Chapter 30
There Is Beauty in Surviving
Knox
We pushed the lounge chairs together and covered them with pillows and blankets. Tucked in nice and warm, each of us with a hot chocolate in hand, we’re roasting marshmallows from the linen cabinet over the fire.
The sky is dark. Silent snowfall. Protected by the awning we’re waiting for the sunrise because I told her that the moment the sun begins to rise behind the Aspen Highlands and the sky looks like it’s been painted in pastels is something that feels a little bit like magic.
We don’t have a lot of time, because we both have to go to training, but I notice how Paisley is trying to stretch the moment out.
She’s holding her cup with both hands and blows into it multiple times before taking a sip.
She puts it to the side and has to bend down over the edge of the sofa to keep her marshmallow over the fire.
It slowly turns golden brown. She holds it to her lips and breathes it in.
I watch it. I watch every one of her tiny movements.
She looks at me. Laughs. “What’s up?” Whashup?
“Nothing.” The caramelized sugar sticks to the corner of her mouth. I reach out my hand and run my thumb across it. “I want things to work out between us.”
“Yeah,” she says. Swallows the marshmallow and puts the stick to the side. “Me too.”
“But I don’t have any idea how that works.”
“How what works?”
I observe my own marshmallow, but do nothing. I held it directly into the flames, and now it’s just a sticky black mass dripping onto the wood. I put my own stick to the side. “Doing it right.”
Paisley observes my tar-like mass of marshmallow. The flames reflect in the glassy haze of her eyes. She licks her lips, and I want to kiss her again.
Again and again and again.
“There’s no right or wrong between us. We’ll make mistakes, but we’re allowed. We should. For this to function doesn’t mean everything has to run smoothly. It just needs to be real, Knox.”
I know that that’s what I want to be. For her.
It might be tough though, because I haven’t been that for a long time.
Real. But I’m certain that I can be if I’m with Paisley.
When I’m with her, I want to be myself. I have the feeling that she hates me the moment I pretend, the moment I’m no longer Knox, but loves discovering me, loves when I show more of myself.
When I allow her to get a deeper look. Like a ragged, brittle map that you have to unroll carefully, piece by piece and not too quickly or otherwise everything will fall apart and then all is lost.
“Both of us,” I say and tug at the tattered drawstrings of her hoodie. “Both of us have to be real.”
Paisley turns away to watch a lonely piece of chocolate floating in her cup.
“The rules of the game have changed, huh?”
I pull the blanket straight, so it covers Paisley’s naked skin where she’s rolled up her hoodie. “Rules of the game?”
She looks at me. God. Those ears. What’s the deal?
“A truth for a truth. Only answers, no questions, remember?”
I nod.
“If we want to be real, we should be allowed to ask questions. We should be honest with each other.”
My pulse increases. I make circles on the white fabric of the pillows and know that she’s right. I know it, but that word causes me to panic.
Honesty.
“Okay.”
She turns to face me. The cover rustles. “If you had one wish, what would it be?”
I take a breath. I smell fire. Smell ice.
Paisley looks at me attentively, seems to notice every detail.
I readjust the pillow behind my head and look through the white fog to the snowy mountains, because I can’t bring myself to look at her while saying what I want to say.
What I have to say if I finally want to make peace with the monsters underneath my bed.
“I wish my mom had never died.”
I wait for Paisley to ask the question of questions. The question that has been dogging me all these years and destroyed me. That calls the moment into my head over and over.
How did she die?
Paisley doesn’t ask. She doesn’t do it. She simply turns onto her back, glances past me toward the sky, and says, “If your mom was here, she’d tell you to stop.”
“Stop what?”
“Dying before you die.”
My limbs turn cold. Cold and then numb. My whole body breaks out into goose bumps even though I’m underneath a blanket next to the fire and have my hand wrapped around a cup of hot chocolate.
Paisley has put her fingers around my heart and squeezed.
She’s grabbed hold of the black cloud that took possession of my soul and dangled it in front of my nose so that I stop running away from it.
Although you can’t grab hold of a cloud, she managed. She grabbed it.
