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  Jenny was on her tummy when Farrell reached the crib, her tiny hand cupping the edge of the blanket. Not gripping it, though Farrell could tell that’s what she’d been doing reflexively just before. Jenny’s dreadful robin’s egg blue hand cupped the pink blanket.

  Farrell gathered her to him and ran as fast as he could go, the pounding of his footsteps drowning the chimes of the clock, back through the living room, across a shaft of light from the bathroom, into the dimly lit hall and the dark bedroom where Lena slept.

  Farrell gazed at the snow building on the ledge outside his window. He couldn’t remember one word that was said the day they took Jenny back to the church in Quincy where he and Lena had been married. He knew only that later, after they’d driven to the cemetery, he’d concentrated on keeping his feet moving on the long walk through the wet grass.

  Billy O’Rourke, his father-in-law, had found Farrell in the backyard of his house later that evening, walking back and forth between the laundry poles, one finger on the line. Billy had walked him back into the house and Farrell had drunk two quick whiskeys. He headed for the kitchen, where he found Lena washing the dishes, every dish her mother had.

  A month later, Lena announced she was returning to work.

  “I’m just going on,” she said in a way that made Farrell wonder just whom she was talking to. “We’ve just got to keep moving and it will get better.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked. At work, he spent hours tapping a pencil on a piece of paper until his secretary had taken it from his hand. “The doctors said this might take time.”

  “I don’t want time,” she said. “I want to make it stand still.”

  Even then, Farrell was stunned by her strength. He decided it was something she’d inherited from her mother, Carol, who had been struck by multiple sclerosis in her late twenties, yet refused to give in to the disease. Carol had kept her job in the local library and forced the town to build her ramps so she could do her job.

  Together Farrell and Lena retreated into routine and, though he did not realize it until that moment in his room at Alta, into isolation. Rain or shine, he arose each morning to run for miles through the park by the lake. The sweat and the endorphins calmed him, kept the awful memories of that November day boxed and corded in a remote basement in his mind. Whenever he’d catch himself breaking into melancholy, he’d pinch himself or sprint until everything blurred except the sidewalk. One morning he slipped on a patch of ice and sprawled hard on the pavement. A huge bruise and raspberry developed on his skin that ached all day and made it hard to think. Each morning after that during the long Chicago winter, he intentionally sprinted near ice, so that at least once during his run he’d feel his balance go and he’d thud hard on the frozen ground.

  He filled his days with details, trying to cram as much experience as he could into every minute. In this way, his mind could not wander. Phone calls to Mexico, meetings with loan officers and statisticians and Commerce Department representatives. Reports written, more phone calls, no lunch, deals consummated over the phone (he’d requested no travel), then more meetings, decisions made, notes prepared for the following day. Finally, out into the Chicago night, briskly striding through the streets toward home.

  Some nights he got home first and he cooked dinner. They spoke very little to each other, preferring to find solace in routine. While Lena watched television, he opened the recipe book, preheated the oven to three hundred twenty-five degrees. Butter and oil in the casserole, and when they began to foam, he added veal, browned it lightly on all sides, removed the meat, and added the carrots and onions to the pot. Between bastes, he swept the floor, rearranged the bookcases, took out the trash, wrote checks for the bills. When the day was over, he fell into bed, grateful for the exhaustion that brought sleep, not thought.

  In February, Lena looked up from her plate and said, “I’ve asked for a transfer. I can’t take the unit anymore.”

  Farrell nodded. “What will you do?”

  “Maybe the E.R. I like the speed of it. You just go.”

  “What made you decide?”

  Lena twirled spaghetti on her plate, then said: “Their faces.”

  It was that night, Farrell remembered, that Lena wrote again in her diary. She didn’t write every night like she used to. No, the daily pattern had been shattered. Now, sometimes once a week, sometimes once a month, he awoke to find her sitting at her table scribbling. He watched her shoulders move with the rhythm of the pen, then pull a pillow over his head and fall again into darkness. Farrell turned from the window and opened the diary.

