The Art of Holding On and Letting Go (11 page)

“What the hell does that mean?” Kaitlyn asked.

“She was at the climbing gym yesterday,” Nick said.

Kaitlyn and I pierced him with an accusing look.

“What? My brother works there. He came home talking about her. I didn't write the frickin' note, already.”

His brother. Tattooed, pierced-tongue guy. Now I saw the resemblance.

“So your brother has been writing the notes?”

“He already graduated.”

“And you've been playing mailman?”

Nick opened his mouth in indignation, then looked at Kaitlyn.

She was grinning. “You deserve it.”

“What did I do? What did I do?”

“He's so clueless.” Kaitlyn smiled at me and patted Nick on the shoulder. “Poor guy. I think he's too simple to have pulled this off.”

The first bell rang, and we scattered for our classes, leaving Nick shaking his head.

The conversation resumed at lunch. The rest of the group sat the slightest distance away from the three of us. It was barely noticeable at first glance. It was like Kaitlyn and Nick were fringe goths. And I don't know what I was. Too blond and au naturel to be part of the goth crowd, that's for sure.

“So who is it then? Who else climbs there?” Kaitlyn asked Nick.

“Hardly anyone from school, not regularly anyway. There're these two freshmen that I see there a lot, but I can't imagine they'd have the balls to keep sending the notes.”

“Why not? It doesn't take guts to send anonymous notes. They're wimps. We need to confront them.”

I listened to their conversation ping-pong back and forth. Kaitlyn and Nick sat with their heads tipped toward each other, and I wondered if they liked each other as more than friends. I thought about Becky and Zach and my other teammates, and how they were all back home and training like usual. Once, I had asked Becky how she got into climbing in the first place. She said it was something different from all the preppy sports like tennis and field hockey at her private school. Her mom was devoted to Becky's training and competition schedule, and her dad loved to brag to his colleagues about her. Climbing made her interesting. Especially to guys.

I had never thought about climbing that way. It was just who I was. The wilderness, the mountains, the rocks, they were part of me. Part of my family.

I glanced down the aisle to Triple T's table. There was yet another girl sitting next to him. Whatever.

Back at my locker, the llama greeted me from the Ecuador postcard. I rested my forehead against it, the metal door hard and cool against my skin. Whoever was dropping the notes in my locker, they didn't know me. They probably thought I was like Becky, climbing for sport, a way to get attention, not as a way of life. I wanted to know who was writing the notes, but solving that mystery wasn't going to get me back home.

Kaitlyn asked me to come home with her after school. We had a physics test the next day, and she was stumped.

“You know, I can drive you home anytime, even pick you up in the mornings so you don't have to walk,” she said as we pulled out of the student parking lot.

“Thanks, that'd be great. Sometimes I kind of like walking, though, fresh air and all.”

“Yeah, well, pretty soon it's going to be kick-you-in-the-butt freezing air.”

I grinned. “It gets cold in California too, up in the mountains.”

“Just you wait.”

Kaitlyn's station wagon was ancient and absolutely hideous, with fake wood paneling on the side and everything.

“Thanks to my brother, I inherited this boat. Parallel parking's a bitch, but other than that I love it,” Kaitlyn said. “It's my beast. I feel totally safe in it, even driving next to monster SUVs.”

I sank into the seat and lowered the window. Speaking of monster SUVs (and flipping them off), there had been no sign of Nick after school. “Did Nick drive himself today?”

“Oh no, Nick doesn't drive unless he's desperate. He's got a swim meet, and someone will give him a ride home afterwards. He's saving up to buy an electric car. His parents are loaded and own at least four cars, maybe five, of which Nick has his pick, but he refuses.”

I breathed deeply out the window, but inhaled a lungful of exhaust. “Your beast must be quite a gas guzzler. Nick doesn't mind?”

Kaitlyn shrugged. “He rides his bike a lot. Besides, can't complain about a free ride.”

Kaitlyn's parents were both at work. The silence of the house settled around me like a quilt. No TV blaring, no grandma sniping and griping, no knickknack clutter. Just neat, orderly quietness. It seemed like the whole house was cream colored, soft like a pillow.

“Welcome to the cream-puff house, utterly lacking of the tiniest smidgen of character.”

“No, I like it. It's … it's warm and soft and …” I almost said “fuzzy.”

“Ha. You don't have to live here.”

I called my grandparents before they would start to worry. Grandma sounded downright gleeful. Oh goody, Cara made a friend!

Kaitlyn grabbed two Cokes and a bag of Doritos from the kitchen, and I followed her into her room. The walls were painted midnight blue, almost black but not quite. It was like walking into a cave after the cream puff rest of the house.

“It used to be cream, too. But I finally snapped last spring and painted the walls. They wouldn't let me get new carpet though. So, I just pretend that I'm floating on a cloud up in the nighttime sky, or walking across desert sand.”

“I used to pretend our cabin in California was a tree house. I'd look out the window at the birds and imagine I was sitting way up high on a tree limb overlooking the mountains.”

“Ha. Like that butterfly chick camping out in a giant redwood,” Kaitlyn said.

I laughed and licked the tasty orange dust off my fingers. “These are amazing!”

“What? You've never had Doritos? You really have been living in the middle of nowhere.”

“I guess. My mom's a major health nut, so we just never had this stuff around.”

“You've been missing out.”

Kaitlyn picked up a pile of black clothes from her bed, opened her closet door, and dumped them in a laundry basket. The front of her closet was full of every shade of black and gray, but shoved in the back corner, colors peeked out, red, pink, turquoise blue. How long had they been back there?

I could have stayed in Kaitlyn's room all afternoon. Her bookcase was full of fantasy and mystery novels, even old Agatha Christies like I'd been reading.

