Copyright © 2020 by Rebecca Jones-Howe
All rights reserved. This story or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
SNOW FALLS OUTSIDE IN THICK HEAVY FLAKES that make me thankful for the bistro and its electric fireplace. Tourists huddle near the simulated flames. All except one man who sits beside the window. The bright snow contrasts with his plastic-rimmed glasses and his dark head of unkempt hair. Hunched over the table, he clasps at the wide rim of his latte mug, clinging like he needs the extra warmth.
It doesn’t take long for him to notice me watching. He gives me a double-take.
He remembers me.
I remember that he smelt of gin. His throat bobbed heavily when that armed robber entered that liquor store we both happened to be in nearly a year ago. His voice was low and soft with a gentle rasp. He made me feel like my skin was vibrating.
Back then, he had a ring on his finger.
I used to have a ring too. I finally replaced it this morning at a tourist shop. The saleswoman told me that quartz was good for clearing the mind of negativity but all that comes to mind is the the robber’s voice shouting.
You wanna die over a fucking ring, bitch?
The man with the glasses remembers this too.
He tightens his shoulders. He takes a drink but it’s still too hot. Coffee dribbles past his lip and down his chin. He wipes it off with the back of his hand and draws a breath that strains his shirt over his chest.
The waitress approaches his table with a slice of pie. the man jumps when she sets the plate before him. She asks if he’s okay and he he nods too quick, too vigorous, saying, “I’m fine. I’m alright.”
The waitress leaves and his panicked expression slips into something cold and grave and dead. He is far from fine and he is far form alright. He fumbles with is wallet, swallowing hard as he retrieves the bills to pay for his meal. He picks his jacket off the back of his chair.
I watch him through the window as he paces down the bistro’s front steps and in the chill of the village. I make a fist and bring the quartz ring to my lips. Grating teeth over the crystal’s texture, I feel his voice in the ridges.
Ski lifts and gondola rides line the side of Whistler Mountain, taking people into the clouds just so they can plummet back down into the village. White lights twinkle on every tree lining the walkways. Before every shop entrance, there’s a mass of blue salt. It’s supposed to melt the snow but all it does is dirty up the cuffs of my jeans wish muddy slush.
I take the rest of the afternoon to dry the denim over baseboard heater in my hotel room. News articles about the liquor store robbery occupy the time. It doesn’t take much to pick at the trauma. Remnants still linger, the memory of the robber’s gun waving about as he approached each customer and demanded their valuables.
The man with the glasses breathed heavily beside me, already drunk and smelling of decay, despite the fact that he carried a briefcase and wore a collared shirt and tie. The robber found us last, huddled close in the spirits aisle.
My finger swelled over the band of my engagement ring. The robber grew impatient, waving his gun back and forth. He fired a shot at the ceiling. He fired a shot at the wall. The man with the glasses inserted himself between us. He held out his hand and tried to keep the robber calm.
Nobody needs to die, alright?
That soft rasp. That tingle in my throat. The ring slipped out of my shaking grasp and the robber snatched it off the floor before firing one last shot into the man’s chest.
Clearly, his injury wasn’t as life-threatening as the articles all made it out to be.
I can’t go to liquor stores anymore. I still welcome the warming effect that alcohol provides but cowardice always seizes my limbs when I try to buy it in bottled form.
I head out as soon as the only bar in the village opens. The snow’s stopped but the cold still bites. I replace my thin wool coat with a discount winter parka from one of the ski shops. The parka costs a third of my rent but at least it protects my chest. Now I look like a skier, an adjusted soul.
Still, I shrug out of the parka as soon as I find myself a seat at the bar.
I sip my gin and tonic over the curling game playing on the big screen. Red rocks replace the yellow rocks and then the yellow rocks replace the red rocks, all while the players yell back and forth at each other in mid-sweep.
Get on the fucking floor.
The floor’s covered in melted snow, boot marks, black and slick and slippery. There’s a yellow sign positioned over the worst of the slush, warning patrons of the hazard, but all the tourists walk past the silhouette of the man falling backward.
I bring the quartz ring to my teeth again.
Jacob’s number’s still in my phone. He’d called off the wedding well before the the robbery but he still stuck around in the aftermath. He brought food to my new apartment. He climbed into my bed when I couldn’t sleep. He tried to comfort but he couldn’t understand the blotch I’d see every time I shut my eyes.
