Chapter Ten
Ten
He became a regular.
Now, when the children were in school and Kate was at the college, he drove up to the Center, put on his skate skis, and set out on the trails.
Oh, the delight! The sun, the clouds, the falling flakes, the snow of every kind beneath his gliding.
A friendly grouse burst from time to time out of a snowbank.
Why weren’t the trails full of people? he wondered.
The obvious answer, that it was the middle of the day and that people were working, didn’t satisfy him.
It was a college town, with the hours of a college town, and yet the only others there were homeschooling families and a group of elderly Vermonters, part of the Gray Hares program that Bjorn ran for the senior living center.
Let me grow old here, thought Miles, who had to admit that some of the lady Gray Hares were looking good in their cross-country apparel. That could be him, and Kate, scooting along in their winter leotards, faster than the reaper’s scythe.
Most Gray Hares chose to classic ski, trudging along in the safety of the track.
Miles felt that he was showing off a little, zipping past them on the swath, and when their eyes met, he allowed them a flirtatious smile.
And why not? If Kate got to go Bjorning, why couldn’t he smile at them, or homeschooling moms?
It was in the air, the sweet winter air, the rush of wind, the deep lifting of his diaphragm, the way his legs trembled a little when he came to rest.
Oh, how he came to love it! He didn’t think that he had been depressed, but it had been a long time since he had been so happy.
And couldn’t the case be made that it was helping his dissertation?
Once, researching his previous dissertation, he’d read that Tolstoy skied, though this was not really a surprise, since Tolstoy was pretty sporty generally.
A fine skater, Tolstoy was, one of those felicitous facts that had lodged so indelibly in Miles’s mind that he had once told his students there was footage of Tolstoy on ice skates—only to go home and search for it vainly.
Footage of Tolstoy sawing, yes. Tolstoy on horseback, yes.
Tolstoy dead, yes. But skating: Miles must have dreamed it.
And yet this did little to dim the vision of the writer pirouetting, his long white beard whipping as he spun.
It would have been nice if at least one peasant had strapped on a pair of skis, it would have helped him make his case to Kate, each time she gently asked him how his work was going.
But no, not one, at least not in any tale he’d read, all 487.
Still, absence of evidence was not the same as evidence of absence, right?
And the tales were full of snow, lots of it, and it wasn’t crazy to think that a scholar of Russian literary rural life should know snow intimately.
Research was what it was.
At home, he double-danced across the kitchen floor, and paddled up the staircase. The motion followed him to bed, the way waves follow a sailor. And in his sleep: the dream trails, and the dream snow falling, and the dream wind at his back.
January turned to February.
At times, when everything was right, it seemed as if he had but to caress the snow, and it, in turn, would carry him along.
Soon he could keep up with the children, and when they stopped to snack, facedown, he skied back and forth alone.
You’ve really picked it up! said Tom and Herb and Anne, and even Bjorn begrudged pointers.
At night, before he got into bed, he stood before the floor-to-ceiling mirror that he’d come to suspect was Norbert Rumphius’s sex mirror and allowed himself to flex.
Not quite Bjorn-level power, but his shoulders seemed to have grown a couple of extra muscles, and if he sucked in his stomach, and squinted, it wasn’t hard to see himself parachuting from the heavens, skis on his back and pistol in his muscular fist.
He was a bit drunk on it all, a bit incautious.
Now he raced his daughter, taking the hills at speed, in tucks.
He chased her up the steepest slopes until his breath ran out, and stepped into the turns behind her.
Which was what he was doing one evening—Valentine’s Day, to be precise—when he stepped into a track to try to pass her, and his foot caught, and suddenly he was thrown sideways into an ungodly tangle of ski, pole, arm, and leg.
Olive, ahead, turned back and skied to him.
Was he okay? she asked. And despite the pain, he fell a little more in love.
For how many times had he been the one to ask the same of her?
Yes, yes! he answered, but he knew he wasn’t, knew by the pop he hadn’t only felt, but heard.
Oh, it hurt! He punched the trail, as if it were the snow itself he wished to punish, as Xerxes whipped a disobeying sea.
All his life, he had prized himself on his knees.
