O
n this side of the mountain, beyond the railing, were yellow signs on tall posts warning
SKI BOUNDARY
. The area was cordoned off with a pink neon rope. A diamond-shaped yellow caution sign:
DANGER—NO SKIING BEYON
D THIS POINT
. Another one read
WARNING
! HAZARDS EXIST THAT
ARE NOT MARKED—SKI W
ITH CARE.
Just beyond that, a red sign mounted on a pole declared:
THIS IS YO
UR DECISION POINT. BA
CKCOUNTRY RISKS INCL
UDE DEATH.
There were no marked trails here. There were no trails at all. This was the off-piste, ungroomed section, reserved for the most adventurous expert skiers, the hard-core powder heads and freeriders, the rippers and the shredders.
He could see a few lone tracks from skis and snowshoes. Also the parallel corduroy tracks laid down by the teeth and tread of a Sno-Cat, the snow vehicle that could climb up or down the mountainside. People generally didn’t ski terrain this rough on their own. Adventurers usually went in groups led by guides on Sno-Cats.
Had Galvin really taken off down this side of the mountain? It didn’t seem likely.
It didn’t seem at all likely that Galvin had gone this way. Abby must have been mistaken.
Then he noticed something dark and gnarled and malodorous in the snow a few paces ahead: the discarded butt of a cigar, like the turd of a small dog.
• • •
He peered down the mountainside, hoping to catch a glimpse of Galvin’s yellow parka among the glades. Nothing. But that didn’t mean he hadn’t skied down this way. He might just be out of sight, down a gulley, on the far side of a swell.
The sunlight reflecting off the snow dazzled his eyes. He put on his goggles and took a deep breath and stood at the lip of a cornice.
The snowdrifts looked seriously deep. Based on the diameter and taper of the tree trunks, he estimated that the snow was as deep as six feet in some places. This was not terrain he was used to skiing. Untouched, ungroomed runs like this, with such a deep snowpack, were meant for backcountry skiers.
Not him.
He briefly weighed making a desperation move—attempting a controlled descent, carving long turns side to side, zigzagging to slow his speed. But standing on the ledge and looking down, he realized what a preposterous idea it was to try skiing this side of the mountain. He turned his skis to one side—and felt the ledge crumble beneath him.
Suddenly he was plummeting, rocketing down the steep decline. He found himself whooshing through powder a foot deep, unlike the hardpack on the other side of the mountain, where the snow was flattened by hundreds, maybe thousands of skis every day. Here the snow was fluffy and lighter than air. It was like gliding through a cloud.
But the wide-open bowl quickly gave way to a more densely forested area, the tall pines scattered on the mountainside. Now he found himself weaving in and among and around the trees, picking up speed. Pines popped up before him like the looming obstacles in a video game. He carved a hard turn to one side, swerved to the other, slaloming between closely set tree trunks. From somewhere deep in his memory he recalled that the best trick for swooping between the trees was to focus on the white spaces in between, aiming carefully.
He swooped and carved, faster and faster, propelled down the hill by gravity and momentum, and he tried to slow himself down. But the only way to do that was to carve back and forth, shift his weight from one side to the other. And that he couldn’t do. Because he was catapulting downhill so fast, with so little clearance between the trees, he couldn’t afford an unnecessary turn even a few degrees to one side or the other. His skis shuddered. His legs and thighs burned from the unaccustomed muscular exertion. And the terrain between the trees was wildly inconsistent. In some places the snow was deep and fluffy; in other places were sheer patches of ice, and every so often he hit a rocky knuckle. His face felt frozen solid. He caromed faster and faster, always aware that the slightest miscalculation would send him crashing into a tree trunk.
Suddenly his skis crunched against something, which he realized only too late was a ridge, a cliff.
Midair, soaring, he felt time slow. He could see the sharply pitched slope, the rocky chasm directly below, and he knew that if he dropped too quickly, he would hit the rocks and be instantly killed.
He knew his fate was outside his control. He couldn’t alter the force of gravity or the trajectory of his descent. He’d vaulted down an icy chute into a twenty-foot drop, a vertical rock wall, with nothing but slippery boards strapped to his feet and no brakes.
