Still I could not move. I counted down the chair lift, fifteen chairs from the top. That was the left marker of the spot where they’d gone down. I eyed a clump of pines far off to the other side for the right marker. The top marker was the space of my hand held in the air, with the thumb touching the edge of the building at the mountaintop. The lower marker was me. If I drew lines from left to right and top to bottom, they would all intersect at the spot where Guthrie and Lila were buried beneath the snow.
And then I realized that the spot on which my eyes were fixed was where Guthrie had gone down. Lila had been behind him and off to the right. I tried to gauge her position.
The policeman and the man with the walkie-talkie were at my side. “Dinnie,” Mr. Bonner said. “We have to show them where we think Guthrie and Lila went down. I thought I could do it, but it’s such white space—it all looks the same—do you think you can tell from here?”
“They need to come down more, and over to the left,” I said. I’d been through both ends of my scarf and started again. I was thinking Come on, scarf, come on, scarf, do your magic.
The man with the walkie-talkie spoke in Italian, directing the rescue team down and to the left. Immediately there was frantic movement up above. The rescuers were picking up a signal. The digging began.
As I stood there, I knew it was closer to where Lila had fallen than Guthrie, but I found myself praying it was Guthrie’s spot, that I’d been mistaken, and they’d find Guthrie first, and then I was instantly ashamed. Find her, I wished, and find her fast, and find Guthrie, and find them alive.
I couldn’t turn around, but I was aware that Signora Palermo had gone off to the van to get the school’s emergency number, and she was returning now and saying something urgently to each of our group. She reached me last. “Dinnie—”
“I can’t look. Don’t stand in front. I’m watching the spot—”
“Dinnie, are you wearing your transceiver?”
I tapped my belt. “Yes.”
“Oh heavens above, spare us—” she said.
“What?” Mr. Bonner said. “What is it?”
She held up a transceiver. “This was in the van. Everyone else is wearing one. That means that either Guthrie or Lila left this behind—”
Belen was sobbing loudly.
Signora Palermo rushed to the policeman and guide. They asked me again to pinpoint where each skier had fallen. The guide communicated more directions through his walkie-talkie. “A sinistra! Sopra!” He told them that there might be only one transceiver, the one whose signals they had already picked up.
“Why don’t they start digging in the second place?” I pleaded. “Tell them to start digging!”
“They can’t just dig anywhere—”
“But I know where Guthrie is. I know it’s him without the transceiver. Below, to the left. I know the spot.”
“Dinnie,” Mr. Bonner said, “the snow might have taken him twenty or thirty feet beyond where you last saw him. It’s too wide an area—”
“Dig!” I shouted. “Tell them to dig!”
It seemed like an hour, but later they told me it was just ten minutes before we saw the pink of Lila’s jacket and her body being placed on a stretcher and swept down the mountain to a waiting helicopter.
“Alive?” I shouted at the rescuer with the walkie-talkie. “É viva?”
He spoke into the transmitter, then listened. He spoke again, listened.
He raised a fist in the air. “É viva!”
Around us, shouts went up.
I kissed my scarf, but still I could not move. The rescuers were digging in a space below and to the left.
Signora Palermo returned with the news that Lila was unconscious, but alive. The rest of us by now were standing pressed up against each other. Someone held my left hand, I don’t remember who.
Mari said, “They’re saying it’s lucky it was early in the day. We have good light—”
Mr. Bonner said, “Dinnie, we’ve gotten through to your uncle Max. He and Sandy will be down as fast as they can get here.”
I clung to these three things: that Lila was alive, that there was good light, and that Uncle Max and Aunt Sandy were coming. I felt as if they were three good omens, and maybe they meant that Guthrie would be found and he would be alive.
While I was standing on that spot of snow, I suddenly remembered the voci bianche in the St. Abbondio church on Christmas Eve. I thought about those white voices and this white snow, and I ached to hear the white voice of Guthrie.
