by Jan Redford
During Dan’s memorial service, the minister had done his God spiel, and Dan’s brother and sisters had spoken, but no one had talked about what a brilliant climber he was, or even acknowledged he was a climber. No one had mentioned the climbing community, though the church was a sea of Gore-Tex, pile and hiking shoes. And no one had mentioned me, even though I’d been assigned the whole front pew with my mother, opposite the family. It was as though Dan hadn’t had a girlfriend, even though his family had met me several times. I’d even visited them with Dan in Toronto.
Afterward, I’d sat in the stairwell of the church, trying to wring out some tears. I couldn’t. My soul had been given a big shot of anaesthetic. I reminded myself that his parents liked me, they just hadn’t approved of Dan living with me. Dan had mentioned that once. They hadn’t approved of the old girlfriend either. I reminded myself that his parents had lost their child, whom they’d had for twenty-seven years. My year and a half seemed paltry.
The silence of the house pressed down on me, nudged me closer to the edge of somewhere I didn’t want to go. I reached for the small bottle of Valium on the bedside table, popped another pill and washed it down with a glass of stale water. If I could just get to morning. The days were a bit better than the nights.
I closed my eyes and tried to take deep, calming breaths, but it felt like a sandbag had landed on my chest. My breathing got shallower and I started to panic. Two nights ago, the night of the memorial, Wendy and Mom had sat on the edge of my bed, promising they wouldn’t leave until I’d fallen asleep. Then it had hit. Dan was dead. He wasn’t coming home. His house, my home, sold out from under me. Soon I was crying so hard my lungs had become a vacuum, deflated, turned inside out. I tried to suck in air, panicked. My sobs became strange barking sounds, but still no air. Wendy pounded on my back while my mother yelled, “For chrissake, Jan, breathe!” and the fear in her voice compounded my fear. She couldn’t protect me. She couldn’t make this go away. When the air finally whooshed into my lungs, I saw the relief on her face. But my fear stayed. I felt so completely alone.
Is that how Dan and Ian had died? Struggling for air? How long had they been alive during the fall? Had they suffered? When would the moment of death have come? At five hundred feet? Three thousand feet?
My breathing got more and more shallow, till I was taking tiny gasps of air. It was trying to pull me under again. A blackness. I needed something. Pills weren’t working. Alcohol wasn’t working. I needed someone in the room.
With my sleeping bag under my arm, I descended the stairs till I was outside Ian’s room. Now Laurie’s room. If I could just lie on the floor beside his bed, maybe I could sleep. A few nights ago, Grant had slept on the floor beside my bed, and for the first time since the phone call in Burns Lake, I’d gotten a decent sleep.
The door was closed. I knocked lightly. No answer, so I pushed it. It opened with a creak. A dim shaft of light fell on the bed from the hallway. A big shape convulsed for a moment, then my eyes adjusted and Wendy turned toward me, Laurie looking up from under her. She fell onto his chest, laughing. They were both laughing. I mumbled an apology, backed out of the room, shut the door.
Death is an aphrodisiac, someone had said in the bar a few nights earlier when we were discussing some other climbers who’d jumped into bed with each other. It seemed death was erasing everyone’s brain cells, replacing them with sex hormones. But Wendy and Laurie? Wendy was my age. Laurie was a sweet, middle-aged, unemployed, newly separated alcoholic. Not even a climber.
Their voices followed me as I grabbed my keys off the counter, slipped bare feet into runners, and rushed to my car with my sleeping bag.
* * *
—
Banff Avenue was deserted. Too early for the summer tourist invasion. My car seemed to know where I needed to go; it barely paused before turning onto Wolf Street. Grant’s house was pitch black when I pulled up in the alley beside Ian’s beloved blue Honda Civic. His parents had given it to Grant. They had wanted one of his friends to have it.
I pushed on the back door. It was open. The stairwell leading to the basement smelled of cat urine, old sweat and spices. One bare bulb flickered at the bottom. I tiptoed down, past the common area, which was made up of a plywood counter above the concrete floor, with a hot plate and mini-fridge. Grant shared these cooking arrangements and one tiny bathroom with four Korean restaurant workers who rented the other rooms.
