My Guys

by Tanya Chris

  “Experience.”

  “He’s a natural on stage,” I told Morgan. “He’s been mentoring you?” I asked Donna, trying to steer the conversation in that direction.

  “You could call it that.”

  I blinked at her, jealousy rising up into my throat. Donna laughed.

  “You see?” she said to Morgan.

  “I see,” Morgan said.

  “It’s nothing serious,” I repeated.

  “Can I be in the play, Aunt Melissa?” Lyla asked.

  “Not this one, honey. Donna’s going to be in it.”

  “And Nate,” Donna said, winking.

  “We’ll have to go see it,” Morgan said. “We’ll make it a girls’ night out, me and Mom. I bet Mom would love to meet Nate. I know I would.”

  “I’d be happy to introduce you.” I wasn’t ashamed of Nate. He was a perfectly pleasant man far past the age of consent, and if I wanted to have casual sex, I’d have casual sex. I deserved it.

  “I’m going to go see Dad.” I stalked off, leaving the two of them laughing behind me. I continued past my mother, who had somehow ended up with grill duty while John and Samuel threw a football around, into the house.

  My father was in the living room in his usual position—reclined. A baseball game played on the television. The room was dim, the light from the windows not reaching his end of the couch. He startled when I sat down next to him.

  “Melissa?”

  “Hi Dad. Did I wake you?”

  “I wasn’t sleeping, just watching the game.” He reached a hand out and patted mine. “I didn’t know you were here.”

  “Everyone’s here. Come outside with us. It’s a beautiful day.” I thought about Derek climbing somewhere with his shirt off, the sun turning his golden body a darker shade of brown.

  “In a bit,” my father said, making no move to move. “Tell me what you’ve been up to.”

  I told him about the trip next weekend. My father didn’t rattle as easily as my mother and kept confidences a lot better than Donna.

  “You always liked to climb trees. You’d go all the way to the top of that old oak tree and poke your head out through the leaves. You looked so free and happy.” He squeezed my hand. “I’m glad you found it again.”

  “Come try it.”

  “I wish you’d asked me that ten years ago. Sounds like an adventure.”

  “It’s not too late to try it now. I see people your age at the gym all the time.”

  “Now, Melissa, you know I couldn’t. Makes me puff to walk down the driveway to get the paper when the girl doesn’t bring it up to the porch like she’s supposed to.”

  “If you walked down to the end of the driveway more often, it wouldn’t.”

  “I have to think of my heart.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m thinking of. Does your doctor say you should sit on the couch all the time?” I angled my body towards his, trying to see his face in the dim light. My father had taken me on every fun adventure I’d ever had as a kid. He was the one who’d sent me up the tree in the first place.

  “The gym’s really safe. I’d keep you safe. Come with me one day. Please, Dad?”

  “Well, let me think on that, little girl. The doctor does say I should get some exercise.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I said I’d think about it. Now, don’t nag me. It’s bad for my heart.” He handed me an empty beer can. “Bring your old man another beer, would you?”

  I sighed and went to the kitchen. There, leaning against the door to the driveway, was Alex. He was dressed for a cookout—khaki shorts and a green polo shirt I’d bought him because it brought out the green flecks in his eyes—but he hadn’t made it past the kitchen.

  The green flecks couldn’t brighten his brown eyes today. Despite what appeared to be a dye job to remove the traces of grey from his hair, he looked ten years older than the last time I’d seen him. I stifled the urge to go to him and draw him into my arms and rub his back until his shoulders loosened. Alex wasn’t mine to soothe anymore.

  “I didn’t think you’d come.”

  “I shouldn’t have.”

  “I didn’t ask you to.”

  “No, your mother did.”

  “She doesn’t speak for me,” I said, exasperated—with her, with him, with the situation.

  Alex turned and put his hand on the door knob but didn’t open the door. Neither of us broke the silence for what felt like minutes. Then he leaned his forehead against the door with a bang.

