Peak

by Roland Smith

My father was the first to go. He said he had some errands to run and he would meet me at the airport. It occurred to me that I should thank him, but by then, he was halfway down the hallway, tearing the tie off his neck like it was an anaconda. I guessed I would have plenty of time to thank him later, since we were going to be spending the next three years together.

  Mom gave me my passport and a small backpack stuffed with clothes. Rolf had gone off to find the twins.

  "Are you coming to the airport?" I asked, still feeling a little numb.

  "Of course," she said. "But we may not have time to wait for your flight to leave. Rolf has a trial."

  I flipped through the pages of the passport. "So, you knew I was leaving?"

  "Not really," she answered. "Josh got in late yesterday, and we spent the whole night trying to put this together."

  "Are you okay with this?"

  "I don't know," she said. "It would have been nice to plan it out a bit more, but Josh has to get back. It's probably just as well. I think the thing that tipped it for the judge was the fact that you would be gone today."

  "Poof," I said.

  She smiled. "And we can get you back as fast as you disappeared." She pulled out a credit card and an international calling card from her purse and gave them to me. "If things go sour, or you just want to come home, use these."

  I slipped the cards into the pocket of one of the Moleskines in my backpack.

  "Once you get there, we'll ship whatever clothes you want."

  "How long?" I asked.

  "That's up to you, I guess. If you make it to the end of summer, we'll reevaluate. But if you want to come back sooner all you have to do is call. The judge didn't put any restrictions on when you could come back."

  "What about Dad?" I asked. "I mean—"

  "I know exactly what you mean," she said. "Josh seems to have mellowed since the last time we saw him. He traveled a long way to help. I can't tell you how shocked I was when he stepped into Traci's office. At that point we were absolutely desperate. The best Traci thought she could do was get a reduced sentence. Josh listened to the situation, then proceeded to outline exactly what happened today in the courtroom. When you're at the end of your rope there's no one better than Joshua Wood. Unfortunately, he doesn't pay much attention until you're dangling." She laughed. "Rolf and Traci said he should have become an attorney instead of a mountain climber."

  "I'd better go talk to the twins," I said.

  AS SOON AS ROLF and Mom left us alone, Patrice and Paula burst into tears.

  "Who's going to walk us to school?"

  "Who's going to walk us home?"

  "Who's going to play with us at the park?"

  "What about our birthday?"

  "Why did you have to climb that stupid building, anyway?"

  It was easy to become confused around the two Peas. They had a mysterious way of looking at things. They also tended to finish each other's sentences as if they shared the same brain.

  I guess I should explain our relationship. They were born on my eighth birthday, which at first did not go over very well with me. You don't want to spend your eighth birthday in a loft with a babysitter while your mother and nervous stepfather are at the hospital having twins. From then on your special day is going to be the twins' special day, too. It took me a good two years, but the twins finally won me over. They were brilliant, hilarious little Peas and worshipped the ground I walked on (which really helped). They had a full-time nanny for the first few years, but I started spending so much time with them, Mom and Rolf let her go. Paula and Patrice were probably the best birthday presents I could have ever gotten.

  And for the first time since I'd gotten busted, I really regretted climbing that stupid skyscraper. What was I going to do without the two Peas?

  "We read that your daddy is not the same as our daddy." Patrice sniffled.

  I cringed. Another terrible result from the moron climbing the skyscraper.

  We had never told them that I was their half brother. Rolf and Mom thought it would just confuse them. (They always underestimated the twins.) But I hadn't wanted them to learn about it from the newspaper. It hadn't taken the reporters long to figure out Spider Boy was Joshua Wood's son.

  "We're half sisters," Patrice said.

  Paula shook her head and rolled her eyes. "I already explained that to you. One half plus one half equals one. That's a whole. Together we are his whole sister."

  "That's right," Patrice said. "I forgot."

  (I told you they had a mysterious way of looking at things.)