I’d been here only once, a few days earlier, to pick up some gear Grant had forgotten for a climb. I couldn’t believe he lived like this. He seemed to like to suffer. He’d told me he liked the price.
There was no light under Grant’s door. My arms tightened around my sleeping bag. What was I doing here? I knew I should go home and try to sleep alone. I’d have to get used to it eventually.
I tapped softly on the door.
“Yeah? Who’s there?” His voice was gruff, like he was waking from a deep sleep.
“It’s me. Jan.”
Silence. What was going through his head? Was a voice screaming at him not to let me in?
“It’s not locked,” he said.
I pushed open the door. Grant clicked on the bedside light.
Words spilled with tears as I clutched my sleeping bag to my chest. “I’m sorry. I can’t sleep. I just need to be near someone.” A half lie. It was him I needed to be near. Someone who was missing Dan and Ian as much as I was.
He pushed himself up on his elbow and smiled a groggy smile. His shaggy blond hair shot off in all directions, uncontrolled. He wasn’t pissed off.
“Don’t apologize.”
“I’ll just sleep on the floor. You can go right back to sleep.”
He watched me spread my sleeping bag on the thin rug. “Don’t be crazy. You can’t sleep on the floor. It’s disgusting down there. There’s room up here.”
I barely hesitated before crawling into bed with him. With my sleeping bag over me but unzipped, I curled into a ball, facing the wall. I lay there, barely breathing, his body so close I could almost feel his heat, and then his hand crept into my hair. Every nerve in my body was triggered, sensitized, alert. Blood beat against my veins, threatening to break through. I couldn’t move.
Once Dan had been heading out for a climb and I’d said, “If you die, I’ll just go out and get another boyfriend.” He’d looked so hurt. I hadn’t meant it. I’d been trying to threaten him into staying alive.
Grant’s hand crept lower, rested on my hip for a moment, slipped around to my tummy. His thumb grazed my breast. I didn’t stop him.
17
TEETERING ON THE EDGE
My English professor peered at me from behind round wire glasses, then looked back down at my essay. Red ink flashed as he flipped another page. Red ink was not a good sign. Red ink meant mistakes. Mistakes meant failure. Halfway through my first semester of university and I was a failure.
My hands clamped down on the arms of my chair. I’d only written one essay since high school, in my grade-twelve English course, and this first draft, combined with the final draft, was worth 30 percent of our mark.
This was our second one-on-one meeting. In September we’d met to come up with a topic for my paper. Climbing kept cropping up, how I’d built my identity, my community, my life around it, and he’d encouraged me to write about it. Then I’d told him about Dan. When he got that typical sympathetic look on his face and spewed out the requisite condolences, I suddenly felt like I’d taken off all my clothes and given him a private pole dance. Why did I tell him that? Why can’t I keep something about my life private? Maybe I’d needed him to know I was different from the rest of the students in our class. I was special. I had a dead boyfriend. Of course, after a revelation like that, when I decided to defend rock climbers in my paper, prove that we had a life wish, not a death wish, he’d said, “Good luck with that.”
So, with my boyfriend dead less than five months and my new boyfriend up on Mount Alberta, I’d written a paper about the clim
bers’ “life wish.”
And now my professor slapped my essay on the desk, leaned back in his chair and studied me. He looked like John Denver. His neatly cut hair was blond, not a trace of grey, unlike most of my professors. He couldn’t have been more than a few years older than me, maybe thirty. At twenty-six, I was closer in age to him than to the students in our class. Most of them were straight out of high school.
I looked down at my runners, at my baby toe poking out of a hole in the side. I knew he was going to suggest—politely, even gently, no doubt, because he seemed like a decent guy—that I should give up my dream of university. That I just didn’t have the aptitude. That I was stupid. And then what would I do? I had nothing to go back to in Banff. I’d moved out of Dan’s place as soon as I’d finished my summer at the cadet camp. I could waitress, but I wanted to be a professional. A professional what, I hadn’t decided, but when people asked, “So what do you do?” I wanted to be able to say: geologist, or cartographer maybe, or French teacher. Not waitress.
