Snowed Under (Aspen Peaks #2)

23. Cooper

“ W here are we going?” Mini Coop stood at the side exit of the lodge with his arms stretched wide.

I pointed toward the main entrance, down by the floor-to-ceiling windows and the fireplace. “We’re not training at the normal spot.” That was all I was going to give him for now.

I’d texted Madeline first thing this morning, avoiding the topic of what last night meant exactly. I’d gone straight to asking if her nephew was free today. It was my first full day off in the last ten days, and I felt no hesitation about spending it training the kid for the competition coming up in a little over a month. She responded with a quick and simple yes, so I swooped in to grab him. Part of me hoped I’d see her there, and the other part didn’t, in case I’d see regret in her eyes. Luckily, I got both. Charlie was in the driveway with his bags, and Madeline stood at the window of their kitchen. She gave me this smile that was polite but reassuring and felt like enough. I waved, she waved back, and the two of us left for the lodge to start covering some ground.

His basics were down; Finn had laid that foundation well enough that I didn’t need to correct any of it. His ski switches and nose butters were perfect. He was close to nailing a fifty-fifty on a box, and although his pop-offs needed some refining, pretty much everything he had learned up to this point was immaculate. All we needed to work on was some of the skills that would earn bonus points and let him practice on a steeper mountain than we normally trained on.

Our typical lessons were on the east side of the lodge, where we had enough of a curve to use the tiny escalator to guide the kids up and let them ski down. It was safer that way, not just because we could keep them all in a confined space, but also because if we didn’t, we’d have to take them on the lift, and I didn’t trust them to not fall out or jump off at the wrong spot and get lost forever in the mountains.

But one-on-one lessons were usually when I pushed them a little further.

“We gotta take the lift today.” I jerked my chin over to the far right of the lodge’s exit, where the bottom of the lift was located. In the distance, you could see a line forming in front of the waiting area. Rows of people decked out in their gear, snowboards and skis lined up, watching the light turn from red to green, signaling it was their turn to move.

“Seriously?” Charlie tried to hide his excitement, but his mouth was dropped open, and he was looking up at the lift area like it was a sacred place only accessible to the most honorable skiers and snowboarders such as myself.

“Yeah. Come on, man. We gotta beat the crowds.”

The best time to ski was in the morning. The snow hadn’t been churned up too much yet. It was still tightly packed and ready for you to make new paths on it. It was busy this morning, a relief after my lessons this week had been slow. But we should still be riding on new snow where we were going. We would have been here earlier, but I had a strict rule about sitting down and eating an enormous breakfast before taking the lift. There were few things worse than getting a couple of rounds in and dealing with hunger pangs that were so piercing you couldn’t focus on anything other than the hole that was your stomach.

“O-Okay.” Mini Coop readjusted his poles and followed me to the lift.

We got our skis tightened and double-checked our equipment, then we took off toward the small line.

Beside me, Mini Coop was bouncing on his feet, watching every person move in front of him. Studying the way they crouched when the seat came, how soon they pulled the bar down, and how they held their poles.

“You’ve done this before, right?”

I guess I should’ve asked before we were next to go up, but part of me had just assumed he had been with his dad when he was younger.

“No,” he whispered back to me, and I felt like I’d cheated him on this already. Cheated Madeline too, considering she should have been here for this.

“No biggie.” I shrugged. “Super easy. When the light turns green, we’re gonna climb up like you always do, then a chair is gonna circle around, so just bend your knees a little bit and let it sweep you up. You’ve done a lot more difficult things. Trust me.”

His cheeks turned pink right where his orange ski mask was pulled below his mouth, his matching goggles resting on his forehead. “Okay.”

“I can ask the lift guy to slow it down if you want.”

A gray-bearded man named Colbert was working it today. All I knew about him was that he hosted a Dungeons and Dragons meeting every Friday night and that his wife ran a pottery class on the side, but he seemed cool.

Charlie’s face turned sour in an instant. “No!” he hissed in a harsh whisper, as if just the thought of talking to Colbert was mortifying enough.

I shrugged. “All right, if you say so.”

When our time came, he did exactly as I did, eyes tracking my every movement and copying them. We settled onto the chair when it came around, and once I knew he was settled, I lifted up the bar and pulled it over both of us.

“See? No biggie. If you build it up in your head, you’ll freak yourself out.”

He nodded. “Like the mute grabs.”

“Exactly like that.”

For the first couple of minutes, we sat in silence as the lift pulled us farther from the ground. Our skis dangled below, swaying back and forth in tandem. Even after all these years, I still wasn’t quite used to the view. Mountaintops covered in snow, the ground a brisk canvas of white and splattered with dark-green tree limbs off in the distance. The chatter of people on the lift, the wind whirling around us as we moved higher and higher. The sound of cables pulling, of skis rushing down the mountain. It was every bit as incredible now as it had been the first time I came up here.

