Just Let Me Die Here (A Serialized Novel) 11

It is a perfect morning for skiing. There is fresh powder on the mountain and the air is crisply chilled. Everything looks so vivid, unreal. As if the dial has been turned up on the color of the world. And everything is silent. We got up early, one of the advantages of having an infant alarm clock, and, after Tucker puts Millie in the ski resort day care, he and I are some of the first skiers on the mountain.

“Excited?” I ask. Tucker is next to me on the lift, but seems a mile away. He’s looking out at the pine forest that stretches to the horizon.

“Huh? Oh, yeah.” I know skiing isn’t his favorite activity. He is a capable skier and enjoys it in moderation, but he will be finished after just a few runs down some blues. He has booked this vacation purely for my enjoyment and I love him for it. “I’m just worried about Millie. That daycare didn’t look great.”

“What do you mean? I’m sure it was fine.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know about the people working there. How do we know their qualifications? You have to be able to trust the people you leave your child with.”

I can’t believe he trusts you.

“Yes, you do,” I say. “But I’m sure she is perfectly safe for just a couple hours.”

As we move slowly through the air, hovering just over the mountain, I find it hard to contain my excitement. I swing my legs like a little kid sitting in a too-big chair and hum a tune that has been stuck in my head all morning. What are the words? The beat loops over and over, but no lyrics.

“Could you not do that?” Tuckers says, his voice piqued with nerves.

“What? The humming?”

“No, your skis. Stop swinging them.” The chair tips slightly. He tries to play it cool, but I see that his hand is gripped tightly around the side bar of the lift.

“Sorry,” I say. “Forgot.” Tucker is not the biggest fan of heights. Early on in our relationship, we took a trip up to San Francisco. Determined to get in all the touristy stuff, we headed off one afternoon to the Golden Gate Bridge. When we reached the middle of the bridge, Tucker made a strong effort to stand as far back from the railing as possible. Unfortunately, the wind was stronger and it forced him right up to the elevated view. I honestly thought I would have to drag an unconscious man back down off the bridge.

I go to raise the bar as we come to the end of the lift, and Tucker gives a small startled jump in his seat.

“You okay?” I ask, pushing the bar the rest of the way up.

“Yeah, just distracted I guess. Thinking about something.”

“Think you can forget about it long enough to get yourself down this mountain?” He nods.

I haven’t been skiing since the winter before Millie was born, but the second my skis touch the snow, it’s like I never left. I feel at home. Everything feels so natural. I slowly glide down a green run behind Tucker.

“Just a quick warm-up,” he says. He sticks with the pizza-slice stance for the majority of the way down and it’s slow going. I don’t mind it though. The morning is beautiful and I take it all in. The wide-open run is empty and I weave back and forth, having fun being the first to carve large S-curves across the snow. I feel like a ribbon, whipped up into the air by a light breeze, drifting this way and that. Free and carefree. Completely relaxed. This vacation is already doing its job.

Over the next few runs, Tucker loosens up and by the third time down, his skis, now completely parallel, pick up a controlled speed.

“Warmed up enough?” I ask when we reach the bottom. I’m done with easy-going. I want to have some fun.

“Yeah, sure.” He’s beginning to look a combination of tired and bored, but he feigns a smile and we get back on the lift. He definitely loves me.

I met Tucker while I was in grad school. I was working as a part-time secretary for a security company near the university. I hate to say it, but my dad got me the job. “It’s not what you know, but who you know,” Dad used to say. Being an academic, I was prone to favor the “what you know” and press away from any kind of nepotism. But the position was exactly what I needed. It fit in with my university schedule and paid decently. A buddy of my dad’s from the Air Force started the company after leaving the military. He had tried to get Dad to go in on it with him, but Dad had been led to Chicago by a woman he was chasing at the time. Not my mother, I liked to tease him. “Nope,” he would say. “Your mother hooked me once I got here and had already had my heart broken several times.”

So, when I started my grad program and mentioned that I could use some extra cash, Dad put in a call to Bill. And there I was, manning the phones at the front desk, doing light filing work, and going on the afternoon coffee runs, a task I despised both for the cliché of it and the fact that I didn’t even drink coffee at the time, when Tucker showed up. He was a civilian contractor hired by the company for a special project. The first time I met him, he was with a group of men visiting the office for a meeting. He stood out as the only one in a three-piece suit, surrounded by a group of jean-clad, fleece vest types. The next few times, he came alone, each time arriving a bit earlier for whatever meeting was scheduled. And each time he was a bit more chatty. It was Bill who finally called him on his game and gave him a whole “shit or get off the pot” speech right there in the front office. My entire body had blushed. That evening we went out for drinks, but I remained hesitant.

It wasn’t that Tucker wasn’t the type I imagined myself ending up with, it was that I didn’t imagine myself ending up with anyone. I had seen what relationships led to and didn’t want that for myself. I was quite happy avoiding it all. I had my studies and my future as an esteemed history professor with multiple awards for my research to look forward to. I didn’t need a romantic relationship to make my life whole. So, when he called and asked me out on a second date, I did what any reasonable person would do. I agreed to the date and then backed out at the last minute.

“Something came up with my research,” I told him over the phone as I was about to leave the office that night. “I have to meet up with my advisor to go over the abstract for an upcoming conference. But maybe we can get together another time.” I had ended the conversation before he could suggest when that other time might be and hoped that he would get the signal. But the next day, he showed up at the office with a first edition book by one of my favorite authors. I had tried to remember if I had even mentioned the author on our date and was certain I hadn’t. A lucky guess maybe? Either way, I knew that he had very much not gotten the signal and that I was in trouble.

Tucker and I had never really talked about marriage in our short time dating. I figured we were still getting to know each other. Marriage would happen eventually. He didn’t seem too eager to rush into a legal lifelong commitment either, so I figured we were on the same page. And then Dad died of a heart attack.

I didn’t get to say goodbye. I was at work when I got the call from the hospital. He had been rushed there that morning. A neighbor walking her dog had seen him collapse as he was getting into his truck and called 911. They had tried everything, but they couldn’t save him. He died in the ambulance on the Kennedy Expressway.

Tucker had flown back to Chicago with me to attend the memorial service. That evening, in the living room of my childhood home, he proposed. No flash, no show. Just a simple moment between the two of us. At first, I was unsure. We hadn’t talked about this. I thought things were great the way they were. But Tucker seemed suddenly quite excited about the idea and I let my emotional side ignore the rational.

We didn’t have a long engagement. Tucker said he couldn’t wait another day not being married to me. He said my father’s passing made him realize how short life was. He needed to be with me for whatever time we had left. And now that I had no other family, he wanted to be mine. We planned a small ceremony, just a few friends as neither of us had any real family left, and got married in a church around the corner from our apartment. Neither of us were religious, but Tucker felt it was the appropriate, traditional thing to do. Bill beamed with pride as he walked me down the aisle.

Tucker loved me then and he loves me now. I don’t know what I would do without him.

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