Page 1 of The CEO and the Mountain Man

Chapter 1

Clark

The worst call of your life will always happen on a random Tuesday. Or right before a major holiday. Sometimes, if you’re especially lucky, it’ll happen on both.

Last year had already been full of the kinds of transitions that made me long for the dentist’s chair. My wife and I decided our marriage was a dead horse we were both tired of beating. This meant divvying up our lives and paying divorce attorneys while trying to treat each other with a neutrality that was as off-putting as microfiber.

Anyway, divorce is fun.Not.

And then my son came out to us, which … could have gone better. It wasn’t as though it was a surprise, really. Well, Monica had been surprised, but I hadn’t been. When River was five, he declared he wanted to marry the local weatherman, and when he was fifteen, he started wearing lip gloss and girls’ shorts.

Not enough to assume, of course, but certainly enough to point me in a direction.

We’d just told him about the divorce, and in response, he’d lobbed his declaration onto the dinner table like one of those glitter-infused slime toys.

“I’m gay. Thought you should know.”

Splat.

I’d considered telling him about my one incredibly short dalliance with my roommate in college, but meeting his coming out with my slightly bisexual past didn’t seem to be the right way to go in that moment.

Instead, I had the brilliant insight to ask if he was really transgender, just in case he was saying gay as a bellwether of our acceptance. That was … not better.

Monica, however, sat there like a rock. Quiet. Stunned, maybe.

Or overwhelmed.

We were still in the middle of a mostly amicable divorce, after all.

I digress.

Monica and I sold our house, split our bank accounts, and finalized the dissolution of our marriage. Kind of like getting a root canal and periodontal surgery at the same time. Still, I thought we made it through those crucibles mostly unharmed.

I even took River to his first Pride parade. Went to a few PFLAG meetings on my own. And applauded him for joining his school’s Gender-Sexuality Alliance Club, though we both agreed that G-SAC was an unfortunate acronym. All in all, things had started looking up.

And then I got the call.

It was the day before Christmas. River would be graduating at the end of the school year, and we’d decided to spend one last holiday together as a family. River had wanted to celebrate in my new downtown condo because it overlooked both Lake Michigan and the Art Institute.

Monica was driving while River was looking for Christmas music on the radio. Barely out of their new subdivision, she lost control on an unremarkable hill. The plows hadn’t been by, and she slid right through the T intersection into a massive oak.

In the post-accident photographs, the front of Monica’s car was buried beneath the massive yellow directional sign affixed to the oak. Left-right arrows, like a warning shouted a second too late.

In that one terrible call, I learned she’d died on impact.

For hours, though, they couldn’t tell me the state of my son. Three hours and seventeen minutes, to be exact, he was trapped in that car. They had to use the Jaws of Life to get him out. He was then rushed to the nearest level 1 trauma center.

I was told over and over that my son had been lucky. The doctors spouted words like moderate pelvic avulsion and lateral malleolus fracture with no displacement, andhe won’t need surgery, along with relatively mild injury to the brain.

The first person he’d asked for was his mom.

To this day, River doesn’t remember the accident or the hours stuck in the car. He was surprised, then, to wake up in the hospital on Christmas morning with a fractured pelvis, a broken ankle, and a dead mother.

Despite that phone call, forever etched into my white matter, the horrible hours of not-knowing, and the weeks of physical therapy, it was the sound of anguish pouring from my son that would stick with me. His pain was a never-ending constant, dredged up from some unknowable depth within him.

I thought, mistakenly, that he would somehow be okay after.

After the hospital. After the memorial. After the wheelchair had been exchanged for crutches. After the crutches had been exchanged for a snazzy onyx walking stick, because he refused to walk with a cane. After the last of the physical therapy sessions. I thought surely I would get my son back. That he would find his way back to joy and return to the things that made him smile.