  February 6

  They say I can’t go back. Can’t tell my Mom and Dad why. Can’t tell Jack. He seems to be handling it all so well, as if feeling squished inside came natural.

  A baby today, she crowned perfectly. Rotated one of those textbook rotations that freed her shoulders from her mom. She was so strong, that woman. Pushed just once and her daughter slipped free, warm and bloody into the doctor’s hands, from hers to mine. Margaret helped the mom while I took the girl to do the Apgar tests. A real little one, 5 pounds, 2 ounces.

  I tested her, washed her, dried her. Swaddled her in blankets. I even stroked her cheeks so she instinctively turned to suck at my finger. As if it were my breast. I asked her what she thought of her new mommy and the world. I whispered, I love you.

  That’s when I noticed Margaret’s hand on my arm. She asked me if I didn’t think it was time Paula held her baby now?

  I snapped back that I was going as fast as I could. Margaret looked at me with the strangest expression, as if I were speaking a language she didn’t understand.

  I looked at the clock. The testing and washing usually takes me ten minutes. Thirty-five had passed.

  Dr. Powers says I can stay at the hospital, just not near babies. Not for a while, not unless I get help. Don’t need help. I’d never hurt a baby. Never.

  Farrell dropped the diary across his chest. “Oh, Jesus,” he whispered. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to remember, tried to see anything on her face that would have told him what she went through that night. Lena’s face was blank. Farrell slammed his fist into the mattress.

  March 6

  I’ve begun to dream again and it scares me. Used to be I thought of dreams as something different. Awake, dreaming, now they are the same.

  Last night I saw myself lying in bed while Jack sat spread-eagled on the floor, bent at the waist, hands reaching for toes in white socks.

  I told him that he thrashed in his sleep, that it kept me awake. He shrugged his shoulders and said his neck hurt.

  I said, you lost weight. He smiled and said, the running, it’s a benefit. I sighed and asked him how an ache can help. Jack switched to a groin stretch, his feet together, back against the wall, hands on the inside of his thighs. He said he’d get through it.

  I asked what he hoped to get through. Jack didn’t look at me, just said he’d read somewhere that the Japanese believe that if you move steadily into pain, you will eventually pass through it as the muscles and joints become accustomed to activity.

  I rolled the edge of the pillow in my hand. I somehow knew that I had read the same thing and that they talked about a promising Japanese baseball pitcher who had a strained elbow. He threw a thousand pitches a day to fix it. His arm’s useless now.

  I was suddenly sitting up in bed, looking at my hands. I said, you used to love my smell.

  He didn’t say anything. He dropped backward into a yoga pose, gasping at the effort.

  Even now, awake, I think that Jack breathes through his mouth now.

  April 2

  E.R. moves. Never get near the young ones. Just treat adults. Better that way. Fast. So fast you leave yourself behind. It’s like that physics experiment in college—as the train goes by at the speed of light, the clocks turn backward.

  Jack goes to Mexico tomorrow to meet with Gabriel Cortez at his home on the coast. I told Jack tonight we need to leave Chicago. I’m slipping. H
e looked at me strange and said okay.

  For now, though, I’m fine. Fine. I just fear the nights when time slows and I catch up to me.

  Chapter 6

  THE WALLS OF THE tiny room seemed to breathe and press in around Farrell like a lung. He felt seasick reading her secret thoughts and told himself working with his hands might still the sensation.

  He grabbed a cup of coffee and a few pastries in the dining room and climbed down the stairs to the basement, where he’d been given a locker. He pulled out his powder skis, separated them, inverted the left ski, and wrenched it tight in a block vise. Under the tip and tail of the ski, he placed three two-by-fours for support. He rooted in the bottom of the locker and withdrew a black bag. Inside he found a ten-inch, second-cut mill file and file card. The small iron nestled in its bag slid effortlessly into his hand. He rooted out the other equipment: a stick of clear, meltable plastic, a metal scraper, and a thermometer.

