The Memory Thief (13 page)

I don't have a problem falling asleep these days, but I sure wish I did. It's not like I know what it was like for Aidan, being buried by the avalanche, but I have a good imagination and what I lack in knowledge, I've made up in creativity. I do everything I can to direct my thoughts elsewhere—take a long bath after Gabe's gone to bed, drink a glass of wine, attempt to stumble through a short story, since my attention span seems to have gone the way of all flesh—but almost every night, after I close my eyes, I see him fall, watch the snow bury him. I try to dig him out, but I am alone on the mountain. There is no one to help me.

My only consolation is that I've also been dreaming about us, how we used to be. It's like my dreams have a better memory than I do—they hold all kinds of details I've forgotten, like the way my green velvet couch had a stain from the Malibu Bay Breeze that Jos spilled on the arm, or how I used to have these gorgeous blue glass plates, broken in the move to Boulder, or how Aidan's eyes held all the light in the room when he told me to have faith. Those good dreams almost make the bad ones worthwhile. Almost.

Tonight, I stand at the foot of the mountain, watching Aidan fall. I know this isn't how it really happened, but in my dreams the avalanche is like a monster, chasing him. It is hungry, and he is what it wants. I call his name, over and over, but he can't hear me. There is nothing left for me to do but to watch him die. I listen to my voice echoing in the clear cold air, drowned out by the roar the mountain makes as it cracks apart, as it comes for him. The cold caresses my cheek, animate and intimate, like fingers stroking me.

Then the mountain is gone. I'm standing in the kitchen of Aidan and J. C.'s old house, the one Aidan and I lived in when we were first married, making coffee in the Cuisinart that looks like it could benefit from having its own remote control. Yawning, I open the refrigerator to look for milk. I find it, but it's expired two days ago. I open it anyway and am bracing myself to take a whiff when I hear the front door open and close.

“Hello?” I call, setting the milk down on the counter. With that now-familiar sense of déjà vu, I turn around. I know what will happen next, because I've lived it before. This is the day I came to see Aidan in Boulder, after he asked me to marry him and I told him I needed some time.

Sure enough, J. C. appears in the kitchen doorway, raindrops glistening in his short dark hair. He's wearing his work clothes—jeans, boots, and a black T-shirt that reads AD HD, with a lightning bolt in the middle. It's Aidan's shirt. His hands are dirty, and he has a fair amount of sawdust on his face. The olive skin of his arms is coated with it.

“Hi, honey, I'm home,” he says. He looks me up and down, and I realize I'm only wearing a tank top and drawstring pajama pants—no bra, and no underwear, either, for that matter. “You just wake up?”

“Yep,” I say, fighting the urge to cross my arms over my chest. “I got in pretty late last night, and then we didn't go to sleep right away.”

“I know. I was here.” His voice is neutral, but I can tell he isn't happy. The last time I saw J. C.—at the goodbye party for their Switzerland expedition in July, when I'd caught Aidan with someone else—he'd made it pretty clear that his interest in me was more than friendly.
I don't like drama,
he'd said, brushing my hair out of my face.
But I like you just fine.
Then he'd driven me to the airport without pressing the issue. They'd left for the Eiger a couple of days later, and I haven't spoken to J. C. since. Now here I am, debating whether to marry his best friend. It's a little awkward, on a number of levels.

“You were awake?” I say, making myself meet his eyes. “You should've come out and said hello.”

“I didn't want to intrude,” he says, and leaves it at that.

“You wouldn't have been intruding. I would have been glad to see you.”

“That would've been one of you. I think A. J. was counting on having you all to himself.”

“Aidan doesn't own me,” I say, hoping J. C. was asleep when Aidan and I went into his room and shut the door. The alternative is too embarrassing to contemplate.

J. C. looks like he has several choice responses to that, but he settles for changing the subject. “Is that coffee fresh?”

“Just made it. And I was trying to figure out if this milk is still good. Do you have any ideas?”

He crosses the counter to me and sniffs it. “Ugh. Definitely not. You want me to pick up some more?”

“Would you? I'd really appreciate it.”

