The chair started moving, without warning. It was a quiet ride, going down. You feel exposed on a chairlift going down a mountain; some people feel queasy. But I just held tight to my loved ones. The ride couldn’t have been long enough for me—I had so much to say to them. “You’re my one and only, too—you know that, don’t you?” I asked my mom. “You really are the only hero, you know—not just because of the Gallows Lounge shooting, not to me,” I said to the snowshoer. They were just enjoying the ride; they were done explaining.

Molly was there to stop the chair at the bottom. I saw one of the lift mechanics barreling down Peril in a snowmobile. Molly and the mechanic must have been talking on the radio. You can see the Blue Ribbon Quad from the top of Number One; the lift mechanic had probably noticed that Number Ten was moving.

“I’ve got two bodies in the chair, Willy,” Molly told the mechanic. “I need the Spryte to take them the rest of the way to the first-aid room.”

“Is that Ray and the snowshoer, Molly?” Willy asked her.

“It is, Willy,” Molly said. “And Ray’s son, Adam, is with them—the Kid’s okay,” Molly assured him.

“I’m glad you’re okay, Kid. I’ll go get the Spryte for you, Molly,” the lift mechanic told her. The Spryte, I knew, was an ugly thing—a flat-nosed pickup truck on two caterpillar tracks.

In the first-aid room, Molly and I would wait for the ambulance to arrive. The patrollers working that day would start showing up in the room at seven—just a couple at first, half a dozen by eight, a dozen by eight-thirty. The patrollers were “a nosy bunch,” Molly warned me. “They’ll be asking questions, Kid. We’ll be glad when the ambulance gets here—it’ll be coming from Londonderry,” the old patroller told me. “The state police will be involved,” Molly was saying, but I tuned out the rest. I didn’t need to know how the coroner had to “release the bodies”—Release them where? I wondered. The Blue Ribbon Quad, Number Ten, wouldn’t be open for business till nine, Molly was saying—just to hear herself say something. Being alone with their silent bodies was killing her. I just hugged her. Molly recited the protocol, but she knew the rest of the details didn’t matter.

48. FIVE YEARS, FOUR MOVIES

The end of January is the coldest time of the year on Bromley Mountain; those two had picked a perfect night to freeze to death. I wasn’t wrong to imagine the little English teacher would leave me something in writing, in addition to what my mom and the snowshoer had written in the snow—the scene those two so artfully composed in the chairlift at the top of Number Ten.