Sheryl had been sitting at the circular bar, listening to the grizzled, windburned ski pro talking from his place in front of the fireplace on the far side for over twenty minutes, and that was the first thing of any substance that had come from his mouth. He had amassed a sizeable retinue of fellow skiers, all of them apple-cheeked where he was leathery, limber in their youth while he sat stiffly upright on his stool. She knew that his impeccable posture was the result of the multiple pins in his back, the origin of every last one having been outlined by him in surgical detail. Sheryl wasn't impressed, not only because she still didn't really consider herself a skier, but because she was still wondering where the hell Kerren was.
The phone call, her girlfriend had insisted, would last no more than twenty minutes, and then she would be down to meet Sheryl at the bar, they'd have a celebratory cocktail and head into the restaurant for dinner. But almost twice that amount of time had elapsed, and she had yet to see Kerren's overpriced boots coming down the rustic lacquered-logs stairway.
So Sheryl patiently kicked her crossed legs up and down, nursing her mojito and trying to soothe herself into nonchlance. There wasn't a TV nearby -- the first time she'd ever been in a bar without one -- so she had no choice but to overhear the old pro outline the times he had nearly been buried in sinkholes, menaced by black bears, and indulged in reckless downhill therapy off the marked slopes and trails, always late at night, with only the moonlight to keep him from barreling straight into trees that were huddled before him like stoic, needly monks, conspiring to step into his path and end his life.
She had to admit, it sounded a lot too much like her own experience on this trip for comfort. Every moment with Kerren these days was fraught with peril. Emotional branches could reach out and snag her at any moment. Was she really calling her mother up there? Sheryl actually shook her head a little to fling the thought off, to keep it from sinking its passive-aggressive little talons into her brain. It was her part of their bargain, after all; she would let go of her suspicions and start to trust Kerren again, and Kerren would do everything she could to start to earn it back.
The fact that this phone call was taking so long didn't do much to set her mind at ease. But there was no way that Sheryl was going to give Kerren any reason to think that she had been even the least bit suspicious. She motioned to the bartender and ordered a second mojito. If Kerren came down and saw that Sheryl had already ordered a drink for her, wouldn't that indicate a modicum of trust?
Almost as soon as the drink arrived, Sheryl saw the recognizable black-and-purple of Kerren's boots clomping down the stairs on the far side of the lodge bar. Good. Let her see just how trusting Sheryl had been that she would arrive soon, ice not even the slightest bit melted in her glass.
"Hey," Kerren said, sitting down on the stool next to her. Craning her neck to see the plate-glass view they were missing behind them, she asked, "Don't you want to sit where we can look out on the mountain?"
Sheryl only slightly forced the smile that she flashed at her wife. "I was hoping to, but..." She gestured with her half-empty glass toward the group occupying the seats with the best view, the one that had gathered around the ski pro. Dressed in an almost unbearably loud sweater, he was still letting people buy him drinks, feeding him fuel to even more deeply slur his tales of high adventures on the peaks around them.
"Eech," Kerren said, hearing just a fragment of the latest gruesome tale. "How long has that been going on?"
"Since before I got here," Sheryl responded. She hoped her voice was jovial enough. Was it?
"Thanks for ordering," Kerren breathed, getting more comfortable on her seat. She held it up, swiveled a little toward Sheryl. "Is it too late for me to make a toast?"
Sheryl shrugged a little. "Sure." She mirrored the position of Kerren's glass, suspended in the air between them. "I mean, of course not. Toast away."
"To eight wonderful years," Kerren said, cocking her elbow to lift the glass to the height of her forehead. "And I'm promising here and now to make the next eight even more wonderful."
"Me too," Sheryl said, hoping it sounded authentic, and was surprised to find that -- at least to her -- it really did. Their glasses clinked.
They sipped a moment in silence, the alcohol giving that familiar illusion of warmth to their bodies. Sheryl had heard that what booze really did was pull the heat from one's extremities, which was exactly the opposite of what you wanted to do out in the cold. It was why the myth of St. Bernards with brandy kegs around their necks was just that. She would have related this anecdote to Kerren, but it seemed completely the wrong note to strike at what was supposed to be not just their anniversary dinner, but a celebration of their reconnection as a couple.
She had meant to steer clear from the subject -- all the better to demonstrate her complete state of trust -- but it came out anyway. "How's Brandy?" Sheryl asked.
"She's good," Kerren said, averting her eyes. "Jay's being an ass, but what's new about that? They're having some big to-do about building that deck again. She's wants to contract someone, he insists he can do it himself, even though he's almost sixty... the usual."
