Chapter 16
“We can swing out over there.” Jon indicated the edge of the pine grove, where Steve had said the Bowl narrowed and grew steeper.
Shane and Jon, oblivious to the wonders Zach had just seen, were locked into a discussion Zach couldn’t quite grasp, mind still drifting up, up, toward the slope he’d just plunged down.
“Remember the route from yesterday? It’ll be amazing in these conditions.”
“Totally,” Shane agreed.
“I mean, it was crap snow yesterday, imagine how it is now.”
“Let’s do it, man, absolutely.”
“Are you—but”—Zach stammered, confused, resentful at being pulled away from the beauty of his run—“Steve said we’re supposed to wait here?”
“Who? You mean the guide?” Shane waved a hand as if sweeping Zach’s words away. “We’re paying him, not the other way around. Guy’s got no balls.”
“Don’t worry, little man,” Jon knocked affectionately on Zach’s helmet. “The tests up there were great. I’ve skied way hairier stuff than this, like, a million times. I saw it yesterday, it’s not as steep as all that. It’ll be epic. Wanna come?”
What had Steve said? What had the mothers said?
Blah, blah, blah.
Jon had hiked up for another run rather than wait for Shane yesterday. He’d left his radio off. And now he wanted Zach to defy his father?
“You—we said we wouldn’t.”
He hated the tremor, the pitch, of his own voice. Remembered the closeness of his father’s breath accusing him of sounding like a girl.
“It’s cool, kiddo.” Shane shrugged. “Don’t come. Just tell the rest of the group we’ll meet them hiking the ridge back up, okay?”
Zach flinched at the way he’d been downgraded from “little man” to “kiddo.”
“I can—radio them.”
“No, don’t do that.” Shane turned to Jon. “Ready?”
“Go get her,” Jon said, then called out a loud, “Yeah, man!” as Shane went out of sight downhill.
“He’s doing great, right?” Jon said. “He’ll be super into doing the movie after this.”
“That’s not…all set?” Zach asked.
“Nah. Soon, he said. But not yet.”
Looking at Jon’s yearning face, pity tightened Zach’s gut. He saw written there a mirror of his own need for approval, his own desire for a deliverance more elusive, a prize more amorphous, than the connection with Shane that Jon obviously hoped would bear profit.
“He’d better follow through, after this trip.” Jon’s eyes narrowed. “He owes me now, that’s for damn sure.”
“Because you guys are…friends?”
“Yeah, sure. Good friends.” Jon glared toward where Shane had gone through the trees. “Doesn’t mean I don’t think he’s an asshole.”
Zach said nothing. But he knew better than most that you could grovel and scrape to someone, love someone, comply to their every whim, desperately prop them up, and simultaneously despise them. Fantasize about them evaporating.
“I’m off.” Jon gave Zach a playful salute before poling downhill and slipping out of sight.
Zach sidestepped on his skis until he was close enough to a tree trunk to lean against its branchless base. It felt good to take some weight off his legs.
Movement pulled his attention up the Bowl.
Russ had been correct; he wasn’t particularly capable in powder.
After nearly falling during his initial drop, the teenager carved a wide, clumsy turn.
The Bowl’s funnel shape bounced sound in unexpected directions, and Zach heard snatches of Russ talking to himself.
A happy “Ah!” after a more capable turn.
A muttered “You got this!” after a recovery.
The clouds eclipsed the last of the blue sky, turning the light completely flat, erasing texture and variations in the snow. Powder rainbowed behind Russ, the growing wind catching and spinning it in enormous whorls.
From below, a cheer from Jon or Shane, the sight of them blocked by the trees.
Slow and steady, Russ continued his descent, the four men watching from the top of the ridge.
The last remnant of Zach’s euphoria died.
Although he’d felt the joy of unity, of dissolving lines, looking up toward Bram he desperately wished that he could always keep this distance, this many obstacles, between them.
The mountain groaned and Zach startled, the reverberation completely unfamiliar.
Russ slowed, head swiveling, trying to figure out the source of the noise.
A clipped, wordless shout came from downhill, followed by silence, the otherworldly vibration echoing only in Zach’s memory. There were no obvious changes in the snow, in the weather, making him doubt he’d heard anything unusual at all.
Russ continued skiing. One, two, three unsteady turns.
Then the Bowl exhaled a soft, sighing, whumph, and Russ jerked downhill about a foot, as though he’d jumped off a stool.
The depth of this new sound, the strangeness of Russ’s movement, quickened Zach’s heartbeat before his mind processed what it meant, his eyes widening in horrified comprehension.