“If you look all the way to your right, you’ll see the airport.” I pointed toward the area, my hand directly in Mini Coop’s face.

He kept his eyes down, though, watching our feet rise farther and farther from the earth. “Mm-hmm. Cool.” His hands tightened around the lap bar, and I was willing to bet his knuckles were turning white underneath those black gloves.

“You know,” I said while Charlie’s face was still tilted down, “I was terrified the first time I rode the lift.”

Terrified was probably putting it lightly, considering I’d clung to Pops’s legs, begging him not to make me go. I’d heard a kid at school talk about some great uncle’s cousin’s sister-in- law getting stuck on a lift at the highest point for hours. Which was completely unrealistic. If I had just mentioned it to Pops, he could’ve told me the resort had systems in place for things like this.

“Really?”

“Yep. My grandfather took me. Pops said if I just kept my eyes on the prize—he meant the ride down—that I wouldn’t even notice how far up I was.” It’s funny to think about how often I used that advice now. Looking out at the final goals in life made day-to-day life a little easier.

At that, Mini Coop lifted his eyes to mine. “Your dad didn’t take you?” The question was more than just one. It felt like he was reaching, asking for more. Wondering if my dad had passed like his.

“I don’t know my dad.” I shrugged.

“At all?”

“Nope.”

“Not even his name?”

I shook my head. “Nuh-uh.”

“So…it was just your mom?”

“Yep. I never really felt like I was missing out on much, though. Ma is great. She always felt like enough.” I reached a hand over and readjusted where his helmet had slipped a bit. I needed to remember to pick up an extra from the locker room; this one was way too big.

Charlie stared at me for a while with clear curiosity, so I answered the questions I could see him thinking. “When I turned sixteen, Ma told me she could probably track him down if I wanted to meet him. But I chose not to. My mom worked hard to raise me, and I might be biased, but I think she did a good job. Pops helped a lot, though—that was her dad.”

Charlie nodded and faced forward, eyes on the mountain we were approaching. “So you don’t, like, miss him?”

“Hold up.” I held a hand out. “Our situations are different. I don’t miss my dad because I can’t really miss someone I never knew. You—” I cut myself short from saying anything about his dad. I didn’t know the guy beyond a golden picture frame and a couple of stories from Madeline.

I took a deep breath and approached it at a different angle. “You had a dad, and you lost him. That’s different. You can and should miss him. It’s okay to. It’s a good thing, really. In a way, it helps keep him alive.” It was the way I kept Pops alive and with me. Missing his wrinkled face and witty comebacks. Remembering how he took his senior coffee and how he looked at my grandmother like she was an angel, even when they were old and gray.

Charlie adjusted his mask, pulling it up his face a little before yanking his goggles down. “Okay.”

He said it in this wavy voice that made it sound anything but okay. “Okay?” I leaned in, saw how anxious it made him to see the bar move, and leaned back to normal. “I’m serious, Mini Coop. Don’t keep that stuff in. Have you tried talking to your May about it?”

He shrugged in this pathetic little way, like the marionette holding him up had gotten a finger cramp. “She’s got a lot going on.”

I nodded. “She does. But not too much that she can’t talk to you about it. She’d probably love it, honestly.” I backtracked quickly and felt like a traitor. “I would assume she would, anyway. I love it when my mom comes to me when she’s sad about Pops. Feels like we’re bonding over it in a way.”

Charlie shook his head. “May’s different. She doesn’t like to talk about it a lot. Sometimes I’ll get upset about…it, and she’ll tell me a story that I didn’t know about him. She seems almost happy at the moment. But then she gets all sad for a few days, and she gets stressed with school and stuff.” Through the lens of his goggles, I searched his eyes. He turned his head before he continued. “I hear her cry sometimes at night. She thinks she’s being quiet. I think she just wants me to think she’s okay. But I know she’s not.”

And just like that, I was punched in the gut so hard, I thought I might throw up. I imagined Madeline lying in her bed, curled up with a blanket, trying to cry as quietly as possible, sucking in tight, short breaths, with her eyes bloodshot and heavy. I could see Charlie or Half-Pint checking in on her. She’d wipe those tears away, staple on that fake-smile mask, and nod. “Sorry, just watched a sad movie,” she’d say, assuring them again and again. Repeating the night over and over. It was so easy to imagine because it was so Madeline. And I wondered then whether Madeline didn’t have a sense of who she was because she’d been wearing a mask for so long and couldn’t tell which face was real and which wasn’t.

