They left about an hour after breakfast the following morning. There were plenty of other people around at first on the marked trails, but they fell away into isolation as Jem took JJ farther into her own territory, routes through the woods that only someone like her would know.
For a lot of the time they said nothing, a silence almost demanded of them by the pillows of snow, hollow woods, earth-hugging sky. And when they spoke their voices carried on the crisp air, an intimate winter acoustic.
There wasn’t much to say anyway, all their memories of skiing cross-country already familiar to each other, a whole evening spent talking about it on his previous trip to the inn. It was almost as if they’d skied together before.
After a couple of hours they began skiing steadily upward, long zigzags up a deep wooded slope. At one point she turned, her breath short, and said, “This is a tough climb, but it’s like so worth it when we get to the top.”
He nodded, not saying anything, leaving the fading trace of her voice to linger there.
He spoke when they got to the top though, a simple “Wow” as he looked over the expanse of the untouched snowfield stretching out flat below them, more wooded hills on the far side, nothing between them but an untouched white bedsheet of snow, an inviting emptiness.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Stunning,” he agreed.
They stood there for a couple of minutes, just staring at it, a whiteness that seemed to swallow up vision and sound. Finally she said slowly, “I used to ski a lot with my dad when I was a kid. A little kid. A few years ago I found this place on my own, like, nearly the end of the season, and I just found it. So I told my dad about it, and he said we’d come here together sometime, so I could show it to him.”
He looked at her, her face still, the only time she’d spoken about her father since that first day, apparent now that it had been something she’d wanted to talk about sooner or later. And though his nerves were bristling it was something he’d wanted too, despite the discomfort it would carry within it.
“He never came,” said JJ, sensing it in her voice, knowing it from the time scale.
She shook her head in response but added, “Not just because of that. Maybe if he’d lived, like, another ten years, we’d have come here together. We were kind of growing apart, you know; I wasn’t his little girl anymore.”
The thought of the girl in Moscow hemorrhaged into his mind, and JJ said in reflex, “That’s the worst thing about death, it has a way of catching you just as life’s overtaken you.
She looked at him like she was thinking about it, possibly not understanding, then looked ahead and said, “You’d lost someone close when you first came here.”
“Close,” he said, thinking of his already distant memory of Aurianne, “but I don’t think I lost ...” He ground to a halt, suddenly realizing what she’d just said, what she’d meant by lost. “You know about Aurianne?”
“Not just Aurianne ...” She turned again and met his gaze, her eyes searching, something building up behind them. Finally she produced a weak smile and said, “I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time.”
He stared at her, numb, ambushed, the fact only slowly sinking in. He was confused too by the way she looked, compassion where there should have been anger, hostility. JJ managed to say only, “How?”
“Ed,” she replied matter-of-factly. “Ed and me have always been kind of close. He trusts me, thinks I can deal with the truth and stuff, whatever. He told me about Dad a few weeks after it happened, even like, about him knowing and everything, about asking for the right guy to do it if it had to be done.” She looked away from him, staring out over the snowfield, JJ’s mind stalled by her composure, by the fact that a girl of her age had carried this around with her, shocked too that Holden had burdened her with it, a weight of knowledge that was an act of cruelty in itself. “Then last September, he told me that guy was coming to the inn, that he was coming to help him with a problem. He didn’t tell me until like, Christmas, you know, what the problem was. But you were the guy.”
She turned briefly, long enough to offer him another fleeting half smile, a nod to the strangeness of things. And as he stood there looking back at her he thought of the way she’d looked at him on the stairs that first time, and of her taking him to her father’s grave. It all seemed to add up now, the way she’d been with him.
“What about the others?”
She shook her head without looking at him. “They don’t know. Ed might seem flaky but he has people pretty well figured.”