The top layer of the snowpack must have collapsed. The flat light smoothed things to deceptive evenness as Zach searched for some sign of change, some indication of whether or not the snowpack had gone unreliable. And then he spotted it.
A thin, rushing line shot from downhill, curving to cut above Russ. The break traveled so fast its sickening, ripping cardboard noise took a beat before reaching Zach’s ears.
How far away? Impossible to gauge distances in the open. One hundred feet above Russ? Three hundred feet above Zach? Less?
“Avalanche!” Zach screamed. “Go, go, go!” he pointed his poles to Russ’s right, gesturing frantically in the direction that was Russ’s only chance of escape.
And despite Zach feeling as though his voice had been sucked to a whisper by fear, Russ seemed to hear him, see him, seemed to understand, and began to pole in the direction of safety, angling his skis downhill to help carry him more quickly.
But the slope was transforming into a living, oceanic thing that shifted, rolled over in its sleep to shrug off its cover of snow.
Above Russ the field of white fragmented into flat, angular pieces, some large as a bus, others small as a skull, and all of them beginning to slip downhill whole, like sheets of paper set too close to a table’s edge.
Already Russ’s efforts were useless, the avalanche snatching support from beneath him.
Russ yelled something incoherent, his voice tipping up to a shriek as the slide peeled him away, tossed his body into its vortex.
A flash of bright yellow—a deployed airbag?
—before Russ was lost. The freed snow sped up, the slabs destroying themselves now, churning into their undersides, into the mountain, with a rolling motion that became the pounding hooves of an apocalypse.
Zach’s mouth had gone to cotton; his body stood so rigid he had to consciously force himself to move, to shake like a wet dog, to wake his mind and muscles.
It couldn’t happen. He was only little. Russ was only sixteen. Bad things happened to kids, but they weren’t supposed to. They weren’t supposed to happen to him. And the grown-ups weren’t even here.
But it was happening. To Russ. To Zach.
His mother’s voice traveled from the past. Deploy your airbag. Keep your hands in front of your face to create an air pocket. It can give rescuers more time.
More time before you suffocate, the snow burying you, your breath turning it to ice and sealing in the carbon dioxide until—
Zach threw his poles aside and artlessly wedged his skis perpendicular to the tree he had been leaning on and a smaller one immediately beside it.
Pressing his skis’ edges as close as possible to the brown, scabbed trunks of the mismatched pines, he turned his back to the avalanche and flung his head between the trees, shoulders braced against them.
He wrapped one arm around each trunk, the thin, low branches on the smaller pine scratching him, fighting him.
He held his hands over his mouth and squeezed his eyes closed.
The rush of frozen air pushed downhill by the mass of snow hit his back, its sound a continuous thunderclap.
The airbag.
He unwound an arm from one tree and fumbled along the shoulder strap of his backpack until he found the pull cord.
He yanked, but it slipped through his mitten.
He tried again. With an explosive hiss, the force of the bag inflating knocked him backward from the bracing trees, and fearing he might fall he said, “No, no, no,” aloud and threw himself at the pines, wrapping arms around them and hands in front of his face again just as the avalanche hit him.
In the crosscurrents of snow, everything turned to deafening blackness. Something bashed his helmet. Something jammed into his side, and he involuntarily tried to fold toward that pain but found he couldn’t move, the screaming snow pressing him brutally immobile against the bending bark.
Zach closed his eyes against the onslaught of the ice, the air, the speed.
His face twisted in anticipation of lethal rocks and debris, his body trying to bear the unbearable.
Something sharp struck him in the exposed place between his coat collar and helmet.
He felt the mountain, his mother, Bonnie, felt the force of the suffocating snow and the physics that crushed him, condensed him, could destroy him, the barriers between him and all things again dissolving, again reminding him of his own smallness, but this time forcing the realization of his mortality; the inevitability of things ending, the universality of consequence.
He should have said something. He should have spoken up. And he’d known that. He’d known it the whole time, he could admit that to himself now. But now it was too late.
Blah, blah, blah.
For a dim moment Zach thought he saw Russ, face frozen in an open-mouthed wail, pressed against an enormous tree downhill, arms spread wide in a crucifixion. But if the older boy had ever been there at all he was instantly gone again, devoured by cold and darkness.
And amid the torrent of snow, rock, debris, ice, the trees around him snapping, straining, Zach’s voice, inaudible even to himself, again and again keened into the chaos the oldest and most universal prayer—“Mama, Mama, Mommy!”