  "We always wondered why your last name was different from our last name," Paula said. "I thought it was because we were twins and you weren't. Some kind of name rule."

  When Mom and Rolf got married I kept Mom's maiden name, Marcello. Rolf offered to adopt me legally, but I passed. I liked my last name and didn't want to change it. And I didn't like Rolf all that much. (There was nothing the matter with him, really. It's just that he wasn't my real father. More on that later.)

  "You're going to Thailand," Patrice said. "Where they make these." She pulled on my necktie.

  "Not quite," I said. "Thailand is a country in Southeast Asia, just south of China."

  "When will you come back?" Paula asked.

  "I'm not sure," I said.

  "Will you be here for our birthday?"

  "Birthdays," Patrice corrected.

  "Will you?"

  "I hope so," I said. "But it costs a lot of money to fly from Thailand to New York."

  "We have money."

  "Sixty-four dollars and thirty-five cents." Paula shook her head.

  "Sixty-four dollars and forty-seven cents."

  "Is that enough?"

  "Maybe," I said. "Look, I'm going to miss you, and I want you to write me a lot of letters."

  "We promise," they said in unison.

  Mom and Rolf came back into the room.

  "We'd better get going," Rolf said.

  ROLF PULLED UP to the departure curb at the airport and we all got out. Mom started crying, and when the twins saw her crying, they started crying.

  I gave them a group hug. As I held them I glanced at Rolf. He was standing off to the side, awkwardly as usual, and I realized that I was going to miss him, too. I gently untangled myself from the girls and walked over to him.

  "I'm sorry about all the trouble," I said.

  Rolf put his hand on my shoulder and smiled. "It's going to be pretty boring without you around. Take care of yourself and don't hesitate to use those cards." He looked at Mom and the twins, and for the first time ever I saw tears in his eyes. "We're going to miss you."

  ROCK RATS

  MY DAD WASN'T at the airline counter when I got to the airport. Our flight wasn't scheduled to take off for another three hours, so I wasn't worried ... yet.

  I went into the restroom and discovered Mom had filled my pack with all the clothes she liked (not necessarily my favorites), but they were better than the suit, which I stuffed into a garbage can. It was too small for me, anyway.

  Two hours and fifty-five minutes to go. Waiting at an airport might be the worst ... well, except for waiting in jail.

  I bought an evil-looking hot dog and wolfed it down with a flat soda.

  Two hours and fifty-three minutes.

  I went through my pack and found the two Moleskines, and I thought about starting my assignment. All I had to do was fill one of them, but at that point I had no idea what I was going to write about.

  I found an automatic pencil in an airport store, but when I sat down and pulled the wrapping off, the eraser shot off into space, and I couldn't find it. I wrote: Moleskine #1 on the first page, then put the pencil and the Moleskine away.

  Discouraging.

  Two hours and thirty-seven minutes.

  As I sat there watching everyone coming and going, it finally dawned on me that I was free, and this got me thinking about what had led up to this—and I don't mean climbing skyscrapers, or getting arrested, o
r the trial. I mean way back. Back before I was born...

  I WAS CONCEIVED in a two-man tent under the shadow of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park.

  At least that's when my mom thinks it happened.

  My parents were twenty-four years old at the time. The day before the tent, they had reached the summit of El Cap along the Iron Hawk route in the record time of thirty-two hours and forty-three minutes. And this was not the only climbing record they had broken that year: Hallucinogen Wall, Body Wax, the Flingus Cling, and dozens of other records had fallen to the climbing team of Teri Marcello and Joshua Wood.

  Climbing magazines and equipment companies had started to pay attention to them ... and to pay them money. The rusty old van they had lived in for three years was ditched for a brand-new four-wheel-drive truck camper. No more temp jobs to scrape together money for gas and food, no more mooching off the weekend climbers. They bought a piece of property in Wyoming and built a log cabin in front of a ninety-foot vertical wall, perfect for conditioning climbs. The rock rats were on their way up.

