The One Who Got Away: A Novel by Bethany Bloom Page B

had just happened. And then Yarrow
turned to Christine. “So tell us again how Dad proposed.”
    Christine said, “You all know
this story.”
    “I know but it’s so good,” Yarrow
said, “I love it so much. I mean, here is this model of delicious, perfect love.
And it had started quite accidentally.”
    “Delicious? Perfect?” Artie
interjected. “You all obviously haven’t seen us trying to find a parking spot
at the airport, or when she’s telling me how to fix an appliance, or when I’m
driving through a snowstorm….”  Artie turned his sideways grin to Christine.
“But continue. Tell the story again, if you must.”
    She smiled, patted him on the
forearm, and nodded. “I long suspected, and still do, that he didn’t even mean
to say it. To propose marriage. That it slipped out in a weak moment. And he
loves me too much to confirm this one way or another. We never speak of it.”
    Her father was using the back end
of his fork to poke at a piece of gristle on his plate, but he was smiling, and
so Christine continued.
    “He had made snowshoes. Because
he hurt himself jumping off a balcony. There was a decade or so when he thought
he was Superman and infinitely indestructible.”
    “Only a decade?” Jon asked.
    Christine ignored the
interruption and continued, “Well, he had just broken his foot because he
jumped from a balcony or some such thing, and so he had this great big cast on,
and he couldn’t go to work because he couldn’t climb ladders and he couldn’t walk
on the tops of two-by-four walls and so he handcrafted these snowshoes because
he didn’t know what else to do with himself. He had all this time, and God
knows he can’t sit still. Never could. So, in the workshop at the cabin, he
worked all day on these snowshoes. He soaked the rawhide to bend it. He laminated
the wood, one thin layer after another, and then he pushed them all together to
form the curved wood of the shoe.” As Christine spoke, she fidgeted with the
charm on her necklace, buzzing it on the chain from left to right. “The way he
had designed them, they buckled right onto your boots. They were a little
cheesy.”
    “Cheesy? Hell!” Artie said, but
he was smiling.
    “So when they were all finished,
I took the pair he made for me, and I strapped them on, and I walked around in
my front yard, and something about it made me laugh. I laughed and laughed and
just fell all over the place into the deep snow,” Christine said, “I felt like
such a pioneer. Remember that, Artie?”
    He nodded, smiling, his eyes
downcast.
    “To walk on top of snow, on
something of your own devising,” Christine said, “It was kind of a
thrill… And so, once Artie decided his foot had gotten pretty close to healing,
he cut off his own cast, so we could go try them out.”
    “You cut your cast off yourself?
What would Paul say?” Jon asked.
    Artie shook his head and Christine
went right on talking, “And so we went to Mount Williams, and in those days,
everyone would hike to the top in the spring and then ride the couliers—the little
chutes—down, down, down on their butts— and sometimes you would make little
avalanches with your rear, but you would ride them.” She clapped her hands
together. “It was great fun! Remember that, Artie?”
    He nodded.
    “Now, over the years, I suppose,
quite a lot of people died that way,” Christine went on, “and so now they really
don’t like you to go down on that side of the mountain anymore at all, but this
is what we had done. And we sat, afterwards, in the bus, back at the trailhead,
and it was just one of those days, with the brilliant sunshine and the hard
exercise where your face tingles when you finally stop moving, and we felt so
alive and awake and unstoppable. And so there we were, afterwards, in his VW
bus. Much like the van that friend of yours used to have, Olivine. Remember
that VW?”
    Olivine’s face flushed hot. Henry’s
VW van with the wooden floors. And she remembered