“This is a good first draft. In fact, an excellent first draft.”
My death grip on the chair loosened.
“I initially had my doubts about your argument, but I must admit, you’ve convinced me. Not quite to the point where I’d try climbing myself, mind you.”
I pulled the paper toward me. It was covered in red, but there was a huge, circled “A” right at the top.
“You’re one of the best writers in this class.”
I sat up straighter. He was telling me I was a good writer, and at the beginning of the year I couldn’t even spell a lot. I’d thought it was one word.
My prof was smiling at me. Does he just want to sleep with me? Is that why he gave me an A? But no, when I stood up to leave, he didn’t ask if he could buy me a drink. He shook my hand politely, not squeezing too much or for too long.
As I speed-walked down the hall to my French class, it was all I could do to keep my feet on the linoleum. I wanted to leap into the air and click my heels together. I had a brain! It was the first moment of joy I’d felt in months.
* * *
—
Shifting my butt carefully so I didn’t dent the hood, I leaned back against the windshield of Ian’s Honda and took a sip of the cold beer Grant had just pulled from the river. After a full day of sunshine, the sun was low in the sky and the cool air was a reminder that this was just a trick, an Indian summer. It could snow tomorrow as easily as be another cloudless day.
Castle Rock filled the horizon, a fortress-shaped mountain over nine thousand feet high. A few hours ago we’d stood on top of the middle buttress, staring down at the Bow River snaking its way beside the Trans-Canada Highway.
“Hey, I forgot to tell you! I got an A on my English paper!” I hadn’t really forgotten. I’d just been looking for the right time. For some reason, Grant didn’t like talking about my schooling. Wouldn’t even read my essays.
“Good for you,” Grant said from his perch on a boulder. He pulled out his pack of cigarettes. He no longer rolled his own now that he had a job logging in BC. He would work long enough to qualify for unemployment insurance, get laid off, then climb the rest of the year.
“I climbed not bad for an A student today, didn’t I?”
My back was stiff, my butt and calf muscles already seizing up from the 4,600-foot elevation gain, but it had been worth it. Thirteen pitches, most of it really steep and exposed, and I’d swung leads the whole way. I didn’t think it possible after my disastrous summer at the cadet camp, bumbling through the mountains in a fog of Valium. I’d made so many bad decisions I hadn’t been invited back for the following year. But today I’d redeemed myself.
Grant grinned at me through cigarette smoke, which was nice to see. Ever since he’d started working in the bush I found it harder to reach him. He was broody and silent when I visited him at the house he’d moved into with a bunch of climbers in Canmore, and even more so after he drove the hour east to Calgary to visit me. I spent weekends seesawing up and down with his moods, wondering what I’d done wrong. Maybe we just needed to be in the mountains to get along with each other.
“It only took us six hours, car to car. And I never once felt like shitting my pants on my leads.” A little voice in my head added, Dan would be proud of me, but I didn’t say it out loud.
From Dan’s climbing journal, I knew that Dan and Ian had soloed this same route in mountain boots. Without a rope, one little slip and they would have plummeted a few thousand feet. Going through that journal made me wonder how he’d lasted as long as he had. It must have been hard for his parents to read. His father had photocopied the whole thing and put it in a binder for me with a picture of Dan and the poem that started Do not stand at my grave and weep.
Sipping my beer, I gazed at the mountain. It rose up from the valley, a fortress with turrets. It had felt so good to be moving confidently on rock again. Maybe Grant was right. Maybe I shouldn’t be going to that grief counsellor. I should be getting into the mountains. Exercising. Beating the grief out of me.
“So.” Grant paused. “Barry invited me on his expedition to the Himalayas.”
Barry. In my early twenties we’d climbed and danced and partied together, even made a half-hearted attempt at romance. He was an Aries like me, which led me to believe two such impulsive, temperamental personalities weren’t meant to be together. And here I was with Grant, another Aries.
