The Undoing. Averil Dean

tickets and the food. It seemed ungrateful after only a few days back not to do him this one favor in return.

      His thoughts spun in circles: go, don’t go, a dozen chattering reasons for and against. Impossible to think through the noise.

      Julian got to his feet and pulled his cap down over his ears.

      “In my experience, if a woman really wants to put you to work, you’ll know it. Today you’re getting a pass. I’d take it if I were you.”

      He opened the door in invitation. A gust of frigid air blew into the room.

      “Arctic,” Eric said. “Go ahead. I think I’m gonna add another layer.”

      “Sure you are.”

      “Give me five minutes. I’ll meet you at the bottom of Prospect.”

      Julian went out, shaking his head.

      Eric sat for a minute after he left, listening as he said goodbye to Rory. When the sound of chopping resumed, he kicked off his boots and went into the kitchen, where Celia was drying the last of the breakfast dishes. She was wearing a cotton nightgown and an ancient, enormous cardigan of moss-green wool. Her hair trailed down her back in a day-old braid.

      He stole up behind her and slipped his hand under the sweater to cup her breast.

      “Come upstairs,” he said.

      The side of her cheek curved upward as she turned off the faucet.

      “I’ve got exactly one hundred and forty-two things to do today,” she said.

      “Hundred and forty-three.”

      He kissed her warm ear. She tucked up her shoulder and turned to face him, smiling, but with one hand flat to his chest.

      “Later, okay?”

      “That’s what you said last night.”

      She wobbled her head, acknowledging this.

      “Are we fighting?” he said.

      “No.”

      “Then come upstairs and prove it.”

      A flash of impatience crossed her face, so quickly he couldn’t be sure it had been there at all. She had pressed a kiss to his cheek and shooed him along, and he’d let himself be sent away because of the kiss and the smile—but now, on the stalled ski lift, it was that swift exasperation he couldn’t get out of his mind.

      He tried to remember the tools of self-control: Think before acting. Count to a hundred, or five hundred. Talk it out. Call for help if you think it’s going sideways.

      He peeled off a glove with his teeth and pulled out his cell phone. He dialed Celia’s number. It rang four times and went to voice mail. And not even her voice, but the canned response the cell came with.

      He shoved the phone back into his pocket.

      One, one thousand, two, one thousand, three, one thousand, four...

      The lift hummed to a start. It traveled a few yards, then stopped again with a jerk that set the chairs swinging. Eric could just make out the lift operator in his box at the top of the run—only forty yards to go, but it may as well have been a mile.

      “Goddamn it,” he muttered.

      Julian sat back comfortably, his arm around Kate’s snow-dusted shoulders. If Eric was there to circumvent trouble with Kate, he was doing a fine job; she had been bubbly and easygoing all day, in spite of the weather.

      “No point stressing, man,” Julian said. “You have somewhere else to be?”

      Eric ground back the answer with his teeth. Though they’d been sedentary for almost an hour, his heartbeat was tripping like a snare drum. His eyes burned with cold, with the chain of sleepless nights that had started in Alaska and continued at the Blackbird Hotel.

      From his breast pocket he pulled out a flask of whiskey, unscrewed it and took a burning slug. Julian and Kate waved it off, so he took a couple more swallows himself, then more after that since the flask was nearly empty.

      The exchange with Celia nagged at him, became tangled in the threads of previous conversations, as if the words had come untethered from their context. He couldn’t remember who said what, or when, or whether certain comments were a response to something someone else had said. He couldn’t put the pieces together. He couldn’t think. That was the problem—he couldn’t think. His mind was a freight train, fast and unsteerable, pushed by its own weight and momentum with Eric like a panicked conductor trying to keep the fucker from jumping the tracks.

      He stared into the whiteness, rocking back and forth with the energy leaping in his chest.

      That impatience on her face. She wanted him to go, didn’t she? Wanted to be rid of him. He remembered standing in the hallway—was that last night or the night before? He couldn’t be sure. But definitely he remembered standing in the hallway with his hand on the doorknob, and finding it locked.

      At least...he thought he remembered.

      He blinked into the snowstorm. On every side, the snowflakes whirled and dissolved into a fine white mist, like a cloud.

      I’m losing it, he thought helplessly.

      Kate was chattering on the seat beside him. Her voice was painfully bright, a needle in his ear.

      “I’ll bet Celia was glad to see you,” she said.

      “Got that right.” Julian laughed. “I thought there was an avalanche last night, but it turned out to be Celia’s headboard banging on the wall.”

      Eric’s racing mind skidded to a halt. A hard tremor shook his body, locked his jaw.

      Last night.

      Time had gotten slippery again. He couldn’t remember whether it was last night or some other when he’d awakened to find himself on the couch downstairs, blinking into the dying embers of the fire. He’d gotten very drunk—he remembered that. All of them sitting around the hearth, and Celia plucking out a melody on her guitar while Julian lounged back in his chair, laughing with Rory and Kate. Eric had watched with a drink in hand, but he’d kept himself distant. Once he’d met Celia’s eye and she’d smiled—a blank kind of smile like she meant it for someone else and Eric just happened to be in the way.

      He must have fallen asleep soon after. Someone—Celia, of course—had covered him with a blanket, and they all went upstairs and left him alone beside the cooling hearth.

      He’d never gone upstairs last night.

      If it was last night.

      He glanced over the edge of the chair at the crazy swirling flakes. Surely there weren’t enough snowflakes in the sky to fall this way for so long; they must be cycling around, like the inside of a snow globe, the same flakes falling and rising again—how could you tell?

      He dragged his mind back to Celia, trying to focus through the haze. But her face appeared again with that fleeting glance of impatience, that thousand-yard smile, turned away and with her eyes shut tight as he fucked her, like she was imagining someone else in his place. The memories rose like specters in the storm.

      Panic rose to bursting in his chest. He had to see her.

      Right now.

      “There’s no place like home.” Kate was laughing. Shrill peals of hilarity, driving the needle into his brain.

      As if she knew.

      As if they both knew. And thought it was funny.

      Maybe everyone was in on the joke. Maybe Celia was making a fool of him. Celia and Rory both, making fun, making other people laugh at him.

      Eric pressed his hands over his ears, rocking back and forth. The chair swung wildly through the snow. Overhead, the cable creaked in protest.

      He had to see Celia. Now, right now, right fucking