Bridge To Happiness (15 page)

Phil looked up at us, straight-faced. “
Wanna
bet it plays
In the Ghetto
?”

We all lost it, and from the expression on the funeral director’s face when he came back in, he must have thought we were crazy, unholy, and completely irreverent.

So Mike ended up in a highly polished rosewood box with a rich grain that flowed across the top like rivers of time and life. It was perfect.

I ran my hand over the top of it now and hugged it a little tighter to my chest. Behind me, my children were gathered near the base of the run, dressed for the trail, setting their gear, and stepping into their boards. I turned back to the face of the mountain and leaned down close to the box. “I know you wanted this, my darling. And we’ll do it for you. I know I have to let go. But please don’t blame me if I don’t let go easily.”

“Hey, Mom. You okay?” Scott skidded his board to a stop next to me.

“Just talking to myself.”

“Rob’s on his way. He was waiting for the mountain to clear out. It closed down fifteen minutes ago.”

“Good. We won’t have to wait much longer then.” It was cold but I wasn’t certain if I was shivering from the air or my state of mind.

“There he is,” Scott said. “I’ll go get the others together.”

I turned around and watched Rob jump off the lift and board over to me. He was now Vice President and Director of Operations for Heavenly Valley, a far cry from his days of running a grooming machine on a small ski area between Truckee and Tahoe City.

Where had the time gone? As I watched him walk toward me, I longed to be back there, to that first day on the slopes, back when we all were young and free and believed in the impossible.

 
His wild Abby Hoffman black hair was now clipped short and his face was tanned and lined from the weather, but his smile was the same. When Rob Cantrell turned his attention on you, you appreciated the manner of the man.

“Hey, Gorgeous.” He gave me a huge hug and then pulled back and looked down at me. “You okay?”

“I am. Thank you so much for this.”

“There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for Mike and for you. You know that.”

“Even let us on the mountain to do something completely illegal?”

“Illegal? What’re you talking about?” He laughed, his arm still slung around my shoulders. “What could you possibly do that’s illegal? Besides, sweetheart, when illegal battles with moral humanity, humanity’s gonna win in my book. And I don’t know of anything illegal. We opened the mountain for private skiing after hours.” He stepped back as Scott, Mickey, Phil and Molly joined us. “Take the quad up to the top. I can open the gates on the bowl runs, but this time of day it’s hard to see and probably icy on that side of the hill. You decide.”

“We won’t need the bowl runs,” I told him and looked at Scott, who nodded.

“We’ll stay on the main face,” he assured Rob, then turned to me. “You and Molly ride with Phil, and Mickey and I will take the next chair. Right, Squirt?” Scott patted Mickey on the head like a pet dog, something Mickey usually hated but today he just laughed Scott off.

It had not missed my notice that my youngest had grown closer to his older brothers lately and less willing to pick fights with them or let their teasing affect him. But he was too quiet sometimes. We all were.

“Come on, kids,” I said to Phil and Molly. “We’ll meet you at the top.” We boarded over to the lift, stepped out of our back bindings, and sat down as it took off.

From the chair, I could see the open horizon, the vast landscape for hundreds of miles. Home was out there somewhere, but far beyond the slight scope of my human eye. The sun was lowering into the west and outlining the rim of land in the distance orange, and the edges of sky were beginning to turn bright colors. Behind us, the lake was an enormous glasslike sea of fresh blue water surrounded by cold mountain peaks fading into lavender in the waning light, and ahead of us was an almost indefinable wall of stark, blindingly white snow and steep runs. The air had grown colder, but there was no wind, and I felt my daughter shiver, so I rested my hand on her thigh.

We, who always had so much to say about anything and everything, said nothing for a few minutes, but seemed to collectively watch our breath fog into the cold air as we climbed to the top on a high-speed quad . . .then Phillip began to hum.
In the Ghetto.

I laughed. Before I could tell him how awful he was, Molly was singing about a cold Chicago morn. I joined in, and we sang at the very tops of our lungs, loud and obnoxious and mostly out of tune, trying to either out-sing or keep up with each other. Soon I heard Scott’s deep voice, off-key just like his dad’s in the shower, and Mickey, too, singing as loudly as we all were, butchering the melody, forgetting the words and half laughing.

I believe we sang with the hope that the air above us would somehow carry our voices up higher than the sky and more reverberant than a mountain echo. In the sheer
stupidness
of what we were doing, I was overcome by the oddest sense of joy. There was no show of strength now, no façade or convention or need to act like we were completely sane. It was one of those who cared? moments that Mike would have loved.

Somewhere close to ten thousand feet, where a blue net spread out from the sides of the chair platform and over the sharp and deadly drop straight down, we slid off, our boards on icy ground again, still singing verses we didn’t really know, though our voices were hoarse and fading. But we still laughed, stumbling into our boards and circling around each other in a ring of flat and final notes, smiles that had been lost to us suddenly creasing our faces.

At the end of my life, when I am almost gone from this earth, I know I will remember that moment of absolute joy as I stood with my children, high on a mountain that divided two states. The awkwardness I’d been feeling for days waned, and a strange sense of peace seemed to hold me in its arms.

Scott squatted down and pulled a bottle of Mike’s favorite wine from his backpack, stood and opened it, then said, “Here’s to Dad.” He took a swig and passed it around.

“I gave you paper cups,” Molly said. “Where are they?”

“I left them in the car. Hell, we’re family. We have the same cooties.”

