Stoked (7 page)

“I believe in you, kid. Always have.”

Something aches in my general heart area, and I duck my head.  “Thanks, Dad.”

“Need anything?”

“I’ll be booking the flights later today for my coach and me, but that’s really it.”

“Well, let me know when you head down under, email or something, if you would. And let me know when it’s okay to tell people. I’ve been biting my tongue.”

“Give me a little longer, all right?”

“Will do.”

There’s a slight pause, and I hear myself say, “Maybe you can meet me in the Alps or something, in October.”

“I’d like that.”

“All right. I gotta go.”

“Thanks for calling son. It’s good to hear your voice.”

I hang up with a weird heat at the base of my throat, and stare out at the little colored figures on the slopes until it goes away.

Monday morning, there’s an email from Jess. Very cryptic.

Something you want to tell me?

I’m running behind, but I stick the bagel in my mouth and type, No idea what yr talking about. On the way out the door, not trying to be rude. What’s up?

Has she found out about my training?  I wish I had time to check out the internet, but even as I’m thinking I might be able to squeeze out five more minutes, my phone buzzes with a text from Alice.

Get ur ass down here, Wilder.

Whatever is going on will have to wait.

At the start, I’m feeling pretty good. Rested, stronger, all the parts coming together to remember how things work. Body memory is coming back, in balance and I’m shredding like my old self. Then Alice wants to take it up, and we head for the slopestyle course. Most people know the half-pipe, the u-shaped feature riders use to move from side to side, up and back.  Slopestyle comes out of skateboarding, with rails and series of jumps meant to give more and more height. I’ve been skating a lot the past couple of years, all over downtown Manitou and with a bunch of crazy-ass dudes with nothing to lose. I’ve been flying down mountains on a bike. I’m feeling strong going into the rails, and all right on the first couple of jumps, then wipeout like a splattered bug on the third ride, twisting in a backside 560 that means I come down hard on my left side, the left battered hip, and it feels like ass. My body twists and spins downward and I finally come to a stop, sprawled on my back at the bottom of the jump, staring up at the sky.

Start again.

You can’t catch air if you aren’t willing to wipe out. But it’s grueling work, going down over and over, falling, skidding, slamming.

And again.

After a lunch break, we review the good and the bad, and I spend another couple of hours hitting the jumps, over and over. I can feel it coming, the feet and the hands, the slant and the air, the style of it, myself, my way of doing things, coming back.

“One more,” says Alice. “Nail it, dude.”

I stand at the top of the slope, sky and snow and mountain all round. I’ve sweated hard all day but I can feel ice crystals in my beard.  I’m listening to my cells, to my blood, mentally seeing the run, tick, tick, tick, and suddenly feel it, the click. I take a breath and launch. Rail, check. Rail, turn, check.  Slope one, 520, sweet. Second jump. I launch and forget the tension of training, finally breaking through to the reason this is so fucking great in the first place.

It’s fun as hell. I’m spinning high like a creature of the sky, and tuck and grab the board, holding my body to get maximum spin—one, two, three, land backside, sweet as honey, building speed for the final jump.  I feel it solid and clean as I catch air, high high high, and stabilize, riding currents like a hawk, spinning in extreme silence, far above the earth, a double cork. It was one of the first tricks I made my own, and now it comes back, roaring through me, and my body is strong, and it’s there, and I land as soft as a kitten, raise my arms, whooping out the pure, clean, perfect exhilaration bursts through me, bright as the dazzle on the snow spraying up from my board.

Alice meets me. “Holy fuck,” she says, and high fives me. “Dude.” She shakes her head. “I’mna find that judge and kiss him right on the mouth. With tongue.” She slaps the back of my head, hard. “Why the fuck have you been doing anything else? You’ve wasted so much goddamn time.”

I pick her up and spin her around. “No time like the present.”

“Yeah, let’s go soak it out. That’s a good place to stop.” She pulls off her helmet and her hair spills out on her shoulders. Again she smacks me, but this time, she’s smiling. “That was goddamn beautiful, son.”

And all I can do is laugh, because it was. It really was. I have a long, long, long way to go yet, but...yeah.

This is what I was born to do. How could I ever forget it?

