Seema paused. Her prolonged pause caused Robert to turn his chair so he was now directly in front of her. Although his face was completely expressionless, he looked up, straight into Seema’s eyes.
“I think the deceiving part is this...” she repeated. “That it doesn’t matter how long you prolong your silence, because your silence just keeps repeating the same thing to us; that we don’t know how much you hurt, right? And I think that’s deceptive because if you know something that we don’t know, well then, talk, tell us what it is! It’s kind of deceiving to keep silent about something you want us to know. And then, no matter what we do to get you to talk, you never tell us. That’s not fair, is it...that you just keep being silent?”
“Ahhh...” Robert let out an irritable gasping breath and angrily charged his way to the door to leave.
Seema called out to him, “Robert, are you a man of your word?”
Robert stopped the wheelchair and, without turning around, he said, “Another obvious fact you forgot, Miss Holmes, is that I didn’t come here to have you hurt me more than I am already hurting.”
“And how would I know that fact, Robert, unless you tell me?”
“Well there, I told you!” Robert started back out the door.
“No, I didn’t ask you how much you hurt, I only asked if you are a man of your word?”
Robert turned around and raised his head in exasperation. “You just don’t get it, do you? What the real fact is? The obvious fact is: I. Don’t. Want. To. Talk!”
“But I need you to, Robert. I need you to! Look, Robert, I don’t want to blackmail you or ‘guilt you’ into speaking with me, but I must remind you of your promise. You gave me your word that if I brought you to the hospital, you would speak to me and talk about anything I needed to know. Well, I filled my part of the bargain: I spoke to your wife and daughter. I took you to the hospital. And now I need to talk to you because, Robert, this is my job!”
“Well, it’s not mine!” Robert wrapped his hands around the wheels of his chair and was out the door in three swift turns of the wheels. Seema lowered the yellow scarf from her head as she moved to her chair and sat down. She lowered her head upon the desk and rubbed her neck hard. As she raised her head, she saw Robert, sitting in the doorway of her office.
They looked at each other like two weary boxers who had just gone fifteen long grinding rounds. Robert spoke in an emotionless whisper, “Look, I’ve been losing a lot of things...and not just my goddamn legs. Frankly, you know what? I don’t have any idea of what I still have.” He paused, the defeat in his eyes evident. “But I’ve still got my word and that has to stand for...Look, I made a promise. Okay? So I’m here.”
Seema pulled her yellow scarf back up onto her head. “Okay, Robert, and so am I.”
20. PRESENT DAY – JENNY’S FLIGHT
“No, Kyle, please let me sit on the aisle.” Jenny already felt a little claustrophobic and she knew sitting by the window would make her even more restless.
“Hey, we’re neighbours.” A happy little voice surprised Jenny as she sat down. It was Claire and her mother, who were sitting across the aisle from them. “We’re fourteen C and D.”
“Excuse me,” Claire’s mother spoke out. “Could you please do me a big favour and take down that orange bag above our seat? I forgot to get out a book for Claire. If I don’t, she might talk your heads off.”
“That’s fine. Maybe my head needs to come off today.”
Claire started giggling. “It won’t really come off, will it?”
As Jenny smiled at the girl, she longingly wished she too could feel what that little girl felt: the excitement of going to surprise her father. She reached for the orange bag and handed it to Claire’s mother.
“Thank you so much.” The mother pulled out some books and asked her daughter which one she wanted.
“Dora! Dora!” Claire said, taking the book and hugging it before she laid it on her lap to read.
Dora the Explorer, Jenny said to herself, shaking her head with the wonder of the memory. She remembered the day her father came home with five or six Dora the Explorer books for her to read.
Jenny’s father was fourth generation Argentine; his parents never spoke Spanish and neither did he. But he had wanted his daughter to learn a little Spanish, so he got the Dora books because he’d been told they were helpful in introducing kids to Spanish.
Jenny was ten and had already started reading small novels so when she opened Dora’s Eggs for Everyone, she’d complained to her father.
“Daddy, these are picture books...for little babies,” she moaned.
“Oh my gosh!” Robert said, “but the bookseller insisted that these could definitely help us learn some Spanish.”
Jenny’s mother leaned over and looked at the book and laughed out loud. “Oh well, maybe you can return them?”
“Well, not really,” Robert said sheepishly. “The ‘bookseller’ is actually a mother at my work who said her son didn’t read them anymore so, I paid her twenty bucks for them.”
“Who was this?” asked Monique.
“You know, Lisa,” said Robert.
“Lisa Mildenburger?”
Robert nodded his head. “Yeah.”
Monique laughed even louder now. “Robert, we just bought a birthday card for her son last week. You picked it out yourself, remember? ‘Seven is heaven,’ it said. So if he is seven and doesn’t read them anymore, why would you think...”
“Oh my gosh, yeah...right.” Robert slightly slapped his forehead. “Just really never put two and two together, sorry Jen.”
But as soon as Jenny heard this, she playfully leaped on the couch beside her father as she always did when she was younger and he read to her. She put the book on his lap, put her thumb in her mouth and in the cutest little baby voice said, “Daddy, read me...please now.”