Diluted blood on linoleum tiles mixed with grit and glass.
I should have called Jacob when I arrived yesterday but it’d just make me feel more alone.
I finish my drink. It only soothes my nerves a little. I like the taste of the gin, the smell of the man, that last bit of adrenaline I felt before his face turned blue and everything went numb.
The snow crunches beneath my feet on the way back to the hotel. It sounds like teeth grinding, feels like a spark in my lungs. I try to unclench my fists but all it does is expose my hands to the cold again. I rub my palms together in the elevator but heat is impossible to create in isolation. I get to my room and I dig into the deep pockets of my parka for the room’s keycard.
Then the elevator chimes. The doors open and the man with the glasses walks out with a bag from the liquor store. He looks at me the same way that he did in the bistro. He swallows. His fist clenches around the paper bag.
“Did you buy gin?” I ask.
He has a suite that looks over the base of the mountain. The gondola lift sits motionless, its cabins illuminated beneath the spotlights. I squint through the lights but the mountain stretches up too high and too far into the dark.
He pours two drinks. Ice clinks against the glasses as he brings them to the table. He swallows again, has a bad habit of swallowing. The vein in his neck twitches. He rolls his shoulder and I imagine where the bullet hole is beneath, what it looks like now.
“I never thanked you.”
He tightens his hold of his glass, drinking from it before shaking his head. “Please don’t thank me.”
The rasp in his voice picks at my throat, moves down between my lungs and settles there.
“You were upset,” he says. “You were hysterical. The guy still got your ring in the end.”
I take another drink, a larger one.
“I see you’ve replaced it,” he says, turning his attention to the quartz ring.
I scrape my nail over the rough edge. “This is just tourist shit.”
Now it’s my hand that starts shaking. I drop my fist out of his line of sight.
“Why are you here?” I ask.
“For a conference. For work.”
I nod.
“You just on vacation or something?” he asks.
“I guess.”
His glance drifts up from his glass, wanting more.
“I’m just trying to get my ex off my back. Trying pretend to be a functional person.” I take another drink and exhale a laugh that echoes in the empty space of his room. “He likes thinking he can fix me. I think he likes proving that I can’t live without him now.”
“My wife sent me to a therapist. It didn’t do shit.” His expression hardens, matching my tone, my voice, my inebriation.
“None of the articles ever said your name,” I say.
“What?”
“The articles about the robbery.”
“Oh.” He glances toward the metal skeleton on the mountainside. “It’s Will.”
“I’m Erin,” I say, reaching across the table to touch his hand. He accepts the handshake but his flesh is chilled and cold from the glass. His grasp is limp, taking what little warmth I had in the first place.
We have four drinks each, maybe five. His head dips a little but then he directs his focus back to the gondola lift and the red diamond-shaped cabins that hang motionless in the air.
“I always wondered if you were dead,” I say.
“I’m not dead,” he says.
He twists the cap back over the gin and slouches in his chair. We both smile, both laugh. Then he touches the spot where the bullet entered him, just over the pocket on his button-front shirt.
“Can I see it?”
He hesitates and I reach for him, but he grabs my hand and pushes it down. The quartz ring thuds against the table.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
He blinks a few times, draws a breath that puts some colour back in his face. He grips my hand, pulls me out of my chair. I stumble over the leg of the table, falling against his chest when he draws me in to kiss him, to taste the grit of him. He still smells of gin. His tongue burns. My lungs take full breaths of him.
Life. Friction. Warmth.
His chest throbs beneath my palms. I pull at the buttons of his shirt and his warmth fades as he pushes me back.
“I just wanted to see if you were okay.”
“You know I’m not okay.” He rubs the gunshot wound, scratches at it like there’s something inside that he can’t get out. “You’re not okay, either. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t okay.”
I step away, replacing his presence with what little relief I can get from the ring. Vibrations. Tension.
“I’m sorry,” I say again.
“Don’t be sorry. I get it.”
I swallow just like him.
“I have a meeting tomorrow morning. A presentation,” he says, softening his voice. “It takes time to pretend. It makes me anxious.”
I nod, feeling the burn in my face, beneath my skin. He picks the gin off the table. He gathers my things off the bed. “We can see each other tomorrow. I think I’d like that. Would you?”
The clear liquid sloshes inside of the bottle as he leads me to the door.
All I can do is nod.
Jacob’s sent me a text overnight:
Did you get there? You never messaged me. I’m worried.
