Since she’d been working part-time, Molly told me she still woke up early, maybe earlier. The old patroller said she liked putting skins on her telemarks and skinning up Twister. She liked skiing down before the lifts were running; she liked skiing on the freshly groomed corduroy, before other skiers had skied on it. But I knew Molly. The old patroller wouldn’t have trained for skinning a mile up a mountain. Unlike my mom and Mr. Barlow, Molly didn’t train.

Molly was going on eighty-six. The old patroller was a big woman to be skinning a mile up Twister to the top of Bromley. I find it hard to imagine her heart stopping, but old Ned and Meg were amazed that Molly made it as far as the Rock Garden.

I thanked the two of them for their call, and for telling me what happened; then Em and I had to talk about it. If the snowshoer had been there, we said, Molly might have made it all the way. Elliot Barlow had gone the distance with my mom. Em and I said Molly shouldn’t have been by herself in the Rock Garden. If Mr. Barlow had been with her, even as small as the snowshoer was, she could have lugged the old patroller the rest of the way. Speaking as two of Elliot Barlow’s rescue jobs, Em and I believed the only hero could have done it. There’s no question the snowshoer would have tried.

Sometimes Em gets angry with me when she catches me “screwing around” with my Aspen screenplay—as she usually puts it. I can’t make up my mind about the title. I have two titles; they seem interchangeable to me. Loge Peak or Not a Ghost. Either they both work, or they both don’t. “If the film can’t get made, it won’t matter what you call it, kiddo,” Em reminds me. But an unmade movie never leaves you; an unmade movie doesn’t go away.

Sometimes I hear the voice of the woman on the subway, except that I’m not on the subway when I hear it—and it’s my mother’s voice I hear, not the voice of the woman who makes the underground announcements. I’m usually in the underpass, beneath the Canadian Pacific Railway bridge, when I hear my mom’s voice. Every sound is amplified there; kids riding their bicycles like to shriek, just to hear the echo. My mom thinks it’s funny to startle me.