The Chair (16 page)

“Fine.” Corin laughed.

“Splendid.” Tesser cleared his throat. “Now let’s see, when to meet. How urgent is this?”

“Very.”

“All right then. Let’s say six tomorrow morning. At my house. It’s the same one as last time we saw each other. I think. Let’s see, I haven’t moved for forty-three years and I last saw you . . . yes, same house. I’ll persuade you to tell me all about what kind of waters you’ve muddied your feet in, and I’ll tell you about the trouble I’ve led skirmishes into for the past decade.”

Corin inwardly groaned. He’d forgotten Tesser’s penchant for early morning meetings. Night Owl meets Crack of Dawn Man. But the price was small. If anyone could pull back the layers on the chair it was the professor.

T
hat night Corin served Tori a spaghetti dinner with three different sauces and tried to ignore the anxiety pressing out on all sides of his chest like an overinflated soccer ball. Would Tesser have any answers? He needed them.

By the time they polished off their bowls of Cookies and Cream ice cream, he’d successfully shoved his worry to the back of his brain but it refused to vanish completely.

“Great dinner, we need to get a picture of it,” Tori said.

“But the meal is over. We should have taken a shot before all the bowls were empty.” He motioned toward the red-stained bowls and plates sitting on his seventeenth-century seven-foot Jacobean oak table.

“Nah, now is the best time; it shows we enjoyed it.”

Corin smiled. “Okay, I’m with you.” He laid his camera on his built-in bookshelf and set the timer for ten seconds, then scuttled back to Tori, put his arm around her waist, and smiled.

Ten seconds later the camera flashed and Tori pranced over to the camera and pulled up the shot. “Nice!”

“Let me see.”

Where they’d stood obscured most of the dishes, but years from now—if they were still together—they’d be able to remember it was spaghetti.

Tori studied his camera. “You have 238 pictures on here as far back as three months ago. Don’t you ever download your photos?”

“I should, but I never seem to get around to it.”

“I’ll do it for you right now if you want.”

“Sure, you get that going and I’ll clean up the table and get the dishes taken care of.”

A few minutes later Corin stood at his sink hand washing the dishes from their meal. It’s not that he didn’t appreciate his dishwasher. There was something about washing dishes by hand that was therapeutic, as if he could wash away the regrets of the past and photos he wanted to wipe out of his memory forever.

He glanced through the kitchen door at Tori sitting in front of his laptop. Would they be together in two months? Two years? Two decades? Did he want to be with her that long? Maybe. He didn’t know and suspected she didn’t know either. Three months together wasn’t long enough to know. Actually it was, but he still needed time to . . . He stopped, plate in one hand, a light blue scrubber in the other.

He needed time to fix things that never could be fixed.

He shook the thoughts from his mind and turned off the water.

“Hey!” Tori called from the living room, “I got ’em all downloaded.”

“Great. Thanks.” Corin wiped his hands on a dish towel and joined her.

“Is this where you keep all your photos?” Tori sat on the couch, studying his laptop, her legs crossed on the coffee table in front of her.

“What?”

“On your laptop, is that where you keep all your pictures?”

“Yeah.” Corin sat beside her and propped up his legs next to hers.

“And where do you keep your backups?”

“Backups?”

Tori flicked him on the shoulder with her forefinger. “You are not going to tell me you don’t back up your photos.”

“No, I would never tell you that. I’ll let you come to that conclusion on your own.”

“Tell me you’re kidding.” Tori clicked on a folder opening up some year; he couldn’t tell which one unless he squinted and he didn’t feel like squinting.

“I’m not exactly a technowizard when it comes to computers.”

“I understand. It’s quite a challenge to stick a blank DVD into your computer, drag your photos over into a file, and hit Burn.”

“Ha.”

“I’ll do it for you if you like.” She opened another folder and spun through a set of photos. It looked like his backpacking trip to the top of Castle Peak.

“You would?”

“Sure. And you should back them up into the Cloud too.”