And yet, for one brief passing moment, it was exhilarating. To feel nothing below him. Airborne, free falling, a human projectile, a missile. It was thrilling. Like nothing he’d ever experienced before. The wind howled in his ears.
He was just a few seconds, and one wrong turn, away from the finality of death.
And he realized at the deepest level of his consciousness how thin the margin was between extreme, awesome, energizing terror—and death. For the first time in his life, he understood thrill seekers, extreme skiers and mountain climbers. Hang gliders and skydivers and tightrope walkers. He finally understood the intoxicating sensation of defying death, of facing down our hardwired instinct for self-preservation.
And then, just as quickly as this realization had come over him, another kind of understanding seized him. That he might actually meet his death on the rocks below.
And the instinct for self-preservation reasserted itself.
This might have taken as much as two seconds. Certainly no more. He bent his knees, squatted, braced himself—
—and landed hard on the ground, absorbing the impact, a blow to his entire body all at once. He catapulted forward. He’d lost control.
The tip of his right ski caught on something. He flipped over and landed, hard, on his back, and for a moment everything was absolutely quiet. He’d come to an abrupt stop.
He tasted blood.
He twisted, felt pain shoot through his limbs, then throughout his entire body, jagged, like the crackle of lightning.
Icy snow bit his ears, his eyelids, the back of his neck. He tried again to move, wriggled, and found he could move his legs, his arms. He felt bruised all over, but nothing seemed to be broken. Then he remembered how to get up with skis on. He tucked his feet in toward his butt and leaned his knees to the left side. He realized he’d lost both skis. Slowly, carefully, he rolled over. Felt something twang in his lower back, a pizzicato pluck of nerve endings. A tendon? A pulled muscle? He hoped it was nothing more serious than that. For a moment he needed to rest, so he sank down, his face buried in the snow, which felt strangely warm, and then icy cold.
Then, bracing himself on his elbows he pushed up, the exertion sending more daggers of pain through his arms and shoulders. He pushed through the pain and got to his knees. He tasted more blood, probed the inside of his mouth with his tongue, realized he’d bitten his lower lip during the fall.
Unsteady on his feet now, he saw something maybe two or three hundred feet away. An old shack, it appeared, built from logs. It couldn’t have been more than ten feet by ten feet. Squat and sturdy and old, with a shingled roof. It looked like an old mining hut, left over from the mining boom at the end of the nineteenth century. He knew that Aspen had once been a silver mining camp, the largest in the country, until the day Congress repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, demonetizing silver; in a matter of months, Aspen was a ghost town. But many of the old buildings remained, dotting the mountainside.
Through a small window on the side facing him, Danny could see a flickering amber light within. And silhouettes moving inside. Instinctively, he sank to the ground, sat in snow. He rooted around in his pockets until he located the nylon pouch that held the camera.
He yanked it open, the ripping sound of the Velcro closure loud in the muffled silence.
He trained the strong lens on the window, dialing the focus in and out until a face came into focus.
Galvin’s.
Even this far away he could smell one of Galvin’s cigars.
Galvin seemed to be rocking back and forth. No, he was pacing. Behind him was a man, or maybe two men, both of them wearing dark coats. One of the other men was bald. Danny refocused on the bald man. A plump, cue-ball round face with a goatee festooning a double chin. A heavy brow, unshaven-looking. He heard the crack of a tree branch, and he turned to look.
A man in a black parka and ski mask was lunging toward him. Before Danny could scramble to his feet, something crashed into the side of his head, an almost inconceivable explosion of pain, and the white light had bloomed to blot out his entire field of vision, the blood bitter and metallic, like copper pennies in his mouth, and then everything was absolutely quiet.
L
ater, the paramedics told Danny that he’d probably lost consciousness for no more than twenty or thirty seconds. But whatever happened in the hour that followed, he had no recollection of it. Later he was told he kept asking, over and over, “Where am I?” and “What happened?” He had nothing more than fleeting strands of memory, swirling like the streamers of yolk in a partly scrambled egg.
