In Broken Places

13




I WAS FAST ASLEEP when Mom barged in. I think I’d been dreaming about touring Italian vineyards with George Clooney, so I wasn’t exactly in the mood for interruptions.

“Shelby! Get up!”

“Wh—what?”

“Get up.” She pulled the blankets off me and threw me the clothes I’d left on the back of a chair a few hours earlier. I was eighteen and still living at home, which was embarrassing enough without tossing in the kind of wake-up call that reminded me of my first day of school.

“Mom, what—?”

“It’s Trey.”

The air rushed out of my lungs and something thick passed in front of my eyes. The look on her face didn’t belong with Trey’s name. Not in a world where things made sense. I shook the cobwebs from my mind and dressed while Mom found her keys and grabbed her purse. I was in the driver’s seat before she was out the door.

“Where?”

“Memorial,” she said, handing me the keys with unsteady fingers. “Drive fast, Shelby.”

It took us twenty minutes to get to the hospital, twenty minutes of speeding through red lights and blowing through intersections and trying not to shriek at my mom to give me more details. She knew so little, which was the way she’d always liked things, but I needed facts. I needed to know times and places and diagnoses and prognoses and anything else I could wedge into the chaos of my brain to still it. Trey was in the hospital. He’d been brought in by his roommate. We needed to get there fast. That’s all we knew.

I ran from the car to the reception desk, unsure of where Trey was, leaving my mom to follow alone. I sprinted from there to the south wing and rushed down an endless hallway of fluorescent lights and gaping doorways and starched-white nurses with concern and boredom on their faces. Somewhere at the end of that hall was the emergency room, and somewhere in that room was my brother, the boy I loved, the man who needed to be alive. Please, God, let him be alive.

A nurse saw me coming and intercepted my flight.

“My brother. Trey Davis!” I would have screamed it if my lungs had allowed it, but they’d stopped doing their job back in the vines with George Clooney.

“Are you a relative?”

“He’s my brother. Is he okay? Is he alive? What happened to him?”

“You need to calm down, honey.” She forced eye contact, and the connection helped me breathe. “I’ll find out where he is, and we’ll see if we can let you in to see him.”

My world was spinning as she walked away. I braced my hands on my knees and took a few deep breaths while the lights got brighter and the sounds got clearer. I saw the nurse’s feet returning and didn’t dare look up. What if . . . ? What if . . . ?

“We’re about to move him to a floor, but if you come with me, you can sit with him for a few minutes.”

I straightened. He was alive. “Please,” I said to the nurse, then followed her through a maze of screaming children and drunks and bloody dressings and beeping monitors to my brother’s side.

They’d dressed him in a hospital gown and covered him with a blue blanket. His head was turned away from the door. The nurse patted my arm and stepped away.

“Trey?”

He turned his head and I could see a five-year-old in his eyes. They were scared and sad and battered.

“Trey,” I said again. My body carried me to his bed without conscious thought. I ran my hand down his arm to the bandage on his wrist, so white and clean and terrifying. I wrapped my fingers over his and held them fast. There were black streaks around his mouth and down his chin. And in his gaze . . . It was his gaze that undid me. I sat on the edge of his bed and held his hand against my chest and raged mutely, my head thrown back, my throat clenched and convulsing, my eyes on the ceiling, on the lights, on God. . . . And when it passed—when the swollen air deflated and the sharp, crude fear abated—I held his hand to my lips and prayed. And prayed. And prayed. While his hollow eyes, torpid and spiritless, stared through me.

They moved him to another floor, where the nurses were friendly and the bedrooms were yellow-beige. There was moaning and misery filtering through the walls, so I stayed close to Trey, hoping to absorb most of the ambient pain with my body before it got to his. Mom went off to fill out papers and talk to his roommate and arrange for follow-up care, and I sat by his bed, wiping the charcoal residue from his mouth and laying my palms across his wrists as if my desperation could speed their healing. He didn’t speak when Mom came back, nor when we tried to feed him, nor when the nurses came on rounds in the morning. A doctor asked us to wait outside, and apparently Trey answered his questions. He was silent when we reentered the room. He met my gaze when I said his name, which was the only word I seemed capable of formulating. He knew the subtext.

“Trey.” Why did you do this?

“Trey.” Your eyes are scaring me. Please come back. Please come back, Trey.

“Trey.” I should have known. I should have guessed.

