by Jan Redford
“Hmmm. This looks great.” Grant grabbed his knife and fork and dug in. He loved to eat, and for some reason, I loved to watch him eat. Must have been part of the whole nesting syndrome. I smiled as I sat across from him. Jenna was nodding off in his arms and I was starting to feel all mushy inside. Maybe I was ovulating again. Maybe it was just my intense relief at finally having some peace and quiet, and adult company.
“Let’s do something tomorrow.” I leaned forward across the table.
“Like what?” He shovelled a potato into his mouth.
“I don’t know. Ski around Emerald Lake. There’s enough snow now. Go for a Jacuzzi.” I smiled and put my hand on his arm, hoping he’d get the hint. “Maybe Jeannette will take Jenna for a couple of hours.”
“We can go Sunday, for sure. That’d be fun. I already told Pete and Jim I’d do Professor with them this weekend.”
I snapped my hand from his arm as though it had turned into a rattlesnake. “I thought we moved to Field so you wouldn’t have to do that drive anymore. And now you’re going to drive to Banff?” And leave me here alone.
“You know I have to climb.”
“With Jim? You never climb with him.” Jim was a Calgary climber who’d been to Everest several times.
“Yeah—well, looks like we might do a bunch of climbing together. He’s invited me and Pete and Jeff to Nuptse this spring.”
Pete was Jenna’s godfather. Jeff was Dr. Risk. Nuptse was in Nepal.
I dropped my fork onto my plate. The walls of the tiny kitchen started to close in on me.
“It’ll mostly be sponsored. I’ll get a free Nikon camera, all the lenses, film for the whole three months. Think about it. This is my big chance to get into mountain photography. And it’s not until March.”
I pushed my plate away, stood up from the table. “You move me to Bumfuck, BC, and then jump on a plane to Nepal?” I pulled a knife out of the drawer and sank it into the banana bread I’d baked while Jenna had slept instead of doing my Jane Fonda workout video.
When I slammed the dessert on the table in front of Grant he said, “Look, you can be married to a grumpy prick who wastes away in a logging camp, or you can be married to a happy climber.”
“How about divorced from both?” I stomped a few feet away into the bedroom, where I couldn’t even slam the door because there wasn’t one.
* * *
—
Two weeks before Grant’s flight to Nuptse, I pulled off the highway into Field from Golden with the car loaded with clean laundry and Jenna fast asleep in her car seat. I didn’t have a washing machine, so had to drive an hour every time I needed to do a load—which was often. I’d lost my zeal for the cloth diapers Wendy and I had sewn together over countless hours and was now a staunch supporter of landfill-clogging Pampers.
An ambulance, two Yoho Parks trucks and an emergency rescue vehicle were parked near the train station. Headlamps bobbed down the railroad tracks away from town, toward the ice climbs. I stepped on the gas but the hill was too icy to speed.
When I pulled up to our house, Grant’s truck was in the driveway. Tension eased from my neck. I knew he’d gone ice climbing up the Icefields Parkway today, not near Field, but it was hard to control my dark thoughts.
I stepped in the door and there was Grant at the stove stirring refried beans, veggies all chopped and ready for burritos. I placed Jenna’s car seat on the floor and put my arms around his waist, rested my head on his back and squeezed. He patted my hands, as though he understood what was going on.
“What’s happening out there?” I asked.
“Avalanche on Guinness Gully. John Owen’s dead. His partner got out.”
My initial relief that it wasn’t a close friend was short-lived. “Oh no. Didn’t he and his girlfriend just get married? Sandra? I used to kayak with her old boyfriend.”
“Yeah. She’s staying at Graham’s. I guess she’s pretty fucked up.”
“No kidding.” I started to pull Jenna out of her car seat.
“Why don’t you go over there? You might be able to help her.”
“Right, and what do you want me to tell her? That everything’s going to be all right?” I spat the words out, surprised at my anger.
