Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
BEAU & SIERRA
BEAU
When I stalk back into the lodge, I find my parents and Jackson huddled around the table with their heads close together in conversation.
Mom looks up and sees me first, and her face is such a portrait of confusion that I can’t even look her in the eye.
Instead, I pull out the seat Sierra had been sitting in and plop myself down with all the pent-up rage that’s bubbling up inside me.
“What the hell was that all about?” I say.
“We were hoping you could tell us,” my dad says.
I look at him in confusion. “How the hell would I know? I walked in on the middle of that conversation.”
I hate myself for how hopeful I’d been in that moment, when saw Sierra sitting there with my family.
I’d let myself believe that maybe she cared about me as much as I care about her—enough that she was willing to tell my family about us.
Instead, I found her sharing my secrets with them, trying to convince them that I’m “not a total fuckup,” as she so eloquently put it.
“Are you and Sierra . . .” my mom starts, but can’t seem to find the words, so Jackson finishes for her: “together?”
“No, we’re not.” How can I feel simultaneously devastated that it’s the truth and relieved that I don’t have to lie?
“What just happened, then?” Jackson asks.
“Nothing to concern yourself with.”
“Then where’d Sierra go?” she asks.
“I have no idea,” I tell her, and she takes out her phone. I can only imagine she’s texting Sierra.
“Beau,” my mom says, “what’s going on?”
“I don’t know, Mom. All of a sudden, you three show up to surprise me completely out of the blue. Then Sierra, too, and I find you guys at a table gossiping about me.”
“You don’t seem very happy that we’re here,” my dad observes.
When I’d gotten their call last night that they were in Aspen to watch me, it was a little surreal. But I’d agreed to meet them for lunch today, never expecting to walk in on the scene I did.
The last time Mom was at one of my competitions was in high school, and neither Dad nor Jackson have ever shown up before. “I’ve been doing this professionally for almost a decade, and suddenly you’re interested in supporting me? Why now?”
Dad sits back in his chair with his thinking face on, his hands folded on the table in front of him.
“We didn’t know you wanted us here. Is this what Sierra meant when she said you’ve been hurt?
” my dad asks. Surprisingly, I don’t hear any condescension in his voice.
It honestly sounds like he wants to understand my take on things.
“I don’t know what she meant, or why she said that.” I shrug. This is not a conversation I want to get into in the middle of a ski lodge.
“She was defending you,” Jackson says, her voice softening. She glances down at her phone quickly, then says, “Honestly, Beau, you could have any girl you wanted. Why did you have to go after my best friend?”
I glance at my parents and neither of them seems shocked. This is the worst-case scenario, because they’ll never believe that I’m not the one to blame here.
“What was between me and Sierra is just between the two of us. It has nothing to do with your friendship with her. This isn’t about you, Jackson.”
“If Sierra’s going to get hurt, it’s about me too—I will never not protect her. And I’m not going to sit by and watch you hurt her like you hurt everyone who cares about you.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” I ask, the words coming out on a low exhale.
“It means that’s what you do, Beau. You push the people who love you away. Me and Dad. Helen.”
“Don’t fucking mention Helen. You have no idea what happened there.”
“Don’t I?” she says lightly. “Do you mean to tell me that when she got into law school, when she got serious and needed you to commit, you didn’t walk away?”
“That isn’t what happened at all.”
“What did happen, Beau?” my mom asks, her voice firm enough for me to know she expects the truth, and gentle enough for me to know she can handle it.
I press my lips together. I’ve never told anyone but Drew and Lance what happened with Helen.
And even they don’t have all the details.
But at this point it was years ago, it shouldn’t matter.
It shouldn’t still hurt. And it wouldn’t, except that realizing that Sierra was embarrassed to be with me seems to have resurfaced a lot of the same feelings I had when Helen broke up with me.
“Once she got into Law School at Cornell, I suggested that I follow her to New York so we could get a place together,” I say, looking over at Jackson, who is looking down at her phone and frowning, “and she laughed at me.” That has my sister’s head snapping up in surprise.
“Said she could never be serious about someone so decidedly unserious.”
Jackson’s eyes flare, like she wants to punch someone for hurting her little brother. “I’m sorry, Beau, I didn’t know.”
“That’s because you never asked, you just assumed.”