37
Watching
Behind me, an Englishman said about Lila, “Lucky really. Caught in the side-surge instead of the full force. Awfully lucky.” There were murmurs of agreement around him. “If she’d been caught in the full force, she would be buried beneath tons of snow. There would have been little chance of getting her out today, I’d say, and no chance of her being alive.”
I heard Mari tell him, “There’s still another one up there.”
“Is that so?” said the Englishman. “I wouldn’t like to be that person. No, I wouldn’t like that at all.”
Belen said, “How long can a person stay under there and still be alive?”
The Englishman said, “If you get them out within five minutes, that’s very good—”
I didn’t know how much time had passed, but I knew it was more than five minutes, more than ten.
“—and up to twenty or twenty-five minutes, still a chance, but after that, not a lot of hope, I’d say.”
Mari grabbed my arm. “Dinnie, it’s been fifteen minutes. Fifteen!”
My eyes felt as if needles were sticking in them. I kept trying to picture Guthrie down there under the snow, and I wished I had heard all he had said about surviving an avalanche. Had he said you could make an air space? How could you do that if you were mashed under the weight of all that snow? Would your body heat melt some of the snow around you? Could you move?
Keisuke came up and laid his head on my shoulder. “Dinnie,” he said in a shy voice, “this is stew-pod, this avalanche.”
That was when I wanted to cry, when he said stew-pod.
While I was standing there staring at the spot where the rescuers were now digging, and while all my thoughts were on Guthrie, into my mind came an image of my parents, and then one of Crick and Stella and the baby. They didn’t know I was here, they didn’t know about Guthrie and Lila, they didn’t know about avalanches. And then I got very frightened. If they didn’t know about this, then I didn’t know what was happening with them. What if one of them was in danger and I didn’t even know it?
It seemed, right then, that there was danger all around, and I was afraid for everyone I knew. Oddly, though, the only person I wasn’t afraid for was myself.
38
Voci Bianche
While I was trying to imagine if Guthrie could see anything down there under the snow, I remembered his story about the two prisoners looking out of the prison cell and one saw dirt and one saw sky. I wanted to know what Guthrie could see. There is dirt, I thought, and there is sky, and in between, there is the mountain and the snow.
I thought about Uncle Max and Aunt Sandy and Mrs. Stirling and the teachers, and how often they must worry about keeping us safe. I thought about my parents sending me on my opportunity and how worried they must have been, but how they wouldn’t show it, and maybe this was because they didn’t want to frighten me. They might be thinking all the time, I hope she is safe, I hope she is safe, but they wouldn’t say it out loud.
I felt as if my whole family were down there under the snow with Guthrie, and that only I could will them alive.
“Guardate!” There was shouting above and waving of arms and crackling through the walkie-talkie of the policeman next to us.
Mari crunched my hand so hard I felt as if all my fingers were breaking. Keisuke pressed his head into my arm. “I can’t look,” he said. “What they saying?”
The policeman threw his arms in the air.
/> “Found?” I said. “Found?”
He punched his fist back into the air. “Si!” he yelled. “Si!”
They’d found Guthrie. And at last I moved. I grabbed the policeman. “É vivo?” I begged.
There were more crackling voices; the policeman gave a whoop of air. “Si!” he shouted. “É vivo! Alive!”
I felt as if my bubble was bursting into the air and zinging off into the sky. “É vivo! Alive!” I shouted, waving my red scarf in the air.
The others picked up the shout. “Vivo! Alive!” We shouted and shouted. We grabbed strangers. We hugged them. We were a chorus of voci bianche: “Vivo! Vivo! Vivo!”
39
Upstanding
Guthrie was loaded into the helicopter and swept off to the Milanese hospital where Lila had already been taken. A policeman accompanied Signora Palermo in a third helicopter. The rest of us returned to the base of the mountain and huddled with Mr. Bonner in the lodge, warming ourselves, holding on to each other in relief, and waiting for Uncle Max and Aunt Sandy.
