Chapter 9 #2
"Two skiers overdue out of the upper basin since yesterday.
We've got a track going in and nothing coming out, and I've got about ninety minutes of light and a staging problem, because the closest place I can put down and turn people around is the trailhead and it's four miles from where I want to be. "
"Use the meadow."
"That's — thank you, that's what I came to ask."
"You can also use the barn and the phone and the coffee," Tess said, "and if you want to shorten your problem by twenty minutes you'll want to know that the drainage forks about a mile above where the map says it does."
Reid Danvers stopped.
"Say that again."
So she got the map out of his hand and put it on the hood of the truck and showed him — the fork, the bench above it where people go wrong in a whiteout because it looks like the way out, the old logging cut that runs the wrong direction and pulls you northeast into a hole with no signal.
"Every year," she said. "Every single year somebody puts a track up that cut.
If your track goes northeast at the fork they're not lost, they're just in the wrong drainage and they're fine and they'll come out at the Loudon road tomorrow.
If it goes west at the fork, then you have a problem, and they're under the cornice on the north side and you want to be there in the next hour. "
He looked at her for a second.
"How do you know that?"
"I ran an outfit up there for ten years."
"Which one?"
"Redmond Pack and Trail."
"That was you," Reid said, and something changed in his face — not the thing men's faces did in Denver, which she knew all the versions of.
Something much plainer. "I flew a body out of the north side of that basin in about 2011 and there was a woman on the ground running the whole thing off a clipboard and I have told that story about a dozen times. "
"That was probably me."
"That was definitely you," he said. "You were extremely rude to my crew chief."
"He was standing in the rotor wash telling me about my own load."
"He was," Reid agreed. "He still is. He's fifty now."
They put the staging in the meadow. The track went northeast at the fork; the two skiers walked out at the Loudon road at ten the next morning, cold and stupid and completely fine, and Reid Danvers came back three days later with a case of beer and left it on the porch with a note that said for the meadow and did not knock.
He came back again the following week, in a truck this time, and asked whether the county could put her meadow on the list as a standing staging site — which meant a form, and a per-use rate, and an argument with somebody in Steamboat about whether a private landowner could be paid for it.
"You'd be on the callout list," he said. "Not as a rescuer. As ground."
"I know what staging is."
"I know you do. I have to say it that way because of the form."
They did the form at her kitchen table and it took forty minutes because the county's paperwork was written by somebody who had never been outdoors, and about halfway through he said, without any particular weight, "Somebody told me who you're married to."
Tess put the pen down.
"And?"
"And nothing," Reid said. "I'm telling you that I know, so that you don't have to spend the next six months wondering whether I know." He turned the page around for her signature. "It doesn't have anything to do with the meadow."
She signed it.
That was all that happened. It was, she thought afterward, the single most restful conversation she had had with a man in twelve years.
Tess thought about it that night, honestly, because she had decided in March that she was done not looking at things.
She had liked it. There was no point pretending otherwise.
She had liked standing at a truck hood with a map, being asked a question by a man who wanted the answer and not the anecdote; she had liked being Redmond Pack and Trail out loud in her own meadow.
And somewhere in the middle of it, when he said that was you, something had gone through her that she had not felt in a very long time and recognized immediately anyway.
She was not going to do anything about it.
That was not a struggle and she did not award herself any credit for it.
She was four months out of a marriage she had not finished having, and a woman who takes a thing like that into a rescue staging area to feel better is a woman she had no interest in being.
But she noticed it. She let herself notice it all the way, at the kitchen table, in the dark.
That is worth saying because of what it meant. For twelve years she had been a wife in rooms full of people who knew whose wife she was. A man had landed in her field and asked her a question about a drainage, and it had not occurred to him to ask her anything else.
She realized it on the last Sunday in April, and it was Toni who caused it, entirely by accident.
They were doing the June manifest. Toni said, without looking up, "You want me to route the string past the house on the way out, or straight up from the barn?"
"Straight up from the barn."
"Okay."
And then Toni said, "When's the last time you talked to him?"
Tess had to actually work it out.
She sat there with a pen in her hand and went back through the days — the permit on the eighth, the horses the week after, the fencing, the bank, Tate starting on the fourteenth, the helicopter on the twenty-second — and found the last time she had thought about her husband at all, and it was a Tuesday, sixteen days back, and it had lasted about four seconds and had been about a well pump.
"Sixteen days," she said.
Toni nodded and went back to the manifest.
Tess put the pen down and went and stood at the sink and looked out at nine horses in a corral in the evening light.
She had wanted this. She had wanted it since the day she signed the papers in Cherry Hills with a pen somebody handed her, and she had it now, and she had gotten it at eight thousand feet with her own name on the account and a permit nobody thought she'd get.
And it had cost twelve years and a truck and a night on a mountain and a man who read her name six times and put the phone face down.
That was the arithmetic. She stood at the sink and did it and did not flinch from it.
It also cost her him, and there was no version of the ledger where that was free, and she was not going to be one of those women who pretends the good part came without a bill.
She had not thought about him in sixteen days.
She stood there and cried about it for a minute — briefly, angrily, with the water running so Toni wouldn't hear — and then she washed her face and went back to the table and finished the manifest, because the trips went out on the fourteenth of June and nothing about any of this was going to wait for her to be finished feeling it.