Chapter 20
Beep.
Zach turned in a circle. No sign of life. He moved in the direction of the beacon’s flashing arrow.
Beep-beep-beep.
There! Ahead, a bit of red against the snow. But it was gone? No, there it was.
Zach rushed toward the flicker of red. Drawing closer distilled it into a bit of fabric whipping in the wind, going in and out of visibility behind a huge snow slab.
“Mr. Dowling!” he said into the radio. “I’ve got something, come quick, over.”
Zach kneeled. The fabric was a piece of a sagging balloon from a deployed avalanche airbag, half buried in the snow. He gripped hard, stood, braced himself, and used his body weight to pull. As the fabric unfurled, as it scattered snow cover, it exposed his father’s face embedded in the debris.
Bram’s voice was a rattling whisper. “Get me out.”
Dave had caught up, was already digging. “We’ve got you, Bram. We’ve got you.”
The snow covering his father’s body, though dense, was shallow.
Zach felt separate from himself now, separate from the sweat trickling from his armpits, running down his spine and temples.
Separate from the hands he watched work until Bram was able to push himself up, able to kick his legs out of the snowpack and lay prone, stunned but free.
Zach’s hands went slack and foreign. The dormant menace of the Bowl pressed him like a specimen between the glass slides of a microscope.
An animal sound somewhere between a keening mourning and a groan of relief tore from his throat, and he involuntarily covered his mouth to block the foreignness of it, his preternatural calm whisked away by the sight of his father.
Bram’s skin had gone so pale it bordered on translucent, shot through with thin blue veins. He blinked vacantly and swiped his face with fierce, violent slaps of his hand, as if he had to check that he was alive, that his physical self still existed, could feel things.
“Dad?”
Bram squinted at Zach. Looked around blankly, as if trying to grasp where he was, and how he’d arrived there, then turned to Dave. “Thanks, man. Thank you.”
“You all right? You okay?” Dave asked.
“I think—I mean I’m sore as hell but”—Bram moved his limbs experimentally—“yeah, I think nothing’s broken.”
“Can you stand?”
Zach sat on the snow, staring at the miracle of his father rising.
Bram fixed on him. “Stop that.”
Only then did Zach realize he was crying, the tears and the sweat that soaked the foam of his goggles already freezing uncomfortably at the edges. He instantly obeyed his father, biting down hard on the inside of his cheek—his old trick, drawing blood to cut off emotion with pain.
Bram staggered. His body shook. His teeth clattered. His gaze went loose in a way that made Zach think his father was staring through things to whatever he’d seen while trapped, face wrapped by the torn nylon airbag, the fabric sucking into his mouth whenever he’d tried to inhale.
Zach wondered if he’d looked the same pinned against the trees when he’d realized he was still alive. When he first understood how close he’d come to being swept away to whatever came next.
“Looking cold there, Bram, yeah?” Dave rubbed Bram’s arms rapidly the way he had with Russ. “Some adrenaline, too? You need to move. Need to get the blood flowing.”
“Course. Yeah,” Bram said, still pale and distant, still not quite back in the world. “The others?”
“We found Pike. He’s okay I think,” Dave said.
“Shane?”
Dave shook his head. “No sign of him. Or Jon, or the guide.”
Bram’s posture changed at this, snapping straight, and his eyes went sharp as if his mind had slung back into place behind them. “Let’s look. We have to look.”
“Yes,” Dave said. “You okay to help? Maybe each of the three of us take an area?” Again he pointed, designating the different search directions.
“What’s that noise?” Bram said.
It was the beep-beep-beep of Dave’s and Zach’s beacons.
Things slid together, and Zach’s jaw clenched.
“Your beacon, Dad.”
Bram didn’t respond. His eyes roamed the devastation around them as if he’d see Shane wandering toward him.
“You have to turn your beacon off? It’s transmitting.”
His father looked up at where the second slide had released, muttered, “Who the hell cares?”
