. My life in Aspen. My life with Knox. I don’t want it to be over. My life.
But I don’t have any choice. I know that Ivan won’t give up.
I know it because there’s a legal basis he can use against me if he wants.
Even if I simply wanted to stay in Aspen, he could force me to go back to Minneapolis.
He would take the matter to court, and he knows that I don’t stand a chance.
Not me. Because, let’s be honest, who am I?
I’m Paisley. Paisley, the trailer-park roach. Paisley, the daughter of a crack whore.
My fingers are numb as I claw at the zipper of my sports bag.
The laces of my skates escape me, but I grab them a second time and manage.
They land in the snow, right next to my tears.
I pick at the knots, slip inside, and tie them back up.
It doesn’t matter where I am, it doesn’t matter how I feel: as soon as my feet are stuck inside of a pair of skates, I am home.
The ice crunches beneath my blades. I absorb the sound and store it in my imaginary jam-jar.
Or wait, no, in my peanut butter jar. Peanut butter because Knox has that memory of his mom—“Did you polish off my peanut butter?”—and I think it’s so warm, so sad, so precious that from now on, it will be for my most beautiful moments.
I take off into a triple axel. I land it and laugh. I laugh, then cry, both at the same time. How ironic that I land it right now, right here. One day before Skate America. How ironic that I managed to do it, but that Ivan could manage to stop me once again.
I don’t know how long I spend out on the ice saying goodbye to my life in Aspen, but at some point, it’s dark and the lights in the surrounding lanterns snap on.
I skate to the end of the lake, change direction with a mohawk turn, but come to a backward stop when I make out the shadow of a person I know beneath the fir tree.
“Did he find you? Is that why you weren’t at training?” Polina’s hands are stuck deep into the pockets of her fur coat. “Ivan?”
I’m starting to feel dizzy. “How…”
“You think I don’t inform myself about my students?”
I’m like a deer caught in headlights. Polina pushes off the trunk and comes out to me on the ice.
She’s not wearing skates, but her movements are sure.
She stops right in front of me and sits down.
Her hand grabs mine, pulls me softly down next to her.
It’s cold. She’s sitting on her coat; all I’ve got are my wet jeans. All the same, I stay put.
“I know where you’re from. I know that you can’t really be here. I’ve known it from the beginning.”
I think I’m going to freeze to death. Her words are worse than the ice. “Then why did you train me?”
Polina looks at me. Then she reaches into her coat and pulls out two little bottles of booze. J?germeister. “Here, drink this. It’s cold.”
She hands me one. I look at her and wonder if she’s serious, out here on Silver Lake with our numb butts, but she’s already unscrewing the top, so I do the same.
We toast each other and down the shot in one go.
My throat is burning. But I start to feel a little warmer, not much, but a little, as I’m already frozen.
“I trained you because I knew that you were passionate about what you do. When you skate, you are on fire. You shine. I knew that you weren’t happy.
However, I knew that you weren’t sad either.
You’re simply empty. And then I saw how, little by little, Aspen filled you with life.
I was certain that, sooner or later, he’d show up. But you know what?”
“What?”
“You’ve got to keep going, Paisley. You didn’t come this far just to get this far. You can do it. You’re stronger than he is.”
“What if I’m not?”
“Oh, Paisley.” Polina presses my upper arm. “What if you are?”
Then she stands up and leaves.
I thought I’d frozen to death, but maybe I’m still alive.