The Art of Holding On and Letting Go

by Kristin Lenz

  “There are metamorphic rocks, too,” I said. “It’s when a rock goes through a transformation, changing its form, like when it’s been exposed to heat and pressure. Chemical reactions, minerals form, different textures emerge.”

  “Cool.” Jake handed me the rope. “Climb on.”

  I shook my head. “You first.” The gym was nearly empty, the ropes hanging in neat, still lines all along the walls. Someone else had directed me to come here today. The ants ran up and down my body again.

  “No fair. I put up the route. If you watch me do it, it won’t count as an on-site for you.”

  “Don’t care. You go first.” I kept an eye on the entrance, waiting for something, anything, I wished I knew what.

  Jake looked around too while he tied in to the rope. Who was he looking for?

  “Climbing.”

  “Climb on.”

  Jake climbed like he had started off on the wrong foot. He made awkward lunges, and almost slipped twice before he even got to the overhang. He tried to maneuver over the crux, came up short, and dynoed toward the next hold. He missed. The force of his fall popped me off my feet, and I dangled in the air.

  “Hiíjole!”

  Two hands grasped the back of my harness.

  Tom? What was he doing here?

  He pulled me down beside him.

  “You know you probably shouldn’t be climbing with a concussion.” He gently touched the spot on my forehead where our skulls collided earlier. “Good, no goose egg this time.”

  My hands slackened on the rope, dropping Jake.

  “Hey! Stop distracting my belay babe! Hold the line, will ya!”

  “Sorry!”

  “Just bring me down.”

  I lowered him to the ground and removed the rope from my belay device, waiting for Tom to say something else.

  Loud voices erupted from the entrance. Kaitlyn marched toward us, dragging a protesting Nick by the hand.

  “I thought you had to work?” I asked.

  “We’re on our way. Nick has something to tell you.” She jabbed him in the ribs.

  He looked helplessly at Tom and Jake. More climbers had entered the gym by now. Sensing something going down, they drifted closer to us.

  “No, Jake has something to tell you,” Tom said.

  “I’m confused.” I said.

  Jake’s mouth twisted like he couldn’t get his words out, and Tom put him in a headlock. Which was pretty funny-looking with Jake almost a head taller than him.

  “I did it,” Jake blurted. “I’m the one who wrote the notes.”

  My eyebrows were glued to my hairline. “What’s going on?” Tom gave Jake a noogie and released him from the headlock. “It … It started off as a way to get you to climb again,” Jake said. “We heard you were in town, but you hadn’t shown up yet. Then Nick met you at school and said you didn’t sound like you were gonna climb anymore. I was like, Whaaaat? I knew you had to climb. I’d read every article ever written about you. I watched the X-games. You couldn’t quit. I had to help you.”

  “Help me?”

  “Well yeah, okay … it, it was for me too. I wasn’t here that first day you showed up. Blake and Nate said you didn’t even climb that day. My climbing idol—living in the D! I had to getcha to climb with me.”

  Jake looked so young and earnest. His tall, skinny body was drooped down, pleading with me, his idol, to understand.

  “You are such a nut,” I said, with a slug to his arm.

  “Your turn.” Kaitlyn poked Nick again. “Fess up.”

  “I only said I didn’t write the notes. I didn’t say I hadn’t delivered them.” Nick held his hands, palms up, in his innocent gesture. He leaned toward me and whispered, “Oh hey, thanks for letting me come to California with you guys.” His dimples flashed, and he hugged Kaitlyn around the neck.

  “You’re going back to California?” Tom asked. “When? For how long?”

  “We leave on Friday, for spring break,” I said.

  “But you’re coming back, right?”

  I glanced at Kaitlyn. “I … I’m not sure. I don’t know yet.” My words faded as I met his eyes. I held his gaze for a moment, but looked away as heat rose into my face.

  Kaitlyn spoke up. “There is still a missing piece to this mystery. How come Tom is here?”

  “I wanted to make sure Jake fessed up.” Tom spoke directly to me. “I made the mistake of telling him about the dance, and how stupid I was, and how I wished I would have gone with you. The next week, he told me about the note he had written trying to get us together.”