“Trey.” We said he wouldn’t break us. We—said—he—would—not—break—us.

We spent the rest of the day at his bedside. Mom tried to be chipper. She failed. I suggested that she go home after supper. Get some sleep. Maybe bake some lasagna. It was the Davis family crisis dish. She left and I pulled a large brown pleather chair up to Trey’s bed and went back to holding his hand, covering his wrists, and saying his name. After a while, I put my head down next to his arm and fell asleep.

The nurses woke me some time later. Trey was still there, still staring, still silent. I brushed back his hair and told him his color was improving. He closed his eyes.

The nurses allowed me to stay the night. They told me the chair reclined into a bed and wished me a good sleep. I was just about to settle down when I heard Trey’s voice.

“Shell?” It was raspy and raw, but it was life.

“We said he wouldn’t break us, Trey.” The words were out before I could stop them, before I could even sit up and touch his arm.

“I’m alive.”

“Oh, God,” I said on a sob. “Oh, Trey, you’re alive.”

Several minutes of silence passed while I looked at him and tried to smile and searched for words. Anger, fear, and gratitude were clashing in a brutal battle above Trey’s bed, and the air was brittle with the strain. I could feel its stranglehold on my muscles, eyes, and lungs.

Trey dozed for a while and seemed less murky when he woke. He turned his head toward me.

“I’m sorry I scared you.”

“Trey . . .”

He stared at me for a long moment. It felt like he was drawing strength from me, like he was delving into my own limited supply of hope and vitality and siphoning it out for his survival. “Did Ian find me?” he asked.

I nodded. “He said he was worried by your last phone call, so he ran home to check on you during a break in his shift.”

“Great security guard he is.”

I let a long silence fill in the details of the horror in my mind. “If he hadn’t sensed something was wrong . . . Trey . . .” I didn’t know how to ask, but I needed so desperately to know. “Why?” I finally blurted, fresh terror seizing my throat.

He looked at me like I should know.

“We said we’d get through it. No matter what,” I whispered.

He sighed and shifted, turning his gaze on the ceiling, frustration tightening his jaw. “I’m just tired of it, Shell.”

I felt anger at his weakness. He was supposed to be the resilient one.

“Tired of what?”

“Of being pissed off,” he said, his eyes firing shrapnel at the ceiling. “Of nothing making sense. Of wanting to scream or hit things or . . . whatever, all the time.” His passion made him cough, his abraded throat constricting around the failure of his act.

“But, Trey . . .” I wanted to say something powerful to fix his world so it wouldn’t be so treacherous, but I knew that his scars—like mine—required more than words.

“He’s supposed to be dead to me, Shell. I’ve done everything I could to make him dead to me, but he keeps . . . he keeps coming back.”

“He’s gone, Trey. He’s been gone forever.”

“But not in my head.”

I knew what he meant, but my indignation and distress outweighed my sympathy. “So you tried to kill yourself?” My voice was hard with disbelief. “You decided to bail out on me and leave me alone? Thanks a whole lot!”

“I wasn’t—”

“You promised me! You swore you’d stick with me.” I tried to stand, but my muscles were too stunned by the past twenty-four hours to lift me out of my chair. I felt electrocuted by horror, dismantled by sorrow.

“Shell—”

“We haven’t heard from him in four years, Trey.”

“I know. But he’s in my head. He’s—in—my—head,” he said again, anxiety reverberating in his voice. “I can’t get him out of my head.”

I tried to think of something comforting to say, but nothing came to mind. It was Trey who was supposed to be the strong one, Trey who was supposed to have the answers, Trey who was supposed to convince me, as he had done so many times, that life was worth fighting for.

“Did something happen?” I asked, desperate to know the impetus that had sent him hurtling into the abyss of self-destruction. “Should I have seen something . . . or known something?”

He shook his head. “It’s just too much,” he said, and his voice held the forlorn emptiness of an abandoned home. “I try to hate him so much that he won’t matter anymore, but . . . it’s like he’s still watching me and forcing me to be who he wants me to be.” His eyes roiled with need and anger and pain. “But I don’t want that. I don’t want anything he wants anymore.” Tears welled in his eyes for the first time since he’d tried to end his life. “And then sometimes . . .” He swallowed convulsively, averting his eyes.

“What?”

