Ditched
You stood at the bottom of the bunny slope waiting for me, your face pale and empty in the moonlight. My friend pulled her Chevy Nova into the parking lot, and I caught sight of you right away, there by the tow rope, head down, shoulders slumped, both hands stuffed into your jacket pockets. When the car stopped, I clambered out, asking if you wanted to go for one more run, maybe get some hot cocoa in the lodge, extra marshmallows, my treat. But you simply shook your head no.
You knew what I’d done, that I’d left you there on that hill by the river, surrounded by pine trees and inky-black sky, to go joyriding with my friends. Those days, we didn’t have cell phones, so my desertion must have been pre-arranged. I must have asked them to come and get me, to take me away from the obligations of looking after my ten-year-old brother. Or maybe they just showed up. All I know is I left you. I left you and didn’t look back.
Perhaps I thought you wouldn’t miss me, or that I’d return before you even noticed I was gone. Either way, I kicked off my skis, dropped by poles and jumped into the passenger seat, eager to put some distance between myself and responsibility. My friend peeled out of the lot and headed into town, first to Main Street to flirt with boys - Tony, who worked at the gas station, and those basketball players from another high school, what were their names again? – then out to backcountry roads where we could drive fast. One hand on the vinyl seat, another on the dash, we sang Billy Joel and Bobby Brown at the tops of our lungs, that Nova pitching over frost heaves and ice patches like a missile in the night.
Sometimes I wonder how we managed not to crash, not to fly off the road into a ditch, that old brown car tumbling end over end, flinging our limp bodies into some farmer’s frozen field. I guess when you’re fifteen you don't think about those things. You don’t think about the people you’d leave behind, how they might feel when you’re gone. You don’t really think about anything except boys and Billy Joel and going nowhere fast.
You looked for me, no doubt. First at the snack shack, then the bathrooms, and finally out on those darkened ski trails. There were only ten to choose from back then, our small-town slope more hill than mountain. Your big sister should have been easy to find. But no, she was gone. She’d ditched you for a better offer.
It stung, that rejection. That act of abandonment. We’d always been close, the two of us. We spent afternoons and school vacations at home together, playing Nintendo and eating boxed mac and cheese while our parents worked in the shoe factories. We’d get the neighborhood kids together to ride bikes or throw the football. On rainy days, we watched movies and played video games. The one where the little guy jumps on mushrooms, that was our favorite. We fought, of course, but never for long. Staying mad meant having no one to talk to.
I suppose by the time I was fifteen, I wanted something else. I wanted Friday night football games, trips to the mall and fast rides through town. Things that made me feel older, more mature. Things that didn’t include my little brother.
When Mom finally came to the slope to pick us up, you could have tattled on me. You could have told her what I’d done. She would have grounded me, for sure - for a month, maybe longer. But you didn’t say anything. You sat in the front seat staring straight ahead, as quiet as you’d been on that bunny slope, where we stood side by side in the dark waiting to go home.
I always assumed our drifting apart began much later, in our 30s and 40s, when politics became a sticking point, when you got married and I got divorced, when our kids were born, when our dad got sick, when I remarried and moved to the opposite side of the country. But maybe it started much earlier than all that, on the night I jumped into a Chevy Nova and rode away.
Wendy Fontaine’s work has appeared Pithead Chapel, Hippocampus, Longridge Review, River Teeth and Sweet Lit, as well as Creative Nonfiction’s Sunday Short Reads. She’s received nonfiction prizes from Hunger Mountain and Tiferet Journal.