The CEO and the Mountain Man (Snow Creek Ranch #6)

1. Clark

Clark

The worst call of your life will always happen on a random Tuesday. Or right before a major holiday. Sometimes, if you’re especially lucky, it’ll happen on both.

Last year had already been full of the kinds of transitions that made me long for the dentist’s chair.

My wife and I decided our marriage was a dead horse we were both tired of beating.

This meant divvying up our lives and paying divorce attorneys while trying to treat each other with a neutrality that was as off-putting as microfiber.

Anyway, divorce is fun. Not.

And then my son came out to us, which … could have gone better.

It wasn’t as though it was a surprise, really.

Well, Monica had been surprised, but I hadn’t been.

When River was five, he declared he wanted to marry the local weatherman, and when he was fifteen, he started wearing lip gloss and girls’ shorts.

Not enough to assume, of course, but certainly enough to point me in a direction.

We’d just told him about the divorce, and in response, he’d lobbed his declaration onto the dinner table like one of those glitter-infused slime toys.

“I’m gay. Thought you should know.”

Splat.

I’d considered telling him about my one incredibly short dalliance with my roommate in college, but meeting his coming out with my slightly bisexual past didn’t seem to be the right way to go in that moment.

Instead, I had the brilliant insight to ask if he was really transgender, just in case he was saying gay as a bellwether of our acceptance. That was … not better.

Monica, however, sat there like a rock. Quiet. Stunned, maybe.

Or overwhelmed.

We were still in the middle of a mostly amicable divorce, after all.

I digress.

Monica and I sold our house, split our bank accounts, and finalized the dissolution of our marriage. Kind of like getting a root canal and periodontal surgery at the same time. Still, I thought we made it through those crucibles mostly unharmed.

I even took River to his first Pride parade. Went to a few PFLAG meetings on my own. And applauded him for joining his school’s Gender-Sexuality Alliance Club, though we both agreed that G-SAC was an unfortunate acronym. All in all, things had started looking up.

And then I got the call.

It was the day before Christmas. River would be graduating at the end of the school year, and we’d decided to spend one last holiday together as a family. River had wanted to celebrate in my new downtown condo because it overlooked both Lake Michigan and the Art Institute.

Monica was driving while River was looking for Christmas music on the radio. Barely out of their new subdivision, she lost control on an unremarkable hill. The plows hadn’t been by, and she slid right through the T intersection into a massive oak.

In the post-accident photographs, the front of Monica’s car was buried beneath the massive yellow directional sign affixed to the oak. Left-right arrows, like a warning shouted a second too late.

In that one terrible call, I learned she’d died on impact.

For hours, though, they couldn’t tell me the state of my son. Three hours and seventeen minutes, to be exact, he was trapped in that car. They had to use the Jaws of Life to get him out. He was then rushed to the nearest level 1 trauma center.

I was told over and over that my son had been lucky. The doctors spouted words like moderate pelvic avulsion and lateral malleolus fracture with no displacement, and he won’t need surgery, along with relatively mild injury to the brain.

The first person he’d asked for was his mom.

To this day, River doesn’t remember the accident or the hours stuck in the car. He was surprised, then, to wake up in the hospital on Christmas morning with a fractured pelvis, a broken ankle, and a dead mother.

Despite that phone call, forever etched into my white matter, the horrible hours of not-knowing, and the weeks of physical therapy, it was the sound of anguish pouring from my son that would stick with me. His pain was a never-ending constant, dredged up from some unknowable depth within him.

I thought, mistakenly, that he would somehow be okay after.

After the hospital. After the memorial. After the wheelchair had been exchanged for crutches.

After the crutches had been exchanged for a snazzy onyx walking stick, because he refused to walk with a cane.

After the last of the physical therapy sessions.

I thought surely I would get my son back.

That he would find his way back to joy and return to the things that made him smile.

That didn’t happen.

His last semester of high school was a total loss. Rather than going to summer school or enduring another semester in the fall, he begged me to let him take the GED. I agreed, thinking it would help him turn a corner. More crazy wishful thinking on my part.

All I had left of Monica was a son with a hole blown right through the middle of his chest. My bright, shiny boy, who used to like pink, had painted like an artist, and wanted to marry the weatherman, now only dressed in black.

His hair, my exact boring brown, traded for a dark, iridescent raven.

His favorite pink sparkle lip gloss, swapped for plain onyx nails.

We went to grief counseling, of course. Together, separately. His therapist thought I should let him set the timeline and lead the way. My therapist thought I was too hung up on my son’s new, black aesthetic. She wanted me to treat it like a new phase of adolescence. Growth pains of the worst kind.

Deep in my soul, however, I knew something was happening that was bigger than our heartbreak and sorrow.

I was losing him. Not even bit by bit or chunk by chunk. This wasn’t the same as puberty, where every parent struggled to keep up with the small, daily shifts because of hormones and socialization.

No, I knew my boy. Essential parts of his soul had been sheared off. It reminded me of the last family trip we took together. A cruise to Alaska to see the glaciers. Awe-inspiring in their size and yet sobering as massive blocks of ice broke off and dramatically plunged into the water.

