by Jan Redford
“We thought you might be lonely down here.” Barb stepped into the kitchen behind Niccy.
The girls were obviously heading out to climb. Niccy was wearing rugby pants and a cotton T-shirt. A green bandana pulled her damp hair off her face. She and I had the same type of climbing wardrobe. Threadbare, baggy, like we were trying to hide our bodies. Barb was wearing black Lycra shorts and a sports bra that looked painted on her lean body. Her bare abs were naturally flat, not intentionally sucked in, and her arms hung slightly out from her body in that distinctive ape-like stance climbers get from training. We’d met on my third trip to Yosemite and then worked two seasons together at the cadet camp. For a few years we were equally matched, but recently she’d set the record for the hardest route climbed by a Canadian woman, while I was unable to picture myself doing a single pull-up ever again.
“Nice and cool down here,” Barb said, wiping her forehead.
“Yeah, of course we’d have a damned heat wave at the height of my pregnancy.”
“Are you watching soaps?” Niccy stared at the TV screen. “You are! You’re watching soaps!”
“Fuck off!” I tried to push her out of the way.
I slammed the power button and the room went quiet. Barb came to my rescue. “Have you heard from the guys?”
“Just got a letter. They haven’t even gotten to base camp yet. Permit problems. And then road closures. But it took that letter ten days to get here, so they’ve got to be at base camp by now. I hope.”
Barb and Niccy looked down at my tummy.
“Don’t worry. He’ll get here in time,” Barb said.
I changed the subject. “Where are you heading?”
“Up Grotto Canyon. Probably do Farewell to Arms.”
One of my favourite climbs—overhanging, strenuous, but with huge holds and permanent bolts for protection. If you fell, there wasn’t much chance of getting hurt. So far I’d only followed it, but Barb had been trying to get me to do it on lead. She said I needed to push my limits. Learn to fall.
Learn to fall. Exactly what Dan used to tell me.
“Shit. I couldn’t waddle up the approach right now.” I glanced at Barb’s abs again.
“Don’t worry. You’ll be flying up it again next summer.” Barb took the pickles and ice cream from Niccy, headed toward the fridge.
“Come see the crib.” I pulled Niccy toward the bedroom to show off my second-hand crib with the pastel green bumper pads and sheets with the little yellow duck pattern. Barb followed.
“Listen to this. It’s perfect for a little climbing baby.” I wound up the mobile and the upside-down clowns started to spin to “The Bear Went Over the Mountain.” I’d gone on a shopping spree for the baby in Calgary with my Mastercard. We stood there till it played out.
“Cool,” Niccy said.
She and Barb glanced at each other. “We should get going.”
After they’d gone, the emptiness of the suite settled on everything like dust. I grabbed a spoon and the tub of half-melted ice cream, turned on the TV. The music for Days of Our Lives filled my little space. I’d missed the ending.
* * *
—
Another letter arrived. The boys had finally reached base camp, at 11,000 feet. It had taken seventeen days. I pictured Grant sitting on a boulder, surrounded by the world’s biggest mountains. Writing to me. Thinking about the baby and me. Missing me. He’d received my three letters and the Father’s Day card. They’d also had to change their flights. They were now coming home August 7. My due date was August 10. Less than one and a half months away.
“I hope your due date is accurate,” he wrote.
I laid the letter on my belly. Closed my eyes. Panic squeezed my lungs and it was hard to breathe. I can’t do this alone.
There was a light knock on the door and the hinges squeaked as it opened. I sat up and saw Rory’s bushy red beard poking around the corner. I smiled and my shoulders relaxed. He had come to show me his latest writing. He was one of the few climbers I knew who wrote poetry.
“Ready for the poem? You’re in it.”
Oh, shit. He didn’t tell me he’d written about us. We’d happened seven years ago. My face still burned when I remembered his girlfriend looking at me with the same knowing in her eyes that I’d had when I’d looked at Dede and Brad, who were, miraculously, still together after three years.