  “For God’s sake, Alex. What did you expect? We’re getting divorced.”

  “Are we?”

  “Isn’t that what we agreed? You said yourself you didn’t think we should be married anymore.”

  My father wandered in from the living room. “Well, I wondered what happened to that beer.”

  I opened the door to the refrigerator and yanked out a beer and handed it to him. I watched him walk back to the living room, wishing I could follow him—walk away from this conversation like he had.

  “I guess I hadn’t given up,” Alex said when my father was out of sight. “Until ...”

  “So you cheat on me, that’s not enough for a divorce, but if I sleep with someone else, having every right to do it—‍”

  “If you’d slept with me—”

  “I did sleep with you.”

  “Out of obligation. Did you sleep with him out of obligation? With resignation? Did you just lie there, Melissa?”

  “It’s none of your business what we did.”

  “Do you have any idea how much that hurts? That you’d willingly do with someone else what you wouldn’t with me?”

  “Sorry you got hurt, Alex,” I said sarcastically. “You did this.”

  “You could have prevented it.”

  “No, you could have.”

  “You made me feel like less than a man.” His voice cracked.

  My heart tugged towards him. This was the man I’d have done anything for three months ago. His pain was my pain, his wounds, my wounds. It went against my own soul’s desire to be the one causing him harm.

  Uninteresting and uninterested, my ego whispered. I’d made him feel like less of a man? He’d made me feel like no kind of a woman.

  “Why?” he asked. He turned to me, reaching out a hand. “Just why?”

  “Maybe it was you,” I said, ripping at the bandage, wanting it all the way off—no turning back. “Maybe you just weren’t very good.”

  I watched the expressions play across his face—shock, then shame, then hate.

  “Get a lawyer,” he said, before he turned and walked out.

  Chapter 13

  Katrina picked me up after work, pulling into my driveway with an excited squeal of brakes.

  “I’m so fucking revved,” she said as we threw my bags into the back of her car.

  I’d been to the sporting goods store and practically bought the place out—sleeping bag, sleeping pad, headlamp, plus a duffel to pack them all in. It would have been cheaper to stay at a hotel.

  It was nearing midnight before we pulled into the campground. I was expecting a big fire with people sitting around it drinking beer and telling ghost stories, or maybe climbing stories, but the double site we were sharing was quiet. Scattered across the dark ground were the darker humps of our friends’ tents.

  Katrina and I picked out an empty section of ground and tried to erect her tent.

  “I remember this being really easy,” she said in a loud whisper, dropping a pole in frustration. The tent flopped to the ground. We looked at each other by headlamp-light, then looked at the puddle of nylon that was refusing to become a tent.

  “Maybe if we could see,” I whispered back. I was about to suggest that we find a hotel room for the night—what I wanted anyway—when a guy I barely recognized emerged from one of the dark lumps. In five minutes he had our tent up and was stomping back to his own.