“The Cloud?”

“You have to know what the Cloud is.”

“Storing it on someone else’s server where people can steal your images.” He closed his eyes and leaned his head back into the softness of his leather couch.

“We’re talking pictures here, Corin. Do you really have such valuable pictures that people would try to steal them?”

“Probably not.”

“Wow.” Tori bumped him with her elbow. “I didn’t know you skied.”

“I don’t.” Not for the past ten years.

“This isn’t you in this picture?”

Corin opened his eyes and looked at the computer screen. His heart rate accelerated and his face grew hot. How did she find that? “What?”

“Right here.” Tori pointed to the picture filling his laptop’s monitor. “Looks like a wicked jump. You have to be twenty-five feet in the air. Nice. Who’s that with you? It is you, right?”

Heat continued pouring into Corin’s face. “Where did you find that? Why did you dig that up?”

“What’s your problem? It wasn’t hidden; it was right there in that folder with a bunch of other pictures from long ago and far away. Are you one of those people who puts dead-end signs on memory lane?”

“Delete it.” Corin reached over and slammed his laptop shut. “I . . .” He got up, strode to the front door, yanked it open, and spilled down his steps into the front yard.

Not cool. Not right for that photo to pop up out of the past and grab him around the throat. Especially with Tori there. He spit on the ground. Why did she pull that thing up?

He grabbed the aspen tree at the end of his walkway and squeezed. He needed to get a hold of himself. It wasn’t her fault. He should have deleted the picture a long time ago, but he’d buried that part of his life and hadn’t remembered the photo was still on his computer. It must have been transferred over when he did the dump from his old desktop.

Corin turned and stared through his living room window, the warm glow of the lamps on either side of his couch bathing Tori in a soft light. He would have to tell her something, but what? How the day that photo was taken was the darkest of his life? How he’d unsuccessfully wiped its existence from his memory? How a few minutes ago his heart had once again been ripped from his chest and doused in forty thousand gallons of guilt and regret and she’d just lit the match?

As he hiked across his lawn, up his front porch stairs, he decided to tell her as little as possible.

She looked up as the front door creaked open. “Are you okay?”

“No.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” She gestured toward the laptop.

“No.”

“You should.”

“I know.”

“Talk to me.”

Corin stumbled over to the couch and slumped down beside her. “Did you delete it?”

“I get the feeling it’s not mine to delete.”

“I suppose not.” Corin leaned his head back again and clicked his teeth together as if he could bite the emotions coursing through his soul in two and make them die.

“You need to let some light into whatever dark closest you’re hanging out in at the moment.”

“You can’t image how dark.”

In the next moment the entire memory flooded his mind as if it had happened yesterday.

“That’s a double black diamond just begging to be conquered,” Shasta said after he skidded to a stop at the top of a narrow chute barely ten yards wide and sidestepped over to Corin.

“You think it’s enough of a challenge for us?”

“Hardly. But for the next week I can’t do anything pegging on the far side of mildly challenging.”

“No worries; I’m not taking you down it. We have other plans.”

“And you’re going to tell me about them when?”

“When we get there.” Corin motioned with his ski pole toward the lift that would dump them at the top of Heaven’s Gate. “Let’s go.”

A minute later they settled onto the lift and lurched up the mountain at a forty-five degree angle, the sun creating a blazing white carpet dotted with cliffs and bristlecone pine trees.

“How are your feet?”

“Toasty.” Shasta laughed. “I’m so ready to marry Robin.”

“Good. Then coming up here wasn’t a waste of time.” Corin swung his boots and skis to keep the circulation in his legs moving.

“The place we’re going isn’t packed with our usual insanity, right?”

“Nope. We’re going someplace special.”

“Why doesn’t that bring me any comfort?”

Corin smiled. “If after we’re done, if you don’t agree it was the absolute right call to do this, I’ll eat one of my gloves.” He shook one of his blue-black gloves in the air and shouted, “Chow time.”

