Winners (7 page)

She left Bill and the hospital a few minutes later. She had assured Bill that Ben Steinberg would be monitoring Lily closely and let her know if he needed her to come in. Tim’s funeral was the next day, and for now she needed to be with her kids. This time Bill didn’t complain.

She was home a few minutes later, and all four of her children had stayed home from school, and her neighbor Sally McFee had come by and brought them food. Everyone wanted to help. Chris and Heather were sprawled in the living room, watching daytime TV, Adam was in his room, lying on his bed and staring at the ceiling with a blank expression, and Jimmy was sitting next to Heather, sucking his thumb, which he hadn’t done since he was three. They were a forlorn group, and Jessie looked no better as she walked in. Sally showed her what she’d put in the fridge for them. It was a mountain of food that none of them wanted to eat, but Jessie appreciated the thought. Everyone in the neighborhood felt terrible for them. Tim had always been the nicest guy they knew, and had even been helpful with their kids, not just his own. He was always willing to drive carpool, have their kids spend the night, or help a friend. Jessie looked at Sally with devastated eyes, and then Sally hugged her and they both cried. Jessie knew without saying it that her life would never be the same again.

They talked about the accident at the chairlift then, just to change the subject, and Jessie mentioned that she had a patient who had been one of the people who had fallen off. Sally and her husband knew two of the ski instructors who had been killed. They compared it to a similar accident that had happened more than thirty years before. The chairlift had been well maintained, but it was just one of those fluke accidents that happen, and sweep lives away, and alter other lives irreversibly, like Lily’s. It was fate, like Tim’s death two nights ago. And now Jessie had the rest of her life to face without Tim. After Sally left, Jessie went upstairs to pull out clothes for the kids to wear to their father’s funeral, and something for herself. She looked into Tim’s closet then, to find something decent to put him in, even though the casket would be closed. She had promised the funeral parlor she would drop off a suit for him to wear, and as soon as she opened the closet door and looked at the clothes he would never wear again, she just stood there for a minute, sank to her knees, and sobbed.

While Lily slept that morning, which she still did most of the time, Bill went back to the house to take care of some things. He called Angie, his assistant in Denver, and gave her a list of calls to make for him. He had told her about the accident by e-mail, and she was horrified by the news, and anxious to do whatever she could. She adored Lily and was dedicated to Bill. He gave her the names of neurosurgeons all over the world that he wanted to check out, and he said he had no idea when they’d be coming home. It was too soon to tell.

And after Bill spoke to her, he called Penny in St. Bart’s. The accident had happened two days before, but he hadn’t had the time or the heart to call her. She wasn’t part of his family life, and although she had known Lily for two years, they weren’t close.

He was planning to leave Penny a voicemail, and thought it unlikely she would answer, and was surprised when she picked up. He hadn’t wanted to give her news like this in a text, and for a moment he wanted to hear her voice. He had called no one until then, except his assistant a few minutes before.

The moment she heard his voice, Penny could sense that something was wrong. She felt guilty for not having called him from St. Bart’s, but she had been intensely busy for the past week. For her, work always came first—it was a choice she had made with her life twenty years before. At forty-two, she had never married or had children and had no regrets. Her clients were her kids. Her business meant everything to her, and that suited Bill, who wasn’t prepared to give more than he had. Lily owned his heart. And there had never been serious room for anyone else in it, since his wife died.

“Something wrong?” She could hear instantly the somber tone of his voice when he said her name.

“Yeah, very much so,” he said, as tears filled his eyes and he cleared his throat. He didn’t want to get emotional with her, he just wanted to let her know, but it was comforting to hear her on the phone. They knew each other well after all. “Lily had an accident in Squaw.” He told her what had happened then, and Penny was horrified. He didn’t tell her the doctor had said she would never walk again—the rest was bad enough, and he didn’t believe it yet.

