Reading Snow

Jim Lynch

Morgan examined the looming snowfield for cracks or pinwheels as she trudged higher into the cooling air. Her left hip ached with every other step. There was no getting around the blunt diagnosis. Bone-on-bone. Just 36, and she was already staring down the barrel of a hip replacement. Go fuck yourself, she told the first surgeon. But when the next three concurred, she found herself hoping for divine intervention.
She looked for more telltales, then packed a crunchy snowball and hurled it toward a depression beneath the steepest section of the sparkling slope. The toss fell embarrassingly short. The hill silently swallowed it, as if to say, Thank you. May I have another?
Her work required healthy hips. As the avalanche forecaster for the Jack Mountain Recreation Area, she hiked and skied the slopes from late fall to mid-summer. She forecast snow conditions, day to day, hour to hour. None of this was happenstance. She chose this life, this work, her drafty U.S. Forest Service cabin at 4,713 feet and this kaleidoscope of trees, rivers, and peaks. But not this hip pain, which swung from mild to vicious, and which she rarely mentioned aloud for fear she’d be put out of her professional misery like a racehorse with a bum leg.
Nine heavy inches had fallen the night before. So, at a little past dawn now, Breakneck Hill looked even more pregnant than when she’d blasted it three weeks ago. From her vantage, slightly above and to the side of the steep face, she saw that the eastern aspect, glittering in the new sun, raised questions her daily report would have to answer.
Climbers and skiers awaited her takes. So did her avalanche team. It was her call when to pull out the pipes, the cannons, or the 105 mm howitzer to blow up these hills. Her weapons, in theory, kept everybody safe, by shaking loose small buildups before they turned into violent rivers of snow. But they still sounded like bombs.
Breakneck’s forty-degree slab looked so ready to slide, she worried it might go this morning. Just about anything could trigger enough vibrations to set it off. A foraging pika. A toddler on skis. A brief gust. She packed another snowball and scowled at the slope like a pitcher staring down a batter.
Morgan preferred mountains to people. She marveled at their quirks of slope and aspect, their botany and biology. With Lidar’s pulsing lasers she could even see their bones. When she’d moved west with degrees in geology and meteorology, she left behind the asphalt, the bricks, the shysters and the mother who gave God credit for everything—and blame for nothing—to work at this dreamy new playground in the North Cascades. Then her hip started complaining.
She threw a second snowball farther, toward the thickest bulge of new powder. If Breakneck Hill was a pregnant stomach, she was aiming at the bellybutton. She missed high. The hill swallowed it up. May I have another?
Her surgeons’ comments kept re-infuriating her. They wanted to replace—not fix—her hip. And if she got a new one, then what? Fake knees? New lungs? A pig kidney? The first diagnosis was early arthritis, then bone spurs, then bone-on-bone. Morgan squinted at the MRIs and X-rays but saw no difference between her left and right hips. The surgeons pointed at fuzzy curves that, to her, looked like cirrus clouds. Bone-on-bone, they kept saying as if it were the password to get her into the operating room.
She wished Breakneck Hill wasn’t so popular. Sure, it offered the largest span of steep and deep powder in the Jack Mountain area but as she warned skiers and climbers tuning into her avalanche videos, beautiful steep faces should frighten you. Those slopes are treeless, she’d point out in her buzzkill deadpan, for a reason.
She packed another baseball-sized snowball and hurled it toward the belly button. She didn’t hit the spot but came closer than the others. Breakneck swallowed it silently. May I have ano—
Several pinwheels spun diagonally across the crispy surface before stopping. That seemed to be the end of it, but then larger rollerballs tumbled downhill, followed by a foot-deep slab suddenly separating the upper and lower belly, creating a C-section fifteen feet across. Then nothing happened for five breath-holding beats until Morgan watched, then heard, a slab the size of a tennis court rumble downhill.
“Avalanche!” she shouted, though she was confident nobody would be coming up behind her at this hour, not after all her warnings and signage. Still, she yelled again, louder, “AVALANCHE!” as if lives hinged on being heard.
Fortunately, only the initial runaway slab continued crashing downhill. The rest of Breakneck stayed put. For now. She felt her hands trembling as she trudged higher toward the ridgetop and the upper cabins.
