The ground bobbed, and the sky was white. When Richard reached mid-station, rain began to fall. Whatever Wallace was doing to the motor, it was not making things run more smoothly. Over the birch trees, on the trail to the left of the trail below his feet, Richard espied the yellow body of the old school bus they had dragged out of the woods for the kids who rode snowboards. In the winter he had seen them sitting on the roof, boys and girls, some asleep and some eating and laughing. And then there were laurels under his legs. He thought he was breathing a lake. Water fell from the sky, and it fell from the crossbar over his head, and it fell from the cables that were slinging his chair up the mountain. The laurel covered the steepest place, where there was no trail, and Richard seemed to be face-to-face with the hillside. And he could see the top, with a cabin and a metal house, partner to the one at the base where Wallace was changing things. Then the lift stopped.

Richard sat in the rain. He was trying to imagine what he would say to Eloise when he got to the top. He could not say why he had left his house, or why he had gotten on the chairlift. The black jacket the man had given him was cutting off his circulation at the wrists. His glasses had fogged up. He swung and wondered, Does Eloise know that once I saw her give a kiss under our deck light? Then the cables gasped, and the chair started again.

Eloise was outside the cabin. She had on her instructor’s coat, which was dark purple, nearly black with rain, and came down to her knees. You bought these coats from the owners of the resort if they offered you a job as an instructor. He had paid for two of them: two hundred and fifty dollars each. And Eloise did have short dark hair. She looked strange, her face not more complete now than it had been when he was trying to picture her. “Hey, Dr. Lehren.”

She sounds good to him. “Hello, Eloise.” He gets off the chairlift awkwardly, taking too many steps. He comes obediently to a stop in front of her and wipes the water from his face, pulling it down and shaking it off his hand in one motion. “Well, I’m here.”

She doesn’t smile at him. She tells him, “I’d like to talk for a second if that’s OK.”

“I’ve come all the way up the mountain, Eloise. Let’s talk.”

She looks past his shoulder, then back at him. “OK. Come with me.” But she doesn’t take him into the cabin. She walks back toward the thin woods where the two trails begin. “Someone’s in there.” She nods at the cabin. Water rolls down her nose and over her mouth.

“Oh,” he says.