I began scrubbing.
You don’t have to do that, said my mom.
He knows I’m right, said Nick.
You’re a joke, said my mom.
I kept scrubbing and then I heard Nick’s rocking chair creak. I heard my mom march into the living room and they started yelling at each other. I wished I could yell too—better than just shrinking up like a bug.
He called her a cunt. She said he wouldn’t know what to do with one if it fell in his lap. Then I heard the sound of meat and bone colliding. A second later a dull thump against the floor. I dropped the sponge and ran into the living room.
My mom was on the floor. She held both hands over one eye. She whimpered like a child, curled and fetal. Nick stood over her. He moved his feet like a nervous horse. I got between Nick and my mom.
You’re a bully, I said.
He swallowed and his Adam’s apple rose and fell. He turned and went to the freezer. I kneeled down and asked my mom if she was okay.
I’m fine, Norman. You should go to bed now. Everything will be okay. Don’t worry, she said. I promise.
I didn’t see how things would be okay. I didn’t see how that was possible. She was either lying or didn’t understand what was really going on.
I’m going to run up to Dad’s, I said.
No! she said. Don’t do that, Norman.
Why? He’ll protect us.
If you try to run away I’ll track you down, said Nick. You’ll never make it.
He sounded like an actor in a movie. He came through the archway with ice wrapped in a towel. In that moment he looked melodramatic and ridiculous to me. Nick handed the wrapped-up ice to my mom. His blood-veined eyes slanted across his face at me. I turned away and saw the sliding glass door and imagined myself escaping out it. I was running up Topanga Canyon to my dad’s house—he would fix everything—but Nick was chasing me on the bridge over the creek and it was dark and his fingers snagged my hair. Feeling myself crash to the ground made my courage wither, exposing something else beneath it, and I stood frozen in the living room, eyeing my escape route, defeated.
In the middle of the night I woke to the cry of a dying animal. I opened my bedroom door and heard my mom moan as if in agony. I stepped toward her room and was about to call out, Are you okay? when she moaned again. It sounded different, as if a note of joy rang out from a frenzy of dark chords, and I realized they were fucking. It dawned on me that their fight had seemed like a show, like they were actors playing parts in a made-up story.
I went back to my bed and thought about how I had lied and about Nick being right and my mom being wrong and about Nick hitting her and how now they were fucking, as if they knew all along that that was how the night was going to end.
SANDRA STOPPED CRYING. Her hand remained over her face. She is wrong, I thought. My dad is for sure still alive. I have to check on him.
I was facing the wrong way in the chute. I had to turn around. A blinding gust scrabbled over me and I closed my eyes, visualizing how I’d make my 180-degree turn. I remembered how Dad had taught me about ice—you always have to keep an edge—and I replayed the time I slipped on the face of Mount Waterman and he dive-bombed the ice face and scooped me up like a shortstop. Once you get going, Ollestad, it’s hard to stop.
When the flurry passed I reached my downhill arm uphill and tried to grab the snow next to my uphill shoulder. My fingers closed around a feeble top layer of crust, knuckles scuffing the hard pack below. So I stabbed my fingers into the hard pack. One knuckle deep. Enough.
I compressed like a ski racer making a high-speed turn, poised on the inside edges of my Vans. Then I unweighted and swiveled my hips 180 degrees, crouching right back into my race pose for stability.
I inched across the chute, slanting the edges of my rubber soles into the crust like I would skis. No steel rail to carve into the hard snow, so I compensated with precise balance. As I crossed into the funnel, a subtle dimple—the threshold between the crust and the intractable ice curtain—I was forced onto my stomach again. I clawed, fingernail to fingernail, across the funnel.
Must be getting close to Dad, I thought, and glanced up from the curtain. A pool of fog clung to him and his curly brown hair appeared. There was some silver in it. Blond surfer hairs, he’d say.
I raked both hands deep into the ice. Spikes of pain weakened my fingers, creeping up my arms. Don’t look down, I told myself. Then I pulled violently to cross the last few feet to my dad. Snap, I lost my grip and went rifling down the curtain instantly.
Out of habit I yelled for my dad. Searched for him above as I descended. I glimpsed his flaccid hand, a pale shape in the mist. It’s not reaching for me.
I twisted like a snake falling down a waterfall, waggling my arms farther out to one side, lunging for anything. I snagged something. My fingers clamped down around it. A spindly evergreen. It bent and I jerked to a stop. I hung on. I got one hand dug into the ice to take pressure off the baby tree, kicked in toe-deep ledges while never letting the other hand unwrap from the needles.
Tears came and I opened my mouth to call for him. Instead I shut my eyes and felt the drops freeze to my cheeks.
I swore at the mountain and at the storm and I cried between outbursts. None of this was helping me—he was still up there drooped over—and my skin stung from the damp cold seeping through my sweater and sneakers. My only option was to try to climb back up by myself.
IHEARD MY DAD’S feet banging the loose wood boards along the side walkway. A part of me woke. A part of me clung to the peaceful cocoon of sleep. He wasn’t supposed to be here. He was supposed to be working on his malpractice case with his law partner Al, whom he went into private practice with a few years ago. They were supposed to be helping some poor guy who lost his leg because someone built a crappy bridge that collapsed, something like that.
The sliding door swished open. Dad never knocked when he came to get me early in the morning. I guess he didn’t want to wake them up. I burrowed deeper into the promise of Sunday morning—no basketball or football or skiing and certainly no surfing. Nick’s going to make his Sunday morning pancakes soaked in maple syrup. It’ll be like nothing ever happened. I rehearsed my plea to Dad: I have hockey camp coming up at the end of August. Come on, Dad. Just one day off.
My bedroom door squeaked. Sunny lifted her head from the corner of the bed. Dad’s warm palm touched my back. Warm lips on my cheek. I pressed my eyes closed, hoping he would have pity on me—poor tired little boy.
Good morning, Boy Wonder, he said.
I moaned, evoking exhaustion.
Sure is a beautiful day out there, he said.
I whimpered like a child lost in a dream.
Time to get up, he said.
I’m too tired, I said in a strained whisper.
The wind will be up early so now’s the time, Ollestad.
I hurt my whole body…falling. I scraped up my whole body.
Let me see.
I pushed down the covers and showed him my hip and elbow and hand.
Salt water is the best thing for it.
Oh