They arrived just before dark, bursting into the lodge, staring wildly around and swooping down on us when I waved a tentative glove at them. I was very glad to see them; we all were. Calm Uncle Max. He would take over now, and we were glad to let him.
But he was flustered at first. After he learned that Guthrie and Lila had both been found and were both alive and in the Milanese hospital, he kept pressing his hand to his chest as if to keep his heart from leaping out of it. He hugged me and then went up and hugged everyone in our group. Aunt Sandy wrapped her arms around me and wouldn’t let go. It felt good.
She kept saying, “Dinnie, you’re okay? Everyone else is okay? You sure you’re okay? Everybody’s okay, right? Dinnie, you’re okay?”
They wanted to know exactly what had happened, from start to finish, and so we told them, with each of us bursting in to add details. Then Uncle Max left for Milan, with Mr. Bonner following in the van with Belen, Keisuke, and Mari. I wanted to go with them, but Aunt Sandy asked me to stay behind with her to make calls to Lila’s and Guthrie’s parents and to finish a police report. We would spend the night in a nearby hotel; one of the rescuers had offered to take us on to Milan to meet Uncle Max the next day.
Aunt Sandy had trouble reaching Lila’s and Guthrie’s parents. When she finally did get through to Lila’s father in Saudi Arabia, he yelled at her. She kept holding the phone out from her ear. I heard her say, “There were chaperones, sir,” and “We don’t have that information yet,” and “I’ll give you the hospital number,” and “We think you should come,” and then, “Oh, I see.”
When Aunt Sandy hung up the phone, she said, “I think I need a bourbon. That man is impossible! He’s no pistol—he’s a double-barreled shotgun!”
Apparently he was irate that his daughter had been “running loose all over the world,” and he was furious that we didn’t have an up-to-the-minute doctor’s report, and he was doubly furious at his wife, who had apparently left for America that morning, and no, he could not come to Italy because he was in the middle of Important Business.
Aunt Sandy said, “And he added that we’d better see that nothing else happens to his daughter, and we’d better see that she gets the best care available, and we’d better contact her mother ourselves, and we’d better see that he gets hourly reports. I left out all the swearing, Dinnie. He sure can swear!”
It was worse trying to contact Guthrie’s parents because we couldn’t find them. When there was no answer at their home in Connecticut, Aunt Sandy tried two other emergency numbers the school had given her. No answer on one, and on the second, an answering machine. Aunt Sandy left a message, and kept redialling the numbers every ten minutes.
Three hours later, she got through to Guthrie’s aunt, who said that Guthrie’s father was traveling. I heard Aunt Sandy say, “Somewhere in Canada? Any idea where in Canada?” and then, “What about his mother?” and then, “Oh. I see. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
She hung up the phone and said, “Did you know Guthrie doesn’t have a mother?”
“What do you mean?” I said. “She died?”
“I don’t know,” Aunt Sandy said. “All his aunt said was, ‘He doesn’t have a mother.’”
We lay down beside each other on the bed, and I thought about the motherless Guthrie, and I wanted to rush to the hospital and ask him what had happened to his mother and tell him that I’d felt motherless, too. But I knew that his situation and mine were different, that Guthrie would never see his mother again, and mine was still alive, and I would see her again. Probably.
And then I thought about Lila’s cursing father and her mother dashing off to the States, and I felt a sharp, sudden sympathy for Lila, and a flood of affection for my own parents with their zany style, their nomadic existence, and even their quirky forgetfulness.
Aunt Sandy said, “We’ve got to make a plan. We’ve got to think what to do next. We’ve got to imagine what Max would do.” She held my hand. “Those poor kids,” she said, “those poor, poor kids.”
At our hotel in the Dolomites that night, we were either on the phone or waiting for it to ring. Just after midnight, Uncle Max phoned from the hospital in Milan. Lila was conscious. They were still running tests on her, but it appeared that she’d suffered only a broken arm. Uncle Max took it as a good sign that she had already complained about not having a private room in the hospital.
