by Kristin Lenz
Did I imagine the look, that moment of hesitation?
I glanced at the paper over Grandpa’s shoulder as I headed for the stove. “California Wildfire Blazes.”
Wildfires were annual news in California. No big deal. I guessed Grandpa wasn’t sure if it would upset me or not. I sat down with my mug of tea across the table from him.
“You’re up early.” He said it like a question.
“Yeah, couldn’t sleep so good.”
“Me neither. Your grandma snores like a freight train.”
I laughed. “I thought that was you.”
“Don’t you believe it.” Grandpa looked back down at the newspaper. “Looks like this wildfire business is getting out of hand back in your part of the world.” He slid the paper over to me. “Must be scary.”
The story was about several wildfires that had cropped up in the past week around California. The biggest one was in Southern California. It was being contained, but the authorities were cautious. They warned that once the seasonal Santa Ana winds started blowing the hot dry air off the desert, it could fuel the flames.
“It is a little scary when you see those fires popping up. We never had to evacuate, but there was almost always a fire nearby every year. The firefighters used to do controlled burns in the Angeles Forest near where we lived, trying to clear the brush. Even seeing the smoke and blackened ground from those fires made me nervous.”
“Well, we don’t have wildfires here, thank goodness, or earthquakes. But maybe you’ll get to experience a tornado drill.” Grandpa grinned.
“You’re kidding.”
“Oh no. You’ll probably have to do one at school. They’ll make you sit down in the hallways with your head between your knees. At least that’s what they used to make us do. And if it’s a real tornado warning, you’ll have to hide under a desk or in the bathroom or someplace like that. Last year, those sirens went off when your grandma was in the bathtub. The sky had turned an eerie green. Oh boy, you should have heard her hollering! What to do? Stay in the tub? Run down to the basement? She was in a tizzy.”
Grandma shuffled into the kitchen, her slippers slapping on the linoleum. “What are you saying about me?”
“I was just telling Cara about you leaping out of the tub naked as a jaybird and running down to the basement when that tornado siren went off last year.”
“I did no such thing,” Grandma snapped. “There you go again, putting ideas in her head.”
Grandpa gave me a look and suppressed a grin before focusing on the newspaper again. I didn’t know how he did it. The woman drove me nuts, but Grandpa just didn’t seem to let it get to him.
Grandma was still griping as I left the kitchen.
“Putting ideas into her head. She hasn’t said anything about climbing since she got here, and then you go encouraging it. Climbing is what got her in this mess in the first place.”
I paused in the living room, waiting to hear Grandpa’s response.
“You’ve seen the way she looks, Margaret. She’s like a lost bird, fluttering around here, away from her own environment. She hardly talks, she hardly eats. Climbing is part of her identity. It’s who she is. Besides, she won’t climb until she’s good and ready. I just wanted to open up the doors for her.”
I drifted down the hall to my room, mulling over Grandpa’s words. On an impulse, I jumped up and grabbed hold of the molding above my door. I held on with my fingertips as long as I could. It felt good to feel their strength again. It felt good to hold on to something after being forced to let go of everything. I dropped back down, grabbed my backpack, and left for school.
The humidity had disappeared during the night. I breathed in the sharp, crisp air. Goose bumps popped up on my arms, but I didn’t go back for a jacket. I’d warm up as I walked. I took my time, crunching fallen leaves and helicopter seeds with my feet. For the next seven hours, I’d be stuck squirming on a hard, plastic chair, trapped at a desk.
Back in California, I’d be wandering the woods, one eye always alert for sour grass. When I was little, Uncle Max had once plucked a few stalks. He’d chewed a blade and handed one to me.
“Try some, Cara, it’s fairy food.”
I’d taken a nibble, my eyes widening at the yummy, sour taste. “Fairies live here?”
Uncle Max had shrugged. “I don’t know. Keep an eye out.”