He shook his head and bit his lip. I laid my forehead against his arm and listened to him breathing. After a few moments, he said, “Sometimes I look at myself and all I see is him. And when it gets really bad,” he added raggedly, “when it gets really bad, you look at me like you see him too.”

I raised my head and opened my mouth to protest, but the honesty of his gaze halted my disclaimers. He was right. There had been seconds, fleeting seconds, when his incoherence and anger had revived the fear and guilt I’d so often felt around my father. “I know you’re not Dad,” I said quietly, stroking his arm with my hand. “It’s just . . .”

“I know, but I could be. You know? I think I could be.” He sighed.

I sighed too as I contemplated the tortuous journey that had led us to this place—Trey in a hospital bed, broken and confused, and me at his side, relieved and terrified.

“I never once thought you were him,” I said again with all the conviction of my fear. “Never once—not even when you did things that weren’t like you.”

“Okay.” It was a mechanical response, devoid of faith. He didn’t know how to trust me. His self-condemnation left no room for extenuation.

“Never once, Trey. I promise you.” I squeezed his arm to force his attention. “And if you’d succeeded—if you’d died . . .” A sob lodged in my throat, and all I could do was continue to convince him with the passion in my eyes. I could tell he was far from believing.

When I found my voice again, I took a deep breath and asked, “What do you think he wanted you to be?”

It took him a while to answer. He looked toward the window and his eyes got distant. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “A world-class businessman. A soccer star. Or something else I’m not.”

“So you did this to get even with a dad we haven’t heard from in four years?” I touched his bandages and felt a shiver ripple down my neck. I’d come so close to losing him. “I can think of simpler ways of getting the message across.” My voice was hoarse and overfull.

“Yeah, but not as dramatic. This is the drama-queen side of me.” He managed a smile.

“Who knew?”

“She’s a late bloomer.” He coughed.

“Want something to drink?”

“Yeah.”

“You can be whatever you want, Trey—a bouncer, a ballerina, a candlestick maker . . . Just be alive, okay?”

I got him a glass of water and he fell half-asleep in the seconds it took me to return to his bedside.

“Guess the muddlehood got a little out of hand this time, huh?” he said in a weary voice.

“Yeah. And it’s probably going to take a while to unmuddle it too.”

“I’m going to go to cooking school,” he said, eyes closed.

“Right now?”

“Someday.”

I knew “someday” would come much later, only after he’d recovered from this day. “Yeah?” I said. “I’m going to become a football coach.”



Coach Taylor was on the move, striding up the steep, uneven path like there was a mountain of Twinkies waiting for us at the top. Shayla was hot on his heels, though she took three steps for each one of his, and they were miraculously managing to carry on a conversation as they climbed. I, on the other hand, was a fair distance behind, breathing like an asthmatic heifer in a marathon and squinting up into the distance with the hope that Sausenburg’s tower would suddenly materialize out of the forest.

I had three problems with the adventure at hand. One, it required physical effort. I was okay with physical effort if I could work at my own pace and self-medicate with my foods of choice along the way, but this was most definitely Scott’s pace we were keeping, and the food of choice he’d brought along was oranges. Oranges. ’Nuff said.

My second problem was the fact that it was cold—bitterly cold—and I didn’t like it much. It had taken me ten minutes to get Shayla decked out in so many layers that she now moved with all the grace and agility of the Michelin Man. This fact, however, wasn’t slowing her down, what with her growing infatuation with the guy in the lead, whose enthusiasm and energy made me feel like I was moving at the pace of, say, a tree stump. A tree stump with screaming calf muscles and something wet trickling down the middle of her back, but I didn’t think I had the fortitude to consider that just yet.

And my third problem was causing the kind of internal head-slapping that threatened to dismantle the precarious can-do attitude I’d brought along for the hike. The problem was that I had no one to blame for this excursion but myself. And maybe the Betty Crocker syndrome. Back in the good old days when my idea of cooking had been boiling up some water for Kraft macaroni and cheese, I hadn’t had any delusions of grandeur. I’d gone about my business in the kitchen in the five to seven minutes it took to cook the noodles; then I’d plopped down at the table and declared myself a genius. That simple. But now that I was possessed by Betty Crocker’s ghost, I’d been doing things that were as foreign to me as, say, bringing soup to ailing men, which had led to climbing up a mountain to a castle on a frigid day with a four-year-old and her way-too-fit partner in crime.