I put Grant’s letter on the carpet, got up to turn down the volume so I could still see the actors of my soap opera. Rory sat on the edge of the couch squinting at the TV.
“Don’t tell me you’re watching soaps.” He looked at me like he’d never seen me before.
“Just shut up and read.”
I pulled my feet under me, turned toward him, waiting.
He pulled a single sheet of paper from his pocket, unfolded it and cleared his throat. “‘Meet Some of My Friends.’” He stopped, looked up. “It’s not polished yet, I’m still…”
“Just read. It’ll be great.”
He cleared his throat again and read verses for several of our climbing friends: Geoff: caustic and aloof, poised on the thinnest of holds…Saul: whose parents are scarred by the concentration camps…Choc: an enormous Irishman; he climbed hard with his best friend and now he loves the widow….
Choc’s best friend, Dave Cheesmond, was the one who’d disappeared on Mount Logan just after Dan and Ian died. When Choc and Gillian, Dave’s widow, got together, I’d felt exonerated somewhat.
Jan: Whose moods belay her ability on rock. At last found a man she could love like a river.
I thought of Grant. It was true. I really did love him.
When the mountainside in Alaska collapsed on top of him
eternity shattered
and the stain from her heart
smeared the entire range red.
Inconsolable, with fingers grasping,
she sifts the debris one more time,
one more time.
Hot tears erupted. I thought he’d meant Grant. Now I didn’t know if it was Dan I loved like a river and I wished it were Grant, or if it was Grant I loved and it should be Dan. Maybe I was crying because I was afraid I couldn’t have loved Dan in the first place, given I’d jumped into bed with Grant two days after the memorial, and gotten pregnant with his baby.
But Rory knew I loved Dan. I’d howled for hours on his wood floor in Calgary while he held me. And here we were again. I put my head on his shoulder and he apologized over and over while I cried.
* * *
—
Grant comes home from Pakistan. He’s smiling and happy and I’m so excited to see him. We go to a spa and I think we’re going to make love, but there I am, sitting in my own tub, alone with my big belly, while Grant is in another, fucking a huge woman with tits like mountains.
* * *
—
My eyes popped open. I heaved myself up in bed, stared at the faint light coming through the slit of a window. Finally a dream about Grant and this was what I got? If I weren’t pregnant, I’d take a Valium. If I weren’t pregnant, maybe I wouldn’t need a Valium. I’d be getting ready for my second year of university. I’d be skinny and strong and tanned after climbing all summer. I’d have a big, fat student loan in the bank and I wouldn’t have to worry about having enough money for groceries.
How would I survive two expeditions? In one of his letters Grant had said he was now sure he wanted to go to Everest. I knew Everest would be the biggest thing he’d ever done, and that climbing was what made him feel alive and free, and even though I didn’t want to squelch that, this baby was the biggest thing I’d ever done. If the boys came back with the second ascent of the Rupal Face, and on top of that, Everest, they’d be heroes. I’d just be another woman who’d popped out a baby.
I wanted to tell him if he went to Everest and left me with a newborn, I would leave him. But I knew I wouldn’t.
* * *
—
Back at the post office. Maybe I should move a
bed into the corner, set up a hot plate and porta-potty. I checked my box every day, sometimes twice a day. I hadn’t received a letter in more than two weeks.
I opened the mailbox and there it was, a long, blue envelope with foreign stamps and Air Mail marked in red. The baby did a flip in my tummy and I whispered, “Yes, it’s your daddy. He’s alive!” Or he was when he wrote the letter.
I crawled back into my basement, my only reprieve from the sweltering heat. Temperatures had reached a record high. Parts of my flesh that never used to make contact glommed together, with sweat as the glue. I opened Grant’s letter, dated June 30 in base camp. He’d gone barefoot under his neoprene socks while acclimatizing on a neighbouring mountain, and trench foot had turned his feet to raw hamburger. Now while the other guys climbed big peaks, he was acclimatizing by himself, hiking as high as he could go in his runners. He’d never be ready for Nanga at this rate. On top of that, the monsoons were on their way.