And I had. I’d scanned every flower petal and tree trunk. I’d peered underneath leaves and inside hollow logs. And then I’d found it—a fairy wing, delicate and iridescent. In reality, it must have belonged to a dragonfly, but Uncle Max never let on. He’d acted just as surprised and enchanted as I was.
Nick and Kaitlyn were waiting in front of my locker when I got to school.
“Nick has something to tell you,” Kaitlyn said.
“Isn’t it supposed to be innocent until proven guilty?” he asked.
“Just tell her.” Kaitlyn elbowed him.
“Okay, already. I didn’t write those notes. I swear. See?” He held up the note I had left in the cafeteria yesterday and another piece of paper. “The handwriting is totally different. No way could I write slanted like that. It’s probably someone left-handed.”
What was I supposed to say? It didn’t make him any less of a jerk. I opened my locker. Another note fell out.
The three of us stood there looking at it for a second, then Kaitlyn snatched it up.
“Can I see?” she asked, pausing before unfolding the note.
“Go ahead. I don’t want it.”
She opened it up and read.
“What the hell does that mean?” Kaitlyn asked.
“She was at the climbing gym yesterday,” Nick said.
Kaitlyn and I pierced him with an accusing look.
“What? My brother works there. He came home talking about her. I didn’t write the frickin’ note, already.”
His brother. Tattooed, pierced-tongue guy. Now I saw the resemblance.
“So your brother has been writing the notes?”
“He already graduated.”
“And you’ve been playing mailman?”
Nick opened his mouth in indignation, then looked at Kaitlyn.
She was grinning. “You deserve it.”
“What did I do? What did I do?”
“He’s so clueless.” Kaitlyn smiled at me and patted Nick on the shoulder. “Poor guy. I think he’s too simple to have pulled this off.”
The first bell rang, and we scattered for our classes, leaving Nick shaking his head.
The conversation resumed at lunch. The rest of the group sat the slightest distance away from the three of us. It was barely noticeable at first glance. It was like Kaitlyn and Nick were fringe goths. And I don’t know what I was. Too blond and au naturel to be part of the goth crowd, that’s for sure.
“So who is it then? Who else climbs there?” Kaitlyn asked Nick.
“Hardly anyone from school, not regularly anyway. There’re these two freshmen that I see there a lot, but I can’t imagine they’d have the balls to keep sending the notes.”
“Why not? It doesn’t take guts to send anonymous notes. They’re wimps. We need to confront them.”
I listened to their conversation ping-pong back and forth. Kaitlyn and Nick sat with their heads tipped toward each other, and I wondered if they liked each other as more than friends. I thought about Becky and Zach and my other teammates, and how they were all back home and training like usual. Once, I had asked Becky how she got into climbing in the first place. She said it was something different from all the preppy sports like tennis and field hockey at her private school. Her mom was devoted to Becky’s training and competition schedule, and her dad loved to brag to his colleagues about her. Climbing made her interesting. Especially to guys.
I had never thought about climbing that way. It was just who I was. The wilderness, the mountains, the rocks, they were part of me. Part of my family.
I glanced down the aisle to Triple T’s table. There
was yet another girl sitting next to him. Whatever.
Back at my locker, the llama greeted me from the Ecuador postcard. I rested my forehead against it, the metal door hard and cool against my skin. Whoever was dropping the notes in my locker, they didn’t know me. They probably thought I was like Becky, climbing for sport, a way to get attention, not as a way of life. I wanted to know who was writing the notes, but solving that mystery wasn’t going to get me back home.
17
Kaitlyn asked me to come home with her after school. We had a physics test the next day, and she was stumped.
“You know, I can drive you home anytime, even pick you up in the mornings so you don’t have to walk,” she said as we pulled out of the student parking lot.
“Thanks, that’d be great. Sometimes I kind of like walking, though, fresh air and all.”
“Yeah, well, pretty soon it’s going to be kick-you-in-the-butt freezing air.”
I grinned. “It gets cold in California too, up in the mountains.”
“Just you wait.”
Kaitlyn’s station wagon was ancient and absolutely hideous, with fake wood paneling on the side and everything.
