Chapter 7 #2
She put her hands on the first hold and started climbing. She was fine for the first ten feet, actually better than fine. It was as if her body remembered what her brain had forgotten.
How to stretch her arms and reach for things. The satisfaction of pulling yourself up. The physics of just regular weight and leverage.
She had been a gymnast in high school, which was now a lifetime ago. Somewhere deep in her muscles, the memory must have still lived. Dusty but functional, like a book she pulled from a shelf after thirty years. She could do this!
At about fifteen feet, she made the terrible mistake of looking down. The gym floor was right below her, further than it should have been.
Kai was a small figure holding a rope, while Harper and Nina looked up at her with tilted heads and mouths slightly open.
Now the wall seemed less like a fun challenge and more like a vertical surface that was actively trying to take her life. Yep, this was it. The news would say a poor fifty-year-old woman lost her life falling fifteen feet onto a padded floor because she panicked. What an embarrassing way to go out.
And when they asked her husband for a comment, he wouldn’t have even realized she was gone until at least dinner time.
Claire’s hands locked on the holds.
Her feet locked onto the footholds, and then her entire body said, “Nope.”
She froze.
And not in the dramatic kind of freezing that happens in a movie where the character gasps, and the music swells. This was the quiet kind of freezing where all of your muscles suddenly stop cooperating. Your brain says move, and your body just says,” That’s going to be a no from me.”
Claire hung on the wall fifteen feet up and couldn’t go up or down or do anything but grip the hold so tightly that her knuckles went white. Her forearms started to burn. She could hear her heartbeat in her ears.
“Claire,” Kai called up. “You okay?”
No, she was not okay. She was hanging on to this fake rock in a converted warehouse in Charleston, having what she would suspect was either a panic attack or a profound spiritual experience, and she couldn’t tell the difference.
“Just take a breath,” Nina said from below. Her voice was calm and steady. She knew this was the same voice she used with Lucia when there were thunderstorms or she had had a bad dream as a kid. “You don’t have to go up. You don’t have to come down. Just breathe.”
Claire breathed. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t been breathing the whole time, but for some reason she’d needed Nina’s reminder.
The wall was cool under her hands. She could smell the chalk on her fingers. She could hear the gym around her, other climbers, the squeak of their shoes on the holds, someone laughing on the bouldering wall in the next section.
All normal and safe sounds. She was not going to die. She was just going to hang on this wall and breathe and figure out what to do next.
“Claire?” Harper called up. Her voice was quite a bit different from Nina’s.
More direct. It was the voice she always used in meetings when someone needed to make a decision and seemed to be stalling.
“Listen, you have two choices. You can come down, and that’s fine.
We’ll be proud of you for just trying. Or you can look at that next hold.
Just the next one. Don’t look up at the top.
Don’t look at the ground. Just look at the next hold and decide if you can reach it. ”
Claire looked at the next hold. It was blue, maybe two feet above her right hand. It was shaped like a jug, which Kai had said was the easiest kind, and it was right there within her reach.
So she reached for it.
Her hand closed around the blue hold. She pulled hard, and her feet found the next foothold. And then she was moving again. It was definitely neither graceful nor fast. She probably looked like a monkey on espresso trying to get to that next hold.
Just one hold at a time, the way that she had seen Nina climb, the way Nina did everything now. Just one grip to the next. She didn’t look down again. She didn’t look up either.
She just looked at the next hold, then the next, then the next. The wall started to pass under her hands and feet.
The sounds of the gym faded, and there was nothing but her, the rock, the quiet, and the stubborn act of going up, even as everything in her wanted to let go.
Suddenly, her hand hit the top.
Claire Morrison, fifty years old, a third-grade teacher, napkin chooser, onion chopper, and wife of a man who watched the ’95 Braves on repeat, touched the top of that climbing wall inside a converted warehouse in Charleston and burst into tears.
These weren’t sad tears, not the kind that she swallowed for most of the last few years. These were the other kind, the kind that came from being proud of yourself when you haven’t felt like feeling in years. Maybe decades.