  “I told you it was easy,” Katrina said, pushing her bag inside.
<
br />   I threw mine in too and then looked around. I needed to use that outhouse I’d been dreading before I tried to go to sleep. A wretched feeling of homesickness washed over me. Katrina would be the first person I’d slept next to since Alex.

  ~~~

  Over breakfast at a local diner the next morning, I got to know Roy, the guy who’d put up our tent, and his wife Pam plus the other two members of our party, Conrad and Leon. Roy and Pam were in their mid-forties and had been climbing, and married, since their twenties. They’d been everywhere and climbed everything and done it as a team. Conrad and Leon were graduate students at the local university.

  The group kept up an unbroken string of conversation, mostly centering on past trips to this climbing area—who had climbed what before, who was climbing what today. I wasn’t following it. I grimaced across the table at Katrina who looked just as lost.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll get you guys set up,” Jenny said, catching my expression.

  I already felt like a burden and we hadn’t even started climbing yet.

  We piled back into the cars and drove to the crag. From there we had a steep walk up carrying our packs. I trailed along at the back of the crowd, struggling to keep up, my heart threatening to burst through my chest. Gym climbing hadn’t prepared me for this.

  After what felt like miles of straight uphill, everyone threw down their packs. Derek and the others conferred while I sat gasping on the ground. No one else even looked sweaty, not even Katrina.

  Derek grabbed me and brought me over to the rock.

  “We’re going to do this eight,” he said, gesturing up towards the top of the cliff.

  “How do we get up there?” I didn’t see a way to hike around to the top like there’d been at the cliff Amy had taken us to.

  “I’m going to lead it.” He saw that I was confused and explained that he was going to climb the route first and bring the rope up with him. Then, when he lowered back down, the rope would be set up like the ropes at the gym were so Katrina and I could climb on it.

  “But that’s not safe for you, is it?”

  “Not as safe,” he said, “but safe enough. First of all, this is dead easy. For me.”

  Right. Eight wasn’t dead easy to me.

  “So I’m not going to fall off, but if I did, the bolts would catch me.” He pointed up at the rock again and this time my eyes picked out what they hadn’t before—little round pieces of metal protruding from the rock every eight feet or so. I visually followed them up the cliff until they met at a two-piece anchor similar to what was at the top of a gym climb.

  “I’ll clip into the bolts as I get to them. If I fall, you’ll catch me, just like in the gym, but I might fall a little farther.”

  He showed me how to feed out slack as he climbed upward. At the gym, my job was to keep all the slack out of the rope, so leaving slack in was counterintuitive, but before he left the ground, Derek reminded me that if I didn’t give him slack, he couldn’t move.

  I kept second-guessing myself about how much was the right amount. First I’d give him too much slack and then I’d panic and take it back in. About halfway up, he tried to pull up the rope to clip to the next bolt and didn’t have enough slack to do it. He looked down at me, patient but stern, while I quickly fed out some more.

  “Better too much than too little,” he said as though he were saying it for the first time, not the third.

  “Leave the ropes up when you’re done,” he said when he was back on the ground next to me. “We’ll come back to deal with them. And don’t touch anything at the top.”

  He and Jenny picked up their packs and left us, disappearing around the corner in the direction Conrad and Leon had gone.

  Katrina and I looked at each other.

  “Jenny said that one’s easier,” Katrina said, pointing at the route that Jenny had led. “You want to start there?”

  She and I had each climbed each route twice and the morning was gone before Derek and Jenny came back.

  We’d done pretty well. By the last climb, I’d gained some confidence in my ability to step on the sharp ripples and dig my fingers into the small holes. Derek and Jenny re-climbed the routes to clean the anchors they’d set up, then rappelled back down, pulling our ropes down after them.

  While we ate lunch, I peppered Derek with questions about this new concept of leading. He arranged a complicated three-dimensional scenario, featuring pine cones as climbers and a piece of cord as the rope, to try to explain how far the leader would fall based on where they were in relation to the last bolt they’d clipped.

  “What do you do for a living?” I finally asked him.

  “I’m a mechanical engineer, why?”

  Jenny burst out laughing. “He’s such a geek. Everything with him is physics or math.”

  “I get math,” I said. “I’m an accountant.”

  “OK. In simple mathematical terms, it’s twice the distance to the last bolt plus slack.”

  “So slack does matter.”