“Thanks to my brother, I inherited this boat. Parallel parking’s a bitch, but other than that I love it,” Kaitlyn said. “It’s my beast. I feel totally safe in it, even driving next to monster SUVs.”
I sank into the seat and lowered the window. Speaking of monster SUVs (and flipping them off), there had been no sign of Nick after school. “Did Nick drive himself today?”
“Oh no, Nick doesn’t drive unless he’s desperate. He’s got a swim meet, and someone will give him a ride home afterwards. He’s saving up to buy an electric car. His parents are loaded and own at least four cars, maybe five, of which Nick has his pick, but he refuses.”
I breathed deeply out the window, but inhaled a lungful of exhaust. “Your beast must be quite a gas guzzler. Nick doesn’t mind?”
Kaitlyn shrugged. “He rides his bike a lot. Besides, can’t complain about a free ride.”
Kaitlyn’s parents were both at work. The silence of the house settled around me like a quilt. No TV blaring, no grandma sniping and griping, no knickknack clutter. Just neat, orderly quietness. It seemed like the whole house was cream colored, soft like a pillow.
“Welcome to the cream-puff house, utterly lacking of the tiniest smidgen of character.”
“No, I like it. It’s … it’s warm and soft and …” I almost said “fuzzy.”
“Ha. You don’t have to live here.”
I called my grandparents before they would start to worry. Grandma sounded downright gleeful. Oh goody, Cara made a friend!
Kaitlyn grabbed two Cokes and a bag of Doritos from the kitchen, and I followed her into her room. The walls were painted midnight blue, almost black but not quite. It was like walking into a cave after the cream puff rest of the house.
“It used to be cream, too. But I finally snapped last spring and painted the walls. They wouldn’t let me get new carpet though. So, I just pretend that I’m floating on a cloud up in the nighttime sky, or walking across desert sand.”
“I used to pretend our cabin in California was a tree house. I’d look out the window at the birds and imagine I was sitting way up high on a tree limb overlooking the mountains.”
“Ha. Like that butterfly chick camping out in a giant redwood,” Kaitlyn said.
I laughed and licked the tasty orange dust off my fingers. “These are amazing!”
“What? You’ve never had Doritos? You really have been living in the middle of nowhere.”
“I guess. My mom’s a major health nut, so we just never had this stuff around.”
“You’ve been missing out.”
Kaitlyn picked up a pile of black clothes from her bed, opened her closet door, and dumped them in a laundry basket. The front of her closet was full of every shade of black and gray, but shoved in the back corner, colors peeked out, red, pink, turquoise blue. How long had they been back there?
I could have stayed in Kaitlyn’s room all afternoon. Her bookcase was full of fantasy and mystery novels, even old Agatha Christies like I’d been reading.
“They were my grandma’s,” she said. “She died a few years ago, and all the grandkids got to pick something from her house to remember her by.”
Kaitlyn picked up one of the books, Three Blind Mice. “She used this huge magnifying glass to read. I would visit sometimes and read to her, so she could rest her eyes.”
“I have that one too. My mom has a whole collection.”
Kaitlyn returned the book to her shelf. “I haven’t read one in years, they seem so old-fashioned now, but I remember Grandma and I would take bets on who was the murderer. She liked the Miss Marple stories best. Supposedly Agatha Christie got tired of Hercule Poirot and called him an insufferable, egocentric creep.”
I laughed, and Kaitlyn continued, “I know, isn’t that great? So she created Miss Marple based on her grandmother. My grandma told me that story over and over again. She would crochet blankets the whole time I read to her. She made this one for me.”
I smoothed my hand over the purple afghan on her bed. “It’s so soft.”
“She was teaching me how to crochet right before she died. I made half of a red scarf but never finished it.”
I tried not to look at Kaitlyn’s misshapen hand, but I couldn’t help it. Most of her clothes seemed to have long, floppy sleeves, and she kept her hand tucked away most of the time. She held the can of Coke and grabbed a book with that hand just fine, as if she wasn’t missing three and a half fingers. Still, crocheting was pretty impressive.