Scott had returned to school on the day after the soup incident and had tracked me down in my English classroom during lunch. He’d handed over my Tupperware and cocked his head to the side again, which had the unpleasant effect of making me wonder how weird I really was.

“Stop looking at me like that. It was only soup.”

“It was great soup. I think Shay’s carrots put it over the top.”

I’d been wondering since yesterday what had put me over the top. “She was adamant about bringing it to you,” I lied. “I’m glad you enjoyed it.” Score one for being a mom—you got to blame things on the kid.

He took a deep breath. “Okay, so I’m going to go out on a limb here and revisit the battlefield of skirmishes past,” he started.

I held up my hand. “You sure you want to go there? ’Cause I tend to pull out my zingers when things get weird, and I wouldn’t want you to get, you know, injured or anything.”

He laughed. I loved it when he laughed. It made me feel less fat and more funny. Which was good. He propped against one desk and I propped against another.

“Can you maybe keep them sheathed until I’m finished talking? Then you can let ’em fly.”

I made a mental leap back to the humiliating monologue about turkey I’d submitted him to and decided that the least he deserved was a chance to put me through the same.

“Shoot,” I said.

“First, I need to apologize.”

Huh? I felt a monologue coming on. “What for?”

“Pouting.”

I fiddled with some papers on the desk and said a clueless, “Uh-huh . . .”

“It’s a character flaw—another one. And not very adult of me.”

I smiled and wondered if that was the appropriate response. I was a bit outside my comfort zone here.

“So anyway,” he continued, raking his fingers through his hair and shifting to sit on top of the desk, “remember the gym?”

“Yeah, it’s right over there.” I pointed over my shoulder.

He did his play-along-here-will-you? look. “I mean—do you remember the last conversation we had in the gym?”

“Sure.” It was on a par with the time Trey had crushed my thumb in a car door when we were little.

“I acted like a jackass.”

“Is that any way for a missionary to talk?” I was trying to lighten the mood.

“And I’ve been acting like a jackass ever since.”

“I prefer ‘horse’s patooty.’”

“Shelby . . .”

“Sorry—please go on.”

“So I apologize for that.”

“You’ve been fine.”

“I’ve been distant. Like I said, I was pouting.”

And here I’d blamed it on my hair. I really liked Scott at that moment. One, because he looked good in forest green, and two, because he was acting like a grown-up—and doing so for my sake. It felt kinda flattering, in a dangerous sort of way.

He let out a quick breath and said, “So here’s my question.”

“Is this the battlefield part?”

“I really think Lady Shay would like the Sausenburg ruins. And I think you might enjoy the view from the tower. And I guess what I’m saying is that I’d love to take you ladies on a field trip—to make amends for being a horse’s patooty.” He paused. “And . . .” It was what you might call a pregnant pause, and pregnancies—real and metaphorical—had always made me nervous.

“We’ll be happy to!” I jumped in. Maybe too fast and too loud, because he looked a little taken aback.

He cocked his head again.

“Stop doing that.”

“What?”

“Looking at me sideways.”

“Was I doing that?”

“You were.”

“I’ll try to stop it.”

“Good.”

“Saturday?”

“Whatever.”

“Two o’clock?”

“Sounds like optimum castle-climbing time to me.”

“Good—looking forward to it.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

He walked to the door and turned back. “No zingers?”

“I’m being good,” I said. “But you should see the verbal constipation in my brain.”

He laughed.

And here we were, days later, turning a field trip into a fitness test. The air was like a sheer sheet of ice, and it seemed to amplify the brightness of the sun.

“You okay, Shelby?” Scott called from up ahead.

I’d stopped to catch my breath and work on my attitude. “Just enjoying the view!”

“You’re surrounded by trees!”

“I like trees!”

He trotted down the path to me with a grin on his face that looked like it said, You’re so cute when you’re winded. The winded part made sense. But the cute part? I dismissed it as a figment of my imagination.

He came alongside me and matched his pace to mine. “You doing okay?”

I nodded. He had his hand on the back of my neck, a gesture I’d seen him use a hundred times while talking with his players, and certainly the furthest thing from an intimate touch, as my scarf and coat formed a pretty thick barrier, but still . . .

“You coming?” Shayla was waiting for us up ahead, her purple knit hat a little askew on her head.

“Coming, Shayla! Wait right there, okay?” She crouched down to peer closely at something on the path. “How much farther?”