  Trying to keep the hangover of Lena’s voice from ringing in his head, Farrell stepped out the door into the driving snowstorm and stuck the thermometer in the snow, waited thirty seconds, and peered at the mercury line: 10 degrees Fahrenheit.

  As Farrell began surgery on his skis, Page walked in wearing tight black stretch pants, an oversized red anorak, and a thick red and black wool hat. He shook melting snow from the hat, wiggled out of the anorak, and brushed back his hair. He was obviously about Farrell’s age, early thirties, but his blond hair was still full and lank, the hair of a teenager.

  “Too bad we had to cancel,” Farrell said. “I was getting ready.”

  Page hoisted himself on top of another bench. “It will be the wildest thing I’ve ever done. She was pissed, but there’s just too much snow. What could she do?”

  “I have time for this?” Farrell asked.

  “Sure,” Page said. “This is The Wave’s show today.”

  “What’s she got him doing?”

  “Don’t know exactly,” Page said. “But I’m sure it’ll be good.”

  Farrell nodded and cut a ragged chunk of bottom from the inside edge of the ski with a pen knife, then dug at the core with a light stroke. He held the plastic stick cigar-style, shaved the tip with the knife, and lit it. An acrid odor filled the room. Farrell held the stick away from his face, watching until the black carbon dripped off and it burned clear. “Been a long time since I’ve seen your pictures in the magazines,” Farrell said. “Three years?”

  “Flying then, wasn’t I?” Page said.

  “Must have been a hell of a crash.”

  “Yeah, the ski company I was working for eventually gave me the boot—something about my bookkeeping. That night I melted our bank machine card on a shipment of fine Peruvian. Around two in the morning, my heart started to skip and blood ran from my nose.

  “At the hospital, I heard the nurse tell a doctor I had chunks coming out of my nostrils, which scared the shit out of me and I tried to straighten out. Trouble was, by the time I got it together, Tina, my fiancé, was gone.”

  Farrell shifted uncomfortably; Page made him think too much about his own responsibility for stories such as these. He snipped small pieces of wire off a roll and laid them diagonally within the hole. He knew he had to say something, so he said: “Story of the eighties.”

  “Ain’t it, though?” Page said, tugging aimlessly at a piece of royal blue yarn that had snagged on his sweater. He seemed to drift off.

  Farrell dripped the melted plastic into the core first, then made a second pass and filled the gash to the surface. When the mass had bonded, he bent the ends of the scraper concave and removed the excess material.

  Page said: “This Y thing. The way I figure it, I perform, get filmed, get seen, get sponsors, make money. It’s been five years since I’ve been on top.”

  “So Inez is your redeemer.”

  “That’s how I’ve got it. Those low budget movies she’s made were just the start. Now she needs a class act for the show.”

  “And you’re Mr. Marquee,” Farrell said.

  “Sarcastic bastard, aren’t you?” Page said.

  “Sorry, I have my moments,” Farrell said. He held out his hand. Page flipped him the mill file. Farrell laid the rough steel at a forty-five-degree angle and pulled in long, even strokes down the ski. After five pulls, he cleaned the file, repeating the process until the ski bottom was flat.

  “Inez’s movies,” Farrell asked. “Any good?”

  “Only seen the first one, not the second, where the guy goes,” Page said. He fell quiet for a moment. “The first one, the title has something to do with an eagle, it depends on how you look at it. When I was young, my dad, asshole that he was, taught me a lesson I’ve never forgotten. There we were. I was twelve, standing with him in some San Francisco gallery. He points to a painting: mostly blue with a couple of big splashes of grainy white in the upper left.”

  “The painting?”

