The room was crowded and loud, football on all four screens, Sky keeping Wylie just in the corner of his vision. Sky could tell Wylie was watching the game, his bearded face uplifted and the TV light faint upon it. Sky thought he should stop and survey the room with some kind of propriety, just to project that he was in no hurry to leave, that he was champion skier Sky Carson, future Olympian, on his way to his next appointment. He looked around briefly and thought, I guess I should at least say hello to the bastard, if I’m to regain my authority and good name in this town.
He angled through the revelers, sidestepped through a tight spot, and brought himself to rest at Wylie’s table. Wylie and the others turned to him and went quiet. Time to say something, he thought. “My line in the snow is fairly drawn.”
“Beat it, Sky. I’m just so damned sick of you.”
“Apologize.”
“For what?”
“Foul play on the X Course.”
“So, this is all about something that didn’t happen?”
“It’s about everything that has happened.”
“Oh hell — not all that.”
“Your ho mother cost my father his life and sent my mom to prison. All I got out of the deal was you and your disrespect. You can apologize for that, too, while you’re at it.”
Movement. Sky threw a punch, but he was already falling backward under a blow. Smack and percussion, no pain. He was flat on his back, looking up at a thickly bearded face, Megan hovering, a chandelier, and a stamped aluminum ceiling, all interlocked and rotating like the pattern in a kaleidoscope.
Chapter Thirteen
I was five months along with Sky at the time I shot Richard. I was showing plenty, as a woman will do with number three. Thirty years old and my third child on the way. But I still had good strength because I was born strong, and I was extra stout in the legs from a lifetime on skis. Big-lunged, too. I could ski or run or swim forever and not get winded. I’d long ago given up racing to have my family, but I still got up on the mountain when I could. And ran and swam at the athletic club. And kept up with a three-year-old and a four-year-old. What I’m saying is I was a five-months-pregnant mother of two and I was still as beautiful and strong as I’d ever been, and I was there for Richard, all his for anything, willing, a good wife.
I was a prisoner when I bore Sky at the county jail hospital. The pregnancy really took it out of me. He was breech and I tried for weeks to coax him into turning around. I’d lie on the preg-room floor with my feet elevated and a little radio set up down by him, with music playing, trying to get him to just switch himself around inside me so he could hear the music better. The doctor said the music was an unproven folk remedy, and he was right about the unproven part, because Sky turned not one centimeter that anybody could determine. And like I said, when Sky finally came, the epidural didn’t work right, so when it was over I felt like I’d died and gone to hell in the form of a county hospital staffed by tiny, grim nurses and one monstrous deputy sheriff wearing a shirt so tight that it pulled apart between the buttons, and, of course, a big gun.
They took Sky immediately, and I didn’t see him again for one month. They did let me pump milk for him — to shore him up against allergies and worse — which went into a cooler that Adam and Sandrine ferried from the prison to Mammoth Lakes. Sky had a wet nurse, Teresa by name, who had lost a baby of her own. She used to wait on us at El Matador on Main.
Of all the infuriating things that got into me during those first months of prison, one of the worst was thinking about Sky suckling at the breast of another woman. Sure I was thankful he had something like a mother’s milk. Sure I knew he’d be better off for it. But I had a recurring dream back then that I was standing on a cliff with Teresa and she handed baby Sky to me and I brought him into my arms and smiled at her, then placed my boot — a ski boot! — to Teresa’s middle and pushed her over the cliff.
I healed up slowly. Never felt weaker or had less hope. Hell is a cage with you in it. Murder trials are time-consuming, for starters, and we had my pregnancy and the birth of Sky and a storm of pretrial motions to consider. I went through three lawyers. When we finally got into the courtroom, the DA went straight after me, and you can bet it was a free-for-all. Kathleen Welborn was one of the witnesses. The DA painted me as privileged Mammoth Lakes “royalty,” which meant a Carson. Tried to make it a class thing, portrayed Kathleen Welborn as a penniless commoner who’d come up from San Diego and worked as a doughnut maker, then later as a ski instructor so she could try her luck on the mountain. Which is exactly what she was. Common.
The first time I saw Kathleen’s son, Wylie, was in court. When she came in with him, it caused quite a stir, even though without a jury there weren’t lots of people. The judge allowed it. Of course it was a naked ploy by the DA to steal any small sympathy for me that the judge might have in his heart. I didn’t ask to bring in Sky. I would not stoop that low.
Even at two months, the baby Wylie had the hallmark Carson head. Same as Sky and all of them. Wylie had a hint of the Carson jaw, too, and I could see it would become more pronounced as he grew. So there I was, sitting ankle-shackled in the Mono County Superior Courthouse, room 1, helpless but worried sick about Sky back home in Mammoth, not to mention Robert and Andrea.
And being forced to look at my own husband’s seed made flesh through Kathleen! That first time I saw Wylie was the closest I ever came to feeling like I might go crazy. I was never crazy. I was not crazy when I shot Richard. I am not crazy now. But for that first hour sitting in the courtroom with Wylie not thirty feet away, I feared that I might just leave my marbles behind and never be able to find them again. But I didn’t. Instead, I stared. I stared at Kathleen and my husband’s son, and resolved never to be defeated by them.
Earlier today, I got the wheelchair from the medical rental place by the hospital, even though Robbie’s doctor said it would be impossible for me to get him in and out of it by myself, much less push him around town to do some sightseeing. He was quick to say that Robbie wouldn’t be aware of anything that was around him. Nothing.
But — and this is interesting and I’ll be writing about in The Woolly — when I pressed the doctor for a 100 percent guarantee that Robbie was not aware of anything, the sawbones would not give one. He admitted there was a small chance that Robbie was, in fact, aware of some things, just like it said in that newspaper article that Sky found. With the new scans, they can tell things they couldn’t tell just a few years ago. So who is one nearsighted, itty-bitty little neurologist to seal my son’s fate? Who is he to attempt that? I told the doctor I’d take Robbie out into the world regardless. I gave him a current issue of The Woolly, however. Certainly no hard feelings
It’s a heavy contraption, that wheelchair. But I’m still very strong and patient and I’m going to get Robbie out there in the sunny, real world. As I would have done with him so many more times in his stroller if it weren’t for Kathleen Welborn. Adam and Sky and Hailee will help, and we’ll get the nurses if we have to. The way I look at it is, what could it possibly hurt?
Chapter Fourteen
Spring came and the racers skied and boarded the corn snow into June. Finally, the corn snow melted to hero snow — the slushy pack in which even beginners can carve deep turns. Eventually, the hero snow gave way to a thin mud-speckled carpet, and the man-made snow was too expensive to earn a profit for the mountain. So Adam Carson closed it. It had been a good year — 584 inches of snow, high visitation to the mountain, and high occupancy in the rental market. Restaurants were full and spending was strong, real estate inching back up for the first time since the Great Recession. No plane crashes, avalanches, ski or boarding fatalities, no tree-well suffocations, deadly fumarole collapses or earthquakes.