The Sweetheart Deal (7 page)

E
very morning after it happened again, my mom was in my room, leaning over me first thing.

“Sweetie, how are you? Brian, are you all right?”

I mostly wanted to be left alone for a few more minutes before I had to get up. “I'm fine, Mom,” I said. “God. I'm not even awake yet. Can you leave me alone?”

“Of course,” she said. “I know. I just need to make sure you're okay.”

Andrew, the little shit, had started calling me “screaming meemie,” but I mostly felt bad about waking up everyone else in the middle of the night.

The dream was always the same. It scared me so much, I wanted to die. In it, we're all at home, and it's my birthday, and there's cake and presents and everyone's happy but my dad is missing. Not like
missing,
he's not dead, he just isn't there, and no one thinks anything of it. My mom and my brothers are singing to me. Everyone's having a great time but I can tell I'm the only one who knows something bad is about to happen. And when the bad thing happens, everything changes, just like that. Something dangerous is loose in the house, wanting to hurt us, and the party is over, and my mom and brothers are afraid and everyone has run from the table to find somewhere safe to hide. That's what I want to do too, run and hide. But what makes the dream so bad is that I can't find any of my family—even though I look everywhere, fast, in closets and under beds—and when I can't find them I realize I'm the one who is supposed to save us from the bad thing happening, the loose thing in the house, which is after me now, since everyone else is hiding and safe. And I can't find anywhere to hide—no place I can think of is good. It doesn't even look like a person, or look like anything really, the dangerous thing, it's just a terrible force I can feel, but it's after me, and I think if I can just get far enough ahead of it, I
can
find a place to hide, and lose it, and protect my family at the same time since it's chased me, and if it doesn't get any of us it will just go away, but it's always right behind me, gaining, and I can't get any distance from it, so I start to scream as loud and hard as I can, and wake up. Every time I woke up, my mom was there trying to hold me and keep me still. It was hard because I'd push her away and try to run from my own room. Sometimes I crawled on the floor, sweating, scrambling away from my bed when she came in, and I would keep crawling, even after she was there, trying to grab me and convince me I'd had a dream. Now that Garrett was here, he came in with her once or twice too, when it was really bad, and I'd managed to get away from my mom, when I was still freaked out beyond reason.

Like Chris, I'd told my mom I'd go to the Dougy Center one time and if I changed my mind about going more, I'd tell her. It was such a weird thing that the building where we went had replaced the one where my dad had fought a fire. I didn't say anything to anybody, but it was almost like he was there, kind of. We were in the same place where my dad had done his job the best he could. All those firefighters hadn't been able to save the building after all.

What I hadn't expected were the murals, which decorated the rooms on the first floor. It was such great work that I couldn't believe I'd never heard of the artist, and that she wasn't an artist for her job. When I asked the people there they told me her career was something else, in real estate or something financial. I would have gone there every day if I could have just stared at all those scenes on the walls instead of sitting around waiting for my turn to talk.

One of the things we talked about the time I went was if we thought we could have done something to prevent the death. Even if it was a totally unrealistic thing, we could say anything we wanted to—like for the one girl, never running out of milk, like not ever. Or the other guy, what was he supposed to do, tell his dad he shouldn't compete in a triathlon when everyone else his dad knew was so excited about it? But I bet that kid wouldn't ever compete in a triathlon himself, and maybe if he heard about someone else training for one, he'd tell them to do a marathon instead, and why.

It hadn't been a big deal to me. I knew we couldn't go skiing on my birthday, that we needed a new fridge, even though my mom was always saying,
The way you boys eat,
food doesn't have a chance to go bad in this house
. But she liked things taken care of, and the fridge did suck. And that morning after it broke, all the food stank, then it stank up the whole kitchen while my mom divvied it between the compost and the garbage until my dad came downstairs and said he'd take care of it. I hadn't thought about it until they asked us in our group, and even after that, I didn't think there was anything I could have done. If I were a totally different person and I'd thrown a huge fit about my life being ruined because we weren't going to ski on my birthday, it's not like my family would have done things differently.
Oh, Brian's having a fit, forget the fridge, we better go skiing
. I wasn't like that and my family wasn't like that. Nobody caved about something important because someone was having a fit or not getting their way. The fridge was important. We needed it, and so we went the next week. That's just what happened.

