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And all the time her parents welcomed him like he was the son they never had, never once noticing their happy-go-lucky only child growing increasingly more insecure, miserable and bitter.
Then there was Sam. The first time Sam had really made her laugh, she thought a flood-gate had opened somewhere inside her. A joy so profound and delicious burst from her that she felt intoxicated. It was almost as if she’d forgotten how to laugh like that. Crying with mirth, sides aching from elation. With the laughter, always a stirring of sexual passion that made her lightheaded.
And to think she nearly didn’t join her parents in Silver that year. Tom had asked her to forgo the yearly family vacation in Alberta and stay in Vancouver as his partner at some charity ball, and she had nearly said yes. Her parents didn’t expect her to come with them any more. She was a grown woman after all. The ball was tempting. Tom’s friends and business acquaintances were rich. There would be a marquee, and she could wear a taffeta ball gown and long silk evening gloves with a bracelet over the wrist. She would drink sparkling white wine and maybe break away from his iron-pumping idiot pals for a moment to find someone who would talk about something more than their own flesh and how they were keeping it healthy. But somehow Katie wanted to be a little girl again for a few weeks. She longed to wear an old sweater and stack her Dad’s woodpile neatly for him, the sensual touch and smell of the rough pine delighting her. Her routine. A routine that had survived for two decades. And she wanted to sit with her Mom as Mrs Crosby in her silly cotton hat made another futile attempt to capture Wolf Mountain in watercolour from the porch. She wanted all that warmth and security that Tom seemed to provide but really didn’t. So she went to Silver with her delighted, but surprised parents. And she met Sam Hunt.
He drove a bus. That’s what Sam was doing when she first saw him. Katie remembered everything about that day. It was hot as Hell, and she was wearing khaki shorts, a plain white T-shirt, a tiny tartan rucksack on her back, making her way to Lazy Hot Springs for a hike. And she was waiting to board Sam’s bus in the depot.
A big sign on a stand read Passengers wait here until driver checks your ticket, and so she waited by it. Funny thing was, everybody else just walked by her, out through the glass swing doors to the sidewalk and got on the bus. It sure was filling up. There were lots of Japanese, a few hiking couples and some elderly tourists. But they were all getting on the bus before her. She saw the seat she fancied was already gone, the front one opposite the driver where you can look out front from the big windshield, and she started to get annoyed. Where was the driver? Why didn’t someone in charge come and tell all these people to wait in line like the sign said?
Then a young man appeared in the blue company overalls, holding a styrofoam cup of coffee. A young, impossibly handsome man. Sam was twenty-five, six feet tall, his black shiny hair swept back from a noble forehead. His blue tunic top was open by three buttons, revealing a T-shirt beneath and the suggestion of tight brown pectorals. He was obviously Indian and to Katie’s surprise, he was also undeniably gorgeous.
This driver from the planet sex stopped and looked at Katie, and then at the nearly full bus through the glass doors. Walking over to her he handed her the coffee. ‘Can you hold this, miss? I’ll be right back.’
She took the cup, astonished.
He boarded his busy vehicle and she could see through the doors people standing and milling about on board. In seconds the passengers were pouring off the bus, back through the doors into the depot concourse.
Sam was at their back, waving his hands and shouting, ‘Come on, that’s it … hurry along … quick as you can …’
The passengers milled around grouchily, complaining under their breath, in front of Katie. She was going to be last again.
Sam pushed his way through to where Katie stood, took her by the hand not occupied holding his coffee, and led her to the front of the line.
He cleared his throat, and clapped his hands together twice. ‘Could I have your attention please, ladies and gentlemen?’
They grew silent, some fishing around in bags for the tickets they were now going to have to present.
‘I’d like to introduce you all to a very special person.’
Katie looked at him, horrified. What was this? The crowd started to look curious.
‘This young lady is unique in Canada and it’s a great honour to have her with us today. We, at Fox Line Travel, always knew that one day she would grace us with her presence, but now it’s happened, and all I can say is that I’m humbled to find that I’m one of the people to witness it.’
The crowd started to buzz with low conversation, heads bobbing up to get a look at the woman this bus driver held by the hand.
Katie was blushing to her feet. What on earth was this man doing? Who did he think she was?
