by Jan Redford
“We’ll have to wait about ten days, till they’re overdue, before we confirm that they are…you know…That it was them. There’s always a chance they’re on another route.”
Wendy wiped away a tear, but I jolted up. “Did you hear that? He said there’s a good chance it’s not them!”
Larry smiled sadly at me and nodded. Betty blew her nose noisily into a tissue. I couldn’t figure out why they hadn’t heard what the warden had said. They must have been on another route!
Wendy and Julie led me out and down the road to our cabin. They were both crying. I tried to feel something.
* * *
—
I paced the small floor, ten steps to the wall, turned, ten steps to my bed, sat on the edge of the mattress, my knee bouncing up and down like it did when I was scared out of my mind on a climb. Got up, paced again. Energy roared through me like I’d injected myself with twenty cups of espresso. Wendy and Julie watched me. I stopped. Turned to them.
“What am I supposed to do?”
“It’s all arranged. Barb will pick you up at the airport, take you to Dan’s brother’s.”
“But now. What do I do now? That’s tomorrow.” It was only eight o’clock, still light out. Too early to sleep. And how would I sleep anyway?
“Betty’s going to try to find some Valium.”
I started riffling through my backpack, looking for something, but I’d already forgotten what. My brain wasn’t working. My hand closed around something flat and round. I pulled it out. Birth control pills. You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Anger clawed, like some wild beast trying to rip out of me. I threw them against the wall. The plastic shattered and pink pills sprinkled across the floor like confetti.
15
IN THE ARMS OF A MOUNTAIN
Grant was behind me on the trail, letting me set the pace. Up the switchbacks, through the trees, I tried to grind myself into the ground hard enough to beat down the panic that was balled up in the back of my throat. But my whole body felt mired in gravity thick as quicksand and I started to slow. At the next switchback I leaned over with my hands on my knees, suddenly dizzy.
“You okay?” Grant stopped beside me. He’d been hanging around the house for ten days now with the rest of our friends, taking me out hiking or climbing or mountain biking to exhaust me enough to sleep. The wardens in Alaska wouldn’t declare Dan and Ian dead until they were officially overdue at the end of May. Tomorrow. But I seemed to be the only one who couldn’t say out loud what everyone else knew. They were dead. They’d been dead for almost a month.
“Yeah, just give me a sec.”
“Did you eat anything this morning?”
“No, I couldn’t.” I’d barely eaten since the phone call.
“Last night?” He was taking off his pack.
Last night. Had I eaten last night? I’d been in such a fog from the Valium. The half bottle of red wine I’d washed it down with hadn’t helped either.
“I don’t think so.”
Grant pulled an energy bar from the flap of his pack, peeled off the wrapper and handed it to me. It was one of the expired army-issue bars we’d all filled our packs with after cadet camp last year. Free, and for good reason. It had the taste and consistency of cardboard, but I chewed on it and felt some energy seep back into my limbs.
“You want to keep going?”
“Yeah. I don’t want to go home.”
Home. Dan’s house, which now belonged to Dan’s parents.
I cinched the hip strap on my pack. I’d lost so much weight the buckles touched.
Grant threw his pack easily on his back and we continued on. After a few minutes, the quartzite spire came into view, the Tower of Babel, leaning toward Moraine Lake. We stopped and Grant pointed out our line, six pitches up the north side. Moderate climbing. Nothing difficult.
We headed off the path onto the scree slope, along the faint trail to the base where we dropped our packs. While I started stacking the rope into a pile in the scree, Grant pulled out his rack.
“You want to lead the first pitch? Good way to get your head back into it for the cadet camp.”
My job at the cadet camp started in four weeks. We hadn’t even had the memorial service yet. How was I ever going to feel normal enough to guide a bunch of teenagers around the mountains? But I needed the money for tuition. I was going to school in the fall as planned. My parents couldn’t help financially with my dad’s retirement looming, but they’d been urging me on, hoping school would eventually lead to a job that didn’t involve climbing.