His Achilles had been a problem since he tore it in high school, and in his forties, he’d found himself regularly waylaid by his back.
But his knees! Friend after friend had been taken: an MCL here, an ACL there, there wasn’t one with two functioning menisci.
Was he now going to join them? With pain, he stood, and wobbled after Olive down the trail, a little faint, trying to put on a good face, to keep positive, to keep that good energy flowing, but, God, it hurt, and, turning a corner, he fell again.
When at last they reached the lodge, and found Kate waiting with Wesley, Olive began to cry that Daddy had broken his leg.
He forced a laugh. It was nothing, just a little twist! But by the time they reached the car he could no longer move it, no longer bear any weight at all.
—
One wouldn’t immediately expect Valentine’s Day to be a busy night for a rural emergency room, but when you start thinking of the drinking, and the fighting, and maybe some of the more vigorous lovemaking, and the hit-or-miss quality control at the mom-and-pop maple-candy operations, then you might get a picture of the motley crew that greeted the Krzelewski-Petrosians as they entered the sliding glass doors of the Vermont Mountain Medical Center, and crossed beneath the banner thanking patients who had voted them number three for Regional Obstetric Care in 2004.
Another time, Miles would have been on his phone, curious about the two other hospitals in the region, whose existence he had never heard of, and why the Medical Center hadn’t delivered any more recent triumphs, but his attention was drawn to an enormous man whose motorized chair took up nearly half the free space in the waiting room.
His first inclination was to go home; the man had at least a dozen medical problems immediately visible to the nonspecialist, and behind him a child was actively bleeding from its nose into a waste bin, and a young woman in pink appeared to have been shot by an arrow, and was lying across the lap of a beefy gallant who was dressed as a giant “Be Mine” candy.
Shouldn’t they pull the arrow out? thought Miles, horrified.
But, silly him, for it was just a cupid outfit: she was barfing!
In fact, all week Kate had heard her students gossiping about the college’s famous Valentine’s costume bash.
And here was the first casualty, though far from the last.
A receptionist, costumed for the holiday, took his credit card behind a window, glass thicker than a teller’s at a bank. “What’s wrong, love?” she asked, and he began to tell the story: the night, the ski, the fall, the pain when he did this but not when he did that.
“So, knee,” she said, and wrote the four letters on a form and motioned to the waiting room. They would call him in a moment, after the others. As he could see, there was a little bit of a line.
“Do you have a sense of how long it will be?” asked Miles.
“Am I a psychic, love?” asked the woman.
Actually, with her Valentine’s Day beads, and white and red nail polish, and her tiara, she could have been a psychic, but Miles decided not to make this joke. Let’s try this another way, he thought. “Do you think my wife and kids should stay with me?” he asked.
“Depends on if you want them waiting out the storm on nothing but Skittles and Monster Energy drinks from the vending machines,” the woman said.
A storm—of course. Only now did Miles recall that this was the forecast. He looked at Kate, her lips tense, eyes glued to the floor. He knew what she was thinking. How many emergency rooms they’d waited in together during her sickest years. How she hated them.
He’d handle this alone. And with a kiss he sent her and the children home, and hobbled over to the waiting area on his ski poles.
Given how very white the Green Mountain State was, especially compared with the Bay Area, where there were computer engineers of every race, Miles always found himself a little relieved to encounter pockets of diversity.
And here was a hemorrhaging white child, and a poisoned Asian coed, and a scooter-bound Black man.
It was a reminder that the America he knew still existed.
But now he had a choice to make, of where to sit, one that might say a lot about him.
That he took a seat by the man in the scooter was not to prove (to himself?
to the man? to the world?) that he was not racist or elitist, nor was it driven by the memory that his wife had once needed such a means of transport nor motivated by the very reasonable consideration that one of the other patients was spurting blood and the other had something infectious.
Rather, it was driven by a very Milesian instinct, persistent despite the pain in his knee, that there was something unusual, something promising, something even heroic, about this man, with his thick glasses, and his souped-up machine.
Behind the glasses, the man’s eyes followed Miles as he hobbled over to take a seat.
“Knee?” he asked.
Miles nodded.