Esther intentionally slid down the ski slope and broke her leg

Esther’s deliberate descent down a ski slope is both a suicide attempt and an act of self-punishment, ending with a broken leg. Its significance lies in the gap between the exhilaration she briefly associates with the fall and the injury that follows: the crash makes an inward crisis physically consequential, while her later reflections shift the blame from Buddy to herself.

Decision and Descent

At the hilltop, Esther’s usual inner warning to protect herself and walk down disappears. The possibility of killing herself enters her mind coolly, and she looks toward Buddy before edging to the rim. She digs her ski-pole points into the snow and pushes off, already certain that neither skill nor a belated change of will will stop her. The action is intentional: she aims straight down rather than trying to descend safely.

The passage briefly makes the descent feel like release. Esther imagines a small point in her body flying toward the white sun and thinks, “This is what it is to be happy.” That declaration is sharply at odds with what she has chosen: a flight she believes she cannot stop. Her plunge carries her past other skiers and into images of returning to her own past, so the scene joins present danger to a sense of psychological regression. The momentary happiness does not prevent the crash or turn the act into a safe escape.

Crash and Immediate Outcome

The descent ends when Esther falls and takes in gravel and ice water. As she regains awareness, Buddy’s face and other people come back into view; the scene’s altered, disorienting perspective gives way to the familiar world around her. A voice says that she had been doing fine until a man stepped into her path, but that explanation does not erase her earlier decision to launch herself down the slope.

Esther immediately says she is going back up to do it again. Buddy refuses, then tells her that her leg is broken in two places and that she will be in a cast for months. The injury therefore stops an immediate repetition of the attempt, while establishing a prolonged physical consequence. The episode’s reversal is stark: Esther has experienced the descent as a moment of happiness and forward motion, but its outcome is immobilization.

Responsibility and Later Meaning

The leg’s consequence persists beyond the slope. Later, while lying awake in her hotel bed as rain falls, Esther feels the ache in the middle of her left shin and recalls that the old break seems to remember itself whenever it rains. The pain is dull, but it brings the event back into the present rather than leaving it as a completed episode.

Her recollection first assigns responsibility to Buddy: she thinks that he made her break the leg. She then corrects herself, concluding that she broke it herself, on purpose, to repay herself for having behaved badly. The two thoughts preserve the emotional complication of the act without making Buddy its physical cause: blame shifts in the space of a moment from another person to Esther’s own deliberate choice. The injury becomes not only the outcome of the ski descent but also a recurring bodily reminder through which she revises her understanding of what she did.

Narrative Significance

The episode is built around contradiction rather than a simple movement from intention to consequence. Esther’s thought of suicide is calm; the descent briefly feels like happiness; and the crash returns her to a world in which other people must respond to her injury. Buddy’s announcement of the broken leg gives the act a definite, lasting result, while Esther’s later self-correction reframes it as a form of punishment directed inward.

By linking the fall to the later ache and to Esther’s two successive judgments of responsibility, the narrative makes the broken leg recur as both physical consequence and remembered choice. The scene does not resolve the distress behind the attempt. Instead, it shows how that distress can be enacted through a deliberate risk, interrupted by injury, and subsequently retold in competing accounts of blame.