Reports on Guthrie’s condition came in more slowly. It wasn’t until nearly two in the morning that we learned he had broken his right leg in two places and had four broken ribs. Later we learned that he had to have stitches in both his right arm and his face for gashes from his ski poles. More worrying, though, was that he was still unconscious, all through the night.
We still hadn’t been able to reach Guthrie’s father or Lila’s mother. Uncle Max said Lila’s father had phoned the hospital and given him “an earful.”
The Dreams of Domenica Santolina Doone
The ski lift was open and crowded with skiers. I took the first lift up, skied over to the second lift, and scooted aboard.
I took in all the view, the smooth snow off to the left, the lumpier piles where the avalanche had crashed down far off to the right. I loosened my lucky red scarf and stared up the mountain and saw the sky, a deep, pure blue above.
At the top, I slipped off the chair lift without downfelling, and glanced down the other side. There was something there: more mountains. I slid over the lip of the plateau, and started down, letting my body move from left to right, right to left.
It was not like a dream. There was the sky above me and the white snow all around me, and I knew I could do this. I might downfell a few times, but then again, maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I would stay up. What would Keisuke call that? Upstanding?
I felt the air, cool and clean, coming in through my nose and filling up my whole self. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to lift off the earth and fly. I felt so—
“Sono libero!” That’s what I felt and that’s what I shouted. “Libero, libero, liberooooooo—” It then occurred to me that since I was a girl maybe I had to say Libera! instead of Libero! but not being sure, I shouted both. I shouted for me and I shouted for Guthrie and for Lila. “Libero! Libera! Libero! Liberaaaaa—”
Something was different. My bubble was gone.
By the time I got to the bottom, I understood exactly what Guthrie meant when he shouted Libero! It was a celebration of being alive.
40
Two Pistols
Early the next morning, when we learned that Guthrie was finally conscious and out of immediate danger, Aunt Sandy and I jumped on the bed and whooped and shouted: He made it! He made it! Then the phone rang again, and it was Lila’s mother.
According to Aunt Sandy, Lila’s mother said, “I’ve just gotten off a transatlantic flight and you want me to get back on another one?” She also added that she knew she shouldn’t have let her daughter go to “that school.” She had known
her daughter would get into some sort of trouble.
Aunt Sandy said, “The avalanche wasn’t Lila’s fault.” Then she held the phone away from her ear, while Lila’s mother told Aunt Sandy that she didn’t like her tone. In the end, Lila’s mother said she’d be on the next flight to Milan, but that she expected the school to foot the bill.
When Aunt Sandy phoned Guthrie’s father, he said, “Is Petie okay?” Petie? I’d forgotten that Peter was Guthrie’s first name, and I couldn’t imagine anyone calling him Petie. Guthrie’s father said he would come instantly.
When we got to Milan, Aunt Sandy and I were able to see Lila first. She was propped up in bed flipping through a magazine and scolding a nurse, who, with luck, couldn’t understand her. “Honestly,” she said. “Don’t you have any American magazines? I can’t read this!” But when she saw us, she instantly broke into sobs. “Oh, Dinnie! I almost died! Oh, Dinnie, Dinnie!”
The nurse rolled her eyes at us. Maybe she could understand English after all.
“There, there,” Aunt Sandy soothed. “You’ll be fine. You look great—”
“I do not!” Lila said. “Look at this arm!” She held out her cast. “It hurts! And look at my bruises!” She held out her other arm, revealing two fat round purple splotches. “And look here—” She pushed her hair back to reveal a small cut below her ear, a tiny rim of dark blood dried along its edge. “A gash!”
“But no stitches at least,” Aunt Sandy said.
Lila ignored her. “And here, look at my knees!” She lifted her gown to show us her purplish bruised knees.
Aunt Sandy nudged me. She said, “Oh, Lila! That’s terrible. You’re a mess! What a trauma!”
“Yes,” I agreed. “You look really awful.”
She sniffed. “I’m the kind of person who is very sensitive to pain,” she said, and then quickly, “Are my parents coming?”