“No big deal. You like milk, or half-and-half, or some of that fancy flavored creamer stuff?”

“Just milk would be fine. Thank you.” This is one of the reasons I like J. C. so much—he's just naturally considerate. And he thinks of the details, which so many guys—okay, people in general—don't. How many guys would have offered to go back out right after they'd gotten off work, to pick up milk for their best friend's girlfriend's coffee—and then improved on that offer with a set of additional options?

A guy who had designs on said best friend's girlfriend, that's who.

Oh well, you can't have everything. And I really, really don't like black coffee, even with lots of sugar.

“I'll be right back,” J. C. says, and lopes out of the kitchen like he's glad to do it. I hear the front door open and close again, and then the hum of an engine as his Forester starts up outside.

That's my cue to make myself more presentable. I go back into Aidan's room and dig through my suitcase for clean clothes. Then I grab my toiletry bag and make my way into the bathroom to brush my teeth and take a shower.

Under the hot water, I ponder whether being alone in the house with J. C. is a bad idea. Maybe he's forgotten about his momentary interest in me, that stuff he'd said when we'd hung out after Aidan was such an ass. It had to have disappeared in the wake of Ellis's death, buried under the weight of more serious considerations—so to speak. Maybe he'd been drunk, for that matter. Maybe he'd just been trying to cheer me up.

As for me, I have to do my best to squelch whatever curiosity I've had about him. It's inappropriate. I love Aidan, and I'm making up my mind whether to spend the rest of my life with him. It's completely wrong for me to wonder whether J. C. is as considerate in bed as he is in the other areas of his life. I'm just happy to see him again, and relieved he didn't end up at the bottom of that crevasse like Ellis. Who wouldn't be pleased to see someone, after they'd almost died? I need to pull myself up by my moral bootstraps and start acting like a decent person. After all, I'd given Aidan such a hard time about Kate, whom he hardly knew, and here I am, imagining making out with his best friend. What a hypocrite I am.

Knock it off, I tell myself, turning up the hot water and stepping under it. I shampoo my hair, then condition it, trying to think of nothing beyond my first cup of coffee. That will fix everything.

When I step out of the bathroom, fully dressed, J. C. is standing there with a steaming mug. “I heard the water go off,” he says.

“Just a second.” I duck into Aidan's room and dump my dirty laundry and toiletry bag back into my suitcase. Then I go back into the hallway and hold out my hands for the coffee.

“I hope I got it right,” J. C. says as I tilt the mug back to take a sip. “I tried to remember how you liked it.”

I take a deep gulp, closing my eyes in appreciation. “It's perfect,” I say, with complete sincerity.

“Good. Now let me get mine.” He heads back to the kitchen, and I follow him. He's changed clothes, into navy longboard shorts and a clean, sky-blue T-shirt. I try not to notice how the muscles in his shoulders shift under the shirt.

“So how's it going?” he says, his back to me as he doctors his coffee.

I consider what to say, whether to ask him about what happened on the mountain. In the end I decide discretion is the better part of valor. If he wants to talk about it, he'll bring it up himself. “Not too bad. Work is okay. I have a fair amount of freelance stuff to do, so that's good. Gives me the freedom to do things like this—take trips on the spur of the moment—as long as I have my laptop with me. You?”

“I've been better,” he says, turning around to face me with his coffee mug in his hand. This close, I can see how tired he is. Small surprise he'd heard us come in; he looks like he hasn't slept in a week. “I've lost friends before. You come to accept it, when this is what you do. I mean, we've all got to be a little crazy, right? And this is the way it works out sometimes, the cost, or whatever. But Ellis—it hit me hard. His two little girls. Their eyes.” He sighs. “Whenever I go over there, they look at me like I killed their dad myself. And Patty, she tries to act like she doesn't blame me, or A. J., either, but I see how she looks at me when she doesn't think I can see her. She can't stand me now. I promised Ellis that if anything ever happened to him, I would look after all three of them. But they don't want to have anything to do with me, so that's a problem.”

There is silence, as I try to figure out what to say that will be helpful, or at least not trite. Finally I say, “He asked you, not Aidan?”