“Well, if it helps—” I cleared my throat, trying to toss any indignation out of it. “If you ever want to talk about your dad, you can call me.”

“I don’t have a phone,” he pointed out.

“Okay, then write it down. Bring it to our lessons, and you can rant or—” I stopped before I said cry. I had the feeling that Mini Coop was still young enough to think crying was an embarrassment instead of relief flooding your body. Like a scientific reaction meant to comfort you. “Or talk about him as much as you want.”

We were approaching the lift fast, and I wished we could ride on here a little longer to get another glimpse of this family.

“Okay,” he whispered. “That sounds okay.”

“Okay.”

“He liked to ski.”

That I wanted to hear more about. “Your dad?”

He nodded and adjusted his helmet again when it tilted. “Not like professionally. He wasn’t as good as you.”

I snorted.

“But he was good, from what I remember. My mom hated it, so we would stay back. But Dad would take pictures and videos of the views and stuff for me. It was cool.”

I sucked in a breath. Any kind of pinch of sadness I had over my own father’s absence immediately left my body. I never cried over the guy, never missed him. But I guessed a very small piece of me had wondered about what I was missing out on. Father-son stuff that I hadn’t experienced. Things like this, I guess. My dad had chosen to leave me, and he’d done it gladly. Charlie’s dad was ripped from this earth, probably clinging to his children in the process. Anything I had missed from that random guy my mom had married was abysmal in comparison.

So we sat for a little longer. Just two fatherless guys sitting on a bench, dangling above a blanket of snow, staring out at the kaleidoscope of blue and white around us. We rode the lift past the first stop, where we were supposed to get off, down to the second hill, and all the way to the third before looping back. Neither of us said a word about wanting to hop off. So we made a full loop.

A loop around the mountain and back, full of questions and answers, teaching and learning and references that seemed to always circle back to his aunt. And I sat there, soaking in every word about the Sage family.

He talked about his mom’s dream of driving an ice cream truck around and how she always told him he would hang out in the back, in charge of taste testing each product. His dad would joke that there would be nothing to sell if the two of them were left alone in the truck. He told me about his grandparents, Madeline’s parents. How they didn’t like talking about his dad, or how, if he brought him up, they would immediately get busy. He talked about video games he wanted to try one day and his goals of having a job just like mine one day. I stayed quiet, beyond the random question here and there, and just let him talk. I nodded along with his discussions about his little sister. How she glared at strangers in grocery stores or how she had an odd love of water—always wanting to wash her hands or brush her teeth for an excuse to be near it. He thought she might become an underwater welder or something one day, and I couldn’t disagree. I pictured taking them to a beach one day, and I imagined Piper hissing at random bystanders. I told him I was aware of her hatred for strangers—me included—and he shook his head. “You’re not in the circle yet,” he explained.

The circle, come to find out, consisted of Charlie, Madeline, and his grandparents. He also said that sometimes even his grandfather didn’t belong in the circle, depending on Piper’s mood. “Don’t take it personally,” he said at the sight of my half pout. “No one sticks around long enough to get in the circle. And if you do, it’s kind of a miracle.” That made me even more determined to crack the code that would allow me to squish in there without her noticing.

He spoke of Madeline too. Of how she loved the Beach Boys and coffee, even at nighttime. How she had a special place in her heart for limoncello cake and white cheddar Cheez-its. He told stories of her before his dad passed. How she would come to visit with containers of Nerf guns or Lego sets, claiming she was the best aunt. He would remind her that she was their only aunt, and she would say “No, in the whole world.” She used to collect perfume bottles—still had a box of them in her closet, apparently—and Christmas was her favorite holiday.

I collected each fact like it was a precious gift and stowed it away for later. As if I was planning on writing some kind of Madeline dissertation and needed every single piece of her documented in my brain.

On the loop back, we talked about his crush on Faith—that he refused to label as a crush but didn’t fight me on when I called it that. He told me he liked her smile and thought she was “super funny.” Which, for some reason, made me laugh. In turn, that made him laugh, and everything we described after that was in partnership with the word “super.” This mountain is super high. Your helmet is super big. Your head is super big. I am super at saying super. The list went on, both of us laughing when the other found a new super way to use it.

At one point we came to an agreement that we needed a super handshake, just for the two of us. It consisted of some high fives, fist bumps, and a few bird-flapping motions. It was a little long and a little awkward for a quick handshake, but still, it was something only for us.

“All right, we only do that if something really cool happens.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “I’ll tell you when it’s time.”

Eventually, we did jump off the lift. Both of us somehow changed when we skied our way down.