I knew the first pitch was easy. Grant was being careful with me. Everyone was. All tiptoeing around, trying not to say anything that would set me off. A few nights ago, at the King Eddy Pub, when everyone was talking about Dan and Ian in past tense, I’d yelled, “You all think they’re dead. You’re abandoning them!” People at the other tables had turned and stared at me like I was a freak. When I ran out into the street, Grant followed and walked me home. It seemed every time I fell apart, I turned around and there he was. Not exactly what I had expected from a guy with a reputation for being an asshole.
I looked up the route. Blocks of rusty-yellow quartzite covered in lichen were stacked for 1,500 feet of moderate climbing. The rock was broken up, lots of little ledges and huge holds, and it looked easy to protect.
“So, you want the first lead?”
Pulling on my climbing shoes, I nodded. I hadn’t done a lead since my trip to Oregon with Julie, before dropping the boys off at the Seattle airport. It would be hard to work as a climbing guide if I couldn’t climb. Over the last ten days I’d at least followed Grant up a few routes. If it hadn’t been for him, I wouldn’t have bothered getting out of bed. Every morning he was there like clockwork, ready to drag me into the mountains, indulging me in my fantasy that the boys were coming home.
That fantasy had come to an abrupt end the night before, with a phone call from Toronto. Dan’s mother’s voice. “He’s gone, Jan. You have to let him go.”
Dan’s father and brother had just gotten back from Alaska where they had flown over Mount Foraker with the pilot, the last living person to have spoken with the guys. They took dozens of photos of the snow slope and the avalanche debris at the bottom. They were getting copies made for me. Ian’s family had done the trip a few days before.
“It’s a beautiful mountain, Jan,” Dan’s mom said. “It looks like she’s cradling the boys in her arms, the way the rock wraps around their snow slope.”
Dan’s parents had booked flights to Alberta; they’d be in Banff the next day to plan the memorial service in the United Church. They seemed to think Dan believed in God.
I hung up and kicked in the stereo speaker. Grant and Wendy rushed to my side with a bottle of Valium. Then I phoned my mother. She would arrive from Ottawa in two days.
* * *
—
Grant passed me the end of the rope and I tied in. Once he had me on belay, I started the climb. It was easy. The rock was solid quartzite, quality climbing for the Rockies. I grabbed a huge handhold, stepped up on a small ledge, reached for the next hold. When my feet were above Grant’s head, it occurred to me: It would be so easy to die. All I had to do was lose my concentration for a split second and slip, or be standing in the exact wrong place when a single rock dislodged above me. It didn’t matter that this wasn’t a hard climb. Dan and Ian had been on an easy slog, going up their descent route to acclimatize for the real climb. They just happened to have crossed the slope at the precise moment the mountain decided to shed a layer. If one of them had stopped to take a pee or to eat a chocolate bar, maybe they’d be home now.
But they weren’t coming home. “They’re gone, Jan. You have to stop waiting.” His mother’s words slammed into me like rock fall.
“I can’t move!” My hands were glued to their holds.
Grant dropped his cigarette and looked up. He paused, like he was about to try to talk me into continuing. Then he thought better of it. He
guided my feet with words, talking slowly and calmly like someone coaxing a child out of a tree, till I’d reversed the moves and was sitting slumped against the wall. My chest started to heave with big, messy sobs. I’d never cried on a climb. What was he going to think of me?
Grant took the rack from my shoulder and I started to undo my knot to give him the sharp end of the rope. I couldn’t read his face. It was like a blank slab, no anger, no impatience, no pity, no sadness. Immutable as a mountain. He seemed to exert the same steely grip on his sadness that he exerted over his fear in order to climb death routes. I didn’t know where he got that kind of control, but I wanted some of it.
He started up the climb while I belayed, and continued to cry, as quietly as I could. When the rope went tight, I cleaned the anchor, strapped on my pack, and followed.
On the summit, we sat on large blocks of lichen-covered quartzite that had been placed in a circle by previous climbers. Grant pulled two cans of beer from his pack, passed one to me. I popped the tab and took a long, warm guzzle as he lit up a cigarette.