Too late, I realized River had become that glacier. Reshaping from one minute to the next. Losing parts of himself he wasn’t meant to lose.

To say I was desperate was an understatement.

Therapy was a Band-Aid. His friends didn’t know how to be there for a sad boy who’d lost something they’d never thought a kid could lose. I could hardly blame them; even my own friends struggled to connect with me.

After months of silent dinners and sullen walks down Michigan Avenue, I would’ve tried anything. Paid any amount of money.

My one friend who’d lost her sister when they were teens sent me a social media link for Snow Creek Ranch in Colorado.

It was queer-owned and had a dedicated activities coordinator for teenagers.

According to the gorgeous photos on Insta, the coordinator was a huge mountain of a man with gentle eyes and a nice smile.

Gay, with a cowboy hat. And a degree in Adolescent Developmental Psychology from CU Boulder.

Maybe he’d be someone River could talk to.

Added bonus: the ranch had private, comfy cabins out by a creek. My friend knew I’d need amenities to make it all work.

I grimaced when I thought about what this heads-up from her meant. I suspected she was interested, but the idea of dating, let alone romance … no. I couldn’t bear the thought of it while my boy suffered.

Her suggestion, though, landed. I clicked on the link, saw the mountains and the horses, and thought maybe we could use something out of our comfort zone. And, hey. Maybe he’d find a cute cowboy to … uh ... Actually, I didn’t want to think about my son’s sex life.

I knew he had one, made sure he had the supplies he needed to be safe, and left it at that.

Either way, I didn’t consult with River. I didn’t for one second consider that we were both city boys with no real desire to be at one with nature. I simply booked our stay, and that was that.

Not happy to stop there, I decided that instead of flying into Denver and renting a car to get to the ranch, we’d drive in. I was surprised when River agreed to it.

In retrospect, I wondered if he’d just stopped caring enough to push back.

While the decision to bring my son to a dude ranch had been a questionable one, deciding that what we really needed was to be trapped in a car for two days had definitely been a mistake.

After an entire day of forced conversation, I decided to stop trying. I’d let him lead the way on the second day—pretty sure that’s what my therapist would want me to do, anyway.

This resulted in hours of absolute silence, punctuated only by bathroom stop requests and drive-through orders.

Nothing was said about the towering Rocky Mountains, or the gorgeous high mountain plains, or the blue sky that seemed to go on forever, or the magenta and orange sunset that sent fractals of light into puffy clouds.

I had high hopes for our trip to the grocery store in Fort Collins, but he stayed in the car. Even as we crossed onto Snow Creek Ranch, dotted with horses and cowboys and a stunning expanse of nature … not one word was uttered.

Despite the fact that money hadn’t been an issue for us for a long time, my first thought as I parked at the main house was that I’d wasted a significant amount of cash on a venture that was probably going to do the opposite of whatever I was trying to accomplish.

I was a clueless, aimless father, bound to be a cautionary tale.

Destined to be yet another parent whose child couldn’t stand to talk to him.

Having just spent a thousand miles on the road in near silence, we were already practically no contact.

When the owners, a city boy-slash-country boy odd couple if ever there was one, came out to greet us, my son grunted his answers. Lucas and Jesse were only briefly taken aback. I was thankful that at least they maintained a kind exterior.

“To get to your rental, go back to the main road and turn left,” Jesse said, handing me a paper map and the key fob to the cabin. “Take the bridge over Snow Creek and follow the road around the bend. Yours is the third cabin.”

I perused the map and identified where we were. Our cabin was just across the swollen creek that ran next to the building where we were parked. Meanwhile, River looked at me like I was the most cringeworthy human being on the planet.

“What?” I asked, still a little salty from hundreds of miles of sullen silence.

“You don’t need the map, Dad. It’s on their website,” he said, shaking his phone at me, “and there are signs everywhere.”

I bit my lip. Nothing good would come of my opening my mouth at this point.

Jesse gave me a knowing look. “Breakfast is served in the dining room here. If you want to see your cabin first, you can either drive there or cross the footbridge.” He pointed to the footbridge on the map. “Oh, and Beau, our youth activities coordinator, likes to get going right after breakfast.”

He pointed to something called a round pen on the map and sent me a wink.

Teenagers, he mouthed.

“Thank you.”

My fried brain flickered on the youth activities coordinator. Yes, maybe River would connect with him. I’m guessing this Beau guy probably worked with more than one parent trying to repair their relationship with their son.

Self-recrimination immediately followed.

I was annoyed by River’s shitty attitude as if I’d somehow forgotten the last six hellish months of our life.

My son had lost his mom and had to learn how to walk again, for fuck’s sake.

Being embarrassed by his lack of social grace seemed like yet another fail on my part.

I waved to Lucas and Jesse, then River and I made our way over the river to the small cabin.

It was quaint, with two rooms, a Jack-and-Jill bathroom, and an open living room-slash-kitchenette area.

My son, with his black hair, black clothes, and black combat boots, looked like a weirdly reversed image in the bright country space.

Wordlessly, he picked a room and shut the door behind him. I walked to the door, touched my forehead to it, and listened as he dropped his bag and sat on the bed.

I wasn’t meant to hear him crying, but I did.

I always did.