by Kristin Lenz
My hands trembled. It was an effort to keep my voice steady. “Homeschooling works better for me. I can’t concentrate at school.”
Grandma slapped her palm on the table. “You can’t drop out of school to climb!”
I flinched.
“Margaret,” Grandpa said.
I shoved my chair back from the table. “Who cares! Who cares about stupid school anyway! It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters anymore!”
Grandma stared at the light fixture hanging over the table; one of the four bulbs was burned out. She wasn’t even looking at me. I had become my mother. I glared with all the fury raging inside me, then stood and stomped to my room. I slammed the door.
I pulled the cardboard box out of the closet and pushed my hair out of my face. It had grown longer than I’d ever had it. I couldn’t stand the thought of cutting it. I couldn’t lose anything else. My life was out of my control. At least I had control over my hair.
I twisted it on top of my head into a messy bun and sat cross-legged, looking at my old climbing magazines. I had to get back home. I had to find a way to get back to the cabin. It was all that was left of Uncle Max. Maybe that’s what it would take to bring Mom and Dad home. If I ran away, back to the cabin, back to the mountains.
The phone rang, and a minute later there was a knock at my door. I shoved the box back into the closet.
Grandma opened the door and held out the phone. “It’s your dad.”
I didn’t move from my spot on the floor. Grandma held out the phone, her other hand on her hip, chin jutting out in irritation. I grabbed the phone and shut the door back in her face.
Dad’s deep-throated voice calmed the storm inside me. “Cara, I’m glad I caught you. I wanted to tell you not to worry. The cabin’s still there. They were able to keep the wildfire back and the winds have shifted. It should be safe now.”
“Dad—”
“We’ve heard there’s some smoke damage. Quite a bit actually. But it’s still standing.”
My dad knew. He’d been gone for months with barely a word, but he knew that I still needed the cabin. He understood that it was still my home.
“I want to go home.” My voice broke over the words. My face crumpled and a sob escaped into the phone.
“It’s okay Cara, shh. It’s okay. Shh, it’s okay.”
I sniffled and swiped my fingers beneath my eyes. “I can’t stay here.”
“The cabin will be there waiting for us, when the time is right.”
“I want to go now!”
“Going back isn’t going to change anything. You need to be in school now.”
“It’s not fair! You can’t just send me away, throw my life away.”
The words were out of my mouth before I realized how they might sound. Dad was quiet. I didn’t mean to bring up Uncle Max, to suggest that Dad had thrown his life away too. Or did I?
“I can go to school back at home,” I said, my voice quieter.
Dad’s voice was even and soft. “Cara, we’re trying to give you a life, to give you a home. Because I just can’t do that right now.”
The finality of his words settled inside me, smothering my anger.
“Cara?”
“Dad.”
“I want you to think about something.” Other voices spoke in the background, shuffling, like people coming and going. I concentrated on Dad’s voice. “We want you to join us down here for Christmas, back in Ecuador. I think it will help you understand.”
“Why can’t we just go home for Christmas?”
“I don’t know where my home is right now, where it should be. I can’t go back to California yet.”
“What happened to your ‘scallop shell of quiet?’ That’s what we need now.”
Dad was silent for a minute, and the voices behind him grew louder. Spanish. Hasta luego. A door slammed. I gripped the phone tighter to my ear, afraid to lose him.
“Right now, I need vast space, like a fire that needs to rage and burn. The cabin can’t contain what’s going on inside me now.”
The phone connection crackled in my ear, as if it was responding to my dad’s words. I waited for it to clear.
“But you have all the woods around the cabin to roam in. Remember, you used to talk about the difference between raging rivers and calm mountains?”
“You mean when I stopped kayaking?”
“Yeah, you said the white water stirred you up until your blood was frothing, but in the mountains you felt calm, they shared their peace with you.”
“You don’t forget anything, do you?” he said.
“Not the important stuff.”
“I don’t know how else to explain it to you, Carabou. This is new territory for me. I just need to go into the gaps. You know, deep into the mountains to suck out its marrow.”
“And then you’ll find some peace, enough to bring it back home with you?”
“You’ll understand better when you come here. I need you to have faith in me. Okay?”
“I don’t know what I have faith in anymore.”
The line crackled again. “Let’s just get you down here with us for Christmas. I need to talk to your grandparents about it.”
“Okay,” I said, even though it wasn’t.
I opened my door and found Grandma hovering. I brushed past her, handed the phone to Grandpa, and returned to my room without a word.
Going into the gaps. I had read those words before. Wild words about wilderness. I dug past the magazines in the box to my books underneath. Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I flipped through the pages with folded corners and found the phrase, the passage underlined.
The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps…. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock—more than a maple—a universe.
Dad was clutching and grasping, searching for meaning in the only way he knew how. The books in my box, that’s what they were about too. Annie Dillard, John Muir, Thoreau, and me too—we needed wild places, wilderness.