He played along and started reading but stopped after a few pages.
“Daddy, read a little more.”
“It’s okay, Little Rock, I know it’s a little baby book...so let’s go and...”
“No, Daddy, really, can you? I kind of want to find out who Boots gives his eggs to!”
And so in the following weeks, Dora became the after-supper ritual. Each night, the three of them took turns reading Dora out loud and learning all the Spanish words Dora could teach them.
Suddenly, Jenny was catapulted out of her memory as the plane’s departure announcements of the safety rules came over the speakers. The flight attendant followed the taped announcement with precision, showing how to pull down the oxygen mask and how to click the seat belt.
Kyle put his hand gently on Jenny’s knee. “You okay?”
“Did you ever read any of those books?” Jenny asked, pointing to the book Claire had opened up and was reading.
Kyle leaned down to look across the aisle and read the title of Claire’s book—Dora Climbs Star Mountain.
“No, I never have. Say, Claire,” Kyle leaned towards Claire, “do you mind if I read that book when you’re finished?”
Claire didn’t hear Kyle over the noise of the motors, as the plane started its take-off. Jenny smiled at Kyle’s attempt to cheer her up. He had a gift of making Jenny always feel safe. Kyle sat up and pulled her close. Feeling the comfort of his arms, she dared to reach into her purse and pull out her father’s red worn journal. She laid it down on her lap.
“So that’s your dad’s book...his journal?” Kyle asked.
“Well,” Jenny said. “It was mine first. My dad bought this book in a gift shop at the hospital where I was born.”
Kyle was treated to the story of how this book started its life within the Sanchez’s family. Her mother was holding Jenny, who had been tucked away in her mother’s womb only three hours prior. When her mother had drifted off to sleep, her father stopped off at the hospital’s gift shop.
Upon returning, her father had placed Jenny in her mother’s arms, held one hand behind his back, took his wee daughter’s fin
gers with the other and said, “Well, my daughter, you are no longer a blank page because today, little Jennifer Alida Sanchez, today your story begins!” Just then, he pulled out the red book from behind his back as if it was the sweetest cuddly teddy bear and held it in front of his tiny precious daughter. Monique, who was still showing all the exhaustion of having survived twelve hours of labour, started to laugh.
“The story changes here,” Jenny told Kyle. Sometimes her mother laughed until she cried with tears of joy. And sometimes, her mother told her dad, “You get back to that shop right now and get this child something furry that she can hug...” but usually the story had her mom frozen in disbelief, just staring at her dad incredulously while he explained to her how they would write all about her in this red book. “We’ll call it ‘The Book of Jenny.’”
But her mother had already bought a couple of those time capsule books for recording all your child’s major moments in life and so the red book sat unblemished on a shelf in Jenny’s room until she was five. That was the first time Jenny used the book. It became a handy tray to serve tea at her teddy bear’s tea party where it got marked with a dark yellow Kool-Aid stain. Apparently the blame fell on Winnie the Pooh, Jenny had said he was fooling around and ended up spilling his tea all over the cover and it left a strange R-shaped blot. But it was the odd shape of that stain that gave the red book its real purpose.
Everyone forgot about the book until it resurfaced again as a Christmas present Jenny gave her father.
“Look, Daddy, it even has your initial on it. Winnie put it there for you! You can write me and Mommy when you go climbing!”
So Robert did take it and started writing in his red book by journaling his climb up Mount McKinley in Alaska, in 1995. When Monique and Jenny picked up Robert from the airport after that trip, the first thing Jenny asked was, “What did you write us, Daddy? What did you write us?”
Robert realized that the journal was filled with many thoughts and things that were inappropriate to share with a five-year-old, so he told Jenny that he had lost the book. She cried and made such a fuss at the airport that he quickly bought her another red book on the way home and told her she would be a better keeper of the book and she could use it to write him the next time he was gone.
When Jenny was twelve and was helping her father get ready to climb Mt. Denali, she spotted her father tucking the red book in his knapsack. She recognized it immediately and started jumping up and down in celebration. “Daddy, you found it! You found it! You found The Book of Jenny!”
And so, her father came clean about the red book.
“Little Rock,” he had said, “I think it’s time to tell you that Daddy never lost this book. I mean, really, did you think I would ever lose The Book of Jenny? But you see, Daddy has written lots of stuff that you are not really old enough to read or understand.”
“Oh, Daddy,” she begged with those big, open, huggable eyes. “I am old enough now...I read the Secret Garden, Charlotte’s Web and the whole Little House series already and they are way bigger than that red book!”
“Oh, Jenny, there is nothing more I would want to do but share this with you. But you’ll have to wait. First, it’s not finished yet; there are still so many empty pages to fill and more mountains to climb. And if I give it to you now, I won’t have anything left to give you for your inheritance.”
“What’s an inheritance?” Jenny asked.
“It’s something someone gets after someone dies,” Robert explained.
“What?” Jenny said with her face all scrunched up, disliking the sound of what her father was saying.