I imagine him in my apartment, what used to be our apartment. He’s pacing back and forth, worried even though he has no right to be worried about me. I pull a change of clothes from my luggage before answering.
I’m here. I’m fine. I’m sorry.
Then I pull my parks on. It still smells new, like vacuum-sealed plastic and silica gel. It’s not until I return to the village stroll that I realize that I forgot my gloves. People carry their skis casually over their shoulders and I lower my head and weave between them for the nearest cafe.
The coffee slips past my tongue. It’s a French roast, strong and acidic.
Alone, I have no other refuge but the quartz. The ridges grate in my ears as I follow all the functional people. Lift passes dangle off their jacket zippers like status cards. They’re all here for a reason and I find myself pretending to be here for a reason, clutching at my coffee, following the crowds toward the gondola.
Thirty bucks admits me to a red cabin with a glass floor. The door seals shut. The lift starts. The ground parts from my feet and the lift carries me above me mountain, up and over the people and the trees and the lakes below.
My phone vibrates.
A draft seeps through a gap in the doors. I stare at the misaligned panels as the acid of the coffee burning in my stomach. I set the cup on the floor and take a seat in the corner, watching, staring at the white mountains that move beneath me. The cold finds my extremities, my fingers and my cheeks and my toes curled tight inside my leather boots.
My phone vibrates again. The tension working through the breast pocket and into my body. My rib cage tightens over my lungs and I heave in deep to breathe, picturing Will lying on the glass floor, the view of the mountainside filling in with his alcohol-thinned blood.
A gust of wind rattles the doors and parts them wider.
I shiver as the cabin nears the mountain’s peak. The sky’s black and endless but the people gathered at the top don’t seem to notice. They roast marshmallows and put on snowshoes. Bonfire flames lick at their extended bare hands. The red cabin stops but the doors don’t open.
I reach through the gap in the doors but my fingers turn black at the mountaintop air. I scream. I shout for help but nobody notices. Then the gondola starts again. It carries me back down and the sky returns to its daylight state of grey.
Trees poke their way out of the snow. Black dots turn into adjusted skiers who know how to stop at the bottom of the hill, their skis angled against the flat end of the slope to stop the momentum.
The doors creak open at the bottom and I scramble out of the car, knocking over the coffee. I leave the spill behind and wander back to the hotel as the frostbite seeps into my flesh.
The elevator buttons feel like nothing. Every digit screams inside, the black frostbite turning red and swollen in the hotel’s warmth. My phone vibrates again. I reach inside my pocket to retrieve it but the frostbite hinders my ability to dig my keycard out of my pocket. The flimsy plastic slips through the beating red. The ache swells through my palm, up my wrists and my arms.
“Fuck!”
“Let me see,” Will says, running over from his door down the hall. He grabs my hands and gawks at the swelling.
“I forgot my gloves in my room.”
“Where’d you go?” he asks.
“The gondola.”
“You wouldn’t like anything up there,” he says, his voice firming. “Not without gloves.”
“What do I do? They’re going to have to amputate them—”
“No.” He pulls me up and exhales a hot breath of calm. “You’re going to be fine. Just come with me.”
His hands aren’t much warmer in front of the fireplace in his room. He squeezes my palm, massages his fingers between mine, soothing my frantic gasps down to relaxed breaths.
My phone vibrates again but I don’t answer it.
“That your ex?”
“He’s worried about me.”
“Worry is a frustrating thing,” he says. “You can’t focus when people worry. You can’t be yourself.” He twists the quartz ring off my finger. “My wife used to love this kind of shit.”
“It doesn’t work,” I say.
“Of course it doesn’t. It’s a fucking rock.” He sets the ring on the nightstand and replaces it with his touch. He turns the red frostbite white, then pink. The swelling disappears. Sensation returns.
There’s a little warmth in him, a little fiction. I curl my grasp into his and squeeze tightly.
His alarm rings and he grabs his phone off the nightstand. The light’s fading outside, turning the active village to a place full of pretend lights, skis replaced with drunken shouts and debauchery.
“What’s the alarm for?”
“Cocktail hour,” he says. “Conference stuff.”
“You’re not going?”
He touches my wrist and pulls me closer. The pretend flames in his fireplace twist and contort, illuminating the room with warm tones, amber and red and yellow. Head to his chest, I glance at the wound. It’s just circle of pale scar tissue over his heart.