Sam held up a finger. ‘Now I know there’s not much time for speeches or nothing, what with the bus already a few minutes behind schedule, but let me, on behalf of the bus line, just say this.’ The crowd were expectant. Sam turned to Katie, smiling, and under his breath said, ‘What’s your name?’
Stunned by the warmth of his smile, she replied. ‘Katie Crosby.’
Sam looked to his audience. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Katie Crosby, the only, and I mean only, woman in Canada …’ he paused. ‘Who can FUCKING READ!’
There was a stunned and shocked silence and then Katie burst out laughing. The crowd exploded into an irritated hubbub of noise, peppered with well really and cheeky son of a bitch.
Sam smiled and stood defiantly by the sign, tapping it with a finger. He let go of Katie’s hand and waved her through. ‘Keep the coffee. It’s milk, no sugar.’
She smiled and got on the empty bus, into her favourite seat. Opposite the driver.
Through the window she could see Sam smiling at his frowning passengers, and lip-read him saying tickets please as though he hadn’t a care in the world.
That was a great journey. They talked, of course. All the way to Lazy Hot Springs, until Katie had to get off. She’d gone off the idea of a hike by then. All she wanted to do was stay on that bus and talk more to the handsome funny guy at the wheel. But she got up and made to leave and when he asked her for her phone number she told him. He smiled, opened the hydraulic doors and said, ‘Fox Line wishes you a nice day. Driver Sam wishes you a shitty one for not taking him with you.’
She laughed and waved goodbye, still waving as the bus pulled away, with windows full of glowering people staring at her like she was the Anti-Christ.
All she thought about on the hike was Sam. Her head was spinning and she walked further than she intended, striding out in a trance. Why would she give a bus driver her number in Silver when she practically lived with Tom? But she didn’t regret it, and when the bus back that evening was driven by a middle-aged pot-bellied man with a moustache, she was crestfallen.
The phone call came the next day, her father getting there first. He asked who was speaking in a very careful and deliberate way and then called Katie to the phone in the parlour. He held the receiver out to her as if showing a child something it had damaged and waiting for an apology.
‘A Sam Hunt. For you.’
Katie’s heart had started pounding. She was as excited as a sixteen-year-old on her first date and her father could see it through her mask of indifference.
She took the receiver without putting it to her ear and said thank you. Frank Crosby understood the gesture and left the room.
With that first Hello? she knew it was over with Tom. She and Sam met that afternoon in town and walked up through the trail in the forest to the old fire lookout hut. And they had sex that nearly made Katie die with ecstasy. She’d known Sam for less than twenty-four hours but her appetite for him was insatiable and she thought as she lay in his powerful dark brown arms between all that rapture, that she would never be able to live without him again. With Sam it was fucking, not making love, although each act contained more love than Tom had given her in her whole life. And they talked. They talked so much Katie felt she’d known Sam since she was born.
She didn’t tell her parents a thing. Her father never asked about the phone call, and neither seemed to show any signs of suspecting that each time she went out she was meeting an Indian bus driver who would alternately make her laugh until she cried, and then cry out again in pleasure when he peeled off her clothes, high above town in the pines, or in the tiny wooden bed in the staff accommodation hut behind the depot.
She knew the ugly name for it of course. Indian-struck. That was what white people said when any white girl fell for a Native Canadian man. But Katie wasn’t Indian-struck at all. She was in love with Sam: the man, not the Indian, and she wanted to make sure he knew it.
The night before the Crosbys were due to leave she met him at the fire hut. She held his hands and looked into his black eyes very earnestly indeed.
She was going back to Vancouver, she said. She was going back to tell her boyfriend that it was over and then she would come straight back to Silver and be with him.
Katie braced herself for Sam to be sceptical, to dismiss her as a middle-class girl who’d used him for some rough-stuff vacation fun, and to be angry and hurt. But Sam looked straight back into her eyes, and said, ‘I know you will.’
They did what their bodies told them they had to do about four or five times, and then, exhausted, crawled back down the trail to town. Sam said goodbye at the end of her street, and walked away as if there was absolutely no doubt they would see each other again. Katie knew that was the truth.
She thought about Tom on the car journey all the way back to Vancouver, about how she could tell him without hurting him.
She loved him still, in a nostalgic kind of way. She’d been his girl almost half her adult life. A life together was taken for granted. But now the thought of him even kissing her made her wriggle with discomfort. She would tell him the moment they got back.