"He means well," Sheryl said, and immediately thought that maybe she shouldn't come to Kerren's step-father's defense quite so quickly. She had just wanted to keep the negativity out of this evening so badly, she couldn't help it.
Fortunately, Kerren didn't take the bait. "I know he does, but then she overreacts, and I end up giving her a sympathetic ear, when what I really want to get downstairs to have a lovely evening with my lady."
Sheryl's smile came easily at that one. She was so stupid, even entertaining the thought that Kerren was up to something shady. On their anniversary trip! How heartless could she be? Meanwhile, across from them, the ski pro said, "Listen! You can still hear my elbow pop when I turn it this way!"
---
"I'd kind of like to be like him, I think," Kerren mused when they were both halfway through their bacon-wrapped venison medallions.
“Him who?" Sheryl asked. They had each had a full glass of wine already, and their conversation was flowing much more easily.
"That mangled old skier in the bar," Kerren said. "Not just like that, I mean, not actually scarred, but I'd like to -- I don't want to go through my life and have no wear and tear, you know what I mean?"
Sheryl grinned. "Well, in the morning we're going to run a good risk of getting some scars, aren't we?"
Kerren giggled, and Sheryl marveled, much as she had the first time, at how lovely she was, lit mostly by the lazy fire that formed the centerpiece of the restaurant. Even lovelier now than the night they had met, in some ineffable way. Sheryl had been struck dumb even then. "No," Kerren continued, "I just want to have something to show for it all. I don't want to be unblemished, like I'd breezed through life, like it didn't take anything out of me."
"Sure," Sheryl answered. "I get it. We should have some kind of physical evidence that we fought the fight and won."
"Mm-hm," Kerren said, her mouth full of the wine she had sipped while Sheryl had been talking. "I guess maybe that's why I thought about this place. When I was looking for places for us to go, I mean. It's so outside our real lives and a little dangerous. As much as I we want it to be, I guess."
"Which begs the question," Sheryl said, "how early do you want to get up in the morning to hit those slopes?"
Kerren traced her finger around the rim of her wine glass, making the liquid inside slosh slightly from side to side. "Well, it is our anniversary after all... Who knows? We might find some reason we want to sleep in late."
Sheryl arched an eyebrow at her. "Now, since when did you become a mind reader?"
They laughed together at that, and just for a moment all the uncertainty Sheryl had felt -- and wondered if Kerren was feeling -- seemed to have been shed, peeled off like ill-fitting costumes, to be discarded and left to slide down the mountain into the village below.
Someone had approached their table. Sheryl didn't notice until he was standing right there, blocking the firelight. She looked up, expecting it to be their waiter asking them about dessert, which was sure to instigate another round of double-entendre hilarity, but it wasn't him. It was the grizzled ski pro, looking as if he had just left his post in the hotel bar to walk directly over to them.
"Good evening, ladies," he said quietly, tilting his head to both Sheryl and Kerren in turn. He was leaning forward, his hands raised slightly in a don't-mind-me sort of way.
Neither of them responded immediately, because they assumed that if he were to approach them, it would be because he had something he was ready to say. But for a long moment, they all just looked at each other. After flicking her eyes at Sheryl and measuring no sense of comprehension there, Kerren said, "Hi yourself. How are you doing tonight?"
He seemed unable to speak for a moment, and Sheryl found herself returning to the thought she had about him before Kerren had joined her: how such a man could be through so many harrowing experiences and still have no visible damage. For just a moment, he seemed to have been struck mute.
"I..." he began, "I'm going to suggest that you two might want to make your way back down the mountain tonight."
Kerren, always the more defensive of the two, almost stood up, immediately assuming that she knew exactly what the old man was insinuating. "Now hold on just a damn minute--" she started.
Sheryl put out a hand, but couldn't stop her in time. Kerren was able to turn on the fury at the drop of a hat, something that had always both awed and frightened Sheryl.
"I don't know what business you think it is of yours," Kerren began, her voice starting to smolder, "but the two of us are here for a perfectly legitimate--"
The ski pro was already stepping back, his raised hands now turning their palms to the women in surrender. "No, no," he pleaded, "it's nothing like that! Believe me!"
Sheryl couldn't help but snicker at that, which was enough to stay Kerren's righteous anger; she quieted down after only getting halfway up from her seat. “Yeah, I bet you are,” she huffed.
"I just thought... look, I'm telling only so as not to cause a panic, but sometimes... Spend enough time on a mountain and sometimes you think you can hear it talking to you."
Kerren landed back in her seat, fury defused for the moment, but still holding a sarcastic knife-edge in her voice. "And exactly what is it telling you on this lovely evening?"
The old man's brow furrowed. "I don't exactly know. She's... confused somehow. There's something strange happening. I just thought you should know."