One minute he’d been staring through the camera lens at an old log cabin. The next minute, he was lying flat on his back in some sort of large barnlike room with plywood paneling. He had no idea where. Faces swam in and out of his field of vision. One face loomed directly above his, upside down, the funny-looking harp of a mouth forming nonsense words.
The cadence made the gobbledygook sound like a question, but the words meant nothing.
He tried to look around, but he could barely move his head. The room was overheated. Stifling hot, actually. He felt drenched with sweat.
Again he tried to look around, to figure out where he might be and how he’d ended up there, but his head wouldn’t move, his neck wouldn’t swivel. With a flutter of panic, he tried to lift his entire torso, but he was totally immobilized. His legs, his arms, his hands, and feet—all were frozen in place. Nothing would move.
He was struck with a terrible realization:
I’m paralyzed. I’m a quadriplegic
.
“. . . the United States,” said a voice.
“What?” Danny said.
I can’t move my limbs, can’t even move my head. I’m frozen in place, locked in. I’m paralyzed.
“Who’s the president of the United States?” The upside-down face, the harp mouth. A raspy baritone.
Danny stared up at him in disbelief.
I’m a quadriplegic, and you’re wasting my time with ridiculous questions like that?
“Calvin Coolidge,” he said.
The upside-down face swam out of his field of vision. Someone chuckled and said, “Wiseass.”
“At least his sense of humor is intact.”
Galvin.
An image came back
to him. Galvin and someone else in the window of a small log cabin. The other person in the cabin was someone he’d never seen before. Cue-ball head. Spherical. A goatee floating in the middle of a double chin. Heavy brow.
How long ago had that been? Hours, maybe? Galvin meeting with some unidentified person in an old slopeside hut. But now he and Galvin were here.
“Where am I?” Danny said.
“America in 1925 or whatever, I’m guessing.” Galvin again.
“I can’t move,” Danny said.
“Hey, baby.” Lucy’s face was close, her eyes wide. She looked scared.
“Hey, you. Will
you
tell me where I am?” He smiled with relief, with gratitude, with love.
“Ski patrol hut at the base of the mountain. Sweetie, do you remember falling and hitting your head?”
“No . . . not really.”
“You remember going off to ski the uncleared side of the mountain?”
“That was sort of an accident. I didn’t mean to.”
“How’s your head? Do you have a headache, or are you dizzy, or . . . ?”
“I can’t move.”
“Guys, there’s no reason for him to be strapped down like that,” Lucy said. “Come on. This is silly.”
“I’m strapped down? That’s the best news I’ve gotten in years.”
Now the same voice that had just asked him about the president of the United States said, in a hoarse baritone, “I’m going to insist he go to Aspen Valley Hospital to have a CAT scan.”
Danny could hear noises, snaps and buckles and something rubbing against something. The sharp pain of something squeezing against his wrists. Then he could feel his hands, tingling and heavy. He could move them.
Then the same thing with his ankles and his feet, which also tingled from a loss of circulation. He wriggled his fingers and found they worked just fine. His toes as well. A strap came off his chest, and a pair of hands helped him to sit up.
Lucy’s hands. She leaned in and kissed him. A warm swell of love lapped over him. “Do you have a headache?” she asked again.
He moved his head side to side gingerly and didn’t reply.
The front of his head, his temples, began thudding, hard. Truth was, he had a terrible headache. Like his brain was sliding back and forth in his skull. The pain seemed to be centered just behind his eye sockets. The thudding kept time with his heartbeat. If he could only grab the front of his head and detach it at the temples, he felt as if he could remove the headache and hold it, blood-slick and throbbing, in his hands.
“Seriously,” she said.
“Yeah, some,” he said.
Everything was bright and blazing with fierce color. He saw a few men in red-and-black parkas marked with white first-aid crosses, obviously members of the Aspen Mountain Ski Patrol. A few others he didn’t recognize mulling around. Galvin standing behind them, his bright yellow down jacket unzipped.
Next to him, in a black parka with the zipper partway down, stood his driver, Alejandro. He was an odd-looking man, Alejandro. His head was unusually wide, but his face was narrow, the features clustered close together. A pale line in his upper lip looked like the trace of an old scar. His necklace of green and black beads had a pendant dangling from it that looked, from this distance at least, like the Virgin Mary.