Dipping my head to let my hair cover my face, I took another sip, tried to wash away my panic while Grant talked excitedly about Nanga Parbat in Pakistan in May, then Everest at the end of August, up a route that had never been climbed. I clenched my teeth and willed myself not to cry. Grant thought there was something wrong with me because I cried so much. It had been six whole months since the avalanche. Time to move on.
“Barry’s working on sponsors. We won’t go if we don’t get the sponsors.”
Barry would have no trouble squeezing money out of companies for an expedition. He was one of the best-known climbers in Canada.
Another long swig of beer. I knew the statistics. One in ten climbers died over there. I closed my eyes tight against the tears, but they squeezed out anyway. I tried to wipe them away with my sleeve but they kept flowing.
Grant slumped on his rock. “Jesus.”
Two months earlier, just before school, I’d tried to split up with Grant. I told him I couldn’t deal with his climbing. But even as I said the words, I knew I’d never go through with it. For some reason, I was drawn to him as much as he was drawn to the mountains.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
We sat quietly, staring up at Castle, down toward the river, into the trees. Anywhere but at each other.
* * *
—
“Do you ever come to one of these things and look around and count how many people you’ve slept with?” Geoff said.
We were leaning against the wall, watching couples sway to a James Taylor song in the dim light of the dance hall. My heart was still pounding from the last Rolling Stones tune. It felt good to dance, grind all the academic angst out of me, but any time a slow song came on, all of a sudden it was high school all over again. Anyone without a partner headed to the walls. I was at the Calgary Mountain Club Christmas party on my own because, as usual, Grant was hanging off a mountain with Barry, this time up the Icefields Parkway.
“Yup. All the time,” I said. “We’re such an incestuous bunch.” In our climbing community it seemed like everyone had checked each other out over the years before settling down, most often with an outsider.
“I don’t,” Geoff said.
“Asshole.” I backhanded him in the chest and he doubled over in mock pain.
I watched Saul and Judy sway to the music, holding each other as close as her nine-month bulge would allow. Saul had met Judy in Victoria at the tail end of her disastrous marriage and wouldn’t even tell us her name for months. And now they looked like they had cupid’s arrows twanging in their back
s.
Saul stepped back from Judy and gave her a spin, gently, as though scared she’d break. When we danced together, Saul flipped me upside down and over his shoulder and dragged me through his legs. Once I slammed into a wall.
“They’re so fucking in love.” I took a swig of my beer. Happy couples were everywhere these days. My roommate Mike had recently had a croquet party with Christo and Babs, who was nine months pregnant. A few days later, out popped a little boy.
“Yup. They are that,” Geoff said.
“It’s so fucking unfair.” I could hear the slurring self-pity in my voice. Trying to drink Dan away never worked. Instead it amplified everything. Tears began to burn their familiar path over my cheekbones. Homesickness for Banff and the mountains and Dan gnawed at my gut, day in and day out. We would have been like Saul and Judy and Babs and Christo if he hadn’t gone to Foraker.
Geoff looked down at me with an uh-oh look that was becoming as familiar as my meltdowns.
“I think you may have had enough of this.” He pried the beer out of my hand. “I’ll introduce you to Jim Bridwell.”
“I met him already.”
“Come on.” Geoff pulled me toward Jim as I stumbled, trying to wipe my face with my sleeve.
Jim Bridwell, one of the world’s leading climbers, had done a slide show the night before at the university and I’d gone up afterward and reminded him that we’d played hacky sack together in Yosemite. He hadn’t remembered me, but he did say, “You look just like a black-haired Lynn Hill.” Lynn Hill, the world’s leading female climber. I’d once played hacky sack with her in Joshua Tree. I couldn’t think of a bigger compliment. I’d said, “Too bad I can’t climb like her,” and he’d laughed.
“Ah, it’s the dark-haired Lynn Hill,” Jim said as we approached. Jim was the first to climb El Capitan in a day, and now he climbed big mountains all over the world—the Himalayas, Alaska, Patagonia—in light alpine style, the way Grant and Barry were planning to climb Nanga Parbat in the spring. No porters, no camps to retreat to, no fixed ropes, no oxygen, and just a small team. Fast and dangerous.