She’d blown up countless snowfields and triggered so many avalanches, but never with a snowball. Or was this simply a coincidence? As she often explained, noises don’t trigger avalanches. You can’t shout them into existence. She put thrown rocks and snowballs into a similar camp, with the caveat, not that I’ve seen.
She heard somebody yelling “avalanche!” from the ridgeline above her.
“All clear?” she shouted, her heart galloping. “All clear?” came her echo. Then a response from below: “Clear below!”
She exhaled loudly. Who the hell was down there? And who was above?
When she got to the top of the snowed-over switchbacks, her hip flexor spasmed and her femur threatened to pop out of its socket. Then she saw the two tall, hatless, boyish-looking men looming over her in matching outfits.
She’d seen the climbing twins around. Nobody seemed to know whether they were brothers, lovers, buddies, or Mormon missionaries. They claimed to be doctors training to climb Jack and other peaks. They hiked and skied like rookies. Their gear was new, their pace erratic, their technique unsound. But nobody had a good read on them.
Standing above her on the ridgeline in their ultralight snowshoes, they were clearly waiting for her. As she got closer, it became obvious they weren’t related, much less twins. She knew the taller one with the perma-smirk called himself George. The shorter, darker one, she’d heard, went by Abe.
“I thought you were supposed to forecast avalanches—not start ’em!” Abe exclaimed in a stagey voice, as if berating an underling. He was quick to smile but his eyes were sad, almost apologetic.
“We saw you!” George added, while filming her final ascent with a small video camera. He sounded outraged but looked delighted. “You started it with your third throw, didn’t you? Trying to kill your coworker down there?”
She was rattled by both the camera and the accusations, but would’ve stomped past them without a response if her lungs and her hip hadn’t needed a break. “Everybody knows not to hike below until I file my report,” she said, haltingly. “I put up rope and signs.”
“So, if people die, well that’s their tough shit,” Abe mock-explained to his sidekick, then turned back to her. “Your colleague down there had to sprint to get out of the way.”
“I’ve got an idea,” she said, her temper flashing. “Why don’t you two go fuck yourselves?”
She’d promised herself many times she’d watch her mouth, especially with strangers and customers, but she was more agitated than she’d realized and marched past them to the beat of her own jugular.
“You can’t talk to us like that!” George cried behind her while Abe laughed uproariously.
To her amazement, they followed her to the small cluster of upper cabins, talking nonstop like fake newscasters about how on a day known for misfortune and doom, the Avalanche Goddess herself is creating deadly slides when she’s not cussing out visitors.
She instructed them to wait outside her cabin, and pointed to where they should stand, then stepped inside. She was so rattled and dehydrated she heard herself panting. Finding the employee directory, she called the only colleague zealous enough to have been carrying his skis up the hill at that hour.
She stepped back outside and put him on the speaker phone. “Were you below me just now, Norton?”
“Yes, Morgan.”
“Didn’t you get the warning?”
“I did, yes. I saw the signs, too.”
“There are concerned citizens here accusing me of recklessly endangering you by testing the hill.”
“Not at all,” he said, his voice cracking. “I shouldn’t have been below you without letting you know. My bad.”
She hung up, then glared at the twins. “Now beat it.”
Then she turned and strode toward her cabin without limping in the slightest and did not look back when one of them—she thought it was Abe but couldn’t be sure—said, “You should get that hip checked!” She slammed the door and assumed that was the end of it.
But the twins didn’t leave. They backed up about seventy feet, then laid on a snow berm and pointed two pairs of binoculars at her cabin windows like soldiers surveilling their enemy.
Did they think they were hilarious? She called security.
Two burly uniformed men finally arrived with bear guns on their hips. She watched them question the twins and indulge their banter and laughter. At whose expense? she wondered. Then the twins finally strode down the back hill toward the scattered lower village of cabins that included a mini-grocery and a tiny bar.
Later that morning, Morgan filed her written report, labeling Breakneck Hill unstable after experiencing a minor slab avalanche, which, as she obliquely clarified, she may have self-triggered. She deemed the conditions Level 4 and closed the run. Then she told her team to meet at the explosives hut at noon to blast Breakneck at one-thirty followed by a ski check at three.
