Chapter 26 #2
The music is loud. We can already hear it as we’re leaving downtown and taking the snow-covered path to Buttermilk Mountain.
Additional lanterns—probably from William—have been set up, their gas lights almost swallowed by the deep snow.
My attempt to avoid thinking about Knox has failed.
A nerve-racking tingle is running through my fingertips and making my heart beat faster.
Not because I’m going to see him. I do that every day at the resort.
But because he will see me on the ice. On Silver Lake.
That’s where I saw him crying. Where I got to know the real Knox.
I wonder why that is. Why he makes such an effort to keep people from seeing what’s really going on inside of him.
Maybe for the same reasons as me. Maybe he’s scared. Maybe he wants to forget.
“Earth to Paisley.” Gwen is waving her pink-dotted glove in front of my face. “You still with us?”
Looking up I have to blink twice to make out the backdrop. I almost stumble over one of the gas lights or my own foot, I don’t know which, but I’ve got to grab Levi’s arm.
He laughs. “Everything all right?”
I nod as my eyes wander, trying to take in every centimeter of this winter wonderland. “I think this is the most beautiful place I’ve ever been.”
The fir trees around Silver Lake have been decorated with Christmas balls and colored lights, causing the laughing faces of the many people to glow in the most varied colors.
I catch a glimpse of Polina beneath a snow-draped pine, her hands around a pewter cup and a fox-colored fur hat on her head.
I really hope it’s fake. She’s talking with Gwen’s father.
Seeing me, she nods, and I nod back. Polina and I like each other, and we show that through nodding, because we both live in the same ghost town, and that’s what you do. You nod.
Gwen tugs at the pom-pom on her hat. The glow of the colored lights makes the golden thread in the fabric shimmer. “There’s Mom. Let’s grab something to eat before Harper stabs us with her eyes. I can’t stand that on an empty stomach.”
Harper is sitting on a bare log, tying her skates.
Her Bordeaux-colored cashmere coat reaches all the way to her knees.
Underneath she seems to be wearing her program outfit because she’s already pulling her boot covers over her skates and adjusting her legwarmers.
Her hair falls in red waves to both sides of her face, and I see her sit up, shake it out, and tie it up into a bun, all the while her glance is wandering over to a group of people beyond the pines, at the foot of Buttermilk Mountain.
I have no idea why they’re all standing there until a guy on a snowboard does a double twist over their heads and a collective “oooh” and “ahhh” escapes the women.
Knox. Of course.
“If you keep on staring at him like that, Gwen will lie awake all night.” Aaron doesn’t look at me as he speaks, but his amused expression speaks volumes. “She won’t let poor Bing Crosby sleep with all the plans she’ll be making while waiting for him to give his two cents.”
“He’s a rabbit.”
“Yeah. Rabbits have ideas. That’s why he’s always hanging out in his house.”
“He’s hanging out in his house because his owner is a freak.”
Gwen whirls around. “Who’s a freak?”
“You.” Aaron smirks. “But we love you anyway.”
“You’d better. Or else I’ll get Mom to take more money from you.
” She narrows her eyes and points to Kate, who is running around behind her stand and handing out sandwiches.
Actually, it’s not a stand, but folding tables decorated with tinsel and white felt to represent snow.
Michael Bublé’s “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” drifts over the square.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen nicer folding tables.
“We worship you, Gwendolyn,” Levi says, taking her face in his hands and covering her cold-flushed cheeks with kisses. She fends him off with a laugh and slips under his arms.
Kate pours a ladle of hot punch into a tin mug and hands it to me. “Your first Christmas party in Aspen, Paisley. Don’t let the reindeer frighten you.”
I take a gulp, burn my throat, cough, for a moment think I’m going to die, then everything’s okay again. “Reindeer?”
“Not real ones,” Gwen says after taking a bite of her sandwich and delighting me with a view of it in her mouth.
She points to one of the brightly flashing plastic animals missing half its face.
A few feet past it, there is one with its stomach missing.
I can see the cables that are lighting it up. The deer are horrible.
