Crazy Blood (11 page)

She hummed softly, dabbing the sponge on Robert's chin, as if he'd spilled a little formula on it. Sky glanced at the feeding tube that entered his brother through a round patch of gauze on his lower flank. It almost nauseated him. Made his blood feel sick. He looked at the little bank of monitors on the rolling table near the bed, the drip trolley backed into the corner for now. This is what Robert's commitment got him, thought Sky. Robert's reward. A hospital with no cute nurses. The only thing he hated more than hospitals were prisons.

Cynthia carried the buckets of bathing and rinse water into the bathroom. Still humming, then not. “Did you hear about April Holly coming to Mammoth?” she called out.

“Chip, chip,” he muttered.

“Did
you?”

“Yes, Mom. Great.”

“Maybe our little town can learn from her,” she half-yelled from the bathroom.

“Learn what? How to be a self-obsessed Olympic celebrity?”

“You know what I heard from Brandon? April is engaged to be married to her longtime boy, but her camp thought she was falling in with the wrong kind of people in Aspen. So they brought her here.”

Sky found this to be very funny. “Wait ‘til she gets a load of me,” he said to Robert, smiling slightly.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing, Mom!” Sky summoned all of the determination that he so obviously lacked, according to his mother, and brushed a hand through his brother's freshly washed hair. Even unconscious, Robert struck Sky as truly good and deserving of his deepest love. Deserving of a lot more than that, thought Sky. But what else could he give Robbie now but love? He reached out and lifted Robert's left eyelid and looked into the clear blue emptiness. “I'll win that race, Robert,” he said. “Mark. My. Words.”

*   *   *

As usual this time of evening, Sky hit Slocum's restaurant for happy hour and ran into his group in the bar. The team skiers and boarders had claimed their high, round bar tables in the middle of the room. Thanks to them, the decibel level was very high. Johnny Teller and Greg Bretz and Tyler Wallasch were there, and so were Kelly Clark and Arielle Gold, which turned up the star power to eleven on a scale of ten. Local snowboard contenders Johnny Maines and Suzanna Scott were arguing loudly but with good humor. Sky joined the boisterous table talk. There was no better antidote than this to his mother and her dire pronouncements. Sky loved this part of being a racer, being in a room where every person knew who you were and what you'd accomplished and they just wanted to watch you being cool. And see exactly how you did it.

To his left, someone said, “Sage has got his whole routine so cold, every detail, man, right down to the way he holds the edge on his method, or the angle of his head on the back-side launch. It's, like, choreography.” Sky immediately countered that Sage's whole style was “tweaked out because he has no idea what he's going to do next. It isn't planned out at all, dude—and that's why he looks like he just fell out of bed. And that's what makes him great.” Sky knew little about board slopestyle—Sage Kotzenburg's gold medal Sochi event—but he couldn't pass up the chance to pontificate in front of an audience. He observed himself performing the Sky Carson act, pleased that he was so good at it.

Tourists and locals manned the booths along the walls, looking up with curiosity at Sky and his young comrades enthroned on their higher pedestal tables. Sky knew that this audience was here because he and his friends were champions, or soon to be—the best athletes you would see up on this mountain, or anywhere really. Some would become Olympians. He and his peers pretty much ignored these onlookers because they were not ski or board professionals and did not take the risks of professionals, because, in fact, most of them skied and boarded badly, and looked fucking idiotic skiing and boarding badly in the expensive snow fashions they wore so they would look like professionals. Sky knew this was just his pride, but pride was all you had unless you went Olympic and podiumed; then you had fortune, too, so much fortune that it boggled the mind.

He drank two neat Stolichnayas. He couldn't be in that room with Robert and not feel disheartened. It took his spirit away. He wasn't sure that what had happened to Robert had really sunk in yet. It didn't have the finality of death. To grieve seemed disloyal. So Sky could not say good-bye to him. Was there really anything at all going on inside him? Or was Robert just a crude exhibit of what he had once been?

And two hours with his mother was punitive beyond words. She knew exactly where his psychological scabs were and she picked at them, over and over and over.