In her Friday night video, she stared sternly at the camera beneath her triangular ski hat and explained current slope conditions and potential hazards with the help of her expressive hands. Her braided ponytail was draped over her right shoulder. Her skin looked permanently tanned, which made her rare smile look wildly bright. Her only makeup was Chapstick.
If you are climbing or cross-country skiing in the Jack Mountain Recreation Area, carry an avalanche beacon. Like a seatbelt or a helmet, you should feel reckless without one. And never forget that avalanche danger shifts with elevation and aspect, with wind and temperature. If you don’t know your aspect, stand with your back to the slope and read the compass in front of you. Eastern faces are more vulnerable during the morning sun, and western aspect during the afternoon sun. And regardless of where you are, ALWAYS be on the watch for unstable snow. Keep in mind that ninety percent of deadly avalanches are triggered by the victim or somebody in their party. When snow shoots or rolls across the surface, tune in. If you see evidence of a recent avalanche, pay attention. If you hear a whomping sound, run like hell for the trees.

Despite being stationed at this little-known alpine wonderland just south of the Canadian border, Morgan’s videos were among the most-clicked avalanche updates in the Cascades. Part of her draw was the area was still being discovered. Plus, her delivery could be amusingly direct. She’d say things like, don’t be an idiot.
Her followers doubled overnight after the twins posted their video showing her seemingly triggering an avalanche with a snowball. The end of the video, when she’d encouraged them to go fuck themselves, just added to her lore.
After the next busy weekend went off without an unplanned avalanche, Morgan skied down to The Igloo. She could stomach just about anybody after a beer.
She’d just finished a Stella and ordered a shot of Jim Beam when the twins squeezed into the four-stool bar in sasquatch costumes.
“Oh please, no,” she told the bartender, hiding her face with her hand once she realized who they were.
“Look, George!” One of the sasquatches pointed his paw at Morgan. “It’s the Avalanche Goddess!”
Suddenly feeling frisky, Morgan spun on her stool and lifted her shot. “To another great weekend in the Jack Mountain Recreation Area!” She swallowed without wincing and hooted along with everybody.
With a beer and a shot in her, she flipped varieties of shit at the twins, but she didn’t complain about their video or admit she’d watched it. The truth was she couldn’t wait to see it again.
Once the banter cooled, she asked them who the hell they really were. George told her he was an ophthalmologist from San Jose. Abe claimed to be an orthopedic PA in Oakland. They were old friends on sabbaticals learning how to climb mountains. Morgan didn’t buy any of it. They were too goofy to be doctors on sabbaticals and lacked the build and demeanor of men drawn to summits.
When she grabbed her coat to go, Abe leaned over and told her, “You’re too young for a replacement.” The comment knocked her off balance, but so did his gentle eyes, as if he’d seen her sharp elbows and still had a soft spot for her. She ignored him and gave the bartender prayer hands. She’d never mentioned her hip, much less a replacement.
“Don’t let them talk you into it,” Abe added, before she strode toward the door. “It’s probably just a labrum tear that can be sewn.”
She stopped and said over her shoulder. “You really, truly should go fuck yourself.”
He laughed. “You grow up in New York?”
“Philly,” she said, turning back toward the door.
Slogging up the hill, she wondered if it was possible that against all odds her divine intervention had arrived in the form of a sasquatch named Abe.
The next time she saw the twins was two weeks later at The Igloo again. By then, they were regulars among a stable of drinkers, skiers, climbers and foresters all living in the present with just first names. After two beers and two shots, she started moving to the juke box and they joined her.
George pogo-danced for laughs, but Abe tuned into her unusual rhythm and matched it like few ever had. The three of them twirled around the tiny floor for five songs. Afterward, Abe requested just one brief kiss. Without thinking, she granted it. He kissed like a curious boy. Then, seeing George pouting, she turned toward him. He put his arm around her, swung her backward and kissed her like a trained actor.
Sensing her hip was trashed from the dancing, the twins tag-team carried her up the hill to her cabin—they called it training—in exchange for her promise to teach them everything she knew about climbing Jack Mountain.