But it was the black parka that chimed something in his memory.
Danny noticed his ski boots had been removed. He was in stocking feet.
One of the men in the red-and-black parkas leaned forward. “Your pupils look normal, and your vital signs seem to be fine,” said the raspy-voiced one who seemed to be in charge. “You passed all the cognitive tests. Except the one about the president.
“Fact is, you got knocked out. Might have been for only a few seconds, but you were disoriented for a long time afterward, and that’s something you have to take seriously.”
Danny nodded, carefully. It hurt to move his head.
“You’re a very lucky guy. Your friend here happened to see you and called us immediately.” He glanced at Galvin. “If it wasn’t for him, you might have frozen to death out there.”
“Thank Alejandro, not me,” Galvin said. “He’s the one who found you.”
Danny turned to look at Galvin, then at Alejandro, and then back to Galvin. He remembered a black parka and a black ski mask. Galvin said something to his driver, and Alejandro left the ski patrol hut.
Something about the black parka stirred a vague, fragmentary recollection.
The ski patrol guy said, “We’re going to give you a ride over to Aspen Valley. You might have a skull fracture or internal bleeding, so you need to have a CAT scan at the very least.”
“I think I’m okay. I hate hospitals.”
“You don’t want to fool around with head injuries.”
“I understand. But I think I’ll be okay. Thank you guys so much for everything.” He looked at Lucy. “Where’s Abby?”
“The girls are skiing with Celina,” Lucy said. “Let me help.” She reached for his elbow.
“Really,” Danny said, “I’m fine.”
Galvin said, “Alejandro’s getting the car. I’m going to take him home. We’ll see you guys in front of the lodge.” He gave a quick wave, a flip of his hand, and went outside.
“I’m sorry,” Lucy said to the patrollers.
Even though he didn’t need any support, he took Lucy’s hand. She helped him put on his sneakers—she, or someone, must have retrieved them from the rental area.
“You don’t look so good,” Lucy said when they were outside. “Do you hurt all over, honey?”
He smiled. “Just my head.”
“I know you hate hospitals, but you should go. If you start babbling nonsense, I’m taking you in. No debate.”
“You sure?”
“About what?”
“Sure you’ll be able to tell if I’m babbling nonsense? Worse than usual, I mean.”
“You have a point. Any idea how you got knocked out?”
“I really have no idea, Luce. I can’t remember much of what happened.”
But he did remember, more than he wanted to say. He hadn’t fallen. He’d been knocked out.
By the man in the black parka and the black ski mask.
Who must have been Galvin’s driver, Alejandro.
He needed to sit down. The throbbing behind his eyeballs started up again. If he kept his head steady as he walked, he found it hurt less. It didn’t feel as if his brain was thumping back and forth.
“Are you feeling sleepy?”
“Not sleepy. Just . . . I don’t know, crappy.”
The black Suburban was idling at the curb in front of the Little Nell. Tom Galvin got out of the front seat and opened the middle passenger door. Lucy came around between Danny and the Suburban to help him in. “I’m fine, really,” he assured her.
When he was seated, Lucy began climbing in, but Galvin stopped her with a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Would you mind staying with the girls?”
“I think I should stay with Danny.”
“Celina needs to meet a friend for coffee for some fund-raiser they’re cochairing. She’s not crazy about leaving the girls out there on the slopes alone. Don’t worry about our boy. I’ll get him straight home. He’s in good hands.”
She gave Danny a kiss on the lips, one that lingered a few seconds longer than usual. Her eyes, meeting his, radiated concern. “All right,” she said, and reluctantly waved good-bye.
When they’d pulled away from the curb, Danny waited for a long moment. The only sound was the purr of the Suburban’s 320 horsepower and V8 engine.
Then he said: “We both know what happened.”
Galvin didn’t reply. Danny wondered if Galvin had heard. Maybe not.
He was about to say it again when Galvin turned around and looked right into Danny’s eyes. “I think it’s time we talk.”