  “Only if you fall. And if lack of slack makes you fall ...”

  “Then you don’t come out ahead,” I finished. “I get it.”

  “Let’s go try again. There’s a pair of nines around the corner.”

  “Nine?” Katrina questioned.

  “Hey, you guys had no trouble with the eight, right?” Derek stood up, stuffing his trash into his pack. We all shouldered our packs and followed him around the corner where we repeated the morning’s activities.

  “Still not going to fall off,” Derek said, getting ready to start climbing.

  “I know. Slack.”

  He grinned at me and took off. The formula he’d given—twice the distance to the last bolt plus slack—did help me understand where he was at. Every time he climbed past a bolt, I experienced rising panic as the fall distance grew greater and greater, then a moment of relief when he clipped the next bolt, shortly destroyed as he kept climbing.

  “That was easier when I didn’t understand it as well,” I said when he was safely on the ground again.

  “You did better this time.”

  “It was easier to watch,” I clarified, but I was glad to hear I’d done better. He hadn’t had to stop and wait for me to feed him slack even once.

  Derek and Jenny left us again. I’d lost track of where everyone else was. We hadn’t seen them since lunch, although there were climbers everywhere we looked. This new spot was especially crowded. It looked like the gym, except it was brighter and all the holds were grey.

  Katrina could only get to the top of one of the nines, but I climbed both of them, enjoying the sharp texture beneath my fingers and the way I could put my foot almost anywhere I wanted it to go.

  Pam and Roy came up to us while we were trying to figure out what to do next. Katrina and I had each climbed—or tried to climb—each of the two routes twice. Katrina didn’t want to try the one she was having trouble with again, and I was growing bored and restless, but we were stuck until Derek and Jenny came back.

  “That’s bullshit,” Pam said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re here to learn, right?”

  I nodded.

  “So you need to learn how to take down a route. Derek’s not doing you any favors coddling you. Is he always going to be there?”

  I shook my head.

  “Get the ropes down and Roy and I will put them up somewhere else for you, but you’re going to get the ropes down yourselves.”

  I gaped at her. I had no idea what Derek had done at the top when he’d cleaned the last route. I should have been paying more attention.

  “Don’t worry,” Roy said. “We’re going to talk you through it.” He shot his wife a harsh look. “You’re scaring the newbs, honey.”

  “Damn straight.” She winked at me.

  Pam walked me through the process of cleaning our gear off and rappelling back to the ground step by step. It turned out not to be too complicated. Katrina and I already knew how to rappel thank
s to Amy, and the rest was common sense.

  “Thanks,” I said to Pam. “I want to do as much as I can to help.”

  “People are too easy on women, even women climbers. We can do everything the guys can do, right?”

  “What do you want to do next?” Roy asked. He was coiling Katrina’s rope around his neck. Pam frowned at him and handed the end of my rope to me.

  “I’d like to try a ten.” Trying to follow Roy’s example, I made a loose messy bundle out of my rope.

  “I was thinking more like an eight,” Katrina said.

  “So one eight and one ten.” Pam thought for a minute. “Roy, why don’t you and Katrina do that one in the corner at the far end. I’ll bring Lissie over to Derek and Jenny. They can set something up for her over there.”

  She led me on a short hike uphill to a steeper section of rock where Derek and Jenny were lounging against their packs on the ground in the shade.

  “Lissie wants to try a ten,” Pam said. “I was thinking about leading Lover’s Leap.”

  She didn’t mean that she was going to leap from the top of a cliff. Lover’s Leap was the name of the route. I’d learned that every line up the cliff had its own name and rating so you could tell them apart and know what you were getting into.

  Jenny jumped up. “I’ll belay you on it. Derek can pack all this shit up.”

  She and Pam headed down the cliff while I surveyed the mess left behind. I noticed a rope lying in a pile and grabbed an end to coil it.

  “Lissie?” Derek said when I was halfway through. “You’re making a mess of that.”

  Roy’s coils had been neat and even. Mine were tangled and haphazard. Derek stood up and took the rope off my neck, dropping it to the ground to start over. He grabbed an end and started coiling it around his own neck so that the loops of rope made tidy circles around his nipples.

  “Don’t do it for me.” I peeled my eyes away from his torso. “Show me how to do it.”

  Derek dropped the rope to the ground again and we started coiling it for a third time, this time around my neck. He didn’t speak the instructions. He acted them out on me, his hands brushing my body as they led mine through the motions. When we were finished, he lifted my hair gently from under the rope, then stepped back and smiled.