“Do you still have the scarf? You could keep working on it.”
She shrugged. “I know, but it’s not the same without my grandma.”
I scanned a row of her CDs, some older bands and some I hadn’t heard of, probably indie groups. I loved the Van Gogh poster over her bed and the purple lava lamp. Her room was just so her. A comfortable cave.
“I work at a music store. They have a ton of records for collectors, but I haven’t really gotten into those. They cost a lot, even with my discount. Most of the CDs are my parents’ and my brother’s. He gave them to me when he left for college.”
“That’s cool.”
“Not really.” She half-laughed. “Who listens to CDs anymore? He just needed somewhere to dump them. Actually, I kind of like listening to them, though, and opening up the cases, looking at the pictures, reading the lyrics …”
“You’re so lucky. Wait until you see my room. It’s my mom’s from when she was my age. Hardly anything’s been changed.”
Kaitlyn’s face softened as she looked at me.
“It doesn’t even feel like my mom’s room because now she’s different from how she must have been then. It just feels like another part of my grandparents’ house.”
“Would they let you decorate it? I could help.”
“I don’t know. I guess I just haven’t felt like I was really staying here. Like I’ll be going back home to California, so why bother, you know?”
Kaitlyn had questions in her eyes. She looked like she wanted to ask me about my parents and was trying to judge whether or not I wanted to open up. I hadn’t shared anything about my family so far. For all practical purposes, they’d abandoned me. How was I supposed to explain that?
“Well, we should probably take a look at our physics stuff,” I said. “But take these things away from me,” I added, handing her the Doritos. “I can’t control myself.”
Later, Kaitlyn dropped me off in front of my grandparents’ house.
“Don’t forget Miss Marple,” she said, handing over two Agatha Christie mysteries for me to borrow.
“Are you sure? They were your grandma’s,” I said.
She nodded and smiled. “I trust you.”
I waved good-bye and sat down on the front steps next to the ceramic goose. I wasn’t ready to go inside.
I flipped through the myst
ery novels. I had been racing through my mom’s books every evening. There was something so completely satisfying about all the clues coming together to solve the crime. Everything happened for a reason. Everything made sense. At least for a little while. Then the clutter started accumulating in my brain again, and I reached for another mystery. I was becoming an addict.
Were my parents addicted to mountaineering? I had always thought of climbing as a way of life for my family, but maybe somewhere along the line, it turned into an obsession, especially for Dad and Uncle Max. And now Dad had gone all Ahab.
Until now, there had been a numb, empty void when I thought of Uncle Max, like I had never really left the fog of that last morning in Ecuador. I could even trick myself into thinking he was simply traveling with my parents, away on an expedition. How could he be suddenly gone, just wiped off the face of the earth? The void was beginning to fill up, with memories and sadness. I could see more clearly, like a camera coming into focus.
Dad had always been a hard-core climber, a true adventurer, but Mom had balanced him out to some degree. People always gave her a hard time. Like, how can you pursue such a risky sport when you have a kid? What if something happens to you? It’s bad enough your husband is climbing mountains, at least you should stay home for your daughter. And a lot of the time, Mom gave in to the pressure. She stayed with me while Dad and Uncle Max tackled the most challenging mountains, the riskiest climbs.
Sometimes we traveled with them but stayed close to base camp. Other times, we waited at home. Those were the times Mom said she wished we could live a normal, white-picket-fence kind of life. But then, she’d go home to Detroit for a visit, and suburbia would propel her straight back to the mountains. No matter what anyone said, she’d be ready to climb right alongside Dad. Just like Everest, and Denali, and Chimborazo. And wherever they were headed now.
And I knew what I had to do. I had to find a way to get back home to the mountains. I couldn’t stay in Detroit anymore than my mom had been able to stay here. Just like Mom, just like Dad, I needed the wilderness to feel alive. I needed the wilderness to know who I was.