Scott looked around for landmarks. “Not far. Maybe another couple of minutes.”

“Well, good,” I said, “’cause you’re starting to look a little tired, and I’m sure you could use a rest.”

“Not your idea of fun?”

“Put it this way,” I said, and I realized that the walk had gotten much less painful since he’d turned up at my side. My lungs were even starting to work better. “Would I enjoy sitting by a fire with a good book? Yes. But it’s good for Shayla to get outside and it’s good for me to get exercise, so . . .”

“You really don’t like exercise, do you?”

“Exercise is okay. It’s exertion I despise.”

He smirked. I liked his smirk. “Want a piggyback ride?”

“I can’t afford your hospital bills.”

We reached Shayla and spent a few minutes admiring the entirely unadmirable stone she’d found on the path. She taught us how to say stone in German, clearly disapproving of our accents, then declared that we should set off toward the castle again. I wasn’t pleased that my daughter had gained an elementary understanding of German in the time it had taken me to forget the fifty words I knew.

When we got to the ruins, Shayla went a little nuts. It’s not like it was anything extraordinary. The tower was impressive, but only the bottom half of the castle’s outer walls still stood. There were piles of rocks and gaps where windows used to be. These were definitely ruins. Except in Shayla’s mind. To her, this was an ornate vestige of the days of kings and queens and princesses with long, flowing hair. Though she didn’t really have the verbal skills to paint the picture of what she was seeing in her mind, the expression on her face said it all.

She and Scott started up the tower together. It had a circular wooden staircase that wound up into the dark interior before changing, toward the top, into a zigzagging section of steps. As this wasn’t really a tourist attraction, there were no lights inside, just a dank darkness and uneven steps that scared Shayla into whining. Her voice reached me from inside.

“I don’t like it. I don’t like it anymore. I want to go out!”

I could hear Scott’s softer voice trying to coax her up a few more steps to where daylight streaming through a narrow window would make the space brighter, but Shay’s voice was rising as her panic increased. Like a dutiful mom, I entered the tower and started to climb.

“Shayla, honey, are you up there?”

“I want to go dooown!”

“But you’re almost at the top! Look up—do you see more light, Shay?”

There was a little hiccup from far above me. “N—no . . .”

I heard Scott’s voice whispering, “Here—let me carry you.”

“I want to go dooown!”

She had to be nearly at the top. “I’m coming up too, honey. You go on up and tell me what you see, okay?”

“Look, Lady Shay, see the door up there and the light shining through it? We’re almost there.” Scott’s voice was soothing and calm. “Just a few more steps and . . . Here we are!”

I climbed the last few steps and came out on top of the tower, where a panoramic view of mountains and valleys stole my breath. Or maybe it had been the climb. I preferred the beautiful-view scenario. Stepping to the edge of the platform where Scott stood with Shayla in his arms, pointing in the direction of Kandern so she could get her bearings, I marveled at the simplicity of the moment. Shayla wasn’t even aware of my presence, so entranced was she with the height of her vantage point, the breadth of the view, and the now-clearly-visible outline of the castle’s ancient perimeter. I caught myself wanting to hook an arm through Scott’s and stare out at the scenery with them, but I held back and merely stood next to them, contemplating the view.

A few minutes later, after a mildly traumatic descent back through the darkness, Scott and I sat on a wall and watched Shayla gathering leaves. We were deep into November, so they were half-decomposed and sodden, but she was building a princess bed with them, and in her mind, they were golden.

“She’s a keeper,” Scott said, his eyes on the little girl so absorbed in her task.

“Yeah, I figure I’ll hang on to her for a while.”

“A while?”

“Oh, you know, until she’s forty. Maybe fifty.”

“You’re lucky to have her.”

I contemplated my pre-Shayla life and felt tears stinging my eyes. “You have no idea.”

“So . . .”

I giggled. Sometimes I did that when anticipating tough questions.

“Shayla told me you weren’t her mother; then you told me she wasn’t your daughter. I asked Bev and Gus and they told me to ask you, so . . .”

“I’m her guardian. I kind of . . . inherited her when her dad passed away.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“How long ago?”

“He died last December. I got her in February.”

“Were you close?”

“Shayla’s dad and I?”

She came running up to show us a tattered leaf. We dutifully told her it was beautiful and she ran back to her task.

“No, we weren’t close,” I said.

There was a silence while Scott absorbed the fact and sifted through the questions it brought up.

