Letting Go on the Lift

The suitcase problem started before we even got out of the car.

Ryosuke popped the trunk and just stood there looking at it. "Theresa. This thing has wheels the size of my head."

"It's called a spinner. They're popular."

"It weighs more than you do. I want you to know that if you break a hip on the bunny slope, I'm leaving this thing at the bottom of the mountain as a warning to others."

"Very funny. Get lifting, big guy."

He lifted it, mostly. We were forty-three and forty-seven respectively, which meant we got it up the lodge steps in shifts and laughed about it like that was charming instead of sad. I'd been packing for two days. I'm a therapist. I plan. I had three books I wouldn't read, a first aid kit, hand warmers for hands I don't have, and a spare sweater for every possible mood. Ryosuke had one duffel bag. One. I've been with him two years and I have never once seen him overpack for anything, and it used to drive me crazy in a way I never examined too closely.

The lodge at Mount Yancey is the good kind of rustic. Big stone fireplace in the lounge, windows going all the way up, the mountain sitting outside them like it paid for the view. The kid at the desk looked at my suitcase, looked at Ryosuke's duffel, and said nothing, which I respected.

We got checked in and Ryosuke went quiet on the elevator. I noticed it. I notice most things. It's the job.

"You okay?" I asked.

"Fine. Just tired from the drive."

He wasn't tired from the drive. But I let it go, because we were on vacation, and because I had decided months ago that this weekend I was going to be a different woman. A spontaneous woman. A woman who says yes to things.

We got hot chocolate by the fire because neither of us drinks before skiing and coffee felt wrong for some reason neither of us could name. Ryosuke held his mug with both hands and looked into it for a while.

"I have something I want to tell you," he said. "Later. Not now!"

That's not a sentence you want from a man who has been quietly strange for two years. But I'd made a decision about being a different woman, so I said, "Okay. Later works."

"Tonight. After dinner maybe." He smiled at me, and it was one of his real smiles, the crooked one. "It's not bad. Or it's not bad the way you're deciding it's bad right now, in your head, in about six directions."

"I'm not deciding anything."

"You've decided four things already. I can tell because you did the little eyebrow thing."

I did the little eyebrow thing again, on purpose, and he laughed, and I let myself believe him. Mostly.

The next morning was the beginner slope, because here is a fact about my boyfriend that I find endlessly delightful: the man is forty-seven years old and has never been on skis. He grew up somewhere rural, way off the map, some place he never let me visit, and apparently where he grew up there were no lifts and no groomed runs and no rental shops with sarcastic teenagers.

"So you're telling me," I said, snapping into my bindings, "that you can hike up a mountain in the dark in November with no trail, but two plastic sticks are going to beat you."

"Different muscles," he said. "Completely different category of activity."

"Uh huh."

He fell four times on the first thirty feet. I mean he went down. Not graceful tumbles, full collapses, like his skeleton had been briefly removed. The fourth time he stayed down and made a snow angel with his arms, which the small children nearby found very funny.

"You're not trying," I told him, skiing a slow circle around him.

"I'm trying exactly as hard as dignity allows."

"Stand up. Weight forward. You keep sitting back like the hill insulted you."

He got up. He went six feet. He sat back down again.

I skied circles around him, and I laughed until my sides hurt, and somewhere in there I realized I hadn't laughed like that since before my practice got heavy, since before the years of other people's grief poured into me daily. Stewart Lennon, one of my old clients, actually manages this lodge now. He came through my office for about a year, two years back, working on panic attacks that turned out to be mostly a bad boss. He's doing great. He saw us at check-in and gave me a little wave and I gave him one back, and it's a small town kind of full circle that I like.

By noon Ryosuke could do the whole beginner run without falling, mostly, and he was grinning like the hill had personally apologized to him. He skied down slow and stopped next to me in a spray of snow that got in my mouth.

"How was that?" he asked.

"Ugly. Functional. Ugly-functional."

"I'll take it."

"You know what your problem is? You're too careful. You keep leaning uphill like the mountain's going to bite you. Commit. The hill has never once bitten me."