He called twenty minutes after they returned and said he’d made a dinner reservation in Denton’s. Where better to tell him, she thought, than in the best restaurant in town? Her parents seemed excited, asking her ridiculous questions, like, what time Tom was picking her up and what was she going to wear? Perhaps if Katie’s mind hadn’t been on Sam Hunt’s brown body and warm lips, she might have detected something was up in the Crosby household, but she slung on her green dress and grabbed a jacket when the door chimes announced Tom was there.
Tom held her and kissed her on the lips the moment she answered the door, as her eyes screwed in a grimace that he couldn’t see.
‘God, I missed you, you hick.’
She gave him a weak smile.
‘Let’s eat.’
He was looking unusually smart. He wore a grey Italian suit and a silk tie that she hadn’t seen before, and as he opened the passenger door of his Volvo for Katie she saw him raise his head and wink up at her father waving from the bedroom window.
They went to a wine bar first and Katie let him talk for three-quarters of an hour. He talked about the ball and how everyone had missed her. He told her about the trouble he’d had with his new PA and how James had a new car. He told her that she should enrol in this new health club on the coast that everyone was joining. It would do her good. Get her in shape. She watched his mouth move but struggled to concentrate on what the words meant. Katie was back in Silver, smelling the pines, hearing the woodpeckers knocking out a rhythm in the distance, feeling the rough dry earth beneath her back and buttocks as Sam blocked out the sun above her with his body. But here she was. Sitting in a bar full of vacant young men in crumpled designer suits and women pretending to be young and cool until they could revert to their true suburban colours the moment they hit thirty.
As she gathered the courage to say what she had to say, he motioned to the barman for the check and told her it was time to go. It could wait, she thought. She would tell him at dinner. Give him time to take it in.
They drove to the restaurant in near-silence, Katie staring ahead, Tom smiling and humming. She’d been to Denton’s only once but the head waiter greeted them as if they were long-lost friends. Tom took Katie’s arm and halted her in the marble-floored, plant-filled lobby.
‘You go in, darling. I’ll be there in a minute. I love you.’
He held her face and kissed her deeply. She was stunned. Weird behaviour, but the head waiter was already guiding her through the lobby into the restaurant before she had time to ask Tom what the hell he was playing at. Big shock. Her parents and Tom’s widowed mother were sitting at a big round table for six. They stood up and greeted her. Katie was completely and utterly lost. The restaurant was full, faces looking at her as she sat down heavily on the blue velvet seat pushed into the back of her knees by the waiter.
She looked open-mouthed and helpless at her mother for an explanation, but Mrs Crosby put a finger to her lips and smiled at something behind Katie’s shoulder.
The lights in the restaurant were dimmed, and behind her she heard Tom’s voice. My God, he was talking to the whole restaurant. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, there’s someone very special here tonight.’
She was going mad. What was happening? Her mind tossed in a frenzy to make sense of it. Had Tom somehow read her thoughts? Was this mockery of her first meeting with Sam to punish her, to make her pay for her betrayal? How did he know? How could anyone know her secret?
She spun round. He was standing with a guitar in his hand, his best friend James at Tom’s side holding a lit candelabra.
Tom continued while Katie looked on with the expression of a witness at a road accident.
‘I’m sure you’ll forgive me for interrupting your meals, but I’m hoping that this special person here, Miss Katie Crosby, is going to say yes to what I’m going to ask her in a moment.’
There were noises of people going aw, and ah, and before Katie could move or shout no, her horror was completed as Tom started to play the guitar. It was a clumsy attempt at Harry Nilsson’s ‘Can’t Live if Living is Without You’. She only barely recognized it. Katie’s easy-listening habit stretched way back and Tom naturally scorned her for it, but occasionally relented and bought her albums she liked, always among albums he thought she should listen to. She didn’t, however, like Nilsson. If Tom was being generous, he was misdirecting his energy. He started to sing, becoming embarrassingly and comically way off his limited vocal range when he came to the chorus.
Katie had descended into Hell. The nightmare of a song went on for about ten years, and then it stopped. There was a burst of applause from the diners, and Tom dropped onto one knee while James grabbed the guitar. He took Katie’s limp hand in his and said it.
‘Katie. Will you marry me?’
There was a cheer from some of the more inebriated diners who were clearly enjoying this spectacle.
Katie’s parents beamed and Tom’s mother dabbed at an eye with her napkin.
