His sideways steps are long, and it is difficult for me to stretch my legs out wide enough to re-create his steps. I can feel my heart pounding underneath my jacket. My ears ring as my blood surges, and I feel aware of my heart pumping it all through my veins. There’s something about moving sideways that makes me look down, and when I do, I feel a rush of dizziness, and the earth below me becomes weirdly elongated. I turn my head back to the mountain, but it’s too late. I gag, and bile comes up into my mouth. I spit into the ice in front of me.
“I’m stuck,” I shout.
“No you’re not.”
My body is giving out. I can’t move. I can’t think. Except I know I’ve never wanted to slug another human being the way I want to slug Paul Hart right now.
“Because you’re me, is that it? You know exactly how it is for me right now.” I’m already rattled by the climb, but my anger toward Paul makes me shake even more.
“No, because I know you’ll make it,” he shouts. I feel a sincere and positive tone in his voice; he’s trying to inspire me.
“I can’t. I really can’t,” I shout back. I don’t want to be a victim, but I’m stuck and scared. I look down again. We must be sixty or seventy feet off the ground. The slope is so steep, I wonder how we’ve gotten this far already.
“I’m going to tighten the rope between us and give you a little lift. On the count of three, stretch across.”
“I can’t,” I shout.
“One-”
“No.”
“Two-”
“I can’t!” I scream, feeling my face burn red as I strain my vocal cords.
“Three.”
The rope between us is suddenly taut and I feel my weight lift, and I reach out my right foot and find a new hole and then again with my left. I stop thinking altogether and, foot by foot, I slide across the mountain slope until I reach Paul’s new path.
I look up at Paul, who watches me from behind his chrome, mirrored sunglasses, giving me zero to hold onto emotionally.
“What was that?” he hollers down.
“What?”
“I can or I can’t?” He laughs.
Bastard. Cambridge-Boston butthead. I focus on the mountain and don’t respond. My legs burn, like acid is pumping through my thighs. My arms feel wobbly, like they are made of Play-Doh. I feel doubt blooming in my brain, so I take a few deep breaths and refocus. Crush the doubts, Jane. They offer nothing and take everything.
We make our way up, and as Paul hits the first ledge below the wall climb, he pulls me up on the rope as I climb, making my own climb much easier. When I reach the first summit, I lie on my back and stare at the sky for a few minutes. My chest is heaving and my heart is racing, mostly from effort but with some pride too.
“Not bad,” Paul says. “Not bad at all.”
He stares out over the wall we just climbed and then up the next ascent. I sit up and then shimmy to the edge and put my legs over, letting them dangle.
“Wow. Thank you,” I say, trying to find a way to bridge the anger between us.
“Thank yourself.” He swipes playfully at the top of my hat and then turns to the wall. He looks up and I follow his gaze. There’s nowhere else to go but straight up.
Chapter 22
If it were a sheer wall that required a climbing hammer and those big nails they use, we’d be stuck on this ledge forever. But as I really study it, I can see that the slab of wall isn’t smooth but full of cracks, wrinkles, and stubble, like an old man’s face.
Paul puts his gloves on the rock and massages the stone. He looks up and to the left, then the right, trying to anticipate the climb, the consequences of choosing each possible path in the stone. For the first time in a while, I look to the sky and see that the dull glow of the sun behind the clouds has moved directly over us. The rock overhang, which I cannot bear to think of, is now directly over us and will be for the rest of the day. If a storm were to come through now, there’d be no way down and no way up. We would surely die up here.
Paul toes his right boot into a crack and then reaches up with his left hand. In a cat-like move, he springs and lifts, and boom, boom, boom, he creeps up the face. In what feels like seconds, he’s moved up half the face. He looks down at me and holds up one hand and tells me to stay put.
I watch him with awe. He’s studying the rock like a map. There’s maybe eight more feet to the next ledge, but it might as well be a mile. He digs into a crack with his right boot and then gracefully reaches up and grabs a knob in the stone with his left hand. He carefully places his left boot against a divot and lifts and then pushes the sole of his right boot against the flat of stone wall, the force holding him there momentarily. And then, with the agility of a monkey, he bounces up and grabs the ledge. He quickly swings his other right hand up, and he’s hanging by both arms off the ledge.
For a moment, the air in my lungs rushes out. He dangles a hundred or more feet above the ground, above certain death, if he falls.
If he falls, I selfishly think, I am dead up here. I realize, maybe for the first time in my life, that my survival is intimately tied to the survival of another human being. Without him, I will die. With him, there is hope. I can’t imagine he feels the same way about me, but then again, without me he’d be frozen in a chair on the side of a cliff.
He pulls himself up, grunting-then shouting-with the effort. He rolls over the ledge and disappears from sight. A few moments later, his buggy mirror sunglasses peep down and he calls, “All right. Don’t think about it. It’s all instinct.”
“I’m not good at instinct. I’m a big over-planner and a great second-guesser,” I shout. A little joke, in a difficult moment, isn’t so bad, I guess.
He holds up his thumb and grins. “Look who’s full of jokes in the panicky moments now.”
Then he shouts, “I’m gonna pull you up. Just keep climbing even if you slip.”
It’s a lot easier to go on instinct when you know whatever you screw up shouldn’t matter. Just keep climbing, Jane. That’s the key.
I address the wall and push the toe of my boot into the crack of the wall, just where he had. I look up one more time for reassurance. Paul isn’t where I can see him, but I know he is there, somewhere, lodged against a rock for leverage. I feel a burst of joy inside. Paul is lodged behind a rock; he will not let go; he will pull me up if I fall; no matter what I do, we will find a way. We will get out of here.
I spring up and slot my fingers into the rock with my left hand. I see his path clearly now, and my right hand follows quickly to a knob. My legs feel powerful, springing from one crack to the next, and my hands feel like iron, holding the rock with a grip I did not know I possessed.
I reach the midpoint, where Paul had stopped, and halt my climb. I feel the rope tug on me and I use my left hand to tug back. It goes slack. I stand still and catch my breath, careful not to look down.
“You’re amazing, Jane!”
I look up and those bug eyes are watching me.
I look up at the wall. The path that Paul took across the eight remaining feet isn’t one I can replicate. His arms are long, and his ability to leap and his upper-body strength far surpass mine. I see a crack in the wall that extends from where I am, zigzagging like a lightning bolt all the way to the top. The problem is that it is another good eight feet to my right.
“If I can get to there”-I shout and point-“can you hold me?”
“Yes. Wait until I give the rope three tugs. That means I’m ready.”
I hold up my thumb and wait.
Everything is silent, except for the wind. It sings, a little deathly hollow sound that bounces from rock to rock. It is so lonely, roaming through this valley. I know why that lonely song found its way into my heart before, why the very beauty of loneliness itself could become a friend. It is seductive and sweet, maybe sweeter than anything two people can share. I can still hear the call of it, but it has no pull on me now. I’m just looking at the task in front of me, which is moving eight feet to the left without killing myself.