“Well, some people leave money for their kids...” Robert stopped himself. Even he didn’t like the sound of this.
But Jenny got it right away. “You are only going to give this to me to read after you’re dead?” she said, each word a little louder than the one preceding it until the last word, ‘dead,’ came out almost in a scream.
“Well, then I’m never reading it!” And with that, little Jenny got up, left her parents’ bedroom and closed the door as loudly as she could, for effect.
Jenny and her father never really spoke about the red book again, but Jenny asked her mother why her dad wouldn’t let her read his journal. Her mom always gave the same answer:
“Ask your father.”
“Yeah, but he wants to be dead when I read it though—”
Jenny stopped talking and she put the journal on Kyle’s lap.
“Are you okay?” Kyle asked softly.
Jenny was pale and a little short of breath as she responded, “Yes, I think so...Yeah, I am. I haven’t thought about that book for years. I don’t even know if he still brought it to the mountains with him.”
She and Kyle looked down at the book on her lap and then at each other at the same time.
“Do you want to look inside?” Kyle asked.
“I do, Kyle, I do. But it’s like, I’m too afraid to know...”
“So then I’ll read it to you. I mean, if you want me to,” said Kyle in a gentle, caring voice.
Jenny pouted her lips and softly agreed.
Kyle lifted the red ribbon that kept the book bound. He slowly turned the hard book cover to reveal the first page. There it was, the same horrible handwriting that she had teased her father about so many times. But in the overwhelming emotion of the moment, Jenny found the words were just a blur. She picked up the book and handed it to Kyle and said, “Please read...thank you, Kyle.”
Kyle held the open book in one hand and pressed the pages down with the other as if he was a blind man preparing to read Braille.
“Hey, Jen, look! There’s a quote here on the cover. It says, ‘There never was a time when you or I did not exist. Nor will there be any future when we shall cease to be—Bhagavad Gita.’ What’s that, Jen?”
“I’m not sure, Kyle...What’s the first date my dad started writing?”
“May 23rd 1995, Mt. McKinley. Are you sure you want me to read?”
Jenny sighed and leaned into Kyle. “Yes, yes please.”
Dearest Heart,
Well, here are the first words in the ‘Book of Jenny’. ONE whole world of a story that you and I created! Do you remember when I first got this book? Little Rock was only a couple of hours old. I’m smiling now thinking of what you said then. Do you remember? Well, you were pretty mad and...well, you ordered me out of the room and said, “You go and get your little girl a teddy bear, something she can actually hug!!!” and I guess you were right because she still has that bear!
You know, I’ve never kept a diary in my life so I’m feeling a bit...not sure what...maybe awkward? What should I write? Am I writing to me? Who’s going to read this anyway? You know, I always thought people that kept diaries or journals (grown-up diaries!) were mostly people who were alone and didn’t have anyone to tell all their deep dark thoughts to, so they wrote it down...Hmmm...hey, I guess that’s me at the moment, isn’t it!
Okay, so I’m sitting completely alone in this tent and, without any wind tonight, the only thing making any sounds of life is the scratching of this pencil.. But you know, love, when I’m alone like this...and this kind of alone on the side of some mountain is so special because this aloneness seems to bring me closer to everything that makes up my life...Sometimes I see things clearer up here—all the whys of me seem to be living out their answers...
A lot of climbers say they feel the presence of God when they are so close to the top and some feel they can talk to God up here...And you know I believe in a god...yet, who do I talk to sitting on these ledges? Even writing this diary, which is supposed to be all my own private thoughts...Who do I talk to? Who do I reach out to...you!
Remember that poster Little Rock had on her bedroom door—“Don’t forget to be awesome!” That’s another thing I find up here...it’s that amazing sense of awe...And do you recall when Jenny first saw that poster, she didn’t even know what that word meant but she had to have it because she loved the colours a
nd then after we hung it, she asked us what “awesome” was? Do you remember what you told her?
I don’t remember it word for word but it was something like this: you said Awe is something we find...or something we can create...and...if we live being awe-some then somehow it touches who we really are—because then we find all these little bits of ourselves—for each time you feel, touch or see anything that actually awes you, you will then feel a reason to exist!...And then you said to her that feeling awe is just like...feeling real love. Well, Monique, then you should know...you are all awe to me!
It’s the last night before we summit...Don’t worry, the weather is perfect and 14 climbers have already returned from successful summits...I know we have argued about why I have to climb mountains and I know I will never be able to give you an answer that satisfies you about why I feel I have to do this...yet. Yesterday at supper, one of the climbers told us he was writing a book on why people climb. He has done lots of interviews and found that no one really has the same answer...He said some do it for the challenge, some to find themselves, kind of like they hope they are going to find some deep answer that is buried inside them...Some do it for the adrenaline rush and some...to get away from the world or their own lives...
But I think I’m here because most of us exist in the world which is mostly human made—in a world of TVs and computers, we tend to forget that there are places on this planet which do not respond to the flick of a switch...that these mountains exist without us...and I guess I’m one of those that feel a need to sometimes exist with them.
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