The Ski Lift Stop

I want to start by saying I'm twenty-four years old, I've been married for a year and a half, and I work as a zookeeper, which is a fancy way of saying I shovel a lot of shit and get paid almost nothing for it, and my husband Wally and I saved for a year and a half to afford this stupid ski trip to the Swiss Alps with four friends from work.

The trip was Lois's idea, mostly, and Lois is twenty-three and has been my best friend since we both got hired at the zoo the same week back when I was twenty-two and she was twenty-one, and she's the kind of person who reads the ski map upside down and then argues with the guy at the lift ticket booth about it. We'd been on the mountain since eight that morning and by two in the afternoon my legs were jelly and my face was sunburned in a stripe across my nose, and all I wanted was to ride the gondola down, drink something warm, and sit on my ass for an hour.

So there I am, in the line for the big gondola, the one that goes from the mid station all the way down to the village, and the line's long and slow and Lois is complaining about her boots, and I'm not paying attention to anything except the ache in my thighs. They load eight people to a cabin and the attendant waves us in and we plop down on the bench with two other guys who got shuffled in with us, some older fella and his buddy, and the door clunks shut and off we go.

That's when I saw him.

Three chairs back, or three cabins back I guess since it's a gondola, in the cabin behind ours, there was a guy sitting alone with his skis between his knees, and something about the way he was sitting, all loose and slouched with his helmet in his lap instead of on his head, made my stomach do a little flip before my brain even caught up. And then he looked up, because I guess he felt me staring, and our eyes met through the glass, and I swear to God my whole face went hot.

It was Ian. Ian, who I dated for two years in college, from when I was twenty to when I was twenty-two, and who I haven't seen since graduation two years ago. Ian, who taught golf clinics at the rec center back home and had forearms like nobody's business and who I broke up with not because anything was wrong but because Wally came along and things just happened the way things happen. He was twenty-seven now, I did the math in my head right there on the bench, twenty-seven and sitting three cabins behind me on a gondola in Switzerland, of all the gondolas in all the mountains in the world.

"Oh my God," Lois said, turning around to see what I was looking at. "Oh my God, is that him? Golf Ian?"

"Shut up," I said, but I was grinning like an idiot and she knew it.

"He's staring at you."

"He's staring because I'm staring, shut up."

And the thing is, I wasn't even the kind of person who got like this. I loved Wally, I really did, we had a little rental house and a cat named Moose and a fairly boring and mostly happy life, and I'd never once in two years felt anything other than fond nostalgia when I thought about Ian. But there's something about seeing a person you used to be close with, in a place you absolutely never expected to see them, that scrambles your brain a little. He looked older, obviously, a little broader in the shoulders, some line to his jaw that wasn't there in college. He was grinning at me now, this big stupid grin, and he lifted one hand off his ski pole and gave this little wave, and I waved back like a dork before I could stop myself.

"Is he here alone?" Lois asked, craning her neck.

"How would I know, Lois."

"Should we, like, get off at the mid station and go find him?"

"We're going down, Lois, we're going to the bottom, the gondola goes one way."

"I'm just saying, this is a very romantic mountain."

I laughed at that and turned back around, and he was still watching me, and there was this whole conversation happening in looks alone, the kind of conversation you can only have with someone you used to talk to every single day. It went something like, can you believe this, and no I can't, and you look good, and so do you, and now what, and honestly I had no idea what the answer to now what was.

Then the gondola stopped.

Not slowed down, not coasted gently to the platform, just stopped, dead, in the middle of nowhere, halfway down the mountain with nothing below us but snow and rocks and a very long drop. The cabin swung a little on the cable and everyone grabbed the bar, and the older fella said a word in German that I didn't need translated.

"Great," Lois said. "Great, great, great."

We sat there for a solid two minutes with nobody saying anything, and then the speaker above the door crackled to life and a man's voice came on, young and cheerful in a way that seemed designed to make you mad. It was accented, English but accented, and it said, "Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, we apologize, there is a small technical problem, we expect the lift to be running again in forty-five minutes, please remain seated and remain calm, thank you."

Forty-five minutes. The whole cabin groaned at once, like a choir.

"Forty-five minutes," Lois repeated. "I'm going to lose my mind."

"Remain calm," I said. "We've been instructed."

"Easy for you, you get to make eyes at your ex-boyfriend through a window."

"He's not my ex-boyfriend, he's my..." and I stopped, because what was he, exactly. My ex-boyfriend. My old. I didn't have a word for him that I wanted to say out loud on a stuck gondola. "He's nobody. Shut up."