  Jake confessed even more. Now he seemed proud of what he had pulled off. “I gave the notes to Nate, who gave them to Nick, who put them in your locker.”

  No wonder I hadn’t figured it out, there was no single person to blame. Nick was always at school early for swim practice. It would have been easy for him to sneak the notes into my locker when no one else was around.

  Kaitlyn shook her head. “You guys are unbelievable. All this time we’ve been trying to figure this out. You really pissed us off, you know.”

  “And creeped me out,” I said.

  Jake looked a little sheepish, but still proud, like the murderer confessing at the end of one of my Agatha Christie mysteries. Nick looked gleeful and way too smug.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “So, you’ve read the climbing magazines and blogs, and you could have Googled me and found out about my first 5.14a and my bomb at Hueco Tanks, but what about the different handwriting? How’d you learn to write like that?”

  Jake squinted at me. “Huh?”

  “Oh yeah,” Nick said, “I didn’t deliver those paper airplanes.”

  “Hang on,” I said. “They’re in my coat.”

  I showed them the difference in notes, the slanting scrawl vs. the perfect block printing.

  “That’s my writing,” Jake said, pointing to the messy one. “I’ve never seen anyone write that other way.”

  So I was right; two different people had been writing these notes. And I had an idea about stalker number two. I just didn’t understand why or how.

  “That’s engineer writing,” Tom said. “My dad writes just like that.”

  “Why’d your dad send her notes?” Jake said.

  “Doofus,” Tom faked a punch at Jake. Jake raised his fists and fake jabbed back. “Somebody like him must have done it. And no, it wasn’t me,” Tom said.

  “Not just engineers,” Nick said. “My aunt’s an architect. She writes like that too.”

  I kept quiet about my suspicion. I needed to solve this mystery on my own.

  Kaitlyn glanced at her phone. “Oh my God! We’re going to be so late to work. You okay?” She squeezed my shoulder. “We’ll talk more later?”

  I smiled and nodded.

  “Let’s go.” She grabbed Nick’s hand and pulled him away. I could hear him protesting as they left. “But we were just getting to the good part …”

  The crowd around us melted away, pointing at other routes, tying in to ropes. Someone turned up the music, “Welcome to the Jungle,” and a guitar riff blared from the speaker overhead.

  “Darn, I can’t believe I fell off my own route,” Jake muttered, hands on his hips, head tilting back to follow the handholds and footholds up to the ceiling.

  “You going to show us how it’s done?” Tom asked.

  A calm heat settled deep into my muscles, replacing my jittery, electric-spark nerves. I lifted my sweatshirt over my head, revealing the T-back tank top underneath. I knew I looked as strong as I felt, and thanks to my recent growth spurt, I even had curves. The look on Tom’s face added fuel to my confidence, and I tossed my sweatshirt to him. For the first time, I understood how Becky must feel when she climbed. Climbing brings you attention, makes you interesting—to boys.

  I tied in to the rope, took a slow deep breath, and climbed. My breath remained steady; my body knew the route before my mind figured it out. I twisted and stretched, reached and pulled, pushe
d and danced and floated to the top. I slithered upside down across the ceiling and clipped the final bolt. Tom whistled.

  “Right on!” Jake pumped his fist, then lowered me down.

  “That’s why I named it after you.” He released himself from the belay and floated his arms up and down. “Butterfly,” he called out over his shoulder as he pranced away.

  Tom and I cracked up as Jake joined a group of climbers at another route. I lifted my ponytail, cooling the sweat at the nape of my neck.

  Tom rested his hands on my bare shoulders, leaned his mouth close to my ear, and whispered, “That was so hot.”

  The tiny hairs at the back of my neck prickled. Electricity shot straight to the depths of my belly and radiated beyond.

  “I could watch you all day,” he said and kissed my cheek.

  It wasn’t ants dancing up and down my spine; I was sprouting wings.

  48

  Back at home, I found Grandpa sitting in his usual chair. Instead of the newspaper, a photo album rested in his lap. He looked up at me, sniffled, and gave me a soft smile. Had he been crying? I couldn’t see his eyes well enough behind his glasses.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Oh sure.”