“How long did it take to heal?” I ask.
“It doesn’t always look like that.”
I sit up. “What do you mean?”
“It’s never healed,” he says. “Not completely.”
I stare at him, the yellow illuminating his face until he turns toward the red glow.
“I should have died.”
His voice carves, nestling deep, making a home inside of me. His hand still clutches mine, needs it. Again, I lay my head on his chest. I press my ear to his skin. Somewhere beneath the muscles and bones is a heart still beating.
The quartz ring’s gone in the morning.
Will offers me my parka and we share a plate of pancakes in front of the bistro window. He’s still nervous in public. The metal fork slips in his grasp and I nudge his foot beneath the table. He forces a smile, forces normalcy.
Later, we clutch our gloved hands on the village stroll so the people with their skis have to part and create a space to let us through. He takes me to the liquor store. My grasp tightens around his hand as he leads me to the back where the spirits are.
A bottle of gin.
His phone alarm goes off again. He shuts it off but he doesn’t tell me what he’s missing.
Back in his room, we share the taste of juniper and pine until the night overtakes the village. Black seeps through the windows and we create warmth, friction, my inner thighs wrapped around his sides. My body takes him. He’s warm inside of me, moving inside of me, another person who feels just what I feel, his lips on my neck and on my shoulders, his teeth grating, my breaths expelled.
We steam the windows with release.
The still gondola lingers outside the window, a skeleton that can’t move through the witching hours. I roll over but Will doesn’t stir. The hole in his chest moves with his breathing.
It’s different now.
It’s black in the middle and white at the edges, the surrounding skin flaring bright red and swelling like my fingers swelled when he found me in the hall. The hole’s open where the bullet entered, the skin not healed over. Leaning over him, I dare to touch it, to reach inside. My finger slips into the charred flesh and all the lights on the mountainside shatter.
Cold. Dead. Nothing.
I rub at my eyes and I see nothing. I scream like I’m still on the gondola, scream until the sheets rustle and his cold hands find me. He shakes my eyes open and he stares me down.
“Erin,” he says. “Erin, it’s okay.”
The spotlights burn my retinas, casting light over my blackened fingertips.
“What is it? What’s happening?”
He brings my fingers to his lips, kissing each one softly, his breath numbing my skin. “Frostbite creates lasting damage,” he says. “You won’t feel things the way you once did. Eventually you won’t feel anything at all.”
“Why do I feel you?”
He bites at my ring finger. “Because I was there.”
I pull my hand away, trying to rub the colour back into my skin.
“I don’t mind dwelling in the past,” he says. “It feels good to feel something, doesn’t it?”
My hand numbs. It stiffens.
“Please stay,” he begs.
Our gloves protect our hands from the cold when we venture out of the village and into the woods. Will leads me through the snow-covered paths. The pack is deep. Previous hikers have left old tracks that I try to step into, but then he ventures down an advanced trail where no one has tread.
Just us.
Trees tower above, blocking the view of the mountains. Branches hang, weighted by the snow. The further we go the more my body numbs. The cold slips through my parka. Snow slips into the tops of my boots. My thighs harden. The lack of sensation tingles into a burn. I scratch but feel no relief.
Will stares straight ahead as we walk. The trail darkens. There’s a sign with an arrow pointing toward a destination called Lost Lake.
I’ve seen pictures of it in the summer. There’s a sandy beach and a dock, a concession stand and picnic tables, but the red CLOSED sticker slapped over the sign makes me stop.
“It’s just the concession that’s closed,” he says. “You can still go there. It’s nice.”
I shake my head.
“What’s the point in coming here if you’re not willing to see the sights?”
The path ahead darkens as my thighs itch and burn. “There’s nobody there.”
“You really want to be around other people?” he asks.
“Let’s get a drink,” I say. “Please. I like being with you but I don’t want to be here. I don’t like it here.”
He swallows, his cheeks turning red. I tug at his arm and his exhale fills the air, the shake in his breath finally expressing the same chill that I feel.
In the bar he becomes the same man that I saw that first day.
His shoulders tense and his throat bobs. He adjusts his grasp around his drink, the ice rattling inside the glass. He feels but he feels the wrong things. Behind him, the television blares another curling game. A red rock manages to take out all the yellow stones in play. Marble slams marble and the crowd roars, jumps, screams.
He bows his head and cowers.
