He opened up the throttle and felt the power of the machine as it surged beneath him, thrusting him out over the hard level surface.  He hunched himself down behind the windshield.  The night air was bitter cold on his face but he liked the feel of it.  This must be what it feels like to pilot a jet, he thought to himself as his craft began to pick up speed.  He didn’t see the hole in the ice until it was too late.  It was too wide to swerve around and he was going too fast to stop.  His last thoughts were of the team gathering for the game - and of his mom coming home along in the dark.  What would she do without him?

When the woman came into the house she found her husband asleep in his usual spot on the couch.  There were empty bottles all around, and she could smell the beer on his breath, so she didn’t try to wake him.  Her son was nowhere to be seen.  Where could he be?  The game would have been over hours ago.  There was a message on the answering machine.  It was the coach asking why Jimmy hadn’t been at the game.  That’s when she really began to worry.  She went outside to look for him and quickly spotted the snowmobile tracks leading down to the lake.  She knew what had happened before she walked out onto the ice, and it was in that terrible, excruciating moment that she made up her mind to do what she knew she should have done years before. 

She waited to tell him until the day after the funeral.  He pleaded with her to stay, as he had always done before and said that he would stop drinking and go into the treatment program.  And then he cried, as he always did, and told her he couldn’t live without her.  But she didn’t listen this time.  “I can’t help you,” she said.  “I thought I could, but I can’t.  And now Jimmy is dead because I haven’t been strong enough to leave you.”  Then she picked up the phone and called her brother, and he came with his pickup truck and helped her move her things to the apartment she had rented in town.

 The man drank three beers after his wife left and then walked out onto the ice to the hole where his son had died.  He fully intended to end his life there, too, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.  Something inside of him said “no.”  He walked back to the house, got into the pickup and drove straight to the treatment center in town. He climbed up the steps of the front entrance and rang the bell.  When they opened the door to let him in, he said, “I don’t know if there is any hope for me, but I have nowhere else to go.”