Never Fallen

The number on your banking app says $41,000, and you look at it the way other men look at photos of their kids.

Nineteen thousand more. That's the gap between you and the A-frame on Tamarack Road with the red door and the woodstove and the deck that looks straight up at Lantern Chute. Otto Brask has promised to hold it until spring. Otto is seventy-seven and taught you how to splint a femur in a whiteout, and when Otto promises something, it stays promised.

"You're doing the money face," Paz Ocampo says from the next locker.

"I don't have a money face."

"You have a money face and a knee face and a face you make when a tourist calls a snowboard a 'skateboard for snow.'" She snaps her helmet strap and grins at you in the locker room mirror. Paz is the best skier in the ski school and knows it, dark hair under a beanie, cheekbones that get her tipped double by every divorced dad from Dallas. "Marv's looking for you. He's sweating."

"Marv always sweats."

"Not like this. He's sweating like somebody rich is involved."

Marv Shoop, director of the Silver Lantern Ski and Ride School, is standing outside his office holding a clipboard against his chest like a shield. He's fifty, decent, and has the look of a man who has been yelled at by someone above him since seven a.m.

"Ethan. Good. Great. Sit."

"I've got a family of four at nine."

"Paz has them now." He sits, then stands, then sits again. "Private client. All of December, every day, as many hours as she wants. Four hundred an hour."

You do the math before you can stop yourself. Four hundred an hour, three hours a day, twenty-six days. Your heart does something embarrassing. The red door gets very close.

"Who's the client?"

Marv looks at the ceiling as if it might help him. "Liv Mattsson."

You laugh. He doesn't.

Everyone in Silver Lantern knows Liv Mattsson. Everyone in Colorado knows her, if they read the kind of websites that photograph heiresses leaving restaurants. She's the granddaughter of Sixten Mattsson, who built the first lift on this mountain with borrowed money in 1962, and the daughter of Torvald Mattsson, who owns it now. At sixteen she was the best junior downhill racer in the country. At nineteen she quit, and nobody ever said why. These days she's famous for being late, for being rude to waiters, for a white SUV that takes up two spaces on Main Street, and for a face that a magazine once called "unfair to the rest of us."

"She skis better than you and me put together," you say. "What does she need a snowboard instructor for?"

"She wants to learn to ride." Marv swallows. "She asked for the best. I said you."

"Marv."

"Four hundred an hour, Ethan."

She's forty minutes late.

You wait at the bottom of the bunny hill with a rental board, two coffees going cold and a growing audience of ski school kids' parents who have figured out who you're waiting for. At 10:10 a white SUV pulls into the VIP lot like it owns it, because it does.

Liv Mattsson gets out with a latte in one glove and a brand-new snowboard under her arm that has clearly never touched snow.

She is wearing white. White one-piece, white helmet hanging from her wrist, white-blonde hair in a braid down her back as thick as a rope. And then there's the face, which the magazine was right about. High cheekbones flushed pink from the cold, a wide mouth with a permanent half-smirk, and eyes the gray of a storm coming over the Divide. A dad on the bunny hill looks at her and rides straight into the orange fence.

She doesn't notice. Or she does and is used to it.

She stops in front of you and looks you over like a lift line she'd rather skip. "You're the instructor."

"Ethan."

"Fine." She hands you her latte as if you're a cup holder, and you hand it back, and she blinks at it in her own glove like it's a magic trick. "I'll be honest with you, Ethan, to save us both time. I have never fallen in my life. I'm not starting for you."

"Then this will be a very short career."

"Whose?"

"Yours."

Something flickers in those gray eyes. Interest, maybe, or irritation. It's hard to tell on a face that beautiful; everything looks like a decision.

You teach her to strap in. She refuses the bench and does it standing, wobbling, glaring at you when you reach out to steady her. You show her how to stand: knees soft, weight centered, look where you want to go. She stands like a statue of a woman who's been told to stand on a snowboard.

"Bend your knees."

"They're bent."

"They're decorative. Bend them."

She bends them half an inch. On the first slide down the bunny hill she goes ramrod straight, catches her toe edge, windmills both arms, and somehow, through pure spite, doesn't go down. She skids to a stop sideways at the bottom and looks back up at you, breathing hard, chin high.

"See?" she says. "Never fallen."

"That wasn't riding. That was a hostage situation."

Three kids from the ski school laugh. Liv turns her head and looks at them, and they stop.

You do it again. And again. Every time her board catches, every time her body tells her to go down and roll, she locks every muscle she has and fights it. She's strong. She's a former racer with legs like steel cable. She's going to tear her knee in half doing this, and you know exactly what that feels like.

"Stop," you say, after the sixth run. "Sit down."

"I'm not tired."

"Sit down in the snow. On purpose. Then do it again. That's the lesson. You learn to fall before you learn to ride."

"No."

"Liv."

"Miss Mattsson."

"Liv," you say. "If you can't fall, you can't ride. Everybody falls on a board. The good ones fall well."

She looks at you for a long moment. Then she unzips a pocket, takes out a fold of bills, and counts ten of them into your glove. Hundreds.

"One thousand dollars," she says. "Tell my father I'm finished. Tell him I'm a natural. Tell him whatever you want. Then go home early."

You think about the red door. Nineteen thousand. You can feel the paper in your glove.

You put the money back in her pocket and zip it closed.

"Tomorrow," you say. "Nine a.m. Bring knees."

For the first time, she has nothing to say. She stares at you as if you just spoke Swedish to her and she's not sure where you learned it. Then she unstraps, picks up her board, and walks away without a word.

You finish the day with a make-up lesson for a nervous couple from Ohio and you don't think about her more than six or seven hundred times.

At dusk you ride the Lantern Express up for the last sweep. The sky over the Divide is going purple and the lift lights are buzzing on, and from the top terminal you can see all the way across the bowl to the rope line and the sign:

LANTERN CHUTE. EXPERTS ONLY. CLOSED.

It's the black run. Steep, narrow, a ribbon of white between the pines, with a dogleg halfway down that the old patrollers call the Elbow, where the trees close in like a fist. It's closed tonight because the snow's wind-loaded and patrol hasn't blasted it yet.

There's someone standing at the top of it. Inside the rope.

A white one-piece. A braid. A brand-new snowboard.

"No," you say out loud, to nobody. "No, no, no."

You shout her name. The wind takes it.

Liv Mattsson looks down the Chute, straps her back foot in, and drops in.