“How do you do that?” The words float above us. Dissipate.
“How do I do what?”
“See what no one has ever seen.”
“Knox.” Slowly, I can almost count the milliseconds, the corners of her mouth stretch out.
It’s a sad smile—and the most beautiful I have ever seen.
“You so clearly hide your feelings that I can’t but see them.
You’re a first-quarter moon. A little radiant, a little luminous, but the greater part of your heart is pitch black.
” She puts her hot chocolate to the side and begins to draw imaginary lines from mole to mole on my arm.
“Sometimes I wonder how much you’d shine if you’d just let the full moon appear. ”
I say, “You don’t let it appear either.”
She opens her mouth. Her pupils grow large, small, large. I see pain. “No,” she says. “No, I don’t.”
I take her hand in mine. The hand with the scars. Trace the fine white lines. I think of her honesty when I ask, “What happened?”
Paisley looks at her hand. I think she sees a lot more than I do. I think she sees memories she doesn’t want to think about. She exhales her fear in one breath, and it disappears in a white cloud in the vastness of the Aspen Highlands.
“I didn’t have any money,” she says. “I never had any money. But I wanted to ice skate. It was the only thing that gave me a sense of support. In all the years, I’d have lost myself, I’d have given up so many times, if the ice hadn’t been there to catch me.
After high school I could have started to work and gone to community college, but I didn’t want to.
I had a goal: the Olympics. And then, at some point, to start a kind of boarding school for sports.
At four, I bought my first pair of skates at a flea market.
I’ve skated ever since. I could never imagine not doing it.
And when, after high school, I was accepted by a really good club in Minneapolis, I was ready to do everything to make the most of my chance.
” Her lips are trembling. I lay my arm across her delicate shoulders, kiss her, and taste tears.
I kiss her again and again and again, until they’re dry.
Paisley continues. “We trained from early until late. I didn’t have any time for a job, and there was no one there to support me.
I lived in the home. And then…” She stops.
Takes a deep breath. “Then my trainer was there. Ivan. He was everything I thought I needed: charismatic. Good looking. Talented. Well-to-do. Caring.” She almost spits the last word, as if she wanted to throw it away and let it go forever.
“And in love with me. I gave us a chance. I really thought he was made for me. But then…Ivan got strange. He’d lose his mind when I spoke to any other men from the club.
Whenever I went out with my friend Kaya, he’d stalk us.
One time I talked to a homeless guy, and he beat the guy up, Knox, he really beat the shit out of him.
And after that… After that, he started to beat me. ”
Her hand is still in mine when I reflexively make a fist. As soon as I notice, I relax again and run my other hand across it, as my limbs have grown numb. I feel sick. I want to say something, anything, but I’m afraid I’ll have to vomit. He hit her. He beat this delicate, precious being.
“That was the beginning,” she says. “After that I wanted to end things, but he blackmailed me. He… He said that if I left him, he wouldn’t pay for my training anymore and would make sure I’d get kicked out of the club.
And I… I was so dumb, Knox. I stayed with him out of fear of losing the biggest love of my life. ”
“The ice,” I say.
“The ice.” She nods. I wipe the hair out of her face.
Her skin is ice cold, so I pull her beneath my blanket and press her body to mine.
Paisley places her hand on my chest, crumples the fabric of my hoodie in her fist. “I stayed, and that’s when things got really sick.
He became really sick. Ivan did everything he could to build me up at training.
Before every competition, he rehearsed the best programs with me, gave me the greatest hopes only to destroy me every time, before every run.
He built my hopes up, as high as they could go, just to make it that much more painful when he smashed them to pieces with a sledgehammer. ”
“What do you mean?” The air surrounding me is crisp, but it hardly reaches my lungs.
“He got hot seeing me in pain, Knox. Once, before the regional championships, he locked me in the basement and made it look like I’d done it myself.
Another time, two nights before the Grand Prix, he was drunk.
Totally smashed. I told him he should lie down, and he…
” She lets go of the fabric in her fist and raises her hand.
The scars glitter in the light of the fire.
“…he hit me over and over again. With the bottle. I was unable to compete. Once again.”