Snowbound

“Get your shoes and socks off. I’ll see what I can find.”

He started with the lost and found. Seemed like every week somebody left something. Sunglasses, single gloves, bras hanging on the towel rack in the shared bathroom, long underwear left carelessly on the bed, you name it, he’d found it. If one of the girls wanted birth control pills, he could offer her a month’s supply. Bottles containing half a dozen other prescription drugs. Pillows, watches, but mostly clothes.

John dragged the boxes out and distributed socks, one pair of men’s slippers, sweatpants, a pair of flannel pajama bottoms and miscellaneous other garments. Then, irritated at the necessity, he raided his own drawers and closet for jeans, socks and sweaters.

Without arguing, they sat down on chairs and the floor as close to the fire as they could get and changed, nobody worrying about modesty. Not even the teacher, who wore bikini underwear and had spectacular legs that she quickly shivvied into a pair of those skintight, stretchy pants cross-country skiers wore these days. They looked fine on her, he saw, while trying not to notice.

“We were so lucky to find you,” she told him, apparently unaware that he’d noticed her changing. “I couldn’t see anything. But Dieter—” she gestured toward one of the boys “—saw tire tracks. I don’t know how. Then he spotted your sign. He and his family have stayed here before.”

“You’re not the old guy who was here then,” the kid said.

“I bought the lodge last year.”

“It’s a cool place! My family and me, we’ve come a couple times. Once in the summer, when we stayed in one of the cabins. Last time we skied.”

“It’s not skiing when you have to plod instead of riding up the hill,” one of the girls sniffed. Literally—her nose was bright red and dripping.

“Sure it is,” the first boy argued. He was at that ungainly stage when his hands and feet were out-sized and the rest of him skinny. Crooked features added up to a puppy-dog friendly face. “You don’t think when they invented skiing they had quad chairlifts, do you?”

“My great-great-whatever came west in a covered wagon, too,” she retorted, with another sniff. “I’d rather fly United, thanks.”

The rest chimed in with opinions; John didn’t listen. He looked at the teacher. “Anyone going to miss you?”

“Oh Lord! Yes! We were having trouble with cell phone coverage.” She gave him a hopeful look. “Do you have a land line?”

“Out here? No. And cell phone coverage is lousy for miles around even when the weather’s good. Unfortunately, my shortwave radio had an accident and I haven’t got it fixed.” If what his idiot guest had done to it with spilled coffee could be called an accident. And he should have taken the damn thing to town to be worked on, but hadn’t felt any urgency. Stupid, when a guest could have an emergency at any time.

“Well, we’ll try again anyway. Kids, anyone who brought a phone. If you reach someone, tell them to start a phone tree.”

Six out of the eight kids pulled tiny flip phones out of a pocket or bag. John suddenly felt old. When he was sixteen, nobody’d had a phone. Or wanted one.

The teacher was the only one who got lucky, although he gathered the reception wasn’t good. The kids all put theirs away, shaking their heads.

She kept raising her voice. “Yes, Thunder Mountain. You’ll call the parents?” Pause. “It’s snowing there, too?”

That caused a stir.

“Wow.”

“Cool.”

“We don’t get snow that much. I wish I was home.”

“We have more here.”

“Snowball fight!” another boy said. This one’s face caused a shift in John’s chest. He looked too much like the teenage boys hanging around on dusty streets in Baghdad. He might be Hawaiian or Polynesian. Something just a little exotic, skin brown and eyes dark and tilted.

“Yeah!” The third boy, short and stocky with spiky blond hair. Sweatpants from the lost and found bagged on him. “I will so take you down.”

Girls giggled. Like a litter of puppies driven by instincts they didn’t understand, the boys began shoving and wrestling.

Dark heads, laughter. A group of boys much like this, clowning around. A mud-brick wall. Rusty dust puffing under their feet, a couple of dirty soccer balls lying forgotten.

With a physical wrench, John pulled himself from the past. He tolerated guests at the lodge. Teenage boys, he avoided. Their very presence brought back things he couldn’t let himself remember. How was he going to endure this group?

The teacher—Fiona?—evidently sensed his longing. After telling the kids that the principal would call all their parents, she said to John, “I hope you won’t be stuck with us for long. Um… Do you have any idea when this storm is supposed to end?”

“A couple of days, at least. And I’m at the bottom of the highway department’s list for plowing. Could be a week before they get here.”

The longest week of his life.

Just like that, he was propelled into another flashback.

He was driving a truck, the sun scorching through the window and sweat dripping from his helmet, dust from the convoy ahead turning his and everyone else’s face to gray masks their mamas wouldn’t have recognized. Women walking along the side of the road in dark robes—how in hell did theystand the heat inside them? Kids giving the convoy wary, sidelong looks. Men staring with flat hostility. M-16 in his lap, John scanned the people, the side of the road, the rooftops of the sand-colored mud buildings for anything that looked wrong.

As quickly, the vivid memory faded and he was back in the lodge, only the teacher looking at him a little strangely.

Not the longest week of his life, he apologized silently, if anyone was listening. He’d lived a year of longer ones. Survived them.

If living half in the past, hiding out in the present, could be called survival.

CHAPTER TWO

“A WEEK!” the teacher exclaimed, and John had the sense she was repeating herself.

Yeah, he’d definitely tuned out.

“But…if the highway department knows we’re stranded here, surely they’ll plow this far sooner than that. You can’t possibly have enough food to keep us that long.”

“This is a lodge. I take in paying guests. Since I just stocked up, we won’t starve.”

“Oh.” She nibbled on a delectable bottom lip, full enough to make his groin tighten.

Damn. Why her? The subject of women wasn’t something he’d wasted any time thinking about since he got out of the VA hospital.

“Do you have any guests right now?” she asked.

John shook his head. “Expected a couple today. Don’t suppose they’ll make it.”

“So you have enough beds?”

This was a woman who knew how to stick to the essentials.

“We’ll have to make some up.”

“We can do it. I don’t want to put you out any more than we have to.”

You want to share mine?