“Hey, it was just a thought. You don’t have to go. I’m sure she’s got lots of people around.”
That night, I barely slept. I slipped back to Burns Lake, to the first night after the news of Dan and Ian’s avalanche, when I lay awake curled in a tight ball, heaving and choking, until Wendy pumped me full of Valium.
I wondered if anyone had thought to take Sandra some Valium. She was going to need it.
* * *
—
“I’ve been thinking,” Grant started.
We were on the way to the airport once again. His duffle bags for Nuptse were piled up in the back of the Honda, pushing against the plastic sheet, a replacement for the back window. Barry had shattered the glass earlier that winter when he slammed the door down on a box of ice tools. I’d have to duct-tape it again when I got home.
Grant kept his eyes on the road. “Maybe we should move to Canmore when I get back from Nepal.”
My smile was so big it split open the crack in my lip from the dry winter air. I could taste blood.
I felt like I was turning into Gollum in the dark depths of Field. We’d inherited enough money from his grandmother for a small down payment on a house, but we hadn’t figured out in which town. Grant had been set on Golden. I wanted Canmore. After this winter, I was ready to go back to school.
“I can get into photography, maybe get good enough to sell some stuff while you waitress.”
My smile drooped.
“We can buy a cheap trailer with my grandmother’s money,” he added.
“A trailer? I don’t want to live in a trailer.” With all our friends in Canmore buying houses and condos, there was no way I was going to raise my daughter in a trailer court. Obviously this plan would need a bit of tweaking.
“It’s the only way I’ll be able to get out of logging. I finally feel alive again now that I’m climbing.”
It was true he was a different person these days. All winter I’d locked horns with the logger, but now I was living relatively harmoniously with the climber. Ever since he’d quit work to climb for two months in preparation for Nuptse, it was as if someone had performed an exorcism on him. Instead of monosyllabic grunts, he was talking to me again, and making eye contact. He cooked and cleaned and played loud music and sent me out the door to go for a run or cross-country ski while he played with Jenna. We had so much sex it was hard to believe I’d escaped another pregnancy. Those two months had convinced me he had to get out of logging. A move to Canmore was in the right direction. Toward Grant the climber. A move in the other direction, Golden, was toward Grant the logger.
“We shouldn’t fight,” I said. He turned toward me and his grip on the steering wheel loosened. He nodded and turned back to the road. He understood the unspoken In case you don’t come back.
* * *
—
The first turnoff for Canmore whizzed by. The car felt empty and light without Grant and all his duffle bags, just Jenna fast asleep in the back seat. I was surprised to be dry-eyed. Maybe I was a better Himalayan-climber wife than logging wife.
The second big green exit sign for Canmore approached and I pictured my eight-hundred-square-foot-duplex in Field, and the three months of waiting that lay ahead. I couldn’t lean on Jeannette. I’d barely seen her all winter, except to clean her house and help with her kids, trying to make her life a bit easier. She’d been diagnosed with postpartum depression, a convenient label for the real problem—being all alone with three kids in the shadows all winter. Her mother had finally arrived and they were waiting for the medication to kick in, or the sun to come out, whichever came first. I knew I’d end up like Jeannette if I stayed in Field.
At the exit I turned the wheel sharply, left the highway and drove straight to Babs and
Christo’s. They had two-year-old Logan, so they’d have spare baby clothes. I could buy diapers and a toothbrush.
In my friends’ kitchen an hour later, while Jenna played with Logan, I looked up the number for a real estate company and picked up the phone.
* * *
—
The first offer on a townhouse fell through because the owner didn’t like my unusual conditions: Pending financing, a house inspection, and approval of the husband upon his safe return from Nepal. Everyone in Canmore was familiar with the death rate in the Himalayas. I went back to Field and waited for the realtor’s phone call.