Ignoring his tablemates now—as a way to draw more attention to himself—Sky pulled
The Woolly
from his pocket, looked at the front-page headlines and amateurish pictures. His mother's head shot was on the front page, bottom right, as always, like a Realtor's, a picture taken thirty-five-plus years ago, when Cynthia was in her skiing prime. She was broad-faced and handsome and big-haired in the style of the day. She had been the number-five American woman on the FIS downhill circuit that year, as she had told him many, many times. He folded the paper once, Cynthia face-in, and set it between his stool and his butt cheek.

The thing that was really eating him, though, besides Robert and his mother, was the previous night at Mountain High. Why had so many people thought he was being funny? He was challenging Wylie, berating him, not joking with him. He hadn't meant it as even partially funny. An apology was the right thing for him to demand. He would stand by that. No choice now, since the entire world had seen him throw down the gauntlet.

Sky still had that blood-sick feeling he'd gotten looking at Robert and listening to his mother. He watched the parade of vehicles coming down Main, their headlights moving slowly, dull slush spraying off the tires.

Luckily, Megan, the waitress, was cute as ever, and she had pulled herself away from Johnny Maines to deliver Stoli number three to Sky. He pointed to his abraded cheek. “How is it healing up, dear?”

She swung away the bar tray and leaned in for a closer look. Lovely dark brown eyes and hair. Shampoo like apples. “Kind of nasty,” she said.

“Do you know any good remedies?”

“I always prescribe vitamin A ointment and TLC.”

“Ready for that TLC when you are!” He gave her a smile. “I'll hang here until you're off tonight; then we can hit Mountain High.”

“Maybe. I saw your selfie from there last night.”

“And how did you like it?”

“You got pretty banged up on the X Course. I think Wylie should apologize. But the rest of it, it's all a joke, right? About punishing him? Just, like, comedy?”

“I meant it, Megan.” Christ. He watched Megan size him up, likely trying to factor his mother's past violence into his own future capabilities:
What if he really is like her?
He never got tired of people wondering that, never got tired of wondering it himself. Sky Carson heartily disliked Sky Carson but thought he made for an interesting study.

“You're going to punish him if he runs you off the course again? Is that right?”

“Runs
anyone
off the course.”

“But it's so not
you
to do something like that.”

“I've been underestimated in the past.”

“Put this on the tab?”

“Getting really sick of it.”

“Of Stoli?”

“Cripes, Megan. Just put it on the tab.”

Sky felt a sudden drop in cabin pressure. Without turning, he sensed a large party coming from outside into the vestibule behind him, where the hostesses waited. He saw the tourists' heads swivel in unison in that direction, and Megan's gaze, then those of his tablemates. When he turned, he saw three men—a guy even bigger than Croft, and a snowboard pro he recognized from last year's X Games in Aspen, and a fitness trainer named Andy he'd drunk under the table right here at Slocum's one night years ago. Behind them was a stocky, severely handsome middle-aged woman. And next to her stood gold-medal celebrity and snowboard genius April Holly.

Sky had never seen her in person. She was shorter than he would have guessed, and looked lighter. She had a thatch of blond curls held back in a black band, with her shampoo sponsor's logo up front, where no one could miss it. She wore striped lounge pants and a too-big, out-of-fashion peace sign–emblazoned flannel hoodie that looked like it came from a Mammoth thrift store two years ago. And she had the famously pretty face with the famously upbeat expression that looked, like, completely plastered on. She and her team stood in the vestibule while the hostess collected menus off the rack.

The hostess squared the menus and smiled at April. Sky watched April look around the room at the racers fallen quiet at the bar tables, and he was pretty sure she looked directly at him. Briefly. Then she turned and headed for the exit. Her mother closed in quickly behind her, followed by the men.

The big fellow held open the door until the rest had exited, and when a party from outside started in, he let go and the breeze blew it shut on them. Looking through the frost-edged windows, Sky watched April leaning into the snow, arms around herself, headed for the large black SUV parked in one of the handicapped spaces. It had a large likeness of her face on it, and
April Holly
written in a cursive, autographlike style above her mountain of golden curls.

“We're not good enough for her,” said Megan.