The shush-shush-shush of Zach’s pulse echoed in his ears. A ticking clock counting down the seconds wasted.
Zach’s words tumbled out fast, unstoppable. “We can’t search for the others unless you switch it off ‘transmit.’ Because your signal’s interfering. If it’s transmitting, it’s not searching, and you won’t be able to find anyone.”
Bram patted his middle, then fished out his beacon.
“I told you,” Zach said, hating the way his voice cracked, the high, whispery pitch of it, “I told you up there to switch it to ‘search’ and you ignored me and—”
A warning finger shot up to silence him, and the sight of the Underself’s eyes instantly clotted Zach’s words.
In tandem with his obedience rose self-loathing, because even as Zach stood surrounded by what should have been greater terrors, it was so easy for Bram to spindle out a dark tether that seized Zach’s mind, wrung his gut like a rag, and curdled his insides to nervous sickness.
And through it all, somehow the worst thing was that, just like always, Bram had profited from breaking a rule; had benefited from doing things wrong.
Zach followed back the thread of events and knew that if his father had listened to him, if he’d switched his beacon to “search” up in the grove of trees, if his beacon had been effectively scanning for the buried men when the second avalanche hit, Zach might never have picked up the signal that led him to the red airbag that led him to his father.
If Bram hadn’t ignored him, hadn’t made a mistake, broken rules, he may well have suffocated under just a few inches of snow and some fabric.
A hot bile of rage rose to sour Zach’s tongue, his hands clenched to fists.
Things were always this way, always, consequences for everyone but his father, and for a moment the awful, urgent thoughts of the men suffocating fell away, Zach only hearing Bonnie choke out, “Daddy will be so mad” through tears.
Their mother’s eyes connected with Bonnie’s in the rearview mirror. “Everyone loses things, Bon-Bon. We’ll get you new mittens, okay? Your dad doesn’t care about little girl’s mittens.”
Bonnie’s tiny hand squeezed Zach’s so hard it hurt, and that hurt rushed through him, sharpened by the knowledge that he was powerless to help her, shield her, from the unpredictable but inevitable consequences Bram rained down for even the smallest perceived infraction.
“Even if Dad doesn’t really care,” Zach muttered, “he still cares.”
Grace didn’t argue this truth. “Well then.” Her hands tightened around the steering wheel. “We’ll make sure he never knows.”
“He always knows,” Bonnie whispered through gulping, snotty breaths. “He always knows everything.”
Their mother drove without speaking, parked in the grocery store lot, and walked them five blocks to a shop with a sign that read: Susie’s Consignment—High End Street Wear.
The children trailed their mother through tight-packed racks of clothes to the counter, where she recited a number from memory.
The woman there disappeared and returned with a paper she referenced as she counted out cash, the children gawking at seeing a $100 bill, until Grace ordered them away to find replacement mittens.
Wandering the store, Zach paused before a shelf, confused.
Among others he didn’t recognize sat a pair of his mother’s shoes, ones he remembered because his father had brought them home from a trip as a gift, yet got annoyed if Grace wore them, saying they were too expensive, too precious, for this or that occasion.
Zach cradled the light little wing of the dangling tag and read:
W sz 7
In the style of Gucci
(REPLICA)
$40
Things folded together. The way his mother smoothed out receipts, put them in a drawer, Bram spreading them out later on the kitchen island, ticking through each item, Grace with a drink in hand as he reviewed her choices of milk, Band-Aids, fruit.
Things were always ill chosen. Too expensive.
Unnecessary. Their mother texting before swiping her card in a store, and if she forgot, stiffening as her phone rang, Bram’s voice reduced to a tinny drone on the other end.
“I’m sorry, it’s for that prescription? Right, but there was a three-dollar copay…
” Zach pretending to be asleep on Aunt Felicity’s couch the year before and hearing her say, “You need to take him to court,” his mother whispering, “How? With what money?”