I didn’t know how much to say—what to explain. The sordid details of my family’s derailment hung in the air, suspended like strands of spiderweb. I feared his reaction were he to know the truth. Would he find me too sullied? Too broken? Too complicated? If he knew all the facts, would he step back to a safe distance and become polite-Scott again? Friendly-Scott, who smiled when we crossed in the hall and greeted me when we passed in the street but didn’t initiate Sausenburg hikes?

I braced myself for the worst and started to fill in some of the blanks that resonated like voids in the stillness around us. “Her dad was—not a kind man. He left my life when I was much younger and I didn’t hear from him again until . . . until his lawyer told me he had died and left something in his will for me.”

“Shayla?”

“A cuckoo clock.”

He turned his head to look at me.

“And Shayla. He’d designated me as her legal guardian should anything happen to him.”

“Wow.” Scott looked over at the mound of dead leaves Shayla was trying to shape into a rectangle. “And you took her in right away?”

“Look at me, Scott. Do I look like I suffer from any Mother Teresa delusions?” He glanced at my hellooo face and cracked a smile. “No, I didn’t take her in right away. I’m way too convoluted for anything that simple. I tried every trick in the book to talk myself out of it and finally gave in because it was the only right thing to do. And because I fell in love with her a little bit, with the Heidi mountains and the sunshine and all.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“The bottom line is—I took her in and haven’t looked back.”

“And coming to Germany was . . . ?”

“A new beginning. For both of us.”

“Her dad must have trusted you.”

I laughed out loud before I could stop myself. But I could tell from Scott’s expression that it hadn’t been a very humorous sound—again.

“No, Scott, he didn’t really trust me.”

“So . . . who was he to you?”

“You know, that’s probably a question best left for another day.” Shayla, bored with the bed idea, kicked the pile of leaves and giggled as they rained down around her, a dull-brown waterfall. “But she’s mine now—and we’re here. And I don’t think I’d change anything about that part of the story.”

“You think she’ll ever call you Mom?”

“When she’s ready.”

He stood, shoving his hands into his pockets and turning to look out over the valley. “You must have gotten a lot of questions around BFA with her calling you Shelby and all.”

I shook my head. “Actually, I haven’t gotten many. I think Bev and Gus did a pretty good job of telling people I was a single mom and leaving it at that.”

“But . . . she calls you Shelby,” he repeated.

“And if people ask, I’m happy to tell them it’s an arrangement that works well for us. Period. Some of them seem to think it’s weird, and that’s okay. Any more details would require more explanations than I’m willing to give right now.”

“What do the students call you?”

“Miss. Mrs. It depends. Half of them think I’m divorced.”

“And you’re okay with that?”

“Sure. I know what the truth is, and when Shayla understands it, we’ll be able to make it a little more public.”

“Sounds wise.”

“I try.”

“You’re a good mom.”

“Yeah? You’re a good hiking coach.”

“Sorry you came?”

“Ask me tomorrow when my calf muscles are screaming for mercy.”

“Make sure you stretch them before bed and first thing in the morning.”

I looked at him in fake exasperation. “Don’t go all basketball coach on me. I need a friend, not a tyrant.”

“Well, you’ve got that,” he said, sitting beside me again and pulling me in for a quick squeeze.

“The friend part or the—”

“The friend part, Shelby.”

“Well, good, ’cause the tyrant part reminds me of that time in fourth grade when Miss Nicholson sent me to the principal’s office because I’d drawn a picture of her backside with flowers growing out of it and—”

“You’re not going to start the talking thing again, are you?”

I bit my tongue and counted to twenty. That squeeze had done weird things to me. I didn’t like it. The side effects, that is. The squeeze itself, I didn’t mind.

I pushed off the wall and walked over to put Shayla’s hat back on her head. It had fallen sideways onto her shoulder, exposing a matted mess of blonde that made me itch to grab a brush. She protested right on cue as I set the hat straight and tied its strings under her chin.

“Wanna go up the tower again?” This from the guy who’d nearly not made it up with her the first time.

“Yeah!” On the decibel scale of agreement, her answer ranked right up at the top.

He slung her onto his back and took off toward the thick metal door at the bottom of the tower, turning to wink at me just before they disappeared inside.

Triple salchow, double lutz, and a mind-numbing axel. My stomach was getting good at the ice-skating thing.