When they tracked her down later that week, they waved aside her regrets and apologies for getting too drunk at The Igloo and pressed her for insights on the routes and dangers of Jack.
She told them what she told anybody who asked:
There’s no easy way up. The trails to the south and north basecamps take five hours easy. And then another six to the summit—if you know what you’re doing, and the conditions are favorable. You’re looking at twenty miles roundtrip and five thousand vertical. The summit is a little over nine-thousand feet—high enough to make you sick if you go up too fast. Bring at least a gallon of water per person.
The safest climbs are in early June before the heat or in September after everything melts. The southern route is the quickest, but the headwall is a sustained 55 degrees for about 800 feet. You have to kick steps horizontally across half of it, then go straight up. You can rope up, but that’s a double-edged sword. If one of you falls, you both go. And the rappel from the summit sucks. You need a forty-meter rope.
“So, you’ve made it up there?” Abe asked.
She nodded. “On my fourth try. I turned back once on the north route, twice on the south. The view at sunrise is—” She stopped midsentence. “How much have you guys climbed? Can you rope up? Have you rappelled?”
“We’re learning,” Abe said.
Something in their dimpled smirks set off her bullshit detector. How had she possibly kissed these clowns? What more evidence did she need that she was drinking too much? “Do you even have ice axes, crampons and helmets?” she pressed.
She sent them out the door with a fact sheet on climbing basics and a phone number for a guide who could coach them for a price.
“But we want to be taught by you, and by you alone,” George implored, dropping to a knee. “Don’t we, Abe?”
“Get the fuck out of here,” she spat before Abe could lower himself to the floor.
She’d always had a keen sense for endings. When it came to jobs, friends, or relationships, she was always the first to know when it was over. She moved on, shut the door and hung up a beat before everybody else. She liked the clarity of old movies that said The End before the credits.
So, as the twins bounded out of sight down the hill, she knew in her bones that was the end of whatever that was.

She visited a fifth hip surgeon, a woman finally, who agreed with Abe that she could avoid a replacement. Her labrum could be repaired arthroscopically. She made it sound as simple as a drive-through oil change.
Afterward, Morgan summoned the nerve to tell her bosses that she might be laid up a little while. Thank God was the general response. Get it fixed already!
Three days before Easter, she climbed on a gurney and anesthesia filled her veins. Oddly though, the pain she awoke to was in her left ribcage not her left hip.
Interesting, she thought. She’d heard of referred pain—when maybe your jaw aches after you break your ankle or collar bone. But this pain felt too sharp to be referred. The young nurse blushed when asked to explain and went looking for the doctor. Even in a druggy fog, Morgan sensed something was very wrong.
The surgeon looked and sounded like a different doctor altogether. Her cheery voice had had been replaced with a librarian’s somber whisper. “You had a vagal reaction, Morgan. Do you know what that is?”
Morgan felt like a child. She shook her head.
“On rare occasions,” the doc said, as if bad news hurt less at lower volumes, “there is a vagal stimulation during general anesthesia which causes bradycardia, which progresses to cardiac arrest, which—”
“Just say it,” she interrupted.
“Your heart stopped, dear. We had to resuscitate you.”
“My heart?”
“Yes, it slowed, then stopped. It’s an allergic reaction to the anesthesia. Rarely happens but it’s a thing.”
She felt along her left rib cage. “But—”
“You’re sore,” the doc continued in her confidential whisper, “because we had to compress your ribs to restart your heart.”
Morgan looked around the room, a thin curtain dividing her side from the other where a television was playing a fake courtroom drama. “How long was it stopped?”
“Two minutes and twenty-seven seconds,” the doc said. “But everything is fine—except for your seven cracked ribs, of course.”
Morgan repeated the amount of time she was technically dead in a detached voice, then asked, “And my hip?”
“Your reaction happened before we started. We’ll have to reschedule your hip after your ribs heal. So at least six weeks? We’ll use a different anesthesia, of course.”
She resisted telling the doc what to do to herself. “My heart’s okay?”
“Your heart is great, Morgan. You’ve got a big strong heart.”