By the time I’ve soaked and showered and eaten, it’s nearly six, and I’m hoping I can catch Jess again. Maybe it’s time to tell her what’s going on. It’s real now, that was real today. I’ve been around long enough to know it was good timing, a good moment, and I’ve got a long, long way to go before I can do anything like that consistently, but it’s buzzing through me when I get online.

There’s a second one line email from Jess, sent a couple of hours ago. Check ur Facebook

I’m scowling without any real sense of worry as I type in the address. Can’t be anything much, because I haven’t done anything. Some dumb misunderstanding.

But the minute it opens, I get why she’s freaked.  Somebody has tagged a photo of me and Alice from Saturday night in the bar. We’re toasting the camera, grinning drunkenly. It’s from some sports gossip site and the headline is typically raggy speculation.
Back in the spotlight? One of snowboarding’s glamour pairs spotted in Chile. Could somebody be making an Olympic run?

Hustler has tagged me and commented. “You’re outed, bro.”

And there are a lot of other comments, too. A lot. Friendly, mostly, encouraging. Every rider from here to the North Pole must have been online the past two days.

Nothing from Jess, but I get it. 

I send her an email. It’s ten am there and she said she had the day off.  The earlier email came in at 8 am her time. Jess, she’s my coach, that’s all. Can we Skype? Are you there? 

As I wait for a reply, I google my name to see if anything else has shown up. There are a couple of speculations that I’m back to training, but both reference the same photo. Nothing else. Some of the tension flows out of me, and honestly, I’m still so high from that last run it seems impossible anything could really go wrong.

I’m packing frozen peas around my sore left ankle when Skype rings. I answer with a grin. “Hey! Two days in a row!”

She doesn’t smile back. The room behind her is quiet. “What’s going on, Tyler?”

“Nothing, Jess. Alice is my coach.”

“For snowboarding?” She gives me a perplexed little frown. “You’re riding again?”

“That’s the surprise!” I nod, but it’s hard to keep from grinning. “I am! The judge ordered it, can you believe it? He rides, I guess and watches the players, and he knew my name. He ordered me to make a bid for the Olympic team.”

“Wow, that’s amazing. That’s huge, actually.” She leans in. A frown creases her forehead, and I see something in her eyes that’s unsettling. Dismay. Disappointment, maybe. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know, Jess.” I find that my foot is wiggling, maybe picking up on something I’m too clueless to get. A soft pop of worry releases a bubble of acid in my gut. “I was afraid I’d be totally humiliated. I wanted to see if I had anything left, maybe surprise you with it.”

She nods, those long clear eyes sliding away for a long moment, and then she’s shaking her head. “So, this other person, your friend has been sharing this huge, important moment with you. Right?”

“Well, not really. I just ran into her here.  She was training some other people who were going home and offered to give me a hand, to see if she could help me get my groove back.”

Again that nod. I notice that her mouth is sad. “But still, you’ve been sharing this with her.”

I have to admit that it’s true. “I wanted to surprise you, Jess. I wanted to be worthy of you.”

“I don’t need you to be worthy, Tyler, I need you to be real.” She shakes her head. “Lena and all the people at the Musical Spoon knew about your history, that you were on parole, all that stuff you didn’t tell me. I was the only one who didn’t know, and I was supposedly your girlfriend.”

“I was ashamed, Jess.”

“You hid it from me, like pretty dramatically.”

I reach for her face, her precious precious face. “Jess, please, let’s not fight, not when we are so far away. Let me tell you about today, about everything. I had the best ride this afternoon. Like, it was totally there, like I wasn’t sure it would come back.”

Her face is still unsmiling. Hurt maybe. “I feel really left out, Tyler. I told you everything that was happening here.”

“Let me show you everything.” I turn the camera to the room, and walk to the window. “This is the apartment I’ve rented, in Valle Navaro, which is outside of Santiago, Chile.”

“Tyler,” she says, but I can hear what’s in her voice and I keep going.

“This is my board, and my boots and—“

“Tyler, stop it.”

“And this is my little kitchen.”

“I’m going to hang up if you don’t talk to me properly.”

I sink down on the bed, looking into the camera “Don’t, Jess. I love you.”