"The hill bit me twice this morning."

"That was ice, and that was your fault."

We did three more runs. He got better fast, faster than made sense for a first-timer, and I remember thinking that and then deciding not to think it. That's a thing I do. Notice, file, refuse. Two years of little filings in a drawer I never opened.

That evening we cleaned up and went down to the lodge bar, which is small and warm and has elk on the wall that everyone pretends not to look at. We got a table by the window, and the mountain was doing its night thing, all black and starlit, and I was two sips into a glass of red when Ryosuke went still in that way of his.

A woman had come in the door. Thirty-something, tall, dark hair cropped short, wearing a parka that had seen actual weather. She scanned the room, found him, and her whole face changed.

"Ryosuke Crawford," she said, walking over. "As I live and breathe."

"Eden." He stood up and they hugged, a real hug, the kind with history in it. "What are the odds?"

"Decent, actually. I come up every February. The trails are quiet this time of year." She turned to me and put out her hand. "Hi. Eden Wilkinson. Old friend of this guy's, from way back."

"Theresa. Girlfriend of this guy's, two years back."

"Two years and he never mentioned me? Rude." But she said it easy, no edge in it, and she pulled up a chair without being asked, the way old friends do. "Sit, sit, I'm buying the first round, this is a miracle and miracles require beer."

She looked at Ryosuke with something I couldn't quite name. Not just fondness. Something more like relief, or worry wearing relief's coat. I'm a therapist, I read rooms for a living, and the room had a current in it I didn't understand yet.

"So how do you two know each other?" I asked.

"From before," Ryosuke said. "Before the city. Before any of it."

"Before," Eden agreed, and took a long pull of her beer, and looked at him like people look at someone they're saying goodbye to, which is a thing I know on sight, professionally, and I felt my stomach do a small quiet drop, and then I told myself I was reading too much into a coincidence in a ski bar.

"From way before," she said. "We grew up in the same place. Deep woods, no roads in, the whole storybook deal. Nobody moves to the city from where we're from. Nobody stays away eleven years either."

"Eden," Ryosuke said, in a tone I'd never heard him use. A warning tone, gentle but real.

"Relax. I'm not telling your secrets." She smiled at me. "He was always like this. Terrific at everything, terrible at talking. You should have seen him at eighteen. Well, you know. You know him."

I looked at Ryosuke. He was looking into his beer again, both hands around it, the way he'd held the hot chocolate.

"Tonight," he said to me quietly. "I told you I'd tell you tonight. It's almost that time."

Eden set her beer down and covered his hand with hers, briefly, and then looked at me with an expression I could only call kind.

"Order something good," she told me. "And maybe something stronger than wine."

Eden and Ryosuke talked a while longer, easy stuff, trails and weather and people I didn't know. Then Eden checked her phone and made a face. "Walk with me a minute," she said to him. "Fresh air. My room's stuffy." They went out to the deck and I sat there with my wine, and I want to be fair to myself here, I did not follow them. I stayed put. The deck is right outside the window, though, and the window was doing its window thing, and their voices carried. Cold air carries sound. That's physics, not spying. That's what I told myself, anyway.

"Two days, Ryosuke." That was Eden. "The door opens Monday night. You know this. Everyone back home knows this. You want me to lie to the elders for you?"

"You don't have to lie. Just don't offer it up."

"And then what? They come looking. You know how they come looking. It won't be me they send, and it won't be gentle."

"I know how it works. I've been gone eleven years, Eden. I know exactly how it works."

"Do you? Because it sounds like someone who thinks love is going to renegotiate a treaty."

There was a pause. When Eden spoke again her voice was lower. "You're really not coming back."

"I can't."

"That's not the same as can't."

"Eden."

"I know. I'm sorry. I just. Eleven years, and now this. Does she know yet?"

"She will. Tonight."

They came back in a minute later and Eden was wiping her eyes and pretending she wasn't, and she said goodnight early and hugged me, which surprised me, a real hug, and whispered "take care of him tonight, whatever he tells you," and left. Ryosuke sat back down and turned his beer in his