“It sounds like maybe there are other things we failed to ask about,” my dad says, sounding contrite. “Sierra brought up some fair points. Obviously, we hurt you. Is that why you messed up in high school so much? Were those cries for attention?”
It sounds so pathetic when he says it. “I just wanted what Jackson had growing up—two parents. I wanted you to see me snowboard, too, Dad, just like you were always at every single one of her races. I wanted to believe you cared.”
“And I stole that from you,” Jackson says, the realization dawning in her voice.
I can’t respond, I just look out across the lodge.
“I took Dad with me to Europe,” she continues. “I didn’t mean to rob you of that. I didn’t realize how important it was to you.”
“To have an intact family?” I ask, looking back at her. What kid doesn’t want that? “I mean this as no disrespect, because Mom has always been the best mom there is. But boys need dads too.” Mom reaches across the table to where my hand lays and gives it a reassuring squeeze.
“This isn’t your fault, Jackson,” Dad says, his brows knit together, making him look older than he is. “I was the adult in that situation, it was my job to see and understand that, and I didn’t, even though it seems so obvious now.” He turns to me. “I’m sorry if I made you feel like I didn’t care.”
“You told me I was a disappointment and beyond help,” I say flatly.
My mother’s sharp gasp looks like it causes my father physical pain. And maybe it does. Maybe in some small way he does love me, if only for her.
“I don’t remember saying that, but I believe you that I did. I let my temper get the best of me often when it came to you,” he tells me. “But only because I cared and felt powerless to do anything to help you. Everything I tried seemed to have the opposite effect.”
I want to ask him if by everything he means nothing, because how does he think he was trying back then? A weekly phone call? Putting all the responsibility of parenting a teenage son on my mom, who’d just survived her first recurrence of cancer?
Everyone is looking at me like they’re waiting to see if I’ll accept my dad’s apology.
But it doesn’t feel like much has changed, other than he’s recognized that he hurt me.
And him realizing that doesn’t make it any less painful, which I knew it wouldn’t, which is why I never brought it up in the past decade.
I don’t tell him it’s okay, because it’s not. Instead, I tell him, “Thanks for acknowledging that.”
“I will do better,” he says, as he reaches across the table and clasps my shoulder with his strong hand. “I promise, I will.”
Inside my chest, a small flicker of hope ignites. Maybe this is the conversation we needed, after all. And right next to that small flame of hope lies a fire hose of guilt, because even though Sierra broke my trust, she might have been right about my relationship with my family.
SIERRA
My friends are waiting for me at my place when I get back to Park City. They’ve got tacos and margaritas and plenty of Kleenex.
I’m sure I violated several parts of the homeowner’s agreement by giving them the access code to the condo, but I could not stomach the thought of coming back to the place I’d shared with Beau and finding it empty.
It’ll still be empty when they leave, and now you’ve permanently ruined things with Beau. My inner voice has taken on my mother’s tone, and it’s a special kind of hell having her inside my head.
“I can’t believe how badly I fucked things up.” I cry on Lauren’s shoulder the minute I walk through the door.
“It can’t be that bad,” Petra says. She’s standing just beyond Lauren, looking amazing in leather leggings and a sweater that matches her eyes, the same silvery-blue color of a frozen lake on a sunny day.
“It’s worse. I completely betrayed him, and he saw me do it, and he said he could never trust me again.”
I recount the story as closely as I can without specifically mentioning the nature of his past grievances with his dad or the name of his photography and travel account.
“Is there any truth to his allegations?” Petra asks as she refills my margarita glass.
“That I told his family those things because I was embarrassed to be with the man they think he is?” I clarify, and Petra nods.
“I’ve been asking myself the same question on the entire drive home.
And the truth is, I don’t know. If that was why I told them, it was subconscious.
He’s just such a better person than they give him credit for, and for reasons I don’t understand, I guess he prefers their current perception. ”
“Did he want to keep your relationship a secret, or was that all you?” Lauren asks.
“He never indicated that he wanted to tell other people. I mean, it was a fling. You don’t tell your family about those. And I needed to keep it a secret because I knew Jackson wouldn’t approve. I never wanted to hurt her.”
“It sounds like maybe you were more worried about her feelings than Beau’s, and maybe even more than your own feelings too,” Lauren says.