And even after he died, when I thought about the fridge drama, I still thought it had been funny. My dad blow-drying the freezer trying to make the thing last, those weeks before it tanked, that had cracked me up. So I sketched him doing it—I had a lot of chances—which annoyed him the first few times he was working, lying there on his side waiting for the ice to thaw, pointing my mom's blow-dryer at it like a gun, but when he finally saw what I was working on, it cracked him up too and it became this big joke between us, like he was a superhero whose power was The Blow-Dryer. So all the times he tackled the defroster after he saw my drawing, he'd geek out, hamming it up, all stealth and unstoppable, which was totally corny and he knew it, but because he was so aggravated, I thought he had to do something so he wouldn't blow a gasket. My mom didn't think it was funny at all when he strutted around with his sunglasses on, creeping up on the fridge. She would shake her head and exhale really loudly, she was so pissed, and leave the kitchen so she wouldn't have to see it. Then my dad would swagger away after he was finished, with his sunglasses pushed up on his head and blowing the tip of my mom's dryer the way sharpshooters always do with their pistols after they've saved the town or killed the villain.

Anyway, my drawing was pretty good, and what I'd liked about it the best was that what I'd drawn had turned not a terrible situation, but a frustrating one, into something that made my dad laugh, something he'd made into a kind of game. We had egged each other on. My mom was annoyed and Chris and Andrew didn't care. When I finished the drawing, I gave it to him and he took it to work and I hadn't seen it since. I wanted it back, but I didn't want to remind my mom of anything about the old fridge and my dad's goofiness and my birthday and the day my dad died, and I didn't know who else to ask about the drawing. Maybe I'd ask Garrett to help me get it back. But what I was afraid of was that all my dad's stuff was already cleaned out from the fire station and some firefighter who had no idea what it was had thrown it away instead of giving it back to my mom with all his other stuff.

It was only later, after the one time I went to Dougy, after we'd talked in group about what we thought we could have done to prevent the death, when I hadn't said anything and neither had Chris, that the idea crept into my head that maybe if I hadn't made the drawing in the first place, if it hadn't temporarily made my dad goof off and delay the solution, if instead, without my drawing, he'd dealt with it the way he should have, like the guy he was who took care of things, maybe we would have gotten a new fridge earlier, or at least the freezer might have been repaired by someone who knew what they were doing, long before it broke down completely, preventing what happened later. Without my drawing and all the goofiness it had started, maybe the fridge problem would have been solved and my dad would still be alive.

T
hey were all so damaged, and I had no idea what I could do except finish what Leo had started. Now that I was alone with them, I realized I didn't know any of them as well as I had assumed I did, even Audrey, and that sense of estrangement made me regret the distance Leo and I had lived from each other for so long. Without him as the bridge between his family and me, I felt like an interloper, my usefulness limited to helping Audrey buy his suit and what I'd done the day of the funeral. Refusing Audrey's initial wishes that I not stay made me feel like a bully, and now that I was here to do what I'd said I would, I knew I wasn't being entirely altruistic—I was also staying for me. I would never again be able to spend an hour or a day with Leo, and I couldn't make up for lost time with his family, but I could create new time. It was later than I wished, and under circumstances that I would have changed if I could.

Scabbed onto the back of house was a fresh wood box, bright and uniform in color, with holes cut out for windows. Edges of Tyvek that had come loose flapped in the weather, like the corners of a wrapped but battered gift. The yard was dotted with piles of scraps: stacks of Hardiplank siding, rolls of Tyvek, two-bys, and berms of dirt dug from the trench that Leo hadn't backfilled. The windows he'd ordered were stacked against the back, the glass smeared with grime. Tarpaper covered the top and plastic was laid over it. Inside, the floor joists had sheets of plywood piled on them. On one plank laid across two sawhorses, bags from Home Depot and Lowe's with the receipts still in them, blueprints and sheets of paper with notes and lists in Leo's handwriting, a coffee cup with cold, shallow remains in the bottom and a plate sprinkled with careless crumbs.

As much as it pained me to fasten Leo's kneepads around my own legs, and to drape the straps of his tool belt over my shoulders and buckle it around my waist, when the weather cooperated, the roof was where I started, slowly, laying the tarpaper Leo had already bought. The days the weather made it hard to work up there, I did what else I could. I got organized and oriented myself with the plans and the progress Leo had made. One afternoon I backfilled the trench in the rain. But first, after the funeral, after everyone had left, I asked Audrey if she would take me to rent a car.

