Chapter Seven
“We found your listing still up from a couple years back,” he said. “Figured it was worth a shot. My uncle did a week here in the nineties, said it was the real thing, not a rock wall in a parking lot.” He asked, apologetically, whether we were even still operating.
I told him we were, which was true in the same provisional way most of what I’d said to anyone in this town for nine days had been true — a fact I intended to make solid before Friday rather than a fact that was solid yet.
I got his group size, his employees’ rough fitness levels, his budget, and told him I’d call back within two hours with a confirmed yes or no.
Then I hung up and stood in the gear shed with my legal pad and did the thing I do instead of panicking, which is make a list of everything that had to be true by Friday for the yes to be honest.
“What’s the abnormal channel,” I said, because there is always one, in permitting the same way there’s always one in expedition logistics — an emergency provision, a variance, a person with discretion who’s allowed to use it.
There was a pause on the line that told me Carla was deciding how much rope to give me.
“There’s a short-form provisional operating authorization,” she said finally.
“Covers a single event, valid ninety days, doesn’t require the full renewal packet — insurance and a certified guide, same day, and a district supervisor sign-off, which I can walk down the hall for if you can get me the first two pieces by end of day tomorrow. ”
“I can get you a bindable insurance certificate by four this afternoon,” I said, already doing the math on which carrier could turn one around that fast, having built exactly that kind of relationship with an underwriter a decade earlier for exactly this kind of situation, on a different continent, under worse time pressure. “The guide, I need to make a call on.”
I made the call standing in the gravel lot, because I knew the number, because I’d been turning her name over since my second night back without letting myself dial it — Frankie Suarez, who I hadn’t spoken to in six years and had grown up with on this exact property the way I’d grown up with the rope wall and the trestle table, a fact of the landscape rather than a person I’d had to choose.
Wade had taken her on at sixteen, the year after her own father died in a logging accident two counties over, paid her under the table until she was old enough to be paid over it, and taught her to lead a rope the same unhurried, exacting way he’d taught Rhys a few years later, except Frankie had stayed with it — state-certified rock and alpine guide, a resume that would make any outfitter’s insurance carrier happy, currently, as far as I’d heard from Simone, picking up shifts for Loralei Finch’s franchise because it was the only guiding work left within an hour’s drive.
I remembered her at fifteen, the winter her father died, standing at this same rope wall long after the other kids Wade taught had gone home, coiling and recoiling the same forty-meter line until her hands stopped shaking, and I remembered Wade letting her do it, night after night, without once telling her to go home, because he’d understood, better than I had at that age, that some grief needs a rope in its hands more than it needs a conversation.
She picked up on the third ring. “Hollis Marsh,” she said, and I heard, in those two words, something I hadn’t braced for — not Gary Petrov’s careful, story-laden tone, not Renata’s open curiosity, but the flat, unimpressed affection of someone who’d known me since we were both fourteen and had no interest in reintroducing herself to a version of me the internet had recently gotten opinions about. “Took you long enough.”
“I need a certified lead guide on file with the district by tomorrow afternoon,” I said, “for a provisional permit, for a group of eight starting Friday, and I need someone who can actually run a low ropes and alpine skills day without me having to relearn how to belay a client I haven’t belayed since I was twenty-three. ”
There was a silence on the line I recognized, because I’d made the same kind of silence myself a hundred times — the sound of someone doing their own fast arithmetic. “Loralei’s got me on the schedule Friday,” Frankie said. “Half-day.”
“I’ll pay you for the whole thing, day rate plus a bonus if the group rebooks.”
“That’s not the number I was doing math on.
” Another pause, shorter. “Your dad taught me to tie in before I could reliably tie my own shoes. I’ve been driving past that gravel spur for three years watching the sign lean a little further every season, telling myself somebody else’s problem.
You want to know the actual math I was doing?
Whether I’m willing to burn a bridge with the only other outfit in this county for a lodge that might fold again in six months and take my Friday with it. ”
“It might,” I said, because I have never once found it useful to sell someone a forecast I didn’t believe.
“I can show you the real numbers if you want them instead of my word. But I can also tell you I’ve priced worse odds than this and come out the other side, and I’m not asking you to bet on hope.
I’m asking you to bet on me running the logistics the way my father taught both of us to run them. ”
The silence this time had a different texture.
“Text me the group roster and their fitness levels,” Frankie said.
“I’ll want to walk the rope wall myself before Friday, and if that shed roof drops a client on their head I’m suing you personally, not the lodge, because I happen to know the lodge doesn’t have the money.
” Then, before I could answer that: “It’s good you’re back, Hollis.
For what it’s worth. This place going quiet did something to this town nobody talks about. ”
I got Carla her insurance certificate by 3:40 that afternoon, after four calls to an underwriter I’d worked with on three expeditions and one uncomfortable conversation about premium that I resolved by putting the first payment on my own card rather than waiting on a business account that currently held four hundred and eleven dollars.
I got Frankie’s certification paperwork emailed to the district by six.
Carla called at 5:50 the next evening to say the provisional authorization was signed, ninety days, one event on file, and that she expected — her word, not mine — that I’d be back in her office before it expired asking about the full renewal.
“I expect you’re right,” I told her, and meant it as a promise before I’d fully decided to make one.
? ? ?
Friday morning brought eight employees of Highline Engineering off two vans in the lodge’s gravel lot at 8 a.m., in gear that ranged from appropriately broken-in to a pair of sneakers I quietly steered toward the boot rental bin before anyone could turn an ankle on the scree slope behind the bunkhouse, and I ran the day the way I’ve run every expedition briefing of my adult life — gear check, weather window, group split by fitness and comfort level, a clear verbal safety brief I gave from memory because I’d been giving some version of it since I was twenty-two and it turns out the body doesn’t forget a script it’s said that many times.
Frankie ran the technical side, low ropes in the morning, a scramble up the training slope behind the bunkhouse in the afternoon, her voice carrying across the property in the same unhurried, exacting register Wade’s used to carry, correcting a grip here, praising a client’s first clean rappel there, and I watched Marcus Webb, watching his own employees, do the math I recognized from a decade of clients doing it in real time — the slow understanding that the people running this operation actually knew what they were doing, that the day wasn’t going to be a photo opportunity dressed up as adventure but the real thing, competently delivered.
Renata sent her nephew up with a cooler of iced coffee around eleven, unasked, a note taped to the lid that said heard you had a group, figured they’d want caffeine, on the house, tell me how it goes — the kind of small-town logistics I’d forgotten a person could simply receive rather than have to build herself.
I watched Wyatt, who’d come along at his own insistence, spend the whole morning coiling rope the way Frankie showed him once, with total, absorbed concentration, and heard him tell one of the Highline employees, unprompted, with the flat authority of a boy repeating a fact he’d fully absorbed, “My mom shot footage on four expeditions. She’s the one who actually knows if the weather’s going to hold.
” Nobody had told him to say that. I noted it, filed it, and did not let myself examine too closely, in front of eight strangers, what it cost me to hear my own son say out loud what my own husband had never once said onstage.