Page 183 of On His Mind

I could stand right here and let her teach me the same run forever.

Then Stanley eats it forty feet up the hill — a full, catastrophic yard sale, skis going one way and both poles the other, screaming the entire way down — and the spell breaks. Penelope’s laughing again with her forehead dropped against my shoulder.

Stanley is skiing with Aspen laughing her head off right behind him, and I gotta give it to the man. He knows how to keep her on her toes. She’s loving it. He grabs Aspen, and they both fall down. Benson stops right behind them, laughing.

“You’re hopeless, Sterm.” Then he’s taking off down the mountain.

“I’d like to see you ski, Reeve!” Stanley shouts after him. He picks himself up and says to Aspen, “I thought you said this was easy.”

She puts herself together. “It is. Come on, Penelope. The boys will figure it out.”

Penelope waves at me with a soft smile and skis down with Aspen.

Stanley is suddenly beside me. “Man, this is great, isn’t it?”

There’s no joke in his tone, so I nod. “Yeah.”

He hits me in the chest. “Last man down is the loser.”

I make it down a whole run without going down once, and Stanley is hopeless just like Benson said.

Penelope’s waiting at the bottom, and when I skid to a stop beside her, upright and intact and breathing hard, she looks at me with so much pride on her face you’d think I’d won something. A cup. A title. Not one clean run down a beginner slope.

“There,” she says. “That was good.”

Then I fall flat on my ass trying to get the board off my feet, and she loses it completely — and watching her laughing in the snow loosens my chest.

The hot tub sits out on the deck in the middle of the snow, steaming into the cold, and Gianna’s carried everyone a drink out in the bedazzled wine glasses she smuggled all the way from Hawthorne.

The girls climb in with Gianna’s wine, and it’s going exactly the way Stanley promised them it would back in the Hawthorne kitchen when he was selling this whole trip — that they’d sit out here like queens, steam coming off the water, the mountain gone dark blue behind them with the bedazzled wine glasses.

I’m perched on the edge with my feet in, and Penelope is leaning against my shins, and the whole crew’s crammed into a tub built for half of us. Stanley’s running some game whose rules change the instant he starts losing. Somebody tries to start a snowball fight from inside the water, which does not work in any way, and now everyone’s drink has snow in it.

At some point, I look around at all of them without meaning to.

Benson with his arm hooked around Lucy. Blue and Melly are folded quiet into the corner. Rowan losing an argument to Aspenhe was never going to win. Gianna guarding her wine glass with her life. Stanley in the middle of a story, both arms up, the whole tub his audience.

And it lands on me, sitting there in the steam, that most of them are gone in five months.

They graduate in the spring. Benson, Rowan, Stanley — off into drafts and jobs and whatever comes next, scattered to wherever their lives are about to take them. This is the last December all of us get like this. This house, this configuration of people who saved my life –– gone.

Stanley catches me looking. And for one second, the whole performance drops off his face, and what’s underneath is a man thinking the exact thing I’m thinking.

“This is good,” he says, quiet, just to me. “You know that, right? This is the best. I’m telling you.”

“Yeah,” I say. “It is.”

“Don’t make it weird, Deveroux. I was thinking––”

And Gianna dumps a fistful of snow straight down the back of his neck, and he shrieks like a kettle, and the whole tub goes up laughing, and the moment folds itself back down into the noise where it’s safe.

But I’ve got it now. I used to believe the only way to keep a good thing was not to look at it too hard — that the second you noticed you were happy, you’d already lost it. That was how it always worked for me. I only ever recognized a good stretch of my life in the rearview, once it was gone and too late to feel. But that isn’t what’s happening here. I’m sitting in the steam watching my whole family laugh in the snow, and I know it ends, and knowing it ends doesn’t wreck it. It does the opposite.

I get to miss this. And missing it already means I have it. Means I’m here for it, awake inside it, for once in my life not watching my own happiness through glass from somewhere out in the cold.

Penelope finds me out on the balcony late, after everyone’s finally gone to bed.

The snow’s stopped. The whole valley’s laid out below us, white and silent and lit that deep electric blue that only exists at night in the mountains, and I’m just standing out in the cold breathing it when the door slides open behind me and she steps out in some soft bundled-up thing with two mugs steaming in her hands. Something in my chest gives way at the sight of her, the way it does every time now — this quiet caving-in that used to frighten me and doesn’t anymore.