Chapter 18
RAFE
The dream starts the way it always does.
A cold winter day, with a blue sky above and air so crisp it nips at my cheeks. My brother standing across from me in his red parka and waving to the right. Race you. The mountains spread out across us as far as the eye can reach.
We ski down an off-piste, powder snow rising like mist from our runs. It always starts that way. Like it’s just another day skiing, something we’d done so many times before.
But it never stays that way.
Soon we’re atop another slope.
I yell something to him. It’s different in every dream. But it’s always the same outcome. It’s always my decision to cut over the ridge and start down the opposite slope.
The snow looks pristine. It’s sparkling white, powdery fresh, draped across the mountain’s nooks and crannies in a way that screams of fun. I race down the slope and hear my brother call for me as he follows.
Skiing off-piste is new for me. Etienne’s older, more experienced. But for me this is still wickedly fun, with no other skiers around and pure adrenaline racing alongside us. The dream is good until this happens. Until I decide what run we take, and he has no choice but to follow me.
And then everything goes wrong.
There’s the giant roar of snow, grated against the mountainside. Pain and silence and screaming for Etienne that goes unanswered.
I wake up with a hoarse throat and drenched in sweat. I lie still for long, panicked moments, looking up at the ceiling.
I’m in my house in Como. I’m not buried beneath snow.
It takes a long time for the instincts to fade.
And then the guilt comes like a sucker punch to the gut. Sudden nausea makes it hard to breathe. I sit up and brace my feet on the cool wooden floor. They say deep breaths helps. I’ve always found fighting to help me more.
Lock me in a ring where every second counts and pain is my penance.
A glance at the clock tells me it’s too late to find a place now. There aren’t that many, at any rate, and I have to be so damned careful where I go. No photos. No phones. Nothing leaked to the press.
I run a hand over my face.
It’s been over fifteen years, and the dreams haven’t stopped. They fade sometimes. I can have months when I don’t have a single one. But they never stop. They never disappear.
I don’t deserve to have them gone.
They’re a reminder of him. Of us. Of what I did.
I get up and push the windows open. The lake is quiet, the air cool in a way it never gets during the day. A smattering of glittering lights across the water mark the village where Sylvie lives.
I look to the left. It’s hard to make out her small balcony in the darkness, the twin to mine. But it’s there.
She better not have heard anything. I’ve been told in the past that I scream, when the nightmare gets bad, but she’s the last person who can know about this.
I close my eyes and let the cool air wash over me, much like the snow didn’t. It wasn’t pleasantly cool and it wasn’t gentle.
The wall of snow came suddenly. Around us, the mountain was serene until it suddenly wasn’t, until a deep crack rang out across the white and changed everything.
Snow looks soft.
It’s not. Not at that speed, not when the ground shakes beneath you. Etienne must have realized what was coming before I did. He was higher up the slope, following me and my impulsive decision.
I heard him yell. Bouge! Va à c?té!
But no one can outski an avalanche, and no one can outrun their fate. Or their mistakes. We were above the tree line and there was nowhere to go but down. Nowhere to run but forward.
And it caught up with us.
The river of snow swept me away, and beneath its surface, it crushed me. It felt like being ripped apart. Grated against the mountainside by a force greater than any I’ve known.
And then the snow settled like a blanket, a giant rearranging himself, the mountain once again quiet. Except for the two teenage boys tossed and buried beneath it.
There are rules on what to do in an avalanche. Create an air pocket. Move toward the surface. Don’t expend too much energy.
Etienne knew them better than I did. He was the one who had painstakingly taught them to me before I started joining him on off-piste runs. He knew how to test a mountain for snow safety before a run. He was in charge of choosing which slopes we went down.
What you should do is hard to remember, though, when your mouth is full of snow and there’s nothing but a suffocating, tight blanket around every limb. I panicked and flailed.
Make space pulsed through my mind. So I pushed with all my might against the crushing weight until the pocket grew. I spit out snow and took deep breaths to fill my lungs.
It was pitch dark and crushingly cold. Something hurt like hell against my side and my leg. Air. That was the next step. I needed air.
When I turned with a painful groan, the snow shifted above my hip. That way had to be toward the surface. It was a meager hope, but I listened to it and started burrowing my hand in that direction.