  I'd seen photos of them back then. My father looked like a bodybuilder, but he was as flexible as a gymnast. My favorite photo of him was the one where he was standing on a high ledge touching his knees with his nose.

  My mother was a foot shorter than my father. She was lean, with dreadlocks tickling her powerful shoulders, muscles in her arms and legs like knotted ropes, and abs like speed bumps. She was bulletproof.

  But she was not baby proof.

  Two months after El Cap she told my father she was pregnant. I have no idea what his reaction was, but I doubt he jumped up and down for joy when he got the good news.

  It was a difficult pregnancy. There were complications. She was told to stay in bed or she would lose me. She did, but my father was on the move, teaching seminars, endorsing equipment, and climbing—shattering records on Mount Kilimanjaro, Mount McKinley, and Annapurna, which is where he was the night I was born.

  He called her from Base Camp on a satellite phone after reaching the summit.

  "What do you want to name him?" Mom asked.

  "Peak."

  "Pete?"

  "No, Peak. P-E-A-K. Like 'mountain peak.'"

  He didn't lay eyes on me until I was three months old, and that's when my mother had her accident in the backyard. I was there, strapped into a car seat at the base of the wall (and at that age, probably staring at the prairie dogs popping out of their holes, only dimly aware that I had parents at all).

  They were thirty feet up the wall, free-climbing. For rock rats like them, this was like strolling across a level parking lot. Mom reached up and grabbed a handful of rotten rock. It was still clutched in her hand when my dad got down to her, which was probably five seconds after she hit the ground.

  Thirty feet. Shattered hip. Broken back.

  My dad canceled all his seminars, climbs, everything, staying right at her side through the whole orthopedic jigsaw puzzle. It took nearly a year to put her back together. Wheelchair, crutches, and finally, when she was able to hobble around with a cane, Dad left again, showing up a couple times a year for a day or two at a time.

  It took Mom two more years of physical therapy to ditch the cane, but she never climbed again.

  Dad took me climbing for the first time when I was five years old. (We tried to keep it a secret, but the fly rods and fishing gear didn't fool Mom for one minute.) Only four more climbs with him over the next two years, but in between I made hundreds of solo ascents on the wall in back of the cabin with Mom manning the belay rope, shouting instructions up to me.

  Then Rolf showed up on our doorstep. The New York lawyer in shining armor. He and Mom had actually grown up together in Nebraska. Neighbors. Rolf had been smitten with her since they were eight years old. After high school, Mom hit the road to climb rocks. Rolf went to Harvard to study law.

  He arrived at the cabin at night in the middle of a blizzard. We were sitting in front of the woodstove reading. (We didn't have a television back then.) There was a knock on the door (actually more like a desperate banging), jolting both of us from our books. Our cabin was sixteen miles from the nearest town. People didn't drop by at ten o'clock at night (except for Dad, who never announced his arrivals and wouldn't think about knocking).

  Mom opened the front door and there stood Rolf, although she didn't recognize him at first. He wasn't dressed for a Wyoming winter. He had on a light jacket, khaki pants, and tennis shoes. He was trying to control it, but his teeth were chattering. There was a quiver in his voice, which could have been from the cold, but I think it was more from fear. It had been over ten years since he had seen my mother.

  "Hi,Teri," he said.

  "Rolf?"

  "Yeah ... uh ... my rental car kind of slid off the road a mile back or so. I would have called, but you're not listed."

  "We use a cell phone out here. It's just easi—Well, never mind that..." She pulled him inside and made him a cup of hot chocolate, then gave him some of my dad's clothes, which were too big for him.

  I went to bed, so I don't know what happened that first night, but he became a regular guest at the cabin for the next several months, flying in for long weekends whenever he could. Rolf made my mom laugh and I liked him for that, but aside from that we didn't have much in common. I guess I resented him for horning in on the simple life we had made in the wilderness.