During the whole climb, I hadn’t led one pitch. Even following, I’d been consumed with images of falling through the air.
We were surrounded by summit cairns, rocks piled on rocks in all shapes and sizes. Reaching into a hole in the biggest one, which was almost as tall as I was, I pulled out a waterproof metal cylinder, the summit register. Dan and Ian had probably both done this route. They would have recorded their names. I pulled out the booklet and ran down the list. I couldn’t find them.
“They aren’t here.”
“I don’t always sign those either,” Grant said.
“No. Dan would have signed it.”
I started from the first page again, passing names of people I knew. Geoff, Niccy, Wendy, Barb, Joe, Peter, Saul, Zac, Guy, Ken, Julie, Mark. I was on the verge of tears again. Dan’s name should have been there. He collected climbs like notches on a belt. In his climbing journal, he recorded every route in great detail: the gear he used, the weather, the ratings and a description of each pitch, the approach, the descent. The time it took from car to car. Leaving his signature in all the registers on all the mountains he climbed would have been important to him.
“Maybe they bring a new booklet up when the old one’s full. He could be in an old one.”
Grant sounded impatient, so I brushed away my tears and scratched down our names and the date—June 5, 1987. Seeing our names together like that, on the same line, sent a bolt of shame through me, like I was committing adultery. I wanted to erase Grant’s name, put it a line or two down, but the pencil had no eraser. After I’d crammed the pages back in, I tucked the cylinder back into the hole.
Trying not to cry, I leaned back against the rocks, closed my eyes and let the sun soak into my skin. “I wish I could go up to Alaska. I think it’d help.”
“You don’t have to go to Alaska. Dan and Ian are here, in the Rockies, not up there.” He sounded angry.
I rested my head on my knees. I was so sleepy. I didn’t feel Dan’s presence. I just felt his absence. “Aren’t you ever scared of dying?”
“Yeah, of course, but I’m more terrified of the alternative. Coming home from a nine-to-five job and staring at a wall. Sinking into mediocrity.” He stubbed out his cigarette, dug a little hole and buried the butt.
“Living in a blue split-level house with vinyl siding.” I pictured my father mowing the lawn of our house in Munster wearing his plaid shorts and no shirt, his chest covered in curly dark hair, a middle-age roll starting to form around his waist.
“Yeah. Two-point-five babies and all that.”
Babies. When was it that Dan and I had been talking about babies? Two months ago? Three?
“My father was an Air Canada pilot but he called himself a bus driver,” Grant said. “He was bored out of his mind. I’ll never end up like that.”
Grant had been thirteen when his father’s plane had crashed over Ottawa. He’d been instructing two new pilots. Grant had worshipped him. Maybe that was why he was hauling me around the mountains. He knew what I was going through.
We stared off at the glaciated peaks in the distance and sipped our beers. When he spoke again, he sounded beaten down and exhausted, like me.
“They wouldn’t have been on that route if it wasn’t for me.” He crumpled his empty beer can in his fist. His face looked like it was about to crumple too and I wanted to go over to his rock, put my arms around him and let him cry, but he fought for composure and won. “I pushed them to go to Foraker instead of McKinley.”
Any anger I’d felt toward Grant for his part in Dan’s decision had disappeared near the beginning of the waiting. We’d been at the kitchen table, anticipating an update from the wardens, and Grant had let one tear slip out. He’d wiped it away quickly, thinking no one had seen. But I had.
“It’s not your fault. Dan and Ian made their own choice.”
Is that why he felt such a strong compulsion to look after the widow? Because he felt responsible? A pinch of disappointment, then burning shame spread slowly up my neck to my face. I wanted Grant to be hanging out with me because he wanted to be with me, not from some sense of loyalty toward Dan. How could I even be thinking that?
“I want to do the Infinite Spur in their honour,” Grant said.
Panic closed my throat and I couldn’t speak. I barely knew this guy, but I couldn’t seem to get through the day without him.
