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recruitment, of Olympic possibilities. Her coach said he’d neverseen a skier so confident, so fearless. Her connection to the sport was part instinct and part habit: she skied because she always had and because her body knew how to do it without being instructed. Even the muscle aches that sometimes woke her up at night felt like part of her, as natural as breathing. Then, the year of her sixteenth birthday, her boyfriend Kevin blew out his knee on a sharp turn in a semifinal heat.
    Kevin’s was the first body Grace knew as well as her own. Sinewy, olive hued, it had revealed itself to hers in the backs of buses, cars, a room at their friend Cheri’s house during a parents-out-of-town party. His chest was almost hairless, his muscular calves ropy with veins. The fact that she at first had been frightened by its contours and smells, its unexpected explosions of hair, its capacity for sexual performance, made her eventual familiarity with it seem all the more important, more earned. Seeing him in the hospital bed with his right side bandaged and cast in plaster, she felt the throb and pulse of pain in her own body.
    Two weeks after his accident, Grace said she just didn’t feel like skiing anymore, that she was quitting. This was understood as an act of dramatic renunciation by her teammates, parents, and coaches. Taking it as a testament of her great love, Kevin burst into tears, though this might have had something to do with all the drugs he was on. Her parents encouraged her to confront her fears and get back on the horse. Grace explained calmly and maturely that she had simply decided it wasn’t worth it, that there were other things in life she wanted to pursue. But she was lying. The truth was that just before Kevin’s accident she had discovered she was pregnant. She knew exactly what to do, and she shot toward it as if on skis: she had an abortion. She didn’t tell Kevin, or her parents, or her friends. It was all very straightforward.
    Afterward, to her surprise, she in fact didn’t feel like skiing, and Kevin’s accident provided the perfect cover story. Originally she’d thought she might take a couple of days to recover, as if from a flu, and then, to the rousing cheers of her parents and teammates, return to the sport. But she soon discovered that the urge to race, to compete, to win, had been bled from her on the same morning. It had allbeen too ridiculously and awfully easy. She had a baby inside her, just like that, and she got rid of it, also just like that. Two equally momentous, symmetrical events.
    Not one soul knew what she’d done, and the air of corrupt superiority this secret engendered in her changed her more than either the accidental pregnancy or its termination had. She told herself that she ought to give up something she loved—skiing—in reparation for her carelessness and ruthlessness. But even this sacrifice proved easy and false. Once she quit skiing, she was surprised to discover how little she missed it.
    Kevin endured months of rehab and within a year was back on the team. Grace had no idea what had become of him, this boy whose body had once been so familiar, whose child she’d had inside her. During his recuperation she’d tended his skin with vitamin E lotion to minimize the scars. She’d thought about the thin, olive-skinned children they’d have someday, when they were ready, when it was time. As his knee healed, they swore they’d always be together. Yet when she got into U of T, she accepted without even really discussing it with him, knowing he’d already started eyeing a girl on the swim team with chlorine-bleached hair. Life carried them so fast down the slope and far away from where they’d started that they hardly noticed it happening. They broke the promises they’d made to each other so quickly and easily that they didn’t even have time to feel betrayed.

TWO
 

 
New York, 2002
    SHE WAS NEW to the city at a time when having been there
before
meant