The snow coverage could be twice the length of my arm.
If it was, I was likely dead. The terror was overwhelming. Without air, you die in less than half an hour beneath the blanket of snow. Without air, your only hope is a quick rescue.
Tunneling was hard work. The snow was packed thick. I made it through to my elbow, and then a little bit farther. I tore off my glove to use my short nails to better dig, ignoring the biting cold. The thick snow gave way to the soft, powdery substance I knew so well.
A perfect slope.
My hand was out. Light streamed into the small pocket, and the relief was so strong that I nearly passed out. My skis were long gone. One pole remained, and I could tell that it was lodged deep, my left wrist bent at an unnatural angle.
The burning across my side intensified. I’d later learn that the snow had pushed me against rocks or ice and torn me up from my hip to my upper ribs, and blood was pulsing out of me. Only the tightness of my ski clothes and the cold helped slow the blood loss.
Biting against the searing pain, I slowly managed to take my wrist out of the wrap of the pole and lodge it out of the deep snow by my knee. It took time. It hurt. Painstakingly slow movements. And then, when I had it, I threaded it through the hole I’d created to the surface.
A signal.
For the rescuers, who always come.
I knew these mountains intimately. They’re our mountains. Near the chalet I’d spent most holidays in, in the beautiful Swiss valley where I’d first learned to ski. Avalanches happen and a rescue team is on standby all through the winter.
But Etienne would probably find me first. Most people are helped by members of their own party, after all, and he was a better skier than me. Always quicker in the turns, with three years on me, much longer legs.
The first fifteen to thirty minutes are crucial. After that, most die from asphyxiation. But I have air, I thought to myself, my vision blackening as I teetered in and out of consciousness. I have air. I can wait.
But I knew the other statistics, too. Hypothermia got the ones who made it through the first half an hour. The cold claims lives easily, and after an hour, there are no avalanche survivors.
I just had to wait.
And the rescuers did come. But it wasn’t Etienne on his skis.
No, the rescuers came in a Blackhawk helicopter, thirty-two minutes after the avalanche.
An average response time for the area, I’d read in the local newspaper a week later.
The rescuers were commended for their speed.
We always strive to be better, the lead rescuer said.
Remy Matthieu. I still remember his name. Our goal is twenty minutes.
It wasn’t until later, after everything, that I remembered we both wore avalanche beacons tucked into the pockets of our ski jackets.
That’s how they found me so quickly.
That, and the barely visible tip of my ski pole poking out of the snow. They got me up with a broken wrist, a concussion, four cracked ribs, an open gash across my side, blood loss, a knee injury, and hypothermia.
They carried me across the snow to the waiting helicopter, but Etienne wasn’t sitting there waiting for me. It was hard to form words through the cold. My brother, I told them.
“He’s deeper,” Remy said. I knew that was standard practice, to go for the shallow victim with a higher chance of survival first, but the anger burned at that response. Through the pain and haze. I was fine. I could’ve waited.
He was higher on the mountain when the avalanche started, triggered by our movements. Not by much. But enough to bear the brunt of it.
They dug him out. And I passed out in the helicopter, lying on a gurney, next to Etienne in a zipped up orange tarp. We both left the mountain, but only one of us did it alive.
His neck had broken from the crushing snow.
At the funeral, I heard one of my aunts say that at least he died fast. No suffocation, no hypothermia. Thank God for the little things, she said, in a tone of such false compassion that I wanted to punch her. I’d had to leave the wake.
In the weeks after, I received praise for my quick thinking. There were local newspaper articles written about the boy who survived. The tragedy of Etienne’s death. Remember what to do if the avalanche happens to you.
My father’s depression. My mother’s sobs and hysteria. My little sister’s shock and incomprehension.
So lucky, everyone told me. You’re so, so lucky.
And I never told anyone about who’s choice it was to go down that slope. That I was a newly turned thirteen-year-old who should have known better.
That Etienne died because of me.
I leave the open windows behind and head into the bathroom. With no fighting to do, I’ll have to improvise. And there are other ways to feel pain. I pull off my boxer briefs and step into the spray of ice-cold water.
I survived when I shouldn’t.
I survived where he should’ve.
And now I’m living the life that should have been his.