  He took us to New York, which was interesting, but noisy and confusing compared to the prairie. At the end of our two-week stay, they sat me down in Rolf's kitchen and told me they were going to get married.

  "Okay," I said, not really knowing what that meant at the time.

  I later learned that it meant we were selling the cabin in Wyoming and moving to the loft in New York. It meant that my real dad would no longer be popping in for visits. It meant the Greene Street School. It meant that the closest I was going to get to a rock wall for the next few years was the fifteen-footer at the YMCA down the street, which I could have climbed backward without protection if the guys manning the ropes would have allowed it. None of this helped to sweeten my relationship with Rolf.

  The twins saved me. And it also helped that my mom let me subscribe to a half dozen climbing magazines. In the back of one of those magazines I discovered summer climbing camps. It took a lot of sulking to get her to let me go to one of them. What cinched it in the end was that she knew the climbing instructor. A former rock rat gone legit.

  After this, as long as I did well in school, she let me sign up for more camps.

  Then the time lag between the climbs became a problem. I started eyeing skyscrapers, telling myself that I would just plan the route up but not climb it. Right.

  To get up a rock wall you study the outside, trying to pick the best footholds and handholds, guessing where you're going to encounter problems so you have the right equipment with you to get around them.

  To climb a skyscraper you have to know the inside as well as the outside. (Which is where I screwed up on my last climb.) You don't want to be dangling outside of a window when someone is at a desk working or vacuuming the floor.

  You also have to plan your exits. Mine were pretty simple. I used the elevators.

  Rooftops have doors. Late on the day of the climb, while the building was still open, I'd go up to the roof and put a piece of duct tape over the latch. After I climbed to the top I'd slip into the stairwell and spend the night. In the morning, when the building started to fill up with workers, I'd walk down a few floors, get on an elevator, punch the lobby button, and walk out as if I had just finished an early dentist or doctor's appointment, getting home before Mom, Rolf, or the twins knew I was gone.

  I guess my plan didn't quite work out in the Woolworth Building.

  BANGKOK

  ONE HOUR AND FORTY-THREE MINUTES.

  And still no sign of my father.

  I had made one trip out of the country with Rolf, Mom, and the twins (London, two summers ago) and knew that you had to check i
n early for international flights.

  Where was he? What kind of errands was he running? What if he didn't show? (And all the other boring questions that run through your mind when you're waiting.)

  I walked over to the flight information monitor, thinking that maybe our flight was delayed. ON TIME, it read.

  Above the monitor was a regular TV. I glanced at it, and was going to turn away until the anchor said: "The state of New York has reached a plea agreement with Peak Marcello, the boy who climbed the Woolworth Building early last week. He was sentenced to three years of probation and fined a whopping one hundred fifty thousand dollars! This is the steepest penalty ever given for criminal trespass in New York's history..."

  The camera cut to a shot of the mayor getting into the back of a black limo. He turned to the reporter and said: "This should put an end to people climbing skyscrapers in the city of New York. This illegal activity will no longer be tolerated under any circumstances."

  "Peak Marcello and his family were unavailable for comment," said the reporter, "and it is believed the boy has left the state of New York for an undisclosed location."

  Not yet, I thought, turning away, grateful they hadn't run a photo of me.

  "Peak!"

  Finally. My father was pushing a huge cart with a mountain of gear piled on it. I trotted over. "Give me a hand."

  I helped him push the cart up to the counter. "What is all this stuff?"

  "I don't get to New York very often and thought I should stock up on some supplies. Give me your passport."

  He put it down on the counter along with his own battered passport, which looked like it had been through the wash a couple times.

  "You're cutting it a little close, Mr. Wood," the attendant said.

  "I know," my father said. "Family emergency."

  The attendant pointed at the cart. "This exceeds your baggage limit."

  My father took a credit card out of his pocket. "Just put it on this."

  By the time we had everything checked we had only minutes to catch the flight. We were the last ones down the Jetway.