“Sure,” she said. “But what do you need a car for? You're welcome to use mine. I guess if you think you should have one, okay, but—No, no, you can't do that, it's too expensive.”

“I'm driving up to the mountain,” I said. “I want to be there. I want to see it. I want to get a good look at Mount Hood.”

Because she insisted, I took her car. “I won't need it till you get back,” she said. “And if you need chains, you'll have them.”

It wasn't a short drive. For people who go up to ski every weekend, no doubt it becomes routine and the ride seems shorter, but for me there was a lot of ground to cover between Portland and Government Camp alone, at the base of Mount Hood. Off Route 84 into and through Gresham on 26, then through the town of Sandy, “The Gateway to Mount Hood,” and the other hamlets and mountain villages—Welches, Zigzag, Rhododendron—that peppered the national forest banking the road on both sides. I alternated between listening to NPR—and Oregon Public Broadcasting—and local music stations until as the elevation increased I lost reception and the connections died away. With no CD in the player, in silence, with each mile I climbed, I retraced what had been, without his knowing it, Leo's last trip with his family.

There was more than one resort on the mountain, and after I got a coffee in Government Camp, I followed the signs to Meadows and found an empty place to park in the crowded lot. I walked around and through the lodge, by the racks of skis and poles and snowboards, looking at the people I passed, none of whom noticed me, a guy with no gear, not dressed to spend the day. I got a drink and sat inside the lodge and watched the slopes and everyone gliding down; the awkward and the intrepid, the beginners and the experts, the little kids in ski school—fall and stand up, fall and stand up—the lines forming at the lifts, all from a chair by the window.

I didn't understand how he could die skiing, wearing a helmet. He'd been skiing since he was four. He made his kids do fire drills. It was a shameless taunt that of all those he'd saved, Leo didn't survive his own accident. He'd lived through so many mishaps with me on and off the slopes: icy conditions, the missed jump, whiteouts that only made us stop and wait, but not quit; the time we had to find the road and walk back to the lodge, his parents on the verge of cardiac arrest; the acid and mushrooms and drinking; one night during senior year, when he was sober but still drove too fast on Donahue's moped (no helmet) to 7-Eleven for snacks while the rest of us rolled joints. I couldn't wrap my mind around it. Surviving all that wild youth only to have this be his undoing.

The mountains out here were a far cry from what Leo had grown up skiing on and we'd skied together back east—­Camelback, Elk Mountain, Killington—but he'd adapted and made this mountain his own for all the years he and Audrey and the boys had skied it, until the mountain had claimed him. Maybe mastery had been part of the problem. He was never reckless, neither of us was—though maybe his mother or Audrey might have disagreed—he knew his limits and was confident of his ability on the snow, in a variety of conditions, and I'd never seen him out of control. That's always what seems to be the fatal flaw in sports with any margin of risk: Once you think you know what you're doing—far from reckless but encroaching on invincible—that's when you're fucked. Once you become an expert at something you aren't exempt from making mistakes, you just make them less frequently. Still, all it takes is one. My sister had gone through a horse stage in her early teens, and my mother was never quite comfortable with any of it. So when Christopher Reeve had his tragic accident years later, well past Kate's own time riding, my mother said during one phone call, “Thank God she never got hurt. I'm so glad she didn't stay with it.”

After I finished my beer I asked directions to the ski patrol office—
No, no emergency,
I told the woman, I was looking for someone I wanted to say hello to. When I got to the office, a guy, Tom, was waiting to meet me. I told him I was a close friend of Leo's and asked if anyone who had worked that day was here now. Tom was forthcoming with his condolences—he knew about it, of course, but said nobody who'd been there that day was in the office now, but if I wanted he could check who might be out on the hill. I thanked him and told him not to bother, but asked him to share my thanks with them.

“His wife told me how kind everyone was,” I said. “I wanted to tell you how much that meant to her, and how much it means to me,” I said.

“We did what we could,” Tom said. “It's not a part of the job any of us ever wants to do.”

I stayed less than two hours. I didn't need any longer than that, and after that much time, I had to leave. I drove back down the mountain the way I'd come, reversing my trip to Portland. Audrey had told me someone from the resort had driven her and the boys home that night, and as I drove west, all I could think about was how that journey must have pushed her to the brink of madness. What an agonizing trip it must have been for the four of them. A nightmare end to the day their family had begun that morning, the same as every other.