My stomach felt uneasy. Was there such a thing as third trimester morning sickness? Grant’s words from an earlier letter rushed back: I’m afraid of something happening to me. Had that been a premonition? Like my dreams of Dan and Ian?
After I’d devoured the letter, I cranked the volume on the TV to fill the silence, listened to the angry voices of Roman and Marlena from Days of Our Lives while I started a new row on my blue baby sweater. I had to keep my hands, eyes, ears and brain busy.
The plan was to head up Nanga Parbat on July 10. Four days ago. That meant Grant could call any day. Or that he could be dying that very moment, buried under an avalanche, or falling thousands of feet while I sat watching soaps. Or maybe he was already dead and someone was about to pick up the phone.
* * *
—
The baby had the hiccups for the first time. It was a strange feeling, like a twitch that wouldn’t go away in your calf muscle after a long climb on slabs. I was on the couch, as usual, stitching the little yellow bear buttons onto the blue sweater and watching Days of Our Lives, but the soap opera barely registered. I was trying not to think of Grant. I was trying not to think of Dan. I wanted to focus on the baby. The baby that would save me. The baby that would save us.
Grant should have been off the mountain. He should have called by now, but I knew he was dead. It was the same feeling I’d had with Dan—the dreams, the inexplicable crying, the heavy dread. What had I been doing at the precise moment Dan had fallen? He’d died four days after I dropped him off in Seattle, barely enough time to enjoy the view of the Alaskan mountains. Had I still been in Vancouver? I’d met my dad there for lunch when he was on a business trip, and when we said goodbye I couldn’t stop sobbing, as though I’d never see him again.
Or maybe Dan had died while Julie and I were driving to Burns Lake on our way to plant trees. Or maybe while I was planting. He must have been dead when I sent him a long letter. The one they sent back to me with his personal effects, unopened. While writing it I’d had a strong premonition that he would never read it. Then came the dream of Dan and Ian falling. It had been so intense I’d almost thrown up. I hadn’t slept the rest of the night.
“Roman! No! How…You’re alive!”
This episode of Days of Our Lives wasn’t getting my mind on the right track. Roman Brady had come home after being missing and presumed dead for years—after Stefano had kept him prisoner on a Mexican island. Roman went straight to Marlena, the love of his life, but she hadn’t waited; she’d married John Black. Now everyone was all fucked up and no one knew who was supposed to be with whom.
* * *
—
“He should have called by now,” I moaned to my sister on the phone. “I must have some fucked-up karma to have to go through this again. I must have been horrible in my past lives.”
Or maybe it had been in this life. Maybe I was being punished for being with Grant.
Every moment of every day, I calculated how long it should have taken the guys to get up and down the mountain, pack up base camp and walk out to the nearest phone. Would that be in Gilgit? Or would they have to get all the way to Rawalpindi? At first I could convince myself they’d been delayed by weather, or more road closures, that they weren’t dead. But now panic bore down on me like rockfall. Every time the phone rang, I expected it to be some government official with a Pakistani accent telling me my husband of almost four months was dead.
“What are your chances of being widowed twice? Maybe your karma will protect him,” my sister said.
Every day I prayed to Dan and Ian to keep Grant safe. The other day I’d accidentally said to myself, Please, please, Dan, come home, instead of Grant. Three thousand feet. How long had Dan been alive on the way down? Had he had time to think of me? Would Grant think of me and our baby while he fell?
I phoned my parents collect and my father didn’t gripe about it. “Sometimes I feel like it’s my fate to keep losing everyone I love until I learn to survive on my own.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” my mother said, as though that were helpful in some way. My father was at a loss for words. He’d written to me after Dan’s death: This will eventually make you stronger. I wanted to ask him when exactly he thought that strength might kick in.
* * *
—
At six a.m. the phone startled me awake and I risked premature labour falling off the futon to reach it. I picked up on the third ring.