A distant crash, like thunder, broke the silence between us. To the south, Mount Faye unloaded tons of ice and snow. We sat and listened until the rumble slipped back to silence.
16
THE UNDERWEAR DRAWER
My first night alone. I sat on the edge of the bed with the overhead light still on, not wanting to commit to getting under the covers, to trying to fall asleep before the Valium kicked in. Nights were the worst. So far, I’d been sleeping in the living room, tucked between sleeping bags full of climbers here for the memorial service. But everyone had cleared out except for Zac, fast asleep in his own room down the hall, and Laurie, our neighbour, who was staying in Ian’s room off the kitchen. His wife had kicked him out again, and Dan had always taken him in, so that’s what we’d done. My mother had left for Ottawa that morning, Dan’s parents and two sisters had flown back to Toronto, and his brother was back in Calgary. Before they left, they’d sold the townhouse. I had to be out by the end of the summer.
I reached toward the desk, pulled open the top drawer. This was a ritual I’d been doing for two weeks, as though one of these times I’d find something personal, like a love letter to open in the event of his death. Maybe in a secret compartment. The drawer was empty, as I knew it would be. His family had gone through the whole house, including these drawers, trying to find anything with his mark on it, just as I was doing, as though they could whisk tiny pieces of him back to Toronto and reassemble him there. They had taken his climbing journal and the few climbing stories he’d written. I knew they would photocopy them for me, but it wasn’t the same. I wanted to be able to touch the paper and know it was the same paper his hands had touched.
I did have his account of our trip to Yosemite tucked into my journal, though. I wasn’t willing to share that with his family. The definition of total frustration may be trying to climb with your girlfriend…He’d also written of his drive to the coast to pick me up for our climbing trip to Squamish: By Hope I knew I’d be in my sweetie’s arms by four o’clock, but then a fucking road crew held me up for twenty minutes. He’d written the date, May 5. He’d had exactly one year left to live.
The next drawer held his ledger of expenses. Tiny numbers and words, neatly written and calculated in pencil. He’d even written down each coffee he’d bought downtown on his breaks. He could never fathom how I would sometimes be overdrawn on my account, why I didn’t know from one minute to the next exactly how much money I had.
The rest of the desk drawers were empty. He’d thrown out piles of other papers before he’d left,
stuff he hadn’t wanted anyone to read, as though he knew on some level he was never coming home.
In our dresser, one drawer was untouched. His underwear drawer. I’d given his sweaters and T-shirts to his climbing buddies—knowing if Dan suddenly showed up they would gladly give them back. I’d kept his blue down vest and navy pile jacket for myself. The rest had gone to the Salvation Army. But the Sally Ann didn’t take used underwear, and I couldn’t make myself throw them in the garbage.
I closed the drawer, crawled into bed, curled around my pillow. Maybe if I squeezed hard enough I could get rid of the ache in my belly—too much Valium, Gravol and alcohol, not enough food. I tucked my nose into Dan’s T-shirt, the one our friend Jean had hand-painted for him in Vancouver. She’d told him to take it to Alaska for good luck but he’d forgotten it in the Subaru in Seattle. One sign after another.
A groan slipped out and I stifled it in my pillow so Zac and Laurie wouldn’t hear. I had to get a grip. I wasn’t the only woman curled around a pillow or riffling through a dead climber’s underwear drawer. Dan and Ian had died with two Alaskans who’d left behind wives, and days after their avalanche, a popular Calgary climber, Dave Cheesmond, had disappeared on Mount Logan with his American climbing partner, Catherine. Again, no bodies. Dave had left his wife Gillian alone to raise their four-year-old daughter. At least she had a reason to get out of bed.
I wasn’t planning to go to Dave’s service. I’d had my fill of climbers’ memorials. The only one that had been remotely fitting had been Ian’s. His parents had held it outside on the property he’d grown up on near Fruitvale and had invited all his climbing friends. Afterward, as we played hacky sack, Ian’s mother had said it made things a bit easier to see us laugh.