“I’m going to hold you to that.”

Four minutes later they skidded to a stop at the top of the lift and gazed out over the miles of slopes below them. A pin-thin road slalomed through the white miles to their right, to their left were bright red signs proclaiming DANGER.

“Right or left?” Shasta asked.

Corin grinned. “Left.”

“Why did I know you were going to say that?”

“Because I’m your brother.”

“Nothing crazy.”

“Nope, nothing crazy.” Corin raised his dark brown sunglasses and winked. “Trust me.”

After tightening his boot buckles, Corin shoved off and traversed over the edge of a small cliff just past the danger sign, and the sound of the lift vanished. They’d have to take it slow for the first fifty yards, but after that the slope was more than manageable for skiers of their ability.

He led them down a narrow, tree-lined path that stayed high on the ridge. Six hundred or so yards later, they emerged into an open bowl offering another panoramic view of the resort two thousand feet below them.

Corin threw his arms wide and gazed from side to side at the snow-shrouded mountains. “Nice scenery, huh?”

“Gorgeous.”

Cars crept along the winding highway just beyond the resort. Tiny specs, dark against the pristine slopes, were skiers and snowboarders carving up the snow, looking for a slice of fun on the frozen water.

Corin smiled to himself as he squinted toward the spot he’d picked out last week a half mile away. This day was perfect. No snow, only sun creating the perfect setting. Shasta would love it.

“Ready?”

Shasta nodded and Corin shoved off across the face of the bowl of virgin powder. Five minutes later they reached a long chute with a moderate slope.

“We’re here.”

“You ready to reveal your grand plan?”

Corin pointed to a rise at the bottom of the slope and Shasta studied the area below them.

“You’ve found a jump.” Shasta took off his sunglasses and squinted against the glare ricocheting off the snow. “A big one.”

“That I have.”

“I can’t do it, bro, you know that.” Shasta put his sunglasses back on. “How would I look walking down the aisle with crutches?”

“Stylish.” Corin grinned. “C’mon, you want to do this. Last jump before you’re locked in forever.”

“Locked in?”

“In a good way.”

“Why do you always do this to me?” Shasta sighed. “For the last few years you’ve been making us skate on paper-thin ice.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means we’re getting older and you’re like a junkie always having to find a higher high.”

“You’re not saying you’re getting scared in your old age are you?”

Shasta stared at him. “I’m saying there’s an edge over which adventure turns into leaving any kind of control too far back in the rearview mirror.”

“It’s one jump.”

“Besides, Robin will kill me if I’m sitting in Jamaica with my leg wrapped in a thirty-pound cast.”

“They don’t do casts like that anymore; it would be four pounds max.”

Shasta glared at him.

“You really want to bag out on this?” Corin spread his arms, palms up. “Last jump as single brothers?”

Shasta dug his ski into the snow. “How big?”

“Twenty-five, thirty feet high. Sloped landing, forty degrees. Perfect. I was here last weekend to check it out and did the jump three times.”

“That’s the jump?” Shasta asked as he gazed down the slope.

“Yeah, you’re looking at the right one. Straight down the chute, just to the left of the jagged rock about two thirds of the way down.”

“I shouldn’t do this, Corin.” Shasta zipped up his coat to his neck. “I’m not doing it.”

“You have to.”

“Why? We’ve jumped off millions of these things. Why is this one so important? Why can’t my wedding take priority?”

Corin pointed down the slope. “See anyone moving down there?”

Shasta moved his head to the left, then to the right as he peered down the slope. “Yeah, I see someone. You know him?”

“It’s Tony Budiseski. I asked him to come.”

“Why?”

“It’s your wedding present from me to you, bro.” Corin smiled. “When we launch ourselves into the air, Tony is going to snap a thousand high-speed shots. We pick the best one, blow it up into a poster, and you put it on the wall of your garage so you can remember us when you’re all domesticated. ’Cause after we do this, life will never be the same.”