“A. J. is flighty. You want him to have your back in a crisis, for sure, but for the long haul? Come on. You know how he is.”

Do I? I'm not so sure. The many faces of Aidan James, that's him.

“Doesn't matter anyhow,” J. C. says. “She doesn't want anything to do with A. J., either. After all, he made the decision to toss those slings over the cornice, instead of taking the time to anchor in. Not that that would've mattered, necessarily, given that the whole thing ripped loose, but we'll never know. She doesn't say it, but I know she blames him for not short-roping Ellis down, or not arresting earlier, before we fell all that way.”

That gets my back up, no matter how much sympathy I have for Patty and her children. “How was he supposed to do that? He was falling, too, and Ellis had to weigh at least two hundred pounds. And you were passed out, pulling you and Aidan down. He couldn't do everything.”

“Yeah,” he says, staring into the depths of his coffee mug. “Fat lot of good I was. If it wasn't for A. J. finding some decent ice, we'd all be dead.”

“Do
you
think he made a bad decision?”

He tips his mug left, then right, watching the contents swirl. “I think he did the best he could. Should he have anchored in? Maybe, but there's no way we could've known the cornice was going to come down, and no guarantee that the spot we anchored to would've held. Plus, when you're up there, you've gotta be confident, you know? When the shit hits the fan, you don't have time to take a consensus poll. It's afterward that the doubts set in—should I have done this? What if I'd done that? Especially when you have family members to deal with. And I can't say a goddamn thing. I didn't object when he decided to use the slings, and I sure as hell wasn't any help once I got knocked out. I was deadweight on the rope. If he hadn't arrested like he did, we'd all be at the bottom of that crevasse with Ellis. Aidan saved our lives.”

“How did you pass out, anyway?” Aidan has never been too clear on that part.

“I hit my head,” J. C. says. “There was rockfall everywhere, and I'm not sure whether that's what got me, or whether I just banged into the face somewhere. Either way, I was out for the count.”An expression I can't define crosses his face—maybe regret. “Ellis was in bad shape. He had HACE—cerebral edema. A. J. told you this, right? We gave him oxygen, and a shot of Dex, but it didn't make shit difference. He came to enough to know what was happening to him. After, I thought maybe A. J. should've never given him that shot. Maybe it would've been kinder.” He shivers. “That crevasse—I just remember coming to, and hanging there in the dark, trying to figure out where I was. I could see a thin line of light, and then I heard A. J. screaming. I'd never heard him sound like that before. He'd been at it for a while. His voice was hoarse. And I knew there was no one below me on the rope. I could feel it. I hauled it up, and the end was just frayed. Cut through. When I saw that, my heart sank.”

“What happened, do you think?”

“No telling. But I'd guess the rope caught on something and got sliced, either right before we hit the crevasse or right after. A. J. says he could swear Ellis was still on it all the way down. He told me he could hear him hollering, and the rope jerked hard when we went in, like there was weight on it below me … and then it didn't seem so heavy to him, anymore.” I wouldn't have believed J. C. could look pale, but he manages. “After A. J. got me out, he went down to look for Ellis, as far as he could. He called and called, but Ellis never answered. I didn't know how I was going to get him out of there. He just wouldn't give up. And my head hurt so badly I could barely see.” He stops talking then, and looks grim. “Too many things just went wrong,” he says when he starts up again. “It was bad. A. J. and I hardly spoke to each other the whole way home.” He shakes his head, and I can tell he's trying to shake the memory out of it. “I always say too much when I'm around you,” he says, looking at me as if I somehow am coercing the information out of him.

“You want to talk about something else?” I offer.

“Sure. You pick.” He turns and starts rifling through yesterday's mail, piled on the counter. My guess is that he wants to hide his face.

“How come you're home so early?” It's the most innocuous topic that comes to mind.

He slits open an envelope, swivels back to face me, and then examines the contents with disgust. “It started raining, so they let us go. We were at a good stopping point, anyhow. We'd gotten a whole floor down, and everything else we had to do was outside.”