“You have a funny way of showing it. You don’t trust me at all.”

“What? That’s not true.”

“You aren’t being real with me.” Tears are glittering in her eyes and I’m suddenly really, really afraid. “How can I ever trust you if you never tell me the truth?”

I swallow. “It’s not lying to—“

“To what? Pretend you’re something else? Hide things? That’s what you’ve been doing. I’m embarrassed and mad and I feel like a fool. Again,
all these people
know something really important about you that I don’t know. If I’m so important, how is it that you couldn’t tell me the most important thing going on it your life?”

I wish, so much, that I was there with her. That I could take her hand and kiss her face and hold her close, that I could make her listen. “I gave you hints. I just wanted to find out if I could even do it, and then I was going to tell you.”

Her eyelids fall, covering her expression. After a minute, she looks up. “I can’t trust you to be real with me. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I forgave you for lying about the parole, but—“ She shakes her head. “A relationship is about intimacy, about sharing who you are with someone else. You want everything I have and you’ll only give me those parts of you that you think look good.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No. You know how it was in my family. I told you that. It’s hard to open up.”

“But Tyler, going back to snowboarding is not like getting a new job. You went to a new city on a different continent and poured yourself into something that was very, very important to you, maybe even
sacred
, and you didn’t tell me about it.”

“When you put it like that, I get why you’re mad.” I touch her face, her mouth, on the screen. “I’m really sorry, Jess.”

“I need some time to think about this. I’m so tired I could fall over right now, and it’s hard to make good decisions when you don’t have a brain, but I am very upset with you. I don’t want to give you my whole heart, and have you give me the left ventricle of yours.”

I laugh. She smiles, reluctantly.

“Can we just talk?” I ask.

“No.” Her smile fades. “I am in New Zealand because you kept something from me before. Now you’ve done it again, and I am not sure that we should keep going. I’m not sure you can reveal yourself with anybody, and if that’s true, I’m going to be lonely forever.”

My lungs go airless. “Jess! I can’t believe you’re so upset. Can I please just tell you about today?”

“There’s not context, is there? I haven’t been in on the struggle. You’re just going to tell me about a good day. Well, hooray.” A tear drips from the corner of her eye. “I just need a little time.”

“This is about Kaleb, isn’t it?”

Her eyes narrow. “No, not really. But if you want the truth, he’s pretty open. We share a lot, talk a lot, and it feels good. Maybe that’s part of why I’m so upset about this.”

Immediately, I regret the outburst. “Jess,” I say, quietly. “Please give me another chance. I’m sorry. Genuinely, deeply sorry.”

“A few days won’t make or break us, Tyler, and if they do, maybe we need to be broken.” She swallows. “I do care about you, but I don’t want to wreck everything on a guy who can’t be real with me.” Her clear old-soul eyes are full of sadness, but also something else. Strength? Pride? “I have to show up for myself, you know? And right now that means I need some time to think.” 

“I can’t believe this is happening.”

“Think about it in reverse, Tyler. What if I hadn’t told you I was cast in a commercial and was having this big adventure and I was doing it with a friend of the opposite sex, and then you saw a picture of me with him?”

“You’re right!” I burst out, hands in the air. “I was wrong. You’re right. Can we just start over?”

She shaking her head. “I have to go. I’ll email you in a few days.”

“Jess—!”

But her face is gone.

For long silent moments, I stare at the blue screen, feeling a buzz all through my body that makes me want to smash something, throw something.  Half of me wants to call her back, and keep calling until she’ll listen, but she’s had enough of crazy town, and maybe I have, too.

I press my hands over my eyes and let go of a roar of frustration. Even when I’m trying to fix my life, I fuck it up.

chapter NINE

Under normal circumstances, I’d pace until I collapsed, or drink three pitchers of beer and start a fight, but the day’s training has kicked my ass and I fall on the bed instead, staring at the plain white ceiling. In the hallway, a family is arriving, banging and talking fast in Spanish. I can’t make out the words, but I catch the rhythm.

She can’t be serious, can she? Just because I was keeping a secret, and not like a fidelity secret or something, but a surprise. It was supposed to be a
surprise!