  “Grandma in bed already?”

  “Yup.” He motioned me over. “Come see.”

  I rested on the arm of his chair and peered at the photo album.

  “Do you know who this is?”

  It was a picture of a girl about my age, sitting on the concrete steps of a front porch. She wore a denim skirt, and her legs were stretched out and crossed at the ankle. The photo was in color, but it looked fuzzy and faded. The girl’s hair was dark blond, long and layered.

  “My mom?”

  “Yep. When she was your age. You look so much like her. Her hair lightened up to a golden shine just like yours when she started spending so much time outdoors with your father.”

  He turned a few more pages in the album. There was Mom on her high school graduation day. One picture with Grandpa with his arm around her waist, the next one of Grandma with her arm around Mom’s waist. Everyone grinning, saying cheese and smiling for the camera. Then a shot of the Mustang loaded up with her belongings to take to her dorm room at Eastern Michigan.

  Each page held a year’s worth of birthdays, Christmases, and then, there I was. A teeny, tiny baby in Mom’s arms. Dad with a scraggly ponytail and beard, standing stooped behind her, his arms encircling her waist. Page after page, photos of me. Riding in a baby backpack peeking over my dad’s shoulder. Standing on top of the giant boulders in our yard in Colorado, stretching arms up to the sky; I’m the king of the world! My hair the same color as the Aspen leaves in autumn. And there was Tahoe, her white and gray fur shimmery silver in the sunshine. Bouldering along the beach in Mexico, Dad spotting me from below, arms up, ready to catch me. A monastery in Tibet, red-robed monks kneeling, Mom and I wearing long skirts with our hiking boots, climbing shorts underneath. California, our little cabin in the Angeles Forest, a dusting of snow, Christmas tree tied on top of our Subaru. And Uncle Max. Sitting next to me in the backseat of the car, our faces smashed against the window, smearing our features, grinning like idiots.

  The photos swam in front of me. Grandpa patted my back.

  “I just miss them … And, and everything …” I caught a tear at the corner of my eye with my fingertip.

  “I do too, Carabou. I do too.”

  “All these pictures. We hardly ever saw you and Grandma, all those years. Just the couple summers I came and stayed with you.”

  “I know. We didn’t get to see you as much as we would have liked. We didn’t do too badly when you were younger, but as you grew up and your mom and dad moved all over the country … It was hard on your grandma. She suffered through the drive down South, but when your parents moved to Colorado then California, well that was it. Margaret took it personally and refused to talk to Lori for a while. There was no way she was getting on a plane, and driving cross-country was out of the question for her too. Your mom, she was always good about sending pictures though.”

  He lifted his glasses off his nose and wiped the lenses with his sweater, his eyes shiny.

  “I don’t know, Cara. In many ways, Lori has been lost to us. But I think sending you to live here was a sort of peace offering. A way to reconnect our family.”

  I took a gulp of air and let myself melt into his shoulder.

  49

  That night I had the dream again. The world was awash in white. Freezing, wet, choking whiteness all around. Uncle Max’s voice. But this time I wasn’t tumbling, spinning, falling out of control. I swam steadily forward. I knew I was getting closer. To what, I didn’t know. But I knew I’d feel better when I got there.

  I awoke thinking about the poem “Diving into the Wreck.” Dad had scrawled the words on his latest postcard. It’s a poem about facing disaster, diving deeper and deeper into it, and I think Dad was trying to explain what he and Mom were doing. They’d be trekking deeper into the face of tragedy in order to understand and accept and move beyond.

  I had looked up the author, Adrienne Rich, and tried to understand. In the poem, you can feel her loneliness. She delves deeper under the sea and finds part treasure, part corpse. Was she trying to understand the death of someone close to her, or was she facing death herself? In my parents’ case, it was both.

  I also found some feminist interpretations of the poem. They talked about the explorer’s quest, diving into the wreck of obsolete myths, especially myths about the roles of men and women. Like my mom, breaking tradition and separating herself from me to pursue her passion. My feelings had moved beyond anger to a new place. I wanted her to summit K2 more than I wanted her home. I could wait for her. But I still wanted to go home.

