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The last bit was sheer ice, and Mary was picking up speed and wasn’t sure what to do about it other than to lift her poles in the air to get big and yell, “Incoming!” to protect the innocent bystanders.
Some laughing guy stood wide-legged in front of her and stuck out his hands at the last moment, pressing back on her shoulders and bringing her to a stop.
Mary was panting. She did it. She was down the darned slope. “Merci,” she mustered.
“American, right?” he asked in a nearly perfect U.S. accent.
He could tell that from my shitty ski performance? Mary nodded in stunned and exhausted defeat. “How did you know?”
“Bunch of clues. Your clothes. Your technique.” He grinned. “Mostly the cuss words that were echoing down from the slope.”
“Ah.” She looked around at the children gathering in what looked like school groups with teachers counting heads. “Sorry, kids.” Mary accepted the hand extended out to her.
Wincing, she pressed into her heels and got herself upright. “Thank you.” She looked toward the T-bar lift that was taking people up. Coffee was at the top of the mountain, and that contraption was going to take her there. She angled her skis in that direction.
“Ho, there. Wait just a moment. The dogs are coming.”
Dogs …
For the first time, Mary really looked at the guy and realized he was wearing a red rescue coat. He must be like a lifeguard for the kiddie pool. Here to help out if one of the toddlers took a tumble.
No kid took a tumble. Not a single child. Not anywhere along the trail.
Mary pulled the goggles onto her forehead to see the guy clearly, without all the scratches she’d put into the lenses. She realized she would have to pay for them and briefly wondered how much that would cost her. “Dogs?”
“The dog sled team is harnessed up. They’ll be here in a minute to get you to the lodge. We have a first aid station with a nurse to look you over there.”
“Sled.” Mary was a nurse. So first, she could probably check herself over.
Second, since Mary had decided that she wanted a little less hospital in her nursing life and a little more challenge, so she’d been training for—and had just passed her test to become—a flight nurse on a medivac copter.
What she heard when Red Coat said “sled” was “basket.”
Here was the thing about going into a basket: you lay on your back on the hard surface, and you’re strapped in. Not a little strapped in, a lot strapped in. Blocks go around the head, a strap over the forehead, and spider webbing holds you down. This method of attaching a person to a basket that’s being lifted from the ground up into the helicopter is life-saving. Mary had seen the rotor wash spin a basket around and around so fast that it lost form like a children’s top. And, had that patient not been completely secured, they would have been ejected, catapulted out into the air, and fallen to their death.
Surely, the rescue team would perform the exact same protocol to get her up the mountain. If she came unattached, she’d slide with absolutely zero capacity to protect herself or stop. She could imagine gliding straight for the cliff’s edge or into a crevasse and tipping in. The last thing that would be seen on those go-pros pointing her way was the bottom of the sled and the sound of her last long-held scream as she vanished into oblivion.
She imagined her son talking to a friend:
“How is your mom doing?”
“Ah, man! She died.”
“Wait, what? She died? How did that happen?”
“She went to the dogs.”
“I’m not waiting on dogs. That would be a no.” Mary carefully sidestepped toward the lift. She wanted to unclip the skis, but the ice was pretty much caked and solidified. And then the babies were riding up with their skis on the ground. There was probably a reason. She’d just keep the skis on a bit longer.
“You sure? It looks like you got pretty banged up on the mountain. I watched you through the binoculars to track if we needed to send search and rescue when you headed in the wrong direction.”
“The right side of the mountain.”
“Is more dangerous, yeah. I was pretty worried when you disappeared, but you got yourself back on the slope.”
“You were worried? You should have heard what was going on in my head,” she muttered, then realized that he was being kind, and she stopped with the sarcasm, reaching out a hand as if to soothe. “I appreciate that you focused on me, hoping to keep me safe. I appreciate you. This whining and my stink face I’m making are because I’m wet. I’m cold. I’m a little bruised, body and spirit—ego. And I’m trying to make my way back to the top. Quickly. And so waiting for the dogs will take longer. You understand. Thanks, though.”
“Stink face,” he repeated as if tying it on for size or maybe to see if, by saying it aloud, the meaning might become understandable.