She thought then that she would like to die. Time stood still for Katie Crosby at that moment. It seemed that all the faces staring at her had frozen in the middle of some action, like an edition of the Twilight Zone. Surely Rod Serling would walk in any moment with a cigarette, and introduce the first story?
She saw through the dimmed light a fat man in the corner with a fork raised half-way to his mouth. There was a woman leaning her head on an elegant hand by the window, grinning with the slit of a red-painted mouth. A couple who were holding hands at the next table smiled at her as though she were their daughter graduating from high school. But she could hear nothing except the beating of her heart and the buzzing of her own blood in her ears, and there was Tom’s face, still gazing up at hers in theatrical expectation.
Katie stood up. Her mother made a happy O shape with her mouth over at Tom’s mother.
She spoke quietly, but nobody in the restaurant missed a word. ‘No. I won’t marry you, Tom. I love someone else and I’m going back to Silver tomorrow to ask him to marry me.’
There was a tiny scuffling noise from the table, but mostly silence.
‘I’m sorry. I really am.’
She pushed back the chair and walked calmly from the room. She walked more quickly through the lobby and by the time she got to the street she was running as hard as she could in her high green silk shoes. She ran gasping down the sidewalk, tears of humiliation and horror streaming down her face and she didn’t stop until she got the ocean in sight.
She cried like a child for at least five hours, walking the streets until she could have dropped, before she dared hail a cab and go home. By the time she crawled out of the cab and stumbled up the front porch steps she looked like a hooker on a busy night: her jacket mangled and creased from being clutched to her chest and her face streaked with make-up that had dissolved hours ago in salty tears.
There were no recriminations from her parents – she loved them for that – they were just glad she was safe. But there was talking to be done as her father put it, and never mind them, he thought Tom deserved an explanation.
So she wrote it all down in a letter and posted it to him. Nothing about Sam, just about her and Tom and why it could never work, then packed a bag and made a rail reservation. She didn’t tell her parents who she’d fallen for. She wanted to see if it was enough for them that she needed to be free, that she yearned for something else other than a middle-class life in a Vancouver suburb. And it seemed to be. They asked no questions. They gave her the keys to the house in Silver and kissed her goodbye. When Katie Crosby stepped on that eastbound Via Rail train she had never felt so free in her life.
The miracle was there. Sam was at the station.
Katie saw him from the window before the train stopped, a tall, solitary figure leaning against a wooden parcel trolley. She was completely unable to decipher the emotion that the sight of that patient, hopeful man standing alone on a train platform stirred in her. It was more than love and gratitude. It was more than the very real need to weep. It seemed as though he had always been there, waiting for her to realize who she was and come and find him. But even that could not fully explain the complexity of her passion.
She stepped down from the carriage and waited motionless for him to see her, her bags at her feet.
Katie watched as Sam scanned the crowd of passengers weaving their way from the train to the street. He saw her. The invisible beam of light between them set fire to his face, but he walked rather than ran to her. They said nothing for nearly a full minute as he held her, then he held her face in his hands. ‘I thought I’d check the trains every day for a month.’
That was his explanation. Simple.
‘And then what? What about the fifth week?’
He looked down into her eyes, milky blue jewels, swimming with tears. ‘And then I’d check them for another month.’
They married nine days later, and Mr and Mrs Hunt started married life in the tiny staff accommodation room that Sam rented from the bus company. He wouldn’t use the Crosbys’ house and Katie respected his wishes. It wasn’t hard for Katie to get a job in Silver. Everyone knew Frank and June Crosby’s girl, and within a month of having run out on Tom, Katie was a happily married woman, selling fossils and loose gemstones to Japanese tourists in a lobby arcade shop in The Rocky Mountain Chateau, the massive Canadian Pacific hotel on the edge of town.
Of course there was tension on the day they picked Frank and June up from Calgary Airport, but it was a lot for the Crosbys to take in at once. She forgave them, like she hoped they would forgive her.
And two beautiful grandchildren had subsequently softened everything. Now, her parents liked to think of themselves as shining white liberals, proud their daughter had rejected the shiny prize of North American conspicuous consumption for love.
Oh it was love all right. A deep, enduring, growing and generous love. He had never once let her down in any aspect of their life, and she hoped he could say the same of her. She loved Sam and her children more than anything in the world, and the snarling female wolf downstairs would have tough competition from Katie when it came to who was more terrifying in defending their family.