Annie Dillard wandered and observed the wilderness and its creatures. I had read some of her work before, part of my homeschooling with Mom and Dad. Her words were entrancing, honest, yet often puzzling to me. There was an essay about an animal, what was it? Something in water, a beaver? He had surprised her one day, his fierce face; they locked eyes. She was in his brain for that moment, and he was simply living. Living in necessity, while we live in choice.
I dug through my box again, trying to find those words. I found the essay tucked in a notebook. A weasel, that was the animal she’d stared down. Now I remembered. She wrote about how the weasel bites its prey out of instinct and doesn’t let go. And we could live that way too, if we wanted. I could very calmly go wild…. We can live any way we want…. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse.
In California these words had puzzled me, but I was beginning to understand.
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part.
I read the last paragraph three times, thinking of Mom and Dad and Uncle Max. Grasping their one necessity. It nearly took my breath away. It didn’t matter if I didn’t completely understand the words, I felt their meaning. My body reacted with goose bumps. Okay, Dad.
I closed the notebook and stood at the window. A few clumps of brown, droopy leaves clung to their branches, but the trees were mostly bare now, exposed to the chill that saturated the air. Heavy clouds had veiled the sun all da
y and made the night even darker. I couldn’t see a single star in the sky. The moon was nothing more than a fuzzy halo, a promise in the distance.
And what was up with these ladybugs? Japanese beetles, according to Grandma. They looked like ladybugs to me. I counted four. Two on the windowsill, another on the glass, and another climbing up the curtains. I scooped the ladybugs into my palm and raised the window. Their tiny legs tentatively tapped my skin, but they didn’t attempt to explore.
“What’s the matter with you?” I asked. “You don’t belong in here.” I held my hand out the window. “Now go, before Grandma finds you.
“Go on,” I said, but still they remained on my palm.
“This is not your home. Go.” I blew them off into the darkness and they flew away.
If only I could do the same.
30
There’s a concept in sports training called maximizing your weakness. The gist of it is that you focus on your weakest areas in order to improve your overall performance. My weakness was dynamic power moves, requiring a burst of speed and strength. Now I had an emotional power ball inside me that surged and exploded while I climbed. I attempted moves I never would have tried before. I’d leap right off the wall, suspended in the air. The old Cara would have slowly maneuvered around, finding rinky-dink tiny holds to delicately grasp and balance on. Now I looked for the straightest line and lunged and leaped.
Sometimes Nick and Kaitlyn would come to the gym with me, but they had their jobs to keep them busy. Jake became my main climbing partner. Nick was having fun teasing me about Jake. His favorite line was, “Jake’s on the make.” Jake’s googly eyes were a little annoying, but he was really the only climber near my level at the gym. The only one as obsessed as I was.
On school days, I couldn’t climb until I had finished my homework; my grandparents’ rules were in effect, but I spent the Friday after Thanksgiving break at the gym. Jake belayed me on a 5.12 route he had put up a few days before. I let out a huge grunt as I lunged for a hold shaped like a unicorn’s horn.
“You’re climbing like a freaking nutjob!” Jake called out. “You were supposed to do a locking twist up to that tiny crimper, then grab the horn with your other hand.”
“What are you? My personal route setter?”
“Yes!”
I finished the route, and he lowered me to the ground.
“That was awesome,” he said. “You gotta start competing again. Your style has totally changed. You’re gonna blow everyone away.”
Maybe, but my old life of traveling with my parents and competing seemed so far away. And without the cabin to ground me, it was difficult to even think about real climbing outside on the rocks.
Coach Mel had left me a message about an exhibition event in Tennessee. If only it was in California.
I untied my figure-eight knot and gazed around the gym at the colored holds, the funky shapes, neon tape marking the routes. Buzz-cut Blake was watching me with a group of little kids sitting at his feet.
I had talked to him about getting a job here, thinking that I could earn money to buy a plane ticket back to California. But they only needed an occasional hour or two for little kids’ birthday parties. They didn’t need more help until their summer camp. I couldn’t wait that long. My best chance was to talk Mom and Dad into coming home when I met them in Ecuador for Christmas.
Jake unclipped the rope from his belay device and shook out his wrists.
“You can’t let that Becky girl dominate the scene.”
“Becky?” I scoffed. “How do you even know about Becky? She doesn’t have what it takes to dominate.”
“Oh yeah, then how come she’s burning up routes all over the country?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Hello? She’s everywhere.”
The last climbing magazine I had read was the one sitting in my closet, left over from August. I hadn’t done more than glance at the covers at the gym. I hadn’t even bothered to text anyone to keep in touch.
“I’m tellin’ you, she’s trying to take your place,” Jake said.
Hearing about Becky stirred up something in me, a competitive edge maybe, but I didn’t know what to say or quite how to feel. Competition climbing was behind me, at least for now.