The older fella's buddy started muttering about how much the lift ticket cost, and how in his day lifts didn't stop, and Lois got her phone out and found she had no signal, and I sat there with my skis dangling and looked back through the glass at Ian, and Ian held up his hands like, what can you do, and I held up mine the same way, and we both laughed even though we couldn't hear each other.

And here's the part I keep turning over. When they say forty-five minutes on a stuck lift, what they usually mean is twenty minutes, and everyone knows it, so nobody panics. But the minutes kept going by, five and ten and fifteen, and the cabin stayed exactly where it was, and the wind started picking the cable up a little, making the cabin sway, and the cheerful voice did not come back on.

Then the operator's voice did come back, the same young guy, and this time he didn't sound so cheerful. He said there was a problem with the drive motor at the mid station, that it was a bigger job than they thought, and that they were going to evacuate passengers on the lower section first, and that cabins above the mid station, which was us, should stay put and stay warm.

"Warm," Lois said. "He says warm."

"I heard him."

"We're going to be stuck on this thing for hours, Kira."

And I looked back through the glass at Ian, and Ian looked back at me, and I had absolutely no way of knowing it then, but the forty-five minutes was about to turn into something a lot longer than any of us bargained for.

Ian stood up in his cabin, and he did it calmly, like a man with a plan, but really he just stood up and wedged his skis down between the seats and started unlatching the door like it was the most normal thing in the world. Lois saw it first. "What is he doing," she said, not even asking, just saying it flat. "Ian," I said through the glass, even though he couldn't hear me, "what are you doing, sit down." He didn't sit down. He cranked the door open about a foot, and the wind came howling into both cabins at once, and he hollered over the noise, "Kira, you cold?"

"Freezing," I hollered back, because I was, because the heater in that thing had quit the second the motor did.

"There's a hatch under the tower back there, service hatch, I saw it when we came up this morning, it's got a little platform under it, maintenance space, it'll be out of the wind." He was already halfway out the door, one boot on the little metal step that runs along the outside of the cabins for exactly this kind of thing, which apparently they do have, which apparently he knew about because he's the kind of person who notices things like that. "Grab my hand."

"This is insane," Lois said. "You're not actually going to climb out of a gondola, Kira, we're a hundred feet up."

"We're not a hundred feet up, look at the snow, we're like twenty feet up." I was already unlatching our door. I don't know why, the wind was awful, my hands were shaking, and I did it anyway. "Are you coming?"

"Not in a million years. If you die I'm telling Wally you died skiing beautifully."

"Thanks, Lois."

I got one foot out onto that step and the cabin swung and my stomach went with it, and then Ian's hand closed around my wrist, solid and warm through the glove, and I remembered that hand from a hundred different places, holding mine walking across campus, on the back of my neck at his old apartment, and I got the other foot out and shuffled along that stupid ledge with him behind me like a penguin with a jetpack. The tower was maybe thirty feet along the cable line, this steel A-frame planted in the rock, and right at its base there was a hatch, just a flat metal door in the snow with a handle on it, half drifted over.

Ian kicked the drift loose and hauled it open, and underneath was a crawlspace, maybe four feet high, walled in on three sides with plywood and steel, warm-ish in the way that anything is warm when you've been freezing, and somebody had left a sled in there, an old orange plastic one, plus a coil of rope and an empty Gatorade bottle, because maintenance guys apparently live like raccoons.

We dropped down into it and pulled our skis in after us and shut the hatch, and the wind cut off like a radio, and we just sat there breathing for a second.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi."

"You look good. You look really good. Married looks good on you, apparently."

"You look old," I said, and he laughed, that same laugh, and it did something to my chest that I didn't want to look at too closely.

We got our boots off, or half off, and sat on the sled side by side with our backs against the plywood, and he dug a flask out of his jacket, because of course Ian had a flask, he had a flask in college and he had a flask now, and he handed it to me first, which I noted. It was schnapps, horrible peach schnapps, and it burned all the way down and I loved it.

"So golf," I said. "You teach little kids to putt now!"

"Adults too. Clinics at the rec center, you know that. Retired guys mostly, they tip great and they cheat at everything." He took the flask back. "How's the animals."

"The animals are good. There's a tortoise named after me, did I tell you that."

"You did not tell me that."

"Kira the tortoise. She's fifty-something, she was there before any of us, they just let the new hires name them when one doesn't have a name yet." I pulled my glove off with my teeth so I could hold the flask better, which was maybe not