  “Yeah, the title under this thing is ‘Depression’s Climax Number 41,’ ” Page said, chuckling to himself. “Price tag: Twenty-five grand. My dad asks me do I like it? I said, I don’t know, what’s there to like? He picks up a brochure on the table and opens it. Inside there’s a picture of this woman who looks like Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes, standing in a dirty pair of overalls with a paintbrush in her hand. It said she was the rage of the West Coast, pulling in thousands for everything she’s done. My dad points at the dollar sign and says that’s all you’ve got to know to like it.”

  “So Inez’s film wasn’t that good.”

  “Didn’t say that,” Page said, squinting at Farrell and blowing between his lips as if he wanted to whistle. “Part of it was interesting. Lot of interviews and crazy stuff spliced in. I guess it was what you’d call an art film, only it was a documentary. Anyway, I only saw part of it in a ski shop last year. About this old guide in Chamonix. I tried to find it after she made her offer, but they didn’t have it anymore. From what I remember: experimental. Yeah, I guess that’s what you’d call them. Experimental.”

  Farrell’s interest was increasing by the moment, but he did not let Page see it. He continued to draw the melting plastic evenly along the bottom of the ski.

  “The thing is,” Page continued. “The guy, that guide, you know? The word is that he’s a cripple now. Wheelchair. Had a bad fall in Italy a couple of months after the film was shot.”

  Farrell cringed and looked up at him: “That’s not in the movie?”

  “No.”

  “And the other one, the one your friend saw?”

  Page cracked his neck. “About some younger kid starting out. Good skier, into real steep, real hairy shit. My friend said the movie’s crazy, even before he bites it. She’s buff with him in one scene.”

  “Completely?”

  “Must be,” Page said. “He said her tits are nice.”

  “That’s comforting,” Farrell said. They both laughed, then Page’s expression became somber.

  “The other thing, you know when he eats it, I didn’t want to hear too much about,” Page said. “Can’t take it. I get the same feeling when they show replays of football players breaking their legs. When it’s all said and done, all I know is I’ve seen the line of credit backing this. Some German group. You don’t get bucks like that unless someone believes you’re good. That, my friend, is all you have to know about Inez Didier.”

  “So now you and I play pinball for art,” Farrell said.

  “And money, best money I’ve seen in years,” Page said. He stretched his head low over his knee and grunted. “Besides, what’d she say the other night? I know the risks.”

  “Not scared?”

  Page didn’t respond until he’d touched his head on his knee. “Didn’t say that.”

  They were quiet for a moment. Farrell spit on the iron, satisfied at the way it crackled like birdshot off barbed wire. He turned the iron tip down over the ski and held the wax to the flat. He laid the iron on the base, smoothing the wax in, which made a pleasurable hiss.
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  “You thinking about backing out?” Page asked.

  “Not yet,” Farrell said.

  Page rubbed his jaw, then said softly: “All those years before. Did some crazy shit. But I’ve never heard of anything like this.”

  Page gathered his knees to his chest and leaned his head back against the wall. “I need it, though. Can’t be some full-time salesman in some sporting goods store this early in life. You?”

  “I got nothing else. …” Farrell began. “No, that’s not true. … It’s something about her, Inez …”

  Page’s head bobbed. “You can feel it, can’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Farrell said. Farrell wrenched the vise open and caught the ski as it popped out, angry at himself for opening up too much. He inspected the second ski, noticed no major irregularities, and flat-filed.

  Page watched him. “She’ll come at you strange, though.”

  Farrell kept his head down, eyes on the track the file made; he’d learned long ago that if people have something on their minds, they will tell you things if you keep your mouth shut.

  Page came upright out of the stretch. “She asks you about everything. She’s over there with The Wave right now. She did some kind of word game with me the other night. She said Black. I said Red. She said Pine, I said Red. She said Lethal, I said definitely Red.”

  Farrell glanced up from his work. Page was craning his head to see Farrell with his good eye. He had an idiotic grin plastered across his face. “I believe in keeping people off-balance. You ever sold anything, Collins?”

  “In a way.”

  “Been through a sales program?”