“How come you’ve never competed?” I asked Jake. “You’re way good enough.”
He shrugged.
“Seriously, you should try it.”
He looped the rope through his harness and tied a figure eight. “I don’t got the money to travel to comps. Besides, my family and everyone I hang with thinks it’s a stupid sport. Not even a real sport, you know, like basketball. I’m so tall that everybody thinks I should play basketball and get a college scholarship. Climbing’s fun, but it don’t get you nowhere.”
Jake lived in Pontiac. You can tell the difference as soon as you cross over the city limits from Bloomfield. What I had seen didn’t look like the slums or anything, although people said parts of it were really rough, like a smaller version of Detroit.
“Which do you like better, climbing or basketball?” I asked.
“Both. But if I play basketball in high school next year, I won’t have as much time to climb. You know Tom Torres?”
I pinched my finger in the carabiner on my harness. “Ow!”
“You okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said, sucking on my finger. “How do you know Tom?”
“He’s my big brother. I mean not for real, just at the Y. We shoot hoops all the time. He was my coach at basketball camp last summer.”
I tried my best to sound casual. “Yeah, I hear he’s really good.”
“He’s the best,” Jake said as he climbed on the wall, his long arms reaching a foot higher than my longest twisting stretch. He was made to climb.
I dug my feet into the rubber chips and braced myself as Jake launched over an overhang. A flash of silver as he clicked the carabiner into the bolt. He was wrong about climbing not getting you anywhere. It can take you places most people only dream about. It can take you all around the world. It can take you up so high, you get a completely new view of the world around you. It can take you to places deep inside your own mind that you never knew existed. It can take you places where maybe you shouldn’t go.
31
In Spanish class, I opened my notebook and found a new note, but it was folded like a paper airplane. This time, the handwriting was completely different than the others.
Small, neat printing, all in capitals, written in black pen. The person with the messy scrawl could not possibly be capable of this level of penmanship. I didn’t think I was capable of this writing, so perfect were these letters. At lunch I flattened the note on the cafeteria table for Kaitlyn and Nick.
“What the hell?” Kaitlyn said. “That’s all it says?”
“That’s it.”
“Is someone asking you out, like to a movie?” Kaitlyn said. “What show? Where?”
“Maybe they’re not talking about a movie. The 7pm Show is the name of a climbing route. Rifle, Colorado. My first 5.14a.”
Nick whistled. His brother Mike’s hemp necklace hung around his neck again, replacing the dog collar he had been wearing.
“I am so confused,” Kaitlyn said. “What’s it supposed to mean?”
“And how did it get in my notebook?”
“Creepy, creepy,” Kaitlyn said.
Nick recreased the paper airplane lines, propped it into shape, and sent it soaring across the row of tables. It plummeted to the ground a couple feet before Tom’s table, but no one paid any attention. A girl almost always squeezed in next to Tom, and today it was Ann-Marie Fidesco, Kaitlyn’s middle school nemesis. I fiddled with my beaded bracelets and gazed at Tom’s back.
I’d finished driver’s ed and was happy to have my learner’s permit but bummed that I wouldn’t get to see Tom anymore. I wondered how he was doing with his practice driving. The car accident he mentioned must have been pretty bad if it had made
him so afraid. Maybe that was how he got that scar on his lip.
“Check this out,” Nick said and tilted his phone toward me and Kaitlyn. A snowcapped peak filled the screen. “Mike’s in Colorado.”
His brother who had taken off with his family’s cash had sent them all a text, saying thanks for giving him a fresh start, and he would repay them as soon as he earned enough money. Apparently, Mike had bought a snowboard from a local ski shop with his dad’s stolen credit card. But that was all, no other charges showed up.
“Colorado, huh?” Kaitlyn said.
“They just legalized pot.”
“Right.”
Nick shrugged. “Maybe he’s teaching snowboarding. He was really good.”
“Do you think your dad will try to track him down?”
“I don’t think so. He didn’t report his credit card as stolen, or even cancel it. My mom convinced him to wait and see what happened. Dad said he’d give Mike until the end of ski season to pay him back, then he’s cutting him off.”
Kaitlyn was going skiing in Colorado with her parents for most of the school break. She’d tried convincing her parents to let me and Nick tag along, but no go. It was a family trip. And that was final. Nick especially wanted to go, hoping to find his brother.
“There are probably a hundred ski resorts in Colorado,” Kaitlyn told him. “What are the chances he’s at the exact same one as my family?”
“Just keep your eyes out for him, will ya?”
Nick clicked his phone off and looked at me. “We gonna climb every day over break?”
“Well—”
“What? I’m not good enough for you?”
“I’m visiting my parents in Ecuador.”
“That’s great!” Kaitlyn clutched my hands. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I just have a bad feeling, like something isn’t going to work out.”