  After breakfast, I caught Grandpa alone for a minute.

  “You really think Grandma’s up for this trip?” I asked, remembering what he had said about Grandma not being able to drive across country to visit us.

  “She’s going to try her best.”

  I knew it was selfish, and I should be supportive of Grandma, but I couldn’t help thinking about what would happen if she backed out. What if she couldn’t do it, what if she refused to go?

  “Don’t worry,” Grandpa said, reading my thoughts again. “Everything’s different now. Grandma is full of regrets for not visiting you before. Me too. I wish I would have known how to help her better. We’re not going to miss this chance. Plus, we’ve been practicing.”

  “Practicing?”

  “Yep. We’ve been taking little drives while you’ve been at school. We go a little farther each day.”

  Huh. I twirled my ponytail. That was definitely progress, but I was still worried.

  “She can do it. But we’ll need to be patient with her, and warn your friends.”

  “Thanks again for letting Nick come too.”

  “It’ll be a good distraction for Grandma; she’ll be watching to make sure you’re all behaving.” Grandpa winked.

  The week flew by as I caught up on homework, packed, and got ready for the trip. Two more paper airplanes appeared with their perfect printing, one in my Spanish notebook, and the other in my physics textbook.

  I passed the notes to Kaitlyn. She flattened out the creases. “What do they mean?”

  “Wall of Voodoo is at this place called the bunker in Berlin. It’s an old Nazi fortress that’s been taken over by climbers. I was there with my parents a couple years ago. The concrete walls were old and cracked, full of chipped out chunks, even bullet holes. And climbers have glued on rocks and plastic holds. It’s a crazy fun place, but it has an ominous feeling too.”

  “And this one, Wonder Woman, your secret Indiana She-Jones identity?”

  I smiled. “It’s a climb at Diablo Wall, on an island in Spain. The cliffs jut out over the water. So you don’t need a rope, it’s all free climbing, you fall and splash into the sea.”

  “How does someone know all this abo
ut you? Maybe we need to tell someone. What if he’s a psycho stalker?”

  “You know, it’s not creeping me out anymore. There’s something familiar about it, like the person is reading my mind. He knows my special memories, but not in a hurtful way. I don’t know, maybe I’ll think of something over the break.”

  After school on Friday, I went over to Kaitlyn’s house to help her pack.

  “Just because it’s California doesn’t mean it’s warm all the time,” I said. “It’ll be warm during the day, but we’ll be in the mountains, and it cools off in the evening. You’ll need sweatshirts and jeans.”

  I could hardly tell what she had packed, the entire suitcase was full of black clothes. She opened a dresser drawer and dug down to the bottom, pulling out a pair of faded blue jeans.

  “I only have one sweatshirt that I can wear. I’m still not wearing the MSU one that my brother gave me.”

  I nodded. “Just bring a sweater, and you can borrow one of my tops.”

  Kaitlyn was on the path to healing, but I didn’t know how she’d take the final leap and trust a guy again. Or trust herself to be in a relationship again. I’d thought the Sadie Hawkins dance would be the bridge for her and Nick, but they sure were taking their time crossing it.

  She tossed the blue jeans into her suitcase. One spot of color on top of the pile of black.

  “What about you?” she said. “You finally get to go home. But you’re not staying there, are you? Not yet, I mean.”

  I sighed. “I haven’t let myself think that far ahead. It’s what I’ve been wanting—needing—this whole time. I … I don’t even know if the cabin is livable after the fire. But I can’t imagine how it will feel to have to let it all go. Again.”

  Kaitlyn’s lava lamp oozed and mesmerized. A purple blob broke free and swam to the surface.

  “You’ll know what’s right when you get there,” she said, squeezing my hand.

  Back at home, I set my packed suitcase by my bedroom door and tugged my box of books and magazines out of the closet. I carefully taped the cover back onto my worn, neglected copy of Walden. Maybe Thoreau’s words would make sense again out in the wilderness, back at home. I slid the book into my backpack and zipped it closed.