“Yes,” said Sky. “I am.”

*   *   *

By the time Wylie came in five hours later, Sky had lost count of the Stolis and was halfway through the cowboy steak dinner. He had retreated into the back dining room, which at this hour was sparse of diners and gave him a view of the bar. It was still busy out there. He watched Wylie join a table of half-pipe boarders and skiers. No Carsons at that table, of course. The wallpaper in his booth had a detailed Victorian pattern that swirled and settled, swirled and settled. There was no proper way to leave the premises but past Wylie. Sky wondered if this was fateful. Of course he could go through the kitchen and out the back, but he was a man and a Carson. When he was finished with his dinner, he stood up straight, dropped some twenties onto the table, and walked into the bar.

The room was crowded and loud, football on all four screens, Sky keeping Wylie just in the corner of his vision. Sky could tell Wylie was watching the game, his bearded face uplifted and the TV light faint upon it. Sky thought he should stop and survey the room with some kind of propriety, just to project that he was in no hurry to leave, that he was champion skier Sky Carson, future Olympian, on his way to his next appointment. He looked around briefly and thought, I guess I should at least say hello to the bastard, if I'm to regain my authority and good name in this town.

He angled through the revelers, sidestepped through a tight spot, and brought himself to rest at Wylie's table. Wylie and the others turned to him and went quiet. Time to say something, he thought. “My line in the snow is fairly drawn.”

“Beat it, Sky. I'm just so damned sick of you.”

“Apologize.”

“For what?”

“Foul play on the X Course.”

“So, this is all about something that didn't happen?”

“It's about everything that has happened.”

“Oh hell—not all that.”

“Your ho mother cost my father his life and sent my mom to prison. All I got out of the deal was you and your disrespect. You can apologize for that, too, while you're at it.”

Movement. Sky threw a punch, but he was already falling backward under a blow. Smack and percussion, no pain. He was flat on his back, looking up at a thickly bearded face, Megan hovering, a chandelier, and a stamped aluminum ceiling, all interlocked and rotating like the pattern in a kaleidoscope.

 

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I was five months along with Sky at the time I shot Richard. I was showing plenty, as a woman will do with number three. Thirty years old and my third child on the way. But I still had good strength because I was born strong, and I was extra stout in the legs from a lifetime on skis. Big-lunged, too. I could ski or run or swim forever and not get winded. I'd long ago given up racing to have my family, but I still got up on the mountain when I could. And ran and swam at the athletic club. And kept up with a three-year-old and a four-year-old. What I'm saying is I was a five-months-pregnant mother of two and I was still as beautiful and strong as I'd ever been, and I was there for Richard, all his for anything, willing, a good wife.

I was a prisoner when I bore Sky at the county jail hospital. The pregnancy really took it out of me. He was breech and I tried for weeks to coax him into turning around. I'd lie on the preg-room floor with my feet elevated and a little radio set up down by him, with music playing, trying to get him to just switch himself around inside me so he could hear the music better. The doctor said the music was an unproven folk remedy, and he was right about the unproven part, because Sky turned not one centimeter that anybody could determine. And like I said, when Sky finally came, the epidural didn't work right, so when it was over I felt like I'd died and gone to hell in the form of a county hospital staffed by tiny, grim nurses and one monstrous deputy sheriff wearing a shirt so tight that it pulled apart between the buttons, and, of course, a big gun.

They took Sky immediately, and I didn't see him again for one month. They did let me pump milk for him—to shore him up against allergies and worse—which went into a cooler that Adam and Sandrine ferried from the prison to Mammoth Lakes. Sky had a wet nurse, Teresa by name, who had lost a baby of her own. She used to wait on us at El Matador on Main.

Of all the infuriating things that got into me during those first months of prison, one of the worst was thinking about Sky suckling at the breast of another woman. Sure I was thankful he had something like a mother's milk. Sure I knew he'd be better off for it. But I had a recurring dream back then that I was standing on a cliff with Teresa and she handed baby Sky to me and I brought him into my arms and smiled at her, then placed my boot—a ski boot!—to Teresa's middle and pushed her over the cliff.