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry. Do you want me to fly out? I was leaving tomorrow anyway. The opening went really well,” although it seemed irrelevant to both of them now, in the face of what he had said. She had been planning to stop in New York to see a client there on the way back, and another in Chicago, but said she was more than willing to come to California and drive to Lake Tahoe to be with him instead. He was touched by the offer, but it didn’t feel right to him. He wanted to focus on Lily and no one else. “Will she walk again?” Penny went right to the obvious question, and Bill sounded hard when he answered.

“Of course she will.” He had no intention of sharing Jessie’s prognosis with her. He thought it was wrong anyway. And he didn’t want Penny thinking of Lily that way—it would make it all too real. “I’ve got Angie looking up a list of neurosurgeons to consult. We want the best care we can get. This is a backwater town, although the surgeon is supposedly pretty good, she’s Harvard trained, but not as sophisticated as doctors in big cities. I want to take Lily for some other consultations when we leave here.” Penny could sense that there was something he wasn’t telling her. Bill had put on his toughest voice, and she wondered if they had given him bad news. If it was about Lily, he wouldn’t take it easily.

“That makes a lot of sense,” Penny said quietly, and didn’t press him further about it. “She’s lucky to be alive. Is there anything I can do?” she asked, sounding wistful for a minute. She would have liked to be there for him in a crisis like this. She liked Lily, and Bill, but she was also aware that he never let her into the inner sanctum of his life, and he was even less likely to now when Lily needed him so much. There hadn’t been much room for her before, and there would be even less now. It was just the way he was. Lily was the center of his universe, and Penny was just a place he visited from time to time.

Marriage or even living with a man had never been her goal. And too much time with anyone, or intimacy, made her uncomfortable as well. Her career was easier to manage than a man who might take over her life and try to control her. Like Bill, she had fought hard to improve her life and establish her business. Her own security and independence were more important to her than close personal bonds. But when she heard the sadness in his voice, she was sorry he wouldn’t let her be there for him. Still, she wasn’t surprised. That wasn’t the kind of relationship they’d shared, which was strictly meant for good times, and nothing else.

“I’ll let you know if there’s anything,” he said kindly. “For now, she just has to get strong and heal. She came through the surgery very well, but it was only yesterday. I’ll call you when I can,” he promised, but she doubted that he would. She could hear it in his voice. She was on the outside now, and always had been, except for the occasional nights they spent together when Lily was out, or on trips. Bill Thomas had very successfully compartmentalized his life and guarded his heart from anyone but his daughter.

“I’ll talk to you soon. Give Lily my love,” she said as they hung up. She sent her love to Lily, but had never offered it to him, nor did he want it for himself. They had no commitment to each other, and had preferred it that way. And for an odd moment after they ended the call, Penny had the feeling that he had just said goodbye to her and their relationship. She wasn’t sure, but she could sense that he wanted no distractions now from his helping Lily to recover. And Bill had the same feeling as he sat looking out the window in Squaw Valley, at the chairlift that had broken two days before and changed their lives. The entire area had been cordoned off, and a large part of the mountain was closed and would stay that way for some time until they solved the mystery of what had happened and why.

Lily developed a fever that night, which wasn’t unusual after surgery, and Ben called Jessie to report it to her. They had just come back from the funeral parlor, where the entire medical community of Squaw Valley, and several others, had come to pay their respects to Tim. Parents of their children’s friends were there, men who had played tennis and softball with Tim when he had time. There were people Jessie didn’t even know he knew, and others who only knew her. She was shocked by how many showed up, and she felt drained when she got home and Ben called. And her children looked miserable too. The casket with their father in it had been there, but at Jessie’s request, it was closed. It would have been too much to see Tim lying there. She was sure that she would have lost control and become hysterical if it were open, and she didn’t want her children having the memory of him that way. What Jimmy had seen that night after the collision was bad enough, and he was still talking about the blood coming from his father’s ear, which Jessie knew was from the head injury that he had sustained and that had killed him.

“I’ll come in,” Jessie said with a sigh when Ben called her about Lily’s fever. It was fairly high, and something to watch, but not unusual in the circumstances, but Jessie wanted to see her anyway to be sure. She was responsible and diligent even now, no matter how hard for her.