"Something strange," Kerren repeated.
"Yes," the pro said.
"So says the mountain," she said.
"Mm-hm," he nodded.
"And you think we need to leave."
"That's right."
"It has something to do with the two of us," Kerren said, both index fingers switching between pointing to herself and Sheryl.
"I can't exactly say how I know, but I think that might be right."
Kerren sat back in her seat, crossing her arms and letting out something like a "hmph". Oh God, Sheryl thought, she's only been biding her time. She's going to let him have it now. She'd start with how convenient it is that he's singled us out in the midst all the heterosexual pheromones being tossed around in this place, and move on to how if he thinks we should leave, then why is he not announcing it at the top of his lungs to the entire restaurant...
But Kerren didn't do that. Instead, she shrugged, "Well, sir, we'll have to take that under advisement, now won't we?"
The ski pro could tell that he wasn't being taken seriously. He already seemed defeated. "I'm only saying... my instincts haven't been much wrong in the past." He shrugged, then, seeing no sense of urgency from either of the women, turned to leave. Kerren's eyes burned a hole in his back all the way to the restaurant’s double doors, which opened onto the lobby.
When he was out of sight, Kerren's eyes rolled, and Sheryl was at least thankful that the source of their scorn wasn't her. "Boy," she said. "Can you believe that?"
Sheryl shook her head, but she was already distracted by the fact that she could hear the man clunking through the lobby. In exiting the restaurant, he had transitioned from carpeted floor to hard wood. And he had his ski boots on.
"It's weird," Sheryl said. "He seemed so lucid before, in the bar."
"You must have caught him at the start of his night. It didn't look like he was having any trouble funding his binge."
Sheryl didn't recall a telltale smell of alcohol on his breath, though. She reached for the small note holder against the dark-paneled wall to change the subject, assisted by a devilish wink. "Now, how about a pre-dessert dessert?"
---
True to her word, Kerren did her best to make sure their anniversary was a memorable one, even when they got back to their room, and by the time the pair were finally settling into each other's arms and nodding off to sleep, the moon had just risen over the enormous bulk of the mountain, which stood outside their room's windows, behind the lodge. The white rays just happened to hit the face of Kerren's phone, which in turn fell across one of Sheryl's eyelids, waking her.
When coincidences like this happened, her mind was always quick to run off into the wilds, contemplating the trajectory of a light particle that originated in the heart of the sun, worked its way to the boiling surface over millions of years, then escaped into space, only to ricochet off a stray moon rock, to the phone screen and thus into her eye. As if that had been its destiny all along. Then, inevitably, she began thinking of all the physical interactions of things going on around them all the time, and how they occurred even if there wasn't anyone there to notice them. The sheer volume of physics the real world was cranking out every second. By this time, she was hopelessly awake.
Rolling onto her side, then noticed how beautiful the packed snow looked outside. Kerren's arm had draped across her in their sleep; she tenderly lifted it away before getting up to take a better look out the window. Even though the room was warm, standing in front of their balcony window made her conscious of how cold a night it was. Cool air fell in invisible cascades off the face of the glass to pool around her feet. She wrapped her arms around herself protectively.
The scene outside was devastatingly still, stark, and lovely. The moonlight glanced off the snow at a low angle thanks to the upward slope, causing every tree and rock to throw exaggerated shadows. Even the slightest depressions in the snow looked like craters, black void in the midst of all that pitiless illumination.
Slowly, the events of the evening started coming back to her, and what it had all meant at the time collided with what it semeed to mean now. The overall feel of it was that she and Kerren were a fine facsimile of a relationship with no troubles. She had been very aware that if, at any point, she had really opened her mouth and talked to Kerren about how she felt, things would have gone very differently.
She sighed. She hadn't forgiven Kerren yet. There it was. She might have even convinced herself of it in the midst of the alcohol and warm fires, but here, in the small hours of the night, there was no reason to hide it, even from herself.
She knew that she should go back to bed. Standing here, turning everything over in her head would lead to nothing good, no matter how beautiful the view. And it certainly wouldn't help her get back to sleep. From somewhere beyond the room's door, she could hear the ice maker down the hall whirring to life. It gave her a small amount of comfort; at least she wasn't the only one who was having a hard time sleeping tonight. She hoped their reason was better than hers.
She looked back up at the moon, turning her mind back to the light that it was reflecting off it from the sun, currently blazing on the other the side of the world. The shadows had shortened even in the brief amount of time that she had been standing there. The moon was continuing to rise, slowly erasing the shadows that it had caused as it rose higher above the top ridge of the mountain.
And then, strangely, in a matter of moments, it had set again.
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