“Jan, it’s Yolande.” Yolande. Kevin’s wife. Kevin who was with Grant on Nanga. Her voice sounded hoarse, like she’d been crying. Dread plunged through my body and I wanted to hang up the phone quickly, before she could change my world.
“Jan, something’s happened.”
“Yolande. Don’t.”
My hand was out in front of me, as if to ward her off. It was Alaska all over again. The phone call. The word avalanche knocking the wind out of me. I couldn’t do this again. Not with a baby.
“It’s not the boys, Jan. I haven’t heard from them. It’s BJ. He’s dead.”
Relief flooded through me. It wasn’t Grant! And then I thought of Kevin.
BJ was Kevin’s best friend. He’d taken a long fall on Mount Lougheed. His partners Jeff (Dr. Risk) and Steve had tried to resuscitate him for hours, but the head injury had been too severe. They’d spent the night hanging from the vertical mountain face in a storm, then the next day they’d left BJ behind and rappelled to the ground. The wardens would retrieve the body by helicopter. The guys were planning to finish the climb and name it in BJ’s honour. We’d have to tell Kevin when he got off the plane.
Words of sympathy by rote. I’d done this so many times. There was a family out there grieving, but all that registered was: It’s not me this time. Grant is still alive.
* * *
—
On the first day of August, twenty-one days after the guys were supposed to have started up the mountain, nine days before my due date, I got the call from Rawalpindi, the one that had never come from Alaska. As soon as I heard Grant’s deep, gruff voice, I started sniffling, the last thing I wanted to do. He sounded so familiar. He would land in Calgary in five days. Four days before my due date.
“We should be dead,” he said, his voice expressionless. “We barely made it off the mountain. I’m not going to be much use for a while. I’m pretty fucked up.”
Yolande had warned me to keep my expectations low. The boys would be trashed when they got home. She’d been through this many times.
After I’d hung up, and after I’d made about a dozen excited calls to let everyone know the boys were alive, I sat back in the cool quiet of my basement and my elation started to wane. In three weeks, Grant was supposed to be heading back to Everest.
20
MIRACLES
“Welcome to the show, Barry and Grant.”
The voice of the CBC interviewer, Linda, crackled from the transistor radio beside me on the couch in our Canmore suite. I double-checked the record button on the tape deck and moved the microphone closer to the
speaker, keeping the volume low to avoid the squeal of interference, careful not to jiggle my tiny sleeping bundle. Jenna felt solid in my arms, like a six-pound sand bag.
Across the room, Grant sat hunched over the kitchen table, the phone pressed hard against his ear. In his kitchen in Calgary, Barry also waited on the phone to tell his story.
The interviewer gave the listeners some background about Nanga Parbat, that it was the second highest peak in Pakistan after K2 at 26,660 feet, and that its Rupal Face was the biggest wall in the world, with 15,000 feet of climbing. The boys had attempted the Messner Route, which had been climbed in 1970 but never repeated. Two Messner brothers had summited; only one had returned. Then four years ago, in 1984, a Japanese team lost four of its climbers on the route. They disappeared without a trace.
Grant gripped the receiver like a handhold fifty feet up a wall. This was his first time on national radio.
“We’ll start with Barry,” Linda said.
Grant’s grip on the phone loosened and he leaned back in his chair.
“Let’s get right to what the listeners want to hear. The ‘miracle,’ as you put it, that brought you boys home alive from one of the most extreme alpine climbs in the world. Barry, could you tell us what happened up there?”
Barry’s voice sounded relaxed and personable. He was used to speaking in front of big crowds—he was a legend in the climbing world, as much as a Canadian could be.
“We got to 25,800 feet by day four, just 1,200 feet from the summit. We’d done the most difficult climbing and it was just a slog to the top. That’s when everything started crapping out. All four of us were hanging off one ice screw in the Merkl Gully when a storm hit, blasting us with hundred-mile-an-hour winds, spinning our bodies around. Flipped us upside down. Thunder and lightning exploding. The whole time we were waiting for the ice screw to fail.”
