As we grow older, we learn how memories work. The people we miss know where to find us—on the subway, or in our hearts. When I got home from Summerhill Station, Em was on the phone.
Willy would find Molly in the Rock Garden, in the steeps of Upper Twister—near the top, where Little Ray, running on Prednisone, couldn’t keep going. Mr. Barlow had carried her piggyback the rest of the way, but there’d been no one to carry the old patroller to the top of Number Ten.
As Molly had told me on the dark morning we drove to Bromley to look for my mom and the snowshoer, the lift-maintenance mechanics showed up at six, before anyone else. That was why Willy was in Upper Twister on a snowmobile before sunrise; in his headlight, he saw the old patroller lying in the Rock Garden. Willy was on his way to the lift stations at the top of Number One and Number Ten. Willy would have known the one and only chairlift Molly was headed for when her heart stopped—the foremost, downhill-facing chair of Number Ten, my mom’s favorite, the Blue Ribbon Quad.
Willy wasn’t a patroller, but the lift mechanic knew the old patroller had died where she’d fallen. Out of respect for Molly, Willy wanted her fellow patrollers to take her where she’d been going. Willy said he might have made Molly look like she was lying more comfortably in the Rock Garden; he said he tried to make her appear to be merely resting.
Willy would have been talking on the radio to a few of his fellow lift mechanics in the maintenance shed. The patrollers working that day wouldn’t start showing up in the first-aid room before seven, but I’m sure some patrollers were called at home—the ones who’d known Molly the longest, the ones who loved her the most.
Old Ned and Meg had called me in Toronto—the two of them, together. Em had answered the phone. “It’s someone named Ned—he’s with a woman named Meg. It’s for you, kiddo,” Em told me, her voice breaking. I knew Molly must be gone.
Ned was working only part-time as a patroller now, the way Molly had been a part-time ski instructor; Ned was almost as old as Molly. “The old girl got as far as the Rock Garden, Kid—she almost made it all the way, but she was carrying some extra weight in her backpack,” Ned said.
“What was she carrying?” I asked him; I was pretty sure I knew.
“A six-pack of beer, and enough Valium to do the trick—she was as cold as the beer cans, Kid. Our coldest night of the season—the end of January is as cold as it gets at Bromley, you know,” Ned said.
“I know,” I told him.
“Ned is morbid and tactless, Kid. You know that, too, don’t you?” Meg asked me.
“I know that, too,” I told her. I was fond of them; I wouldn’t have wanted to make the call they were making. I was already imagining how to tell Matthew about Molly.
I could see the rest of it—as Ned and Meg kept talking. The ski patrol had taken Molly to the top. Willy was with them when they settled the old patroller into Number Ten; the first chair headed down the mountain would be Molly’s last chairlift. Willy was the one who went inside the lift-station shack. He made sure the safety gate on the unloading platform was set in the right position; he checked the stop button, and looked over the bull wheel for ice.
While Willy drove his snowmobile to the base of the Blue Ribbon Quad, where he started the drive motor and turned on the safety system for Number Ten, Meg sat with her arm around Molly in the chairlift. Meg was almost as big as Molly; she was strong enough to hold Molly upright in the chair. Meg made one of the new patrollers sit on the other side of Molly for the ride down.
“She was a young woman who worshiped Molly—one of those solitary girls Molly went out of her way to look after,” Meg told me.
“You know Molly, Kid—she wouldn’t have wanted a guy riding down the mountain with her, even when she was dead,” Ned said.
“You’re sick, Ned—sick and morbid and tactless,” Meg told him.
“I know—I’m sorry, Kid,” Ned said.
Since she’d been working part-time, Molly told me she still woke up early, maybe earlier. The old patroller said she liked putting skins on her telemarks and skinning up Twister. She liked skiing down before the lifts were running; she liked skiing on the freshly groomed corduroy, before other skiers had skied on it. But I knew Molly. The old patroller wouldn’t have trained for skinning a mile up a mountain. Unlike my mom and Mr. Barlow, Molly didn’t train.
Molly was going on eighty-six. The old patroller was a big woman to be skinning a mile up Twister to the top of Bromley. I find it hard to imagine her heart stopping, but old Ned and Meg were amazed that Molly made it as far as the Rock Garden.
I thanked the two of them for their call, and for telling me what happened; then Em and I had to talk about it. If the snowshoer had been there, we said, Molly might have made it all the way. Elliot Barlow had gone the distance with my mom. Em and I said Molly shouldn’t have been by herself in the Rock Garden. If Mr. Barlow had been with her, even as small as the snowshoer was, she could have lugged the old patroller the rest of the way. Speaking as two of Elliot Barlow’s rescue jobs, Em and I believed the only hero could have done it. There’s no question the snowshoer would have tried.
Sometimes Em gets angry with me when she catches me “screwing around” with my Aspen screenplay—as she usually puts it. I can’t make up my mind about the title. I have two titles; they seem interchangeable to me. Loge Peak or Not a Ghost. Either they both work, or they both don’t. “If the film can’t get made, it won’t matter what you call it, kiddo,” Em reminds me. But an unmade movie never leaves you; an unmade movie doesn’t go away.
Sometimes I hear the voice of the woman on the subway, except that I’m not on the subway when I hear it—and it’s my mother’s voice I hear, not the voice of the woman who makes the underground announcements. I’m usually in the underpass, beneath the Canadian Pacific Railway bridge, when I hear my mom’s voice. Every sound is amplified there; kids riding their bicycles like to shriek, just to hear the echo. My mom thinks it’s funny to startle me.
“The next station is Summerhill—Summerhill Station, sweetie,” I hear her say. It scares the shit out of me, every time. Or there’s this one—the other stop announcement on all the older subway trains, on the Bloor and Yonge and Sheppard lines. “Arriving at Summerhill, sweetie—Summerhill Station,” my mother will say, in an echoing voice. Then I’ll hear her and the snowshoer laughing; I only occasionally see them in the underpass. Usually, when I see those two on the subway, or in Summerhill Station, they don’t speak at all.
As for the actual woman’s voice on the subway, she doesn’t say sweetie—I can’t imagine her saying it. I wouldn’t know who she was, if Matthew hadn’t told me. It was Matthew who noticed when the voice on the subway changed. It was sometime in 2007, Matthew said—when a new voice was prerecorded for the announcements on the older underground trains. I didn’t notice, but my mother must have noticed, and Matthew really liked the woman’s voice on the subway.
It would be some years later, in 2013, when Matthew told me her name. It was spring in Toronto. Matthew and I were watching some dumb game on TV. Matthew was scrutinizing his cell phone, too. He was twenty-two; I had the impression there was always something interesting on his phone. Em and I were in our seventies; we were dependent on Matthew to demystify the technology in our lives. Matthew showed us what we were doing wrong with our laptops and our cell phones; Matthew made the Internet more manageable.
That April evening, Em was watching the TV on a different channel in the kitchen. Obama was still president, but Em had been riled up since the 2010 midterm elections, when the Republicans retook control of the U.S. House of Representatives. Em hated the new Republicans more than she’d hated the old ones; she said the new ones hated Obama more.