“They’re William’s. He got them from his father, who got them from his father, who got them from his third cousin’s great-grandmother.”
“They look like Halloween decorations.”
Levi nods. “Beautiful, right?”
“Very.”
Aaron points at Silver Lake with his sandwich. “Harper’s warming up. She’s up next. Do we want to watch her flutz?”
“Oh, do we ever.” Gwen grabs hold of me and Aaron, who quickly shoves the last bite of sandwich into his mouth in order to take Levi’s hand with his other and leads us toward the ice.
I watch Harper. She seems concentrated, her jaw tight as she puts one step in front of the other and glides gracefully over the ice. In one smooth movement, she turns around and continues skating backward. Her concentration wavers as her eyes dart over the crowd.
She’s looking for someone, I think. It doesn’t take long for the colored lights to reveal the disappointed shimmer in her eyes that makes it clear it’s in vain.
Maybe her parents. Maybe Knox. I don’t know, but I feel sorry for her.
But when her program begins and she not only fails to land her Lutz but the Rittberger, too, I feel really bad for her.
Harper can be terrible. But I don’t think that’s everything.
I think she’s more than that. She makes an immense effort to keep everyone at bay, from looking inside her walls.
Maybe she’ll begin to pull them down someday. I have no interest in walls. I can’t climb.
The moment her music ends, and she slumps down like a dying swan, I can’t see anything. Everything is bright, everything is blinding. Harper looks like she’s burning up’ and all I can think is, what is happening?
“Too bright, William!” It’s Ruth’s voice, definitely Ruth’s voice. “Turn down the damn spotlights!”
Then it stops and I can see the real Harper-swan on the ice, not the burning one.
Life is beautiful.
But Gwen is continuing to squeal so unmercifully in my ear.
She grabs my arm and jumps up and down at my side, shouting something about “fate,” her breath smelling of sandwiches and jawbreakers, and then I see Levi conspiring with her, patting her on the back again and again as if the two of them had won something.
My eyes drift over to Aaron because his sympathetically contorted mouth gives me hope that he’ll tell me what’s going on.
He shrugs and points his thumbs to the silhouettes at the top of Buttermilk Mountain. “You’ve been chosen,” he calls.
“What?”
“By the tandem oracle.”
It is so loud that I can hardly understand him. So I try to read his lips but what reaches me is “tan-demo-racle,” and I don’t really know if I’m all that interested in any kind of demonstration.
I want to tell him as much, but then I see the great big black spotlight, in whose sphere of light I’m standing, which was the reason for my temporary blindness. Suddenly everyone starts yelling things like, “Tandem oracle!” “It’s on the tandem oracle!”
What in the hell is the tandem oracle?
The people push me across the square with them, past the tinsel folding tables, past the monster reindeer, until I find myself in front of some red-and-white barricade tape, behind which there’s Knox standing in front of a gondola.
Next to him a snowboard. A…tandem snowboard.
Now it’s clear what the tandem oracle’s all about. I put two and two together. I’ve been chosen. The happy chosen one who gets to stand on this thin board with the snowboard star and take a death-defying ride down Buttermilk Mountain.
I think my diaphragm is starting to cramp, but before I can listen to my body more closely, William and Wyatt are putting pads on every part of me they can think of and pressing a helmet into my hand. I stumble over Knox’s snowboard and stagger toward him, and he grabs me with an arm.
He doesn’t look at me. He hasn’t since we were in the store together. He’s holding onto me but looking at my boots.
I’m standing right in front of you, I think. Lift your head and look at me.
He doesn’t. Instead, he opens the gondola, waits until I’m sitting on the bench and then gives a signal to have it start up.
He gets in and sits right next to me, two inches away at most. I can smell him; he smells of snow and vetiver and Knox.
The fairy lights shine in and envelop him in color, orange on his ear, green on his neck.
I don’t want to touch him, even though my fingertips tingle and crave it.
The gondola begins to move. Knox doesn’t look at me. He keeps on looking at the floor—right where all the unstated words are.