A long pause. “High school.”
Goodness, it was like pulling teeth. “With a girl?”
He took a deep breath and crossed his legs out in front of him at the ankles. “It’s a long story. You sure you want to hear this?”
“If you want to tell me.” I motioned with my hands to the blizzard swirling in the openings of the bridge. “I happen to have some extra time right now.”
“Buckle up, then.”
It took him a minute to start the story, but slowly, he began. “When I was a senior in high school, I was dating this girl. Kelly. I’d known her my whole life. I had a crush on her off and on growing up. We were friends, but I was always quiet and didn’t think she’d have anything to do with me. She was…a terror. Wasn’t afraid of anything. Lived every second going a hundred miles an hour.” He chuckled dryly as though he was remembering something from long ago. “Anyway, our senior year, we ended up working on the school paper. She was one of the photographers. I’m not sure what she saw in me, but we started dating, and it got serious pretty quick. We started planning to go to college together, and we were even talking about marriage.” At my surprised face, he amended, “Not right away, but you know, later. Down the road.”
I nodded.
“Anyway, that March, we had one of the worst winters Vermont had ever seen. It might as well have been January. It was pretty crazy, but it made for good skiing. She had taught me to ski earlier that winter, and so, every chance we could, we hit the slopes. For our six-month anniversary, I wanted to surprise her, so I planned this big ski trip. Just the two of us. I wanted her to think I was more of a rebel than I used to be, so I convinced her to cut school that day, and we rode up to Killington Resort together. It was two months before graduation.”
My hand covered my mouth to brace myself as he continued his story. The tension in the air was thick and dense with untold grief.
“Anyway, it was going to be our last run, and she wanted to do the hardest run. She’d done it before, and I wanted her to think I was pretty hot stuff, so we went for it. It was all going fine until about halfway down. I was behind her, watching her go off a jump. From what I could tell, she caught the edge of her ski and plowed right into a tree. It took her down immediately. I skied over to help.” He paused, looking as though he was far away in his thoughts. His voice was low and steady. He wasn’t speaking, as though the grief was fresh and painful. He was calm and matter of fact but with an air of regret and sadness lingering around the words. “I thought she was playing a joke on me at first. She liked to pull pranks, but usually she’d start laughing after a few seconds. But she didn’t. Then, I noticed she wasn’t breathing. It just looked like she was sleeping. But she was gone.”
I sucked in a deep breath as I imagined a younger Miles watching all that unfold.
“I started doing CPR and yelling for help. The medics got there pretty quickly and took over for me, but she was gone. She was gone before I had even gotten to her.”
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered to him.
He blinked and looked away from me, biting his lip. Suddenly, his reaction to the events of the evening made sense.
“Sorry,” he said, smiling meekly. “That’s why I freaked out earlier. I thought, for the second time in my life, I’d been involved in killing a girl I cared about.”
“What happened after that?”
He paused, staring into the distance. “She had been pronounced dead at the scene. And by that time, her parents had gotten there. That part was pretty horrible, too. They rode in the ambulance with her. My mom and dad had been visiting my older sister that weekend, so I had to drive my truck home. The ambulance had left, and her backpack was still in my car. And her lip gloss. I’d bought her a drink from the gas station on the drive up, and she wanted to save the other half of it for the drive home because she liked the taste of it flat. Just so many things like that. I was in complete shock. Shaking like a leaf. I definitely shouldn’t have been driving.” He blew out a breath.
Rubbing his eyes, he sat up straighter and cleared his throat. “I’m sorry. I’m good, I promise, I’ve made my peace with it all, but it’s been years since I’ve talked to anybody about it. And tonight just brought it all back, I guess.”
“It’s probably good to get some of it out again.”
Miles shrugged and cleared his throat. “What about you? What was it like for you to lose your dad?”
I stared at him for a long moment, jarred at the sudden change in the conversation but realizing that he needed a distraction.
“My experience was different. I had a couple of years to prepare, so when the day finally came, it was almost a relief. He had been in such pain—those last few weeks, especially.”
My mind flashed back to those days just before his death. There had been sadness and regret, but the memories were sweet. No matter how sad you are to lose someone, spending the last few days in the company of a loved one about to pass on were some of the most precious moments of my life. I was honored to hold my dad’s hand those last few hours. The part for me that was difficult to think on was the days and weeks and monthsafterhis death. When life moved on without him.
With a shaky breath I kept talking. “But I get what you mean about the things left behind. I remember when they moved his body out of the house. I just walked around in a daze and looked at all of his stuff, just sitting there waiting for him. He’d had these brown slippers next to the bed for years. Before he was bad enough that hospice had to be involved, he was in the middle of a book. It was on his nightstand. Never got it finished. His coffee mug was in his spot by the sink. There were so many parts of him scattered all around the house, waiting for him to pick them up.”
There was silence for a beat, and then Miles said, “Death sucks.”
“Then, your mom puts the brown slippers in a box labeledWalt, along with Walt’s shoes, and Walt’s coat, and Walt’s high school yearbooks, and moves them downstairs. Out of the way. Then, she puts the half-read book back on the shelf and washes the coffee mug. All that he was, now stuffed into a box because someone couldn’t stand to look at it anymore.” I was aware of Miles’s eyes on me. I knew I should stop, but found I couldn’t. “And then, a new guy moves in, and you find out your home is really just a house. Not a home. Lumber and nails. Four walls to a room. Out with the old, and in with the new.”
Salty tears were streaming down my face at this point. I tried to wipe them away, but they were coming faster than I could keep up. I knew I would regret this happening in front of Miles, but there was no way I could hold it back any longer. The dam I had so carefully constructed around my heart had burst. I had wanted to say these things to somebody—anybody—for so long, but I never felt I could. My emotions were coming out in a wave, and I stood powerlessly in front of it as it moved to crush me.
From his place at my side, Miles reached over and wrapped his arm around my neck, pulling me gently to him. My body turned and curled against him, my head on his shoulder and my hand splayed out on his chest. He didn’t try to whisper weightless words or shush me, for which I was grateful. For the first time in our arrangement, I didn’t let myself think. I was all heart. And for a person not used to allowing myself to feel, the experience was both terrifying and liberating.
“I didn’t want to feel anything this Christmas,” I whispered into his shoulder.
He pulled back to look at me, brow furrowed. “Why?” he asked softly.