There were meals and flowers waiting. Several colleagues told her to call if she needed anything. But left alone in her high cabin, she realized she didn’t have one person she felt comfortable leaning on. And she needed everything.
When she called her mother on Easter, they broke down together. “We haven’t cried like this since you were twelve,” her mom said, then blew her nose and asked a series of questions:
Have you thanked anybody for anything lately?
Are you still pushing everybody away with your bravado?
When will you let God back into your life?
“And you wonder why I don’t call more often,” Morgan said, reaching for her shrinking cache of oxy. “If there’s a God, Mom, I think there’s a much better chance he’s out here than back there.”
“Oh, there’s a God, Morgan. And He’s everywhere.”
“That must be so exhausting.”

Pinned to sweaty sheets, running thin on food, she was beating herself up on day four of her recovery when the twins knocked and entered with two bags of groceries.
“We heard you died,” Abe explained, “but then, not surprisingly, rose from the dead.”
“Three days before Jesus did the exact same thing,” George observed. “Very impressive for a mouthy girl from Philly.”
“So, of course,” Abe added, his voice assuming a preacherly lilt, “we came to show our devotion.”
Crossing their arms, they bowed in unison.
Then George started cooking chicken paprika on her stove while Abe commiserated over a messed up medical world where the most dangerous thing you can do is step inside a hospital, which struck Morgan as commentary real doctors would never say aloud.
For the next eight days, the twins cooked her omelets and soups and helped her to the bathroom and picked up prescription refills in Marblemount.
On day two they showed up in pale blue nurse scrubs with stethoscopes dangling from their necks. Abe fixed the cold metal cone to her bare left hip. He brought a finger to his lips and closed his eyes, before shaking his head and solemnly declaring, bone-on-bone. As if it were fatal.
She begged them to quit being funny, but just the sight of them triggered painful laughter. By day four Abe sat beside her in the chair and tried to hold her hand. She waved him aside in the morning but by the afternoon welcomed his warm palm.
On day five, she was high on Oxy, and they got drunk, and Abe showed her videos of people surfing huge waves off Portugal. He was explaining the nuances of surfing when George told him, that’s enough.
By day six, she was convinced she’d misread them entirely. They were obnoxious full-grown children—neither seemingly needed to shave—but sweet and, she was beginning to think, genuine. They finished her sentences. They felt like real friends.
In exchange for their caregiving, Morgan indulged their questions about reading and bombing slopes. She told them all about the pipes, cannons, and grenades, and which weapon she used when. She considered it all part of their tongue-in-cheek reverence for the avalanche goddess. But she loved the attention. Unlike most people, they were interested in the details.
But the more she recovered, the less she saw of the twins. She missed Abe’s voice and George’s cooking. Soon enough, she was back at work, reluctantly getting around on a noisy snowmobile. The twins were still renting their cabin, she was assured, but were rarely seen.
She finally broke down and called Abe. Her skin prickled as she waited through the rings. When he picked up, he sounded startled to hear from her. She didn’t recognize her own voice timidly asking if he and George would like to watch her blow up Breakneck Hill.
“Of course, we would,” Abe said in his stage voice. “Just give us a day and a time!”

In the cool morning air, she showed the twins how a gas mixture in an ignition tube triggered an explosion just above the snowpack, creating a pressure wave that separated a ten-foot-deep slab that then thundered down the hillside.
The twins high-fived, made rooster calls and barked like dogs. Eager to sustain their attention, Morgan felt Abe’s sad eyes on her as she pulled out military grade M67 hand grenades—one with a safer electric ignition that could be detonated remotely, the other entirely manual.
She explained they were dangerous and rarely used. They snapped photos of the grenades then filmed her adlibbing how avalanche work was the art of finding trigger points and relieving stress. “This is so awesome,” Abe said at a volume only she could hear. Her heart banged against tender ribs as she pulled a pin and slung a grenade to the side of the hill that needed another nudge.
Kaboom!
Her staff looked at her as if she’d lost her mind. The grenades were last resorts. But the twins loved the ruckus. They ran in circles. Then George started singing something from Les Mis while Abe juggled four snowballs.