Together, we buy a bottle of gin and head back through the village with the paper bag. The bottle shifts between us, a load lightened as we empty its contents. We exchange juniper kisses beneath the strung white lights and the glaring store fluorescents.
The warmth fills me, makes me laugh. I go running ahead, inhaling deep breaths of northern night air as he chases me in the paved open span of a dead fountain. He pushes me in. Snow fills my boots. Snow touches my cheek and then he pulls me up, takes me back to his room.
In the heat of our shared history, I straddle his hips and tell him that I can probably buy my own gin again.
“How much longer are you staying?”
“Tomorrow’s my last day.”
His grasp loosens. His chest cools beneath my palms. “I don’t want to go back,” he says. “They’re just going to worry.”
“Who?”
“Them. My wife. My family.”
“I was under the impression—”
“That I left them?” He touches the gunshot wound and the black spreads to his fingers. “They keep thinking I’ll come back but I won’t. Not all the way.”
I hesitate, still able to shiver. Somewhere in the room Jacob sends me a message.
“Leave it,” Will says.
“He’s probably worried. I haven’t responded since I got here.”
He pulls me over him again. “Imagine what it’d be like if he stopped worrying.”
The glow of pretend fire makes him look warm, real. Despite the black, there’s still heat in his touch, and all I want is to keep it there, to keep him this way, to stay with him forever.
I wake up and drink water, heaving heavy over the sink, trying not to throw up.
Everywhere he’s touched is red and swollen. I scratch at my cheek and imagine the grit of the quartz stone. Maybe I should buy another. Positive energy would be good.
The wound on his chest matches my skin. It’s healed a little. It’s red, alive, the flesh filled with pus and ready to burst. He’s warm and human but I can barely feel his skin when I touch him. I try to clench my fists but my fingers stiffen. The knuckles won’t bend when I’m alone.
It’s permanent, just like he said.
I huddle against his body, doing myself lasting damage.
I send Jacob a message, assuring him that I’m okay. I’m having fun. I’m doing well.
Jacob responds. He’s not sure how he feels about me being alone.
I don’t tell him that I’m not.
He was the one who left me alone in the first place.
My fingers are pink. They’re healing. I can bend them and feel the blood in my veins.
I leave his worries unanswered.
Will cancels on his last conference meeting.
We hold bare hands at the gondola lineup, paying the fair to climb into a red cabin together. The doors close and the cabin ascends. There’s a stain on the glass floor that blurs the white of snow beneath our feet.
“This is the same car,” I say, pointing to the gap between the doors.
The cold finds us. A breeze flows between the doors. It brushes at his hair and he drops my hand to investigate.
“Will, don’t.”
He curls his fingers between the gap in the metal.
“Will, please.”
“It’s fine.” He wrestles with the door and it whips open, slamming against the end of the guide rail. Cold surges into the cabin but Will barely flinches when the gust tugs at his open jacket. He leans against the edge of the opening, glancing down at the trees and the lakes and the trails all buried beneath a fresh covering of white.
“Will, get away from there.” Frostbite fills my lungs, making it hard to breathe.
Will clutches at the door frame. “I bet there’s nobody down there.”
I pull my gloves off to reveal my blackened fingers.
“I really wanted to take you there,” he says.
The white mountainside blinds my field of vision. I reach for his arm but the puffy sleeve of his jacket gives no resistance. No fight. I tug him backward and he clings to the doorway with his opposite hand.
“Just wait until we get to the top,” I say. “There’s a fire there. It’ll be warm.”
“Nothing warms me anymore,” he says.
“Will, please.” My eyes burn. Tears slip and blister my cheeks.
“You’re worried,” he says, his voice hollowing, slipping.
The tone settles in my lungs, low and soft with a gentle rasp that makes my skin vibrate. My knees buckle. I shake my head. I step forward and grab his arm. He wrestles in my hold, leaning out toward the white. His boots step off the cabin floor. My grasp tightens but he slips his arm out of his jacket. Its down-filled weight withers in my hold.
Beneath the foggy glass, a black dot that disappears into the mountain’s white expanse.
The gondola stops at the top of the mountain.
I try to climb out but my boots slip over the snow.
People turn their heads. They see my swollen cheeks and my black fingers and they all come to help. I’m brought to the fire. I’m given a metallic blanket that crinkles around my frame.
They ask if I’m okay.
They want to know what happened.
They stare at me with worried eyes and everything goes numb.