“You don’t have to,” Ben reassured her. “I’ll stick around for a while.” His girlfriend Kazuko had come to the funeral parlor, and Ben was going to be one of the pallbearers the next day. Kazuko was a nurse he had met at UCSF, and they had lived together for years. She had come to Squaw Valley from San Francisco with him, and the living arrangement they had seemed to work. He was two years younger than Jessie, and at forty-one, he still didn’t feel ready to get married. Jessie and Kazuko had talked about it several times, and Kazuko had given up hope that he ever would. She was forty-six years old, totally devoted to him and didn’t seem to care if they got married now. She said she felt too old to have kids, and had given up the opportunity, to be with him. She worked at the hospital in radiology, had dozens of hobbies, and spoke fluent Japanese, although she’d been born in the States. She and Ben had gone to Japan several times, and he had learned Japanese too. They were avid skiers, which was what had brought them there in the first place, and Ben loved their life in Squaw Valley. Ben had grown up in L.A. and said he never missed it. Mountain life suited him far more than it did Jessie, who still missed city life occasionally, and the cultural life it offered, after her years in Boston and Palo Alto, near San Francisco, and growing up in New York before that, but she had come to Lake Tahoe for Tim and never looked back.

When Jessie got to the hospital to check on Lily, she was sleeping, and Bill was roaming the halls, worried. Jessie examined her and was satisfied that it was a minor but ordinary complication of the surgery, and she and Ben agreed, but she felt better for having seen her.

“How are your kids doing?” Bill asked her before she left. He had been surprised that she’d come in, but Lily was a major case, and although she trusted Ben implicitly, she wouldn’t have been comfortable if she hadn’t seen her herself. She didn’t say it to Bill, but he understood and was impressed. If the news she had given him weren’t so bad, he might have liked her better than he did. As it was, he resented what she’d said about Lily never walking again.

“My kids are okay, I guess,” Jessie answered his question. “As okay as they can be right now. It doesn’t seem real to any of us yet,” and as she said it, she realized that that was how he felt about Lily’s accident. It took time to absorb the reality of change into one’s life, especially changes as major as the ones that had just happened to all of them.

“Thank you for coming in.” He knew the funeral was the next day, and her showing up at the hospital to check Lily’s fever was a sign of her meticulous diligence.

She reassured him again about Lily, and then left, and went home. The children were painfully quiet, and the house was eerily silent since the accident. It was hard to imagine laughter there again. The older children were distraught. Jimmy was already sound asleep in his mother’s bed, and Adam was playing video games on the TV, with a glazed look. They all felt as though they were underwater, moving in slow motion.

Tim’s mother was alive in Chicago, but had dementia, and wouldn’t understand what was going on, so she didn’t come. Jessie had lost her parents years before, fairly young, so the children had no grandparents to share their grief with them. All they had now was their mother.

The funeral the next day was even worse. It had a horrifying unreality to it, as the priest talked about Tim and the choir sang “Ave Maria,” while Jessie and her children cried. Almost every medical practitioner, nurse, and technician in Squaw was there. Jessie recognized hundreds of faces but wouldn’t remember any of them later. The pallbearers were all fellow anesthesiologists he worked with, and Ben, and Chris had asked to be one of them too. It nearly ripped out Jessie’s heart as she watched him and realized for the first time, as her son helped carry his father’s casket, that he was now a man. He had just turned eighteen. And this was the most awful rite of passage of all.

They went to the cemetery afterward and buried Tim in the frozen ground. Someone had told her that the two teenagers who had died in the accident, in the other car, were buried the same day, and those who had died in the chairlift accident would be buried in the coming days. And as everyone went back to Jessie’s house afterward, it began to snow again, big fat flakes of snow that looked like something in a snow globe or on a Christmas card. She stood outside their back door for a minute, to get some air, and to escape all the people who had come to pay their respects, and she looked up at the sky and thought about Tim. It was impossible to believe she would never see him again. She couldn’t imagine a world without him in it, and tears rolled slowly down her cheeks, as they had for days. She shivered in the cold and went back inside, knowing, as she had since it happened, that her life would never be the same.