The next day she heard from the climbing guide the twins had hired him to teach them roped-up glacier crossings on Mount Baker.
“They’re an odd duo,” he said with a snort. “Everything’s a joke. If it’s not funny to them, they don’t pay attention. And there’s not much humor in climbing. Know what I mean?”
When she didn’t hear from them for another ten disheartening days, she called Abe again. He sounded remote, almost formal, as if startled that he hadn’t already removed her from his contacts.
“Thank you,” she said, her heart racing. “I should’ve said that so long ago but thanks to you and George for all you did when I was lame.” From her vantage, she was exposing herself so melodramatically she might as well have swung naked from the top of a cell tower.
“Of course,” he said abruptly, then explained they’d returned to the Bay Area for a spell, but that they’d be back. He wasn’t sure when. But when they returned, he said, they’d love to see her blow up that high snow field on Jack Mountain.
How could he possibly think she could climb up there anytime soon with her unresolved hip and rib pain that he hadn’t even asked about? “Sure,” she lied. “I’ll let you know when we’re up for that.”
“I hope to see you again soon, Morgan.” There was no staginess in his voice.
She knew it was time to hang up and end this foolery, but she couldn’t. She waited for him to end it, then listened to the dead air.
What she heard next was a month later and second-hand. The twins had been seen in their cabin, which they’d reportedly continued to rent while they were gone. But when she hobbled down to visit them, there was no trace. She called Abe with her heart in her throat, but his phone was no longer in service. The Igloo bartender said George told him they were climbing Jack this weekend.
It was suddenly hard to breathe. Why would they even consider climbing after she’d just told everybody high temperatures were destabilizing snowfields throughout the entire area.
“You okay, Morgan?” the bartender asked. “Can I get you anything? Water?”
Within a few hours, she’d pieced together that the twins had left before daybreak and had penciled their first names, their cabin number, and their destination—summit—in the Jack Mountain trailhead log.
Amidst this swirl of new information, she realized she’d never seen or even heard their last names. She called the cabin rental agency. “They always paid cash in advance. Such pleasant guys.”
When she called the climbing guide, he told her he assumed she knew they were planning an ascent. Did he think they were ready? “Hell no,” he said. They don’t even know how to self-arrest. I doubt they ever got beacons.”
“What were their last names?” she asked, her heart galloping.
“No idea.” He laughed. “They paid with crisp hundreds. Even gave me a big tip.”
It took her another day to get the avalanche reports from other climbers. None of them had seen the twins at the basecamp, though they’d all arrived after dark. And they all heard what sounded like a loud avalanche before they saw the collapsed snow wall on the southern face. Then they spread out and hollered and listened for muffled voices. There were no signs of anybody beyond confusing boot prints.
Morgan frantically called Abe again but got the same out-of-service response. So, she sent her two fastest hikers up Jack with a county rescue team to assess the avalanche and search for survivors. By then, she was reporting that two California men who apparently attempted the southern route last weekend are still missing.
Her Friday video went as usual, factual and taciturn in her description of conditions and missing climbers. But at the end she took off her hat and scooted closer to the camera with her lower eyelids brimming.
For many of us, life is a steep slope of glittering snow, and all the beauty and danger that comes with all that. We can stay clear of avalanche country, sure. We can live in safe cul-de-sacs. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But if our favorite thing is skiing in the backcountry or climbing peaks that expand our minds and make us feel more alive, then we need to weigh the dangers. Abe and George weighed theirs and decided to go for the summit. And they apparently got very unlucky. She paused and sniffled then rubbed her hands together. Though you won’t find me glorifying anybody’s exit in this wilderness. And trust me, I don’t find any solace in thinking there’s anything better about people dying while doing the things they love. People who die skiing didn’t love slamming into trees at fifty miles an hour. And climbers who die in avalanches didn’t love suffocating beneath heavy snow. She wiped her eyes. Be careful everybody.

Less than a week later, Berkeley’s student newspaper called her for comment. The kid reporter said in a voice message that he was piecing together an article on the two university alums who’d apparently died on Jack Mountain.
The article broke before she called him back. As word spread, just about everybody living at the recreation area crowded into The Igloo for the best wi-fi.
