her teacher is its purposelessness.
Hey, how is it going?
She replies, Fine, good. How are you?
He asks if she’s all packed up, and she replies, Ya, just last-minute craziness.
Lines of communication pile up like Tetris bricks. For the most part, their entries leave a good-natured slot for the other person to reply. Except that some of Maggie’s don’t, but there’s enough in them for Knodel to find a filament, pick it up, and thread it forward into a new conversation.
The conversation continues into the late evening. Maggie had planned on getting to sleep early, to be fresh in the morning for the flight. Around eleven, Knodel says he is going to bed. Maggie smiles as she types, You’re old!
Knodel says something that disturbs her a little, but also makes her curious.
Just because you’re going to bed, he writes, doesn’t mean you’re going to sleep.
Arriving in Colorado, Maggie becomes reinvested in her own life. The scales of the previous year have been debrided by the winter, by time in general.
The cabin is textbook, tucked down a dirt road deep in the snow-white mountains, with modern amenities but plenty of wood accents. It is big enough to hold all of them—Mr. and Mrs. Wilken and Maggie and her two older sisters and her two older brothers and all the little children. They haven’t been together like this in years. Maggie has her own bed but usually Emily slips into it to snuggle, or Marco does.
They catch up on one another’s lives by the fire. Mr. Wilken does the cooking. He makes an enormous batch of his famous spaghetti sauce. Everybody begs for it and even when you know all the ingredients and their amounts it never tastes the same as when Mark Wilken prepares it. When Maggie was little and they had even less money, he would slip slices of pepperoni into the sauce but there wouldn’t be many because they were expensive. The slices were called prizes, and Maggie and her siblings would fight over how many each of them received.
In the afternoon she goes sledding with the children. The sun casts a blond light across the knolls of snow. There is no grief or fear. It’s the particular blend of beauty and ease that, years later, after strife and death hit, will make her think strife and death don’t make it out to Colorado. In Colorado, you can ski all day and laugh all night and every morning you will wake up unassailable, to coffee in camping mugs and the thud of children. In the quiet evenings, after the children have gone to bed, Maggie’s brothers and Dane turn on the television and tutor the rest of the family in the particular humor of Flight of the Conchords. The gross memory of Hawaii is packed away in the basement with the boogie boards and all the other things you don’t use for nine months. Maggie is resplendent again and she is everybody’s best friend. She gets along with the boys as none of the other women can. She laughs at YouTube videos, memes.
That first night in Colorado, Maggie’s phone dings, and it’s him again. She feels a light go on inside her. This is the person who made her feel the most normal after what happened in Hawaii. During her junior year they’d become close. He had crossed over from being a good teacher into a true ally. So this new attention was not exactly weird. But it was different.
Knodel asks her about presents and snowboarding and the weather and the number of nieces and nephews. There is an appropriate waiting period between texts because that’s what’s required. She puts her phone on the table, facedown, and joins a family conversation. When she picks up the phone again, there are lines of text waiting. Her head gets light from the excitement of it. She will not save the texts, because in the future he will ask her to delete them all, but she will remember each one, especially those from the very beginning, with aching lucidity.
He asks if she is seeing someone and she says yes, a guy from work. It’s nothing serious, but suddenly this feels serious. Serious, but insane. Maggie’s eyes have been wide the whole night, in holy-shit disbelief about this back-and-forth. Honestly she would be less stunned if the man texting her were Brad Pitt, having just felled a bear in the mountains and looking for shelter in her bunk bed.
And because she questioned the impossibility, so