“Cooties? God, Scott. How old are you?” Molly asked sarcastically.

“I have a six year old. She affects my vocabulary.” He looked at his brother. “What’s your excuse, Phil?”

“Brain damage. You beat me up too much when I was a kid and there was that time you punched me in the head and I had to get stitches.” Phil handed the bottle to Molly. “Here,
I
don’t have any communicable diseases. Is there something you want to tell us, Midget?”

She rolled her eyes and shook her head, stepping out of any bantering with her brothers and raising the wine bottle, and as she did so, her face grew serious and her emotion was raw and open for us to see. Since she had lost her father, my daughter the photographer had a constant case of red-eye. “To Daddy.”

We were quiet again when she finished, and it was then that I noticed Mickey standing awkwardly outside our circle. “Come here, love.” I held out my arm and he moved close. I put my hand around his thin waist and handed him the bottle. “Here. It’s okay.”

“No backwash, kid,” Phil warned. “That’s not a bottle of Orange Crush.”

“Bite me,” Mickey said. “To Dad.” He took a long swig of wine that brought tears to his eyes and a flush to his cheeks when he lowered the bottle. He was seventeen, and had no palate yet, though we’d served him wine during holiday dinners. He’d always left most of it in the glass and Mike usually finished it off. “I’m not going to waste that wine,” he’d say. “Why do you pour it for him?”

“Because he doesn’t need to feel ostracized.”

“But he doesn’t drink it!”

“You’ll drink it. Besides, I don’t really care. I won’t make him feel left out. You’re the parent. You should be happy he doesn’t drink it.”

“That logic doesn’t fly with me. If it were beer, the kid would have chugged down the whole thing.”

Mike seemed to have completely forgotten that back in 1968 he drank Red Mountain for a buck a bottle.

We finished the bottle, Phillip making more wisecracks so he wouldn’t get emotional and lose it in front of us all. But he had a tough second or two when he toasted his “Pop” so I took his hand in mine as I saw my other children look down or away. There was something about seeing Phil hurting that struck each of us deeply. Maybe because he was the Cantrell who worked so hard to cover up what he was feeling.

I held out the wood box to Scott. “Here. Let’s open it.”

We all stared at the bottom of the sealed box.

“How do we open it?”

Phil removed the wine cork and handed the corkscrew to Scott.

As I watched him break the seal, something inside of me seemed to unwind. Maybe to strangers the irreverence of laughing over an Elvis urn and using a corkscrew to open an ash container would seem horrid and tacky and disrespectful. But Mike had the blackest sense of humor. He needed one to grow up with a man like Don Cantrell as his father. That black humor was one of Mike’s most valuable legacies to us, so somehow what we had done and that we could laugh at our malediction seemed right.

Once open, we all looked into the box, uneasy, but morbidly curious. It was a wooden box filled with tan-gray ash that almost looked like sand.

“It’s time to do this.” I said, turning away with a rush of mixed emotions, and we moved over to the edge of the run.

Scott handed Mike to me. “You go first, Mom.”

I touched the fine ash and closed my eyes.
I don’t want to let go . . . I don’t want to let go . . . .
I could feel the tears burning up my throat, I could feel so intensely my love, my respect, and my need for that man swelling up from deep inside of me, so I just leaned over the edge of the run and jumped outward, pulling my knees up to my chest as I had done that first time on a snowboard so long, long ago, and I tilted the box behind me as I flew through the air.

South Lake Tahoe
is a strange and beautiful mess of a place. Not much can bruise the grandeur of the lake or the magnificence of a Sierra mountain against a backdrop of those unending skies. Nature often revealed its most profound beauty there.

The television show
Bonanza
was partially filmed on the northeastern side of the lake, and the old set of the Ponderosa complete with a western town and a replicated ranch house was a tourist destination for over twenty five years, until the property became too valuable to leave undeveloped.

When the kids were young, for the price of admission you could see a medicine wagon show, take a walk through Hoss’ mine, and buy a fancy black hat with a silver studded hatband just like Little Joe’s. I read somewhere once that the original show was created by RCA to sell more TVs in the 1950s, and it went on to become one of the longest running television series in history. But it’s gone now and lost to whole generations who have never heard of the
Cartwrights
.

Our family has a significant, almost innate history with the lake, and we bought our place there because Tahoe really was our second home—where Mike sold his first boards in the ski area parking lot long before snowboarding even had a name—and we loved it there.

Nestled into a private plot of wooded mountain with northwestern views of the lake and surrounding Sierras, the house is hidden from sight and doesn’t corrupt the landscape. You would never know it was there until you turn off Kingsbury Grade onto a private road flanked by a statuesque forest of tamarack pines. Our home is made in the lodge style and constructed from recycled wood, glass, and stone, with four rock fireplaces and a two story wood-beamed great room supporting six-foot wide iron chandeliers salvaged from a silver baron’s old hunting lodge, and has enough bedrooms and high-end energy efficient baths for everyone to have their own space.

When Mike first bought
SkiStar
, the brand name needed a boost after straddling the hurdles of bankruptcy restructure, so in the name of publicity, our privacy was compromised and the Tahoe house filled the pages of a winter issue of Architectural Digest. I remember opening the magazine to a huge glossy photo of our great room with me sitting on the sectional and Mike standing behind me, his hand on my shoulder. On the day the photos were taken, there had been photographers and assistants, light meters and reflective shades everywhere, and their makeup artist pasted enough pancake make-up on me to make my face crack if I smiled.