A Berkeley theater professor had apparently recognized the twins in photos The Igloo bartender had posted online, including one with Morgan’s arms around both of their necks. The professor remembered the duo as legendary campus pranksters from a decade ago. As it turned out, Abe was Howard Burton Rawley IV, and George was Elias James Benton Jr., both sons of Bay Area tech moguls.
During their Berkeley years, they’d organized a library flash mob with 3,000 people singing obscene songs. Over a Christmas break, they dismantled an old jeep and reassembled it in the president’s office. They invited outrageous right-wing and left-wing speakers to campus. They stirred the pot.
Weeks before graduating, Rawley (Abe) allegedly went to five Citibanks in the area and replaced their blank deposit slips with his deposit slips. By the time Citibank figured it out, he’d cleared over a hundred grand. He was charged with fraud, but the case never made it to trial.
A year later, the two of them were charged with creating a fake non-profit called The Real Patriots that raised $1.7 million to build southern border walls. Before they were busted, they’d directed those donations to immigrant and refugee organizations. Settlements were reached after charges were dropped.
There were more charges and settlements and warrants. But they’d disappeared. The Benton and Rawley families claimed they hadn’t heard from them in years.
A rash broke out on Morgan’s neck halfway through the article. It all finally made sense. Their charade with her was just another one of their scams. The bluebloods from the bay weren’t interested in an adopted girl from Philly! They endured her to extract what they needed. They played her! The Igloo spun as she realized she’d been both an accessory and a target.
She’d been so charmed by their attention she’d even overlooked their false pretenses. Abe Lincoln and George Washington! They should’ve been as easy to read as a spring snowfield in the hot sun. She floated outside without saying anything to anybody and strode up the hill to her cabin not even noticing her hip stinging, her mind roiling over one overriding question:
Had she taught them how to fake their own deaths?

Instead of re-scheduling her surgery she got a steroid shot. Then she waited impatiently for Jack’s southern face to melt enough to search for bodies. Fortunately, a rare heat dome, as the forecast nerds called it, arrived in late-June, bringing over ninety degrees to the lowlands and seventy up high.
A makeshift search team explored Jack’s face with Morgan. Her hip worked well enough, but there was a knot in her chest. She still didn’t know if they’d find the twins or not. The not knowing tormented her. Regardless of their shenanigans, she knew they still might’ve died.
All they found was clothing—two hats, one glove and a scarf that looked too cheap and too dated to belong to the twins. But as they prepared to retreat, a member of her avalanche team shouted “Morgan!” By the time she climbed up the steep slushy hill she saw what he was staring at—a newish-looking pinless M67 grenade wedged between rocks.
“Don’t anybody touch it,” she said. “And back up.” She studied the Army-grade weapon closer, as her altitude-slowed mind started kicking out the answers she so desperately needed.
“Is that left behind from the last time we blasted up here?” she was asked.
“Looks like it,” she lied. She hadn’t ordered these pinless M67s until the year after they last blasted up here. And this one looked slightly different than the ones she’d ordered anyway.
She remembered the twins photographing the grenades she’d demonstrated for them. They must’ve somehow obtained at least two of them, one of which sat before her, the other of which they must’ve used to trigger the avalanche.
She was almost hyperventilating. She asked everybody to back way up, then carefully grabbed the grenade and hurled it as far as she could down the hill where it bounced and rolled peacefully into the trees.
She was furious the entire hike back to her cabin.
Yet over the weeks, she gradually felt less exploited and more amused. The more she read about their pranks and stunts and scams, the more endearing she found her playful outlaws. She missed their irreverence, their fast minds.
Yet she couldn’t stop worrying that their bodies would eventually be found in a gully on Jack Mountain once all the snow melted. She even noticed a mild ache beneath her still-tender ribs that she figured some people might call love.
On the last day of July, she received an email from avalanchegoddess@gmail.com:

M—
Our adoration was as real as these waves.
A&G

Of course. She smiled. They’re surfing in Portugal.
And while her fatalist mind knew the past-tense of the message meant that this was the very end of her personal saga with the twins, every bone in her body, and most of her organs, hoped that it wasn’t.

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