She hung at the top of the wall and cried.
Below her, she could hear Nina clapping and Harper whistling.
“Get down here so I can hug you!” Nina shouted.
Claire rappelled down.
It was also shaky and graceless, and she did bump into the wall twice, almost knocking herself out. But when her feet hit the ground, Nina grabbed her and held on.
Then Harper grabbed both of them.
And the three of them stood in the climbing gym, chalky, sweating, crying, and laughing.
Kai just stood off to the side, looking pleased with himself and a little bit confused, which was probably his default expression when dealing with fifty-year-old women who were having emotional breakdowns and breakthroughs right in front of his beginner wall.
Ah, to be twenty-five again. He had no idea what life would bring him.
The three women sat on a bench in the late-afternoon sun, drinking water and watching King Street do what it did on Saturdays.
It was filled with tourists with shopping bags, couples holding hands, and horse-drawn carriages clip-clopping past, as if Charleston were still in the nineteenth century.
Claire’s arms were shaking. Her hands were raw from chalk. She felt like she’d been wrung out and then hung up to dry.
The wall had shattered everything she was holding inside, leaving her feeling lighter than she had in months. Now, she sat on the bench with her two best friends, feeling unexpectedly free despite having spent the last twenty minutes crying.
“Well, that was month four,” Harper said, smiling. “We’re a third of the way through.”
“Yeah, but one third of the way to what?” Nina asked.
“I don’t know, to whatever we’re becoming, I guess.”
It was an un-Harper thing to say, almost philosophical. The kind of statement she’d normally just deflect with sarcasm.
The horse-drawn carriage turned the corner and disappeared.
“I froze on that wall,” Claire said.
“Yep, you did,” Nina agreed.
“And I kept going.”
“You did that too.”
“When’s the last time you did that? Kept going when something was hard instead of just trying to make it look easy?” Nina asked.
Nobody answered because the answer was it had been a long time, and everybody knew it.
Claire’s phone buzzed.
Greg.
She looked at the screen for a moment, his name staring up at her. She thought about the kitchen, the onions, and your little club, and I just miss you.
She thought about the way he’d walked back to the den, like the conversation was over when it really hadn’t even begun.
She put her phone in her pocket without answering. Harper noticed it. Nina noticed it too, but neither said anything.
“So who picks month five?” Claire asked, because changing the subject was another skill that she had perfected over the years.
“Harper,” Nina said. “We’re back on track now.” Truth be told, they weren’t holding tight to the rotation. They would do what was right for each of them to get what they needed from the whole experience.
Harper smiled. She had already decided something. “I have an idea.”
“Oh gosh, that smile terrifies me,” Claire said.
“Good, because that’s rule number one. We’re supposed to be a little terrified.”
They sat on the bench for a while longer, the three of them, as Charleston moved around them in its beautiful, unhurried way.
Claire’s phone buzzed again in her pocket. She let it ring.
On the drive home, alone in her car on the road to Beaufort, she looked at the marsh off in the distance and pulled into a gas station parking lot to open her sketchbook.
The one she’d taken off the shelf after karaoke night and the one that she’d been carrying in her bag for weeks without telling anyone, like her own little secret, just a small rebellion tucked between her wallet and car keys.
She drew the climbing wall, not from the bottom looking up the way that it had terrified her at first, but from the top looking down.
It was a perspective that she’d earned.
It wasn’t good. The proportions were way off, and the shading looked clumsy.
It looked like something a talented child might produce, but not like a woman who had once spent entire nights in the College of Charleston art building because she just couldn’t stop painting.
But she didn’t care.
She tore out the page, put it on the passenger seat, and drove home with the windows down and the radio blaring, the marsh air filling her car.
She didn’t check her phone until she pulled into the driveway. Greg had texted twice.
When will you be home?
Then an hour later:
Picking up pizza. What do you want on yours?
She texted back:
I don’t care.
Then she folded the drawing, put it in the glove box, and it stayed there hidden and safe, a small piece of who she was becoming tucked inside the car that drove her back and forth between the life she had and the life she was starting to want.