Which was why her antennae were twitching now. Sam wasn’t himself. It wasn’t just the blackouts, it was as though he was fighting some secret battle.
Katie ran a hand over the top of the model mountain’s glass case and then walked to the wall to unplug the cable.
The snow was piling up outside and she looked forward to kicking her way home through it, letting the big flakes settle on her hair and the cold making her cheeks blush with cold. Katie Hunt loved the snow. But Katie Hunt did not love secrets, which was why she was going to keep a watchful eye on her family. The stuffed wolf continued to bare its teeth silently downstairs, in a lifeless tableau of female solidarity.
Eric Sindon’s formidable rota hadn’t taken Sam’s involuntary stop-over at Stoke into account. There were no points for getting stranded in the snow, and certainly no favours for manual groomers, a species regarded by Silver Ski Company as only slightly further up the food chain than lichen.
Sam found his welcome back to a full day at the depot consisted of being assigned to the bottom station of the Beaver chairlift, on the day of the fun-run. The Beaver run, an easy green trail, was in shade all morning until the sun crept up and hit it around two-thirty. The geeks in fancy dress would come down then, racing for some dumb prize, dressed like morons. Another idea of Pasqual Weaver’s. But that wouldn’t happen until the sun came round. That meant Sam had to freeze his balls off in the shadow of the mountain for six hours while he loaded untidy, grouchy herds of beginners onto the creaky old chairlift. Meanwhile, the lucky guys who drew a longer straw with Sindon basked in the sun on the south-facing slopes, saluting happy passengers on the high-speed quads, and topping up their tans.
As Sam shovelled more snow onto the chair run-up platform, Eric Sindon’s rota of injustice was far from his mind.
Dreams were one thing. Blackouts that left you unable to account for your actions were another. Sam had wrestled with his damaged memory since waking at Stoke, trying in vain to recall how he came to be in the truck. The part of it all that stung him hard was the blood. There was no escape from the fact. His face, his chin to be exact, had been covered in thick, dried, blackened blood. Sam had woken in the warm truck to find himself half-way up the pass from Stoke, on the edge of the highway with the engine running. He had sat in the cab for at least five minutes trying to figure out what the hell had gotten him there, until a glance in the rear-view mirror let him catch sight of his face. Everything below his nose was black with it. It caked his face like a kid’s first chocolate brownie at a party.
His first thought was that he was dying. The panic that rose in his breast sent images of Katie and the kids whirling in front of his eyes, and although he wasn’t aware of it at the time, he had croaked Katie’s name as his hands flew to his face.
But the blood was old, and Sam was not wounded. Half-falling from the cab into the road, he scrubbed at his face with handfuls of snow until the blood, and what felt like most of his head, had finally disappeared.
Now, faced with the grinding normality of the first of the morning’s skiers clattering onto the chair, the incident felt like a distant and vile nightmare. Except that Sam knew it had been real.
The cold was real, too. And the conditions were hellish. All this snow might be good for business, but only if it would damn well stop. It was clear right now, but the blizzards had been rolling in and out of Silver like they’d been ordered. Huge dumps aren’t much use if the pass keeps closing. This morning, it was minus twenty at the lodge and Sam shovelled like a fevered gold prospector to keep his circulation going.
The Beaver took three-at-a-time on a chair that should have been junked ten years ago. Skiers were arriving at his hut in ones and twos, warming up with the first run of the day down what the instructors called a pussy run. This was where Sam was supposed to say have a nice day and enjoy your run as he steadied the chair for them and swept the snow off the seat with a broom. Today, it was unlikely Sam would win bonus money for being employee of the month. In fact, the skiers would be lucky if he looked at them. Sam Hunt was in a very far-away place.
Two early morning ski patrollers, Baz and Grant, who’d been laying the slalom poles for the fun-run, skidded up to the chair, coming to a halt with whoops in a high spray of snow directly and deliberately aimed at Sam, with the misguided intention of making him laugh. Mistake.
‘Go fuck yourselves,’ Sam barked at them from beneath his new mantle of snow, like a snowman possessed by a demon.
‘Hey. So the customer relations course went well then, Sam, huh?’ Baz laughed with an abandon that came with the knowledge he’d soon be skiing in the sun with girls looking at his butt.