“They were my grandma's,” she said. “She died a few years ago, and all the grandkids got to pick something from her house to remember her by.”

Kaitlyn picked up one of the books,
Three Blind Mice
. “She used this huge magnifying glass to read. I would visit sometimes and read to her, so she could rest her eyes.”

“I have that one too. My mom has a whole collection.”

Kaitlyn returned the book to her shelf. “I haven't read one in years, they seem so old-fashioned now, but I remember Grandma and I would take bets on who was the murderer. She liked the Miss Marple stories best. Supposedly Agatha Christie got tired of Hercule Poirot and called him an insufferable, egocentric creep.”

I laughed, and Kaitlyn continued, “I know, isn't that great? So she created Miss Marple based on her grandmother. My grandma told me that story over and over again. She would crochet blankets the whole time I read to her. She made this one for me.”

I smoothed my hand over the purple afghan on her bed. “It's so soft.”

“She was teaching me how to crochet right before she died. I made half of a red scarf but never finished it.”

I tried not to look at Kaitlyn's misshapen hand, but I couldn't help it. Most of her clothes seemed to have long, floppy sleeves, and she kept her hand tucked away most of the time. She held the can of Coke and grabbed a book with that hand just fine, as if she wasn't missing three and a half fingers. Still, crocheting was pretty impressive.

“Do you still have the scarf? You could keep working on it.”

She shrugged. “I know, but it's not the same without my grandma.”

I scanned a row of her CDs, some older bands and some I hadn't heard of, probably indie groups. I loved the Van Gogh poster over her bed and the purple lava lamp. Her room was just so her. A comfortable cave.

“I work at a music store. They have a ton of records for collectors, but I haven't really gotten into those. They cost a lot, even with my discount. Most of the CDs are my parents' and my brother's. He gave them to me when he left for college.”

“That's cool.”

“Not really.” She half-laughed. “Who listens to CDs anymore? He just needed somewhere to dump them. Actually, I kind of like listening to them, though, and opening up the cases, looking at the pictures, reading the lyrics …”

“You're so lucky. Wait until you see my room. It's my mom's from when she was my age. Hardly anything's been changed.”

Kaitlyn's face softened as she looked at me.

“It doesn't even feel like my mom's room because now she's different from how she must have been then. It just feels like another part of my grandparents' house.”

“Would they let you decorate it? I could help.”

“I don't know. I guess I just haven't felt like I was really staying here. Like I'll be going back home to California, so why bother, you know?”

Kaitlyn had questions in her eyes. She looked like she wanted to ask me about my parents and was trying to judge whether or not I wanted to open up. I hadn't shared anything about my family so far. For all practical purposes, they'd abandoned me. How was I supposed to explain that?

“Well, we should probably take a look at our physics stuff,” I said. “But take these things away from me,” I added, handing her the Doritos. “I can't control myself.”

Later, Kaitlyn dropped me off in front of my grandparents' house.

“Don't forget Miss Marple,” she said, handing over two Agatha Christie mysteries for me to borrow.

“Are you sure? They were your grandma's,” I said.

She nodded and smiled. “I trust you.”

I waved good-bye and sat down on the front steps next to the ceramic goose. I wasn't ready to go inside.

I flipped through the mystery novels. I had been racing through my mom's books every evening. There was something so completely satisfying about all the clues coming together to solve the crime. Everything happened for a reason. Everything made sense. At least for a little while. Then the clutter started accumulating in my brain again, and I reached for another mystery. I was becoming an addict.

Were my parents addicted to mountaineering? I had always thought of climbing as a way of life for my family, but maybe somewhere along the line, it turned into an obsession, especially for Dad and Uncle Max. And now Dad had gone all Ahab.

Until now, there had been a numb, empty void when I thought of Uncle Max, like I had never really left the fog of that last morning in Ecuador. I could even trick myself into thinking he was simply traveling with my parents, away on an expedition. How could he be suddenly gone, just wiped off the face of the earth? The void was beginning to fill up, with memories and sadness. I could see more clearly, like a camera coming into focus.

Dad had always been a hard-core climber, a true adventurer, but Mom had balanced him out to some degree. People always gave her a hard time. Like, how can you pursue such a risky sport when you have a kid? What if something happens to you? It's bad enough your husband is climbing mountains, at least you should stay home for your daughter. And a lot of the time, Mom gave in to the pressure. She stayed with me while Dad and Uncle Max tackled the most challenging mountains, the riskiest climbs.

Sometimes we traveled with them but stayed close to base camp. Other times, we waited at home. Those were the times Mom said she wished we could live a normal, white-picket-fence kind of life. But then, she'd go home to Detroit for a visit, and suburbia would propel her straight back to the mountains. No matter what anyone said, she'd be ready to climb right alongside Dad. Just like Everest, and Denali, and Chimborazo. And wherever they were headed now.

And I knew what I had to do. I had to find a way to get back home to the mountains. I couldn't stay in Detroit anymore than my mom had been able to stay here. Just like Mom, just like Dad, I needed the wilderness to feel alive. I needed the wilderness to know who I was.

“Cara? It's eleven o'clock. Are you feeling all right?”

“Mmmhmm,” I mumbled. I was stuck in that half-asleep, half-awake realm where I could hear everything going on around me but couldn't seem to open my eyes.

“Maybe you should get up now. Grandpa and I have something to show you. And you have mail.”

I slowly opened one eyelid. Grandma waved a postcard in the air and set it on my nightstand.

She shut the door, and I curled up on my side. No use. I was awake now. I rolled onto my back, stretched my arms and legs as far as they would go, and rubbed my sleepy eyes. Sunlight spilled through the slats of the window blinds and peeked around the edges.