She was selling her things. Using the money not just to buy Bonnie replacement mittens without their dad knowing, but to have money Bram didn’t know about at all.
It was a stunning defiance. His imagination spun ever outward at the prospect of Bram finding out, immediately exhausted at the sheer volume and endlessness of the inevitable lectures, lessons, fury…
One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand.
As they walked to the car, his mother, edgy, read something in his expression and asked, “What is it, Zakky?”
He couldn’t look at her. Said down to his feet, “You’re gonna get him mad.”
“Maybe.” She sighed. “But maybe we train people how to treat us. And maybe I…failed at that somewhere. Or maybe it has nothing to do with me at all, I—I’m not sure.
I just, I don’t like…the treatment. Of you two.
Or me. It’s all”—she looked up to the sky, searching for the right words—“getting so much worse now. And I don’t like secrets.
I don’t. But some secrets are to do good.
And this secret is for the three of us. Because I don’t think any of us should get in trouble for tiny nothings like lost mittens.
For having a little bit of money in exchange for my old things. Do you?”
“He’s mean,” Bonnie spat so viciously that Zach couldn’t help but laugh, not just because he laughed when he felt awkward, but because he was impressed. He told Bonnie she was right, and then Bonnie laughed, too, the sound of it a wild and bitter purge.
No, Zach didn’t want Bonnie getting in trouble.
And why did their father get to come home whenever he wanted, travel whenever he wanted, buy whatever he wanted, when they had to ask permission to do anything at all?
When Bram took their mother to task for drinking but still brought home boxes of full, clinking bottles every week?
“We won’t tell,” Zach promised. Bonnie clutched his arm tight, and his mother mouthed a silent “Thank you,” and in both their eyes, trust, trust, trust, and from that a rushing sense of power, of unity, because they loved him and he loved them.
He felt greedy, then, for more secrets; rebellions to cling close and nurture.
Months later, after everything, Bram charged into the kitchen where Zach and Bonnie sat eating the dinner Ximena had prepared.
Bram squared up in front of Zach, eyes ablaze, face red. “Did you know your mom had a bunch of cash? In a safe-deposit box?”
A slithering impulse to betray, to obey, wrapped around Zach’s ribs, but then he focused on the question. “What’s a safe-deposit box?”
Bram stared at him for a beat, but reading Zach’s confusion gave a curt nod before circling the kitchen as if caged, a straining tension to his hunched posture that made Zach, Bonnie, and Ximena shrink away.
“She got what she deserved, that sneaky, disrespectful…” He paused.
Straightened. A crooked smile unwound across his face, ugly and vindictive.
“But you know what? As it turns out, it’s convenient.
She helped me out, your mom. God, she’d hate that. ”
Yes, even beyond the end of things his mother had still been found out, still been punished in a way Zach couldn’t understand, while Bram was rewarded, always rewarded for his cruelty, his errors, as if by the universe itself.
Dave took Bram’s beacon from him. Switched it to ‘search.’ “Your boy’s right,” he said. “Can’t search unless you’ve got in on ‘search,’ right, man?”
Bram swiveled. “I can read, you son of a bitch.”
Dave was momentarily dumbstruck at the sight of the exposed Underself, but seemed to reconcile something, voice filled with pity and expression concerned as he asked, “Are you sure you’re okay, man? You’ve been through it, here, it’s all right to take a minute.”
Bram pressed a hand to his forehead. “I’m just—I don’t know what I’m saying.”
“I know. It’s all right. Zach and I will search. You rest.”
“No.” Bram surveyed the expanse of debris. “We need to find Shane.”
“All right. But radio us if you feel dizzy or whatever, okay? How about I search this third, you there, Zach there?”
“Right,” Bram said. “Let’s do it.”
Zach, tongue thick with the bitter taste of an unjust world, eyes stinging and his lip bleeding, now, with the viciousness of his own bite to stop his tears, pushed down his memories, his resentment, and did as he was told.