The second townhouse backed Spring Creek and was also within our price range. My agent suggested I get rid of at least one condition. I wanted to ditch the last one, it reeked of the old love-honour-and-obey crap that I had made sure wasn’t in our marriage vows, but she insisted we needed Grant’s signature on the deal when he got back. I had to get rid of the pending financial approval.
Wearing my wedding ring and armed with Grant’s employment records and a letter from his boss, I left Jenna with Babs and Christo, along with our crappy car so there’d be no risk of the bank manager seeing I was driving a beater.
My palms began to sweat as a woman led me to a cubicle at the back of the bank. I sat, rehearsing my lines, until the bank manager walked in, shook my hand and sat behind the desk. She saw that Grant had worked more months this year than he had collected unemployment insurance, looked at our almost $20,000 worth of Canada Savings Bonds, and signed the papers giving me financial approval for a mortgage of $50,000. I almost did a pirouette as I backed through the door.
The owner accepted my offer, and Spring Creek Townhouse number 29 was mine. Pending my husband’s survival, and approval.
22
BACK ON THE SHARP END
“You’re sure you’re okay for the whole day?” My new neighbour, Caroline, sat across from me at her kitchen table. It would have been easy to mistake her townhouse for mine. Her floor plan was identical, as was the view out her window into the parking lot. She and Lorne had the same chocolate-brown shag carpet in the living room, which Grant called shit-brown, and up the long narrow stairs, where it turned into pumpkin-orange shag on the second floor.
Caroline took one last drag of her cigarette, stubbed it out in the glass ashtray. “Don’t even think about it. I’ve got four of the little buggers, I might as well have one more.”
Caroline had been babysitting for a couple of hours here and there all summer while I went for a bike ride or run. I would have used her more but three dollars an hour added up fast on one income now that we had a mortgage.
I took a sip of coffee. I hadn’t had Nescafé since high school. It wasn’t half bad if you put enough sugar in it. In high school my typical breakfast had been instant coffee, a spoonful of peanut butter, and Du Maurier cigarettes to keep my weight down. These days, trying to keep up with a one-year-old tornado was doing the trick.
Just as I got up to leave, a high-pitched scream blasted down the long stairway. We raced upstairs into the kids’ room.
Caroline’s two-year-old, Chrissy, was straddling Jenna, pinning her to the floor, but even if she had wanted to release her she couldn’t; Jenna had two handfuls of her hair, on either side of her head. The scream had come from Chrissy, not Jenna.
I kneeled beside them and pried open Jenna’s fists while Caroline hauled Chrissy off by the arm.
I picked Jenna up, looked over her head as she wriggled and tried to free herself from my grip. Caroline sat Chrissy into a chair for a time out.
“You sure you want to do this?” I asked again. But I knew the question was directed at myself. Maybe I should just go for a hike with Jenna instead.
Jenna squirmed and twisted till I put her down.
“Just go. The kids will settle down.”
I kissed the top of Jenna’s blond head. Lingered in the doorway. Whenever I was away, all I thought about was my little girl. But I needed to climb.
“Go! Have fun! She’ll be fine.” Caroline laughed.
I slipped down the stairs and out the door.
* * *
—
“Jesus, Niccy! What have you got in your pack?”
I lifted Niccy’s climbing pack by the shoulder strap with two hands and let it fall back into the scree. Grey limestone dust puffed up, resettled.
Barb grabbed the pack and tested the weight. Her biceps bulged with the effort.
“Niccy!”
Niccy looked up from sorting gear, pushed her helmet off her forehead. “It’s just a first-aid kit and a few other emergency things. Space blanket. Extra clothes and stuff.”
“What, like your parka?”
Niccy nodded.
Barb and I looked at each other and groaned. Normally I wouldn’t care if she had packed in eighty pounds, but we’d be taking turns carrying it on the route so the leader wouldn’t have to climb with a pack.
“It’s July! We’re doing three pitches of rock, not a bloody expedition in the Himalayas,” I said.
“Can never be too careful.” She grinned and started to calmly uncoil her rope.
