The Boatbuilder by Daniel Gumbiner

Author:Daniel Gumbiner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781944211547
Publisher: McSweeney's
Published: 2018-05-10T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

“I DIDN’T KNOW YOU hadn’t told them,” Nell said on the phone that night. “I’m sorry. You’re right, it’s your story to tell, but I just assumed you had told them. I mean, you’ve been living and working with these people all day every day for what? The last six months?”

“Well, you should have asked me first,” Berg said.

“Okay, you’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry. I apologize for that.”

Berg looked out the window of the cubby. The trees behind the farmhouse looked green and bunchy, like broccoli florets.

“I still want you to come up this weekend,” Berg said, his voice softening.

“I was still planning on it,” she said. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell them? Why don’t you talk about it?”

“I don’t know,” Berg said.

“You didn’t do anything wrong, Berg. You had a concussion. You kept having all those headaches. They prescribed you painkillers.”

“I know.”

“So there’s nothing to be ashamed about, right?” Nell said.

“Right.”

After they hung up he leaned back in bed. The things Nell said were not untrue, but they were incomplete. The way she told it, he was blameless. But he didn’t feel like that. He felt responsible. He needed to be responsible. If he wasn’t, then he lost all agency, any ability to combat the problem.

He thought back to beginning of everything, to the concussion, three years ago. It had been a long time since he’d been skiing and he was having a nice time. Nell was down at the lodge and he was out on the slopes by himself. The air smelled like pine and hard rock and sweet alpine meadow. The sounds of the mountain were muted and seemed to come one at a time, emerging in their full particularity and then disappearing back into the white silence: the flap of a bird’s wing, the scrape of a snowboarder passing him on his right, carving her way through the ice.

When Berg had finished the first few blue squares he felt ready for something more difficult. He took a lift to the top of the mountain, which would allow him to take any number of routes back to the bottom. Once up there, he approached a man who was wearing a red shirt that said staff. The man’s face looked red and burned, like a piece of meat that had just been taken out of the freezer. Berg asked him what the easiest black diamond was and the man said, “Devil’s Gulch.”

Devil’s Gulch was not the easiest black diamond. Berg would learn this an hour later, as he sat in the emergency first-aid hut at the bottom of the mountain, getting examined by a nurse with a shaved head.

“What run were you coming down?” the nurse asked.

“Devil’s Gulch.”

“Oh boy,” the nurse had said.

But Berg had no time to be angry. Or, rather, he didn’t have the capacity to be angry. He could not think. His head felt like a wide-open field. The field was full of crickets and Tylenol pills and the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.