CHAPTER SEVEN
It began with a sore back.
At first, Janey thought she'd twisted something the wrong way as she was lifting a box of school supplies out of the pickup truck. Matt was always telling her to lift with her knees, not her lower back, and she always ignored him.
But the ache wouldn't go away. After a week or two of ice packs, massages, and enough Advil to eat away half her stomach lining, she gave in and saw the doctor, something she absolutely hated to do. She saw it as a sign of weakness, a failure of character, and an avoidable expense. But it was the only way, short of hitting up one of her drug-dealing high school students, to get her hands on some Vicodin.
She went in for her aching back, but all the doctor wanted to talk about was some freckle he saw right above her hip. Janey found it incredibly irritating, especially when he refused to give her a prescription for painkillers until she went across the hall to see a dermatologist, an old coot with hair coming out of his ears who insisted on cutting the freckle out with what felt like a razor-edged melon baller.
But he stitched her up, gave her the Vicodin, and sent her back home.
Two days later, she got The Call. The little freckle was malignant.
It turned out that the freckle was a tiny speck of an unusually aggressive, particularly corrosive strain of skin cancer that had metastasized, wrapped itself around her lower spine, and then went straight up to her brain, where it was spreading like an oil slick.
Within just a few weeks, she was in the hospital and grim-faced doctors were telling Matt it was time to talk with Janey about her "end of life" wishes.
She had no wishes for death. All of her wishes were about life, and the future she and Matt were supposed to have together.
But now her future was measured in the steady drip of fluids into her IV, which was pumping her full of drugs that dulled her pain but fogged her thinking.
She'd long since lost the will to eat and was being nourished by a feeding tube. She pissed through a catheter and crapped into a bedpan, unable to make it to the restroom any longer.
Janey mostly slept. When she was awake, she was rarely lucid, more often dazed, incoherent, irrational, and irritable. Only occasionally would the real Janey emerge and offer him a tender smile and a look of sadness, and then she'd disappear into herself again.
Matt spent his days sitting at her bedside, holding her hand, soothing her as best he could.
There was a couch in the room that folded out into a hide-a-bed, but he'd usually fall asleep in his chair, still holding his wife's hand.
As he had now.
It was the coldness that woke him up. It was like he was holding on to an icicle.
He jerked awake to find a doctor he'd never seen before standing on the other side of her bed, looking down at Janey, who seemed to be sleeping peacefully, her chest rising and falling with her labored, rasping breathing.
The doctor had a jaunty demeanor, as if he was waiting for the Oompa-Loompas to finish their rhyme before breaking into song. He was wearing a round reflector band on his head, and an outrageously large stethoscope dangled from his neck.
"Why is she so cold?" Matt asked him.
"Perhaps because she's dead." The doctor reached into the pocket of his lab coat and then held a selection of lollipops out to Matt like a sugary bouquet. “Want a lollipop?"
"She can't be dead," Matt said, glancing at the EKG, the little light bouncing across the screen. “Her heart is still beating."
"Really?" the doctor put on his stethoscope and touched the diaphragm to her chest. “We can't have that."
The instant the stethoscope touched her flesh, the skin turned black, curling back and exposing her muscle and sinew, which rapidly rotted away, revealing her sternum and internal organs, which were riddled with yellow pus.
"No!" Matt screamed, lunging for the doctor, but it was too late. The rot was spreading up to her lovely face, devouring it, revealing her skull, eroding the bone itself, and exposing her brain, where maggots feasted on the gelatinous lobes as one writhing, squirming, squiggly mass that spewed out of her cranial cavity and over her entire body.
Matt looked up in horror at the doctor, who unwrapped a lollipop and began sucking on it in an outrageously lewd and suggestive way.
That's when Matt noticed the doctor's orange hair, the round, red ball on the tip of his nose, and the smile painted around his lips.
He wasn't a doctor at all. He was a clown.
The clown took the sucker out of his mouth. “We are going to have so much fun together, Matt."
And that's when Matt woke up, disoriented and afraid, his heart pounding.
It took him a few long seconds to realize that he'd had a nightmare, and that he was in his cabin and not the hospital, and that Janey was long dead.
So the worst part of the nightmare was true.
He glanced at the clock on the nightstand. It was 4:11 a.m., several hours until dawn. But he knew there was no way he could get back to sleep now. So he got up, put on his clothes, and went out into the frigid darkness to chop wood.
Perhaps if Matt hadn't been in such a hurry to get out of the room, and if it wasn't so dark, he might have noticed the lollipop wrapper on the floor…
…and the maggots squirming beneath his bed.
CHAPTER EIGHT
November 19, 2010
The original lodge at Mammoth Peaks was essentially a massive log cabin with several stone chimneys. It was the only authentic building in the resort. The stores, restaurants, and condos mimicked the look of the lodge, with facades of fake stone and artificially weathered timber that might not have seemed so artificial if the real thing wasn't right next door.
Matt and Rachel were staying in the lodge, surrounded by the natural, rustic warmth of that aged timber, in a room with a huge fireplace and a bed made of carved wood that was eerily similar to the one in Matt's cabin.
Rachel didn't know that, since she'd never been in Matt's bedroom, and thought his discomfort was the lingering result of the embarrassing "mix-up" in their reservations that meant they now had to share a room.
"I am so sorry about this," Matt said. “I really did reserve two rooms."
"You don't have to keep apologizing," she said. “I honestly don't mind."
Especially since she'd dishonestly canceled the reservation herself and was relieved when the desk clerk told them the hotel was entirely booked up.
"You can take the bed," Matt said. “I'll be fine on the couch."
She stepped close to him and draped her arms around his neck. “I want to sleep with you."
Rachel could feel him stiffen up, but not in the way she would have liked. His shoulders got tight and he pulled ever so slightly away from her. She responded by pressing herself against him and giving him a deep, tender kiss.
She could feel him relax, and his hands found the small of her back. He didn't move away.
"I don't know if I am ready for this," he said.
Rachel never knew a man who wasn't ready for sex, and yet here he was, going so achingly, frustratingly slow. In a way, it was sexy, like the longest foreplay ever. But she was ready for it to end.
"All I'm asking is for you to hold me close, to let me fall asleep in your arms, and to let me wake up beside you in the morning," she said. “Does that really sound so awful?"
"No, it doesn't." He kissed her softly. “It sounds very nice."
Rachel resisted the temptation to suggest that they take a little nap right now, which was smart, since it wasn't even eleven a.m. yet.
She smiled and broke away from him.
"Let's hit the slopes," she said.
They took the lift up the peak, and then Rachel led Matt away from the crowds to her favorite spot, far from the day-trippers from King City, to a secluded, double-black-diamond run that was pure virgin powder.