Niccy was being extra vigilant because her mountain guide exam was coming up. She’d failed the first time. Still, maybe it was a good idea to have a big first-aid kit on a climb called Die Young, Stay Pretty.
I started to uncoil my rope. It was quiet, just the sound of the clink clink of metal on metal as Barb sorted the rack. She’d take the first lead, I’d take the second, and Niccy would get the hardest, most enjoyable pitch. A thin finger crack. We’d be up and down and pulling our chilled beers out of the reservoir below in a few hours.
As I belayed and Barb started up the crack, Niccy squatted beside me to watch. “How’s the new home?”
“It’s great. There’s a woman next door with four kids who actually loves to babysit.” I fed out the rope. The pitch was easy so Barb was cruising up it.
“I can’t believe you did that. Bought a whole house without even telling your husband.” She laughed and shook her head.
“He was still in the Himalayas. He couldn’t get to a fax machine.” My voice sounded more flippant than I felt.
After surviving Nuptse, Grant had signed the papers, but when we’d moved in two months ago, he’d accused me of taking advantage of him in a weakened state—dehydrated from dysentery, trashed from altitude sickness, and severely depressed. He had hoped Nuptse would be the start of his dream career as an outdoor photographer, but he’d injured his back on the first day and barely got to climb, let alone take brilliant mountain photos. At thirty-six he was the optimal age for alpine climbing, and he was fit from logging, but maybe it was the wrong kind of fitness.
“Well, it’s nice to have you back in Canmore,” Niccy said.
She worried about me, I knew that. Not about my climbing, but my love life. She had never directly said anything about Grant, but I knew through the grapevine that she thought I’d jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire.
“How’s Grant feel about the new place?”
Grant hated everything about it: the eight-by-eight concrete pad of a back yard, the brown and orange shag carpet, the closet-sized kitchen, the mortgage, being sandwiched between neighbours he couldn’t even be bothered saying hello to. He said it was like living in a fish bowl. I knew he felt like a piranha amongst the goldfish. He went out every day to destroy trees while our Canmore friends campaigned to save them. Niccy and Barb were very involved in the Save the Bow Valley Corridor Society.
“He’s getting used to it,” I said.
I wanted Niccy to know that I hadn’t fucked up this time; I wanted her to know how honourable and loyal Grant was for staying with me. Many climbers I knew would have ditched me after I’d gotten pregnant.
“I’m all registered at the university,” I said.
“Good for you. You’ll be a great teacher.”
The other day, when I visited the University of Calgary, I’d felt so
alive and free walking around campus with Jenna gurgling and bouncing on my back, charming everyone with her white-blond hair, little chipmunk cheeks and four new teeth. I’d thought I’d feel like a freak, but there were moms and dads and little kids everywhere. When I went to the registrar’s office I found out I was still in their system as a student, and all I had to do was register for classes. But if I didn’t enrol now, I’d have to apply all over again next year.
About a hundred feet above us, Barb pulled herself onto a small ledge, then a couple of minutes later leaned out from the rock.
“I’m safe!”
“Good job!” Niccy and I yelled in chorus.
Once Niccy and I had finished the first pitch and the three of us were crammed together on the narrow ledge, Barb handed me the rack. My lead. I dipped my already sweating hands into my chalk bag, slapped them together to get rid of the excess, enveloping my head in a white cloud.
“Sure you’ve got enough chalk there?” Niccy said.
“It’s just 5.8, Jan. You’ll do great,” Barb said.
That was two grades of difficulty easier than the standard I was sometimes leading before I got pregnant, which was 5.10. But I was a fair-weather 5.10er. I could lead easy-to-protect routes as long as I was with the right partner, at the right time of the month, with the wind blowing at the perfect velocity and direction.
My first lead as a mother. With my palms on the rock, I studied the pitch. I saw only one bolt, way above.
“Shit, I hope I can get something in before I get to that bolt.”
