My Favorite Souvenir(19)

“Hold on tighter, okay? We’re going off trail for a few minutes.”

“Okay!”

I loved that she didn’t ask if it was allowed or what we were going to see. Maddie trusted me to keep her safe, even though we’d only known each other for a few days. Once I got close to the overlook, I parked and climbed off, removing my helmet and hanging it from the handlebars.

Maddie climbed off, removed her helmet, and proceeded to rub her butt. “I think my ass is a little numb from the vibration.”

“Think how my nuts feel.”

She laughed. “I guess I should be glad you’re not rubbing them then.”

“What did you think I took you up here to show you?” I winked.

I unpacked her camera equipment from the back of the snowmobile and grabbed the Thermos of hot chocolate. “Come on. This way.”

Leading her over to a giant rock about twenty feet from the edge of the mountain, I climbed up first, then extended a hand to pull her up with me.

She turned and got her first glimpse of the winter-wonderland view down below. The landscape was truly magnificent. The forest was turned white, the sky was bright blue, and smoke hovered over a geothermal spring in the center of the valley. “Oh my God. It’s gorgeous.”

I looked at the giant smile on her face. “Yeah, it really is.”

Maddie couldn’t unpack her camera fast enough. She stood and took pictures, lost in her own world for a solid ten minutes. When she sat down and sighed, I figured it was the perfect time for a warm drink, so I poured some of the steaming cocoa into the plastic cap that doubled as a mug and passed it to her.

“Oh wow. This is just perfect,” she said.

We passed the hot chocolate back and forth a few times, taking turns sipping.

She shook her head and sighed. “I can’t just take pictures of kids for the rest of my life.”

“No?”

“There has to be a middle ground somewhere. I loved my job for the music magazine, but I was never home. I want to have a family someday, and there’s no way I want to drag my kids around the globe nonstop like my parents did to me. But the last few days have really made me realize how much I also need to fuel my soul.”

I nodded. “I get it. That’s how I found my way to teaching.”

“You know, when I asked you the other day how you got into teaching, you blew me off. You said it was a story for another day.” She bumped shoulders with me. “Well, it’s another day, Mr. Hooker.”

I stared out at the sky for a moment, not sure where to start. Eventually, I closed my eyes and figured it might be easiest to get the worst part of the story over with first. “I met Zoe my first semester in college—not in class, but at a bar where I was playing a gig, though she was a student, too. She was four foot eleven and weighed a hundred pounds, if that. But she walked up to the microphone and just started singing with me—‘Some Kind of Wonderful’ by Grand Funk Railroad.”

I shook my head and pictured her that night. It was the first time in a long time that I’d actually smiled thinking about Zoe. “She had the craziest deep, raspy voice. It sounded like it belonged to a three-hundred-pound, forty-year-old gospel singer. I used to tell her I fell in love with the woman stuck inside the young, pretty girl. She really was an old soul.” I paused. “Anyway, that was the last gig I ever played alone.”

“Zoe and you became a duet?”

I nodded. “She couldn’t sing if she looked out at the audience. So we sang to each other. We were students, so we played mostly local places during the week. But we branched out some on the weekends, and we started to gather a big following. Our senior year, a record label came to see us play and offered us a deal.”

“Oh wow. I had no idea.”

“That’s because we never recorded the album. Zoe and I were set to take a semester off of school. We were scheduled to go to LA to record in January. The night before we left, I had the bright idea to go skiing one last time before we went to the land of sunshine. Zoe was a decent skier, but she didn’t ski double-black-diamond trails like I did. Rather than stick to the regular trails with her, I told her I’d meet her at the bottom because I wanted to do one last run down the doubles. She insisted on coming with me. I didn’t fight her on it hard enough, so she came. Halfway down, she hit an ice patch landing a mogul and went off course.” I took a deep breath and swallowed. “She hit a tree. Broke her neck. She died instantly.”

“Oh my God, Milo.” Maddie reached out and pulled me into a hug. She held me tight. “I’m so sorry.”

I nodded. “Thank you.” After a few minutes, she loosened her grip, and I finished my story. “Anyway, yesterday was the first time I’d skied since that day. And I decided to go into teaching to stay within music, which I loved. But I couldn’t bring myself to sing without Zoe after that.”

“Wow. I can certainly understand why. But, Jesus, Milo. Why didn’t you tell me how monumental a day yesterday was?”

I didn’t know the answer to that question. “I guess I needed it to not be a big deal for me. Making it about you helped me keep my mind off of the reason I’d stopped skiing.”

“And here I am telling you all my problems. What I went through isn’t half as traumatic.”

“We both suffered a loss of someone we loved. Just in different ways.”