Chapter Nine #2
“I know,” I said, and meant it more than he probably heard in the two words, because I have spent my whole adult life doing exactly that.
“There’s one more thing I need from you.
The work-for-hire letter — the one you made me get notarized, four years ago, on the footage.
Do you still have your copy of it, or the attorney’s contact information?
The studio’s legal team is starting to look at chain of title on the digital release, and I want a second copy on hand that doesn’t live only in my own filing cabinet, in case anyone ever tries to say the paperwork’s incomplete. ”
Wade’s face did something then I hadn’t expected — not surprise, exactly, but the particular stillness of a man arriving at a memory he’d been carrying a long time and had wondered, more than once, whether he’d ever get to explain out loud.
“I’ve got the copy,” he said. “Safe deposit box at the bank in town, same box your mother’s ring is in.
I’ll write down the box number for you before you leave today.
” He was quiet a moment, working something loose.
“You want to know why I made you get that done. Really made you, not just suggested it.”
“I’ve wondered.”
“Man I climbed with, before your mother, before any of this — Del Sturgis. Best partner I ever had on a rope, better than me at the technical work, worse at the business of it, which is the half that matters when you’re broke and twenty-six and a magazine offers to sponsor an expedition in exchange for full rights to every photograph anyone takes on it.
” He turned the loose card over again, slower this time.
“Del fell on the descent. I was two hundred feet below him when it happened, couldn’t do a single thing but watch.
The magazine ran six pages on it — his death, my grief, the whole story, and made real money doing it, because that’s what a dead climber sells.
His widow asked for copies of the photographs, for the funeral, for their kids to have something.
The magazine’s lawyer told her, in writing, that the contract Del signed put every frame in their name, and that she was welcome to purchase reprints at the standard commercial rate.
” He set the card down for good this time.
“She never got a single photograph of her own husband on that mountain without paying for it. I watched that happen, Hollis, at twenty-six, and I promised myself that if I ever trained another person who was going to put their life on a mountain in front of somebody else’s camera, they’d own their own name in the record, whatever else the world took from them.
You were the first person I ever got to keep that promise for.
That’s why I made you sign it, and made you notarize it, and made you keep a copy somewhere you’d never lose it.
It wasn’t caution, Hollis. It was the one thing I could still do right, twenty years too late for Del. ”
I sat with that a moment before I answered, turning it over next to the only other mountain death I carried around with me, Desmond Calder’s, and understood the two of them weren’t actually the same shape at all, whatever the surface of it suggested.
Del’s had been witnessed, by my own father, in real time, and then stolen back from his widow afterward by a contract and a lawyer’s letter — a theft with paperwork, a company deciding a dead man’s photographs were worth more than his family’s grief.
Desmond’s had happened alone, unrecorded, on a route nobody had a map of, the theft built into the dying itself rather than added on after.
My father had spent twenty years answering his grief with a notarized letter, something concrete he could hand a person to keep it from happening again.
I didn’t yet know what Rhys’s answer to his own would turn out to be, or whether he even understood, yet, that he owed his father one.
“Was that why you never charged the town full rate,” I asked, “even after Loralei’s franchise started undercutting you? Simone said you kept the discount going for the regulars long past when the math made sense.”
“Partly,” Wade said. “Del’s widow — Marion, her name was — she moved back to her people two states over inside a year, couldn’t afford to stay, couldn’t afford much of anything on a share of nothing.
I used to think about what it would’ve cost that magazine to just let her have the photographs.
Nothing. It would’ve cost them nothing, and they charged her the standard commercial rate anyway, because the contract let them and nobody in that room was going to be the one to say it shouldn’t.
I decided a long time ago I wasn’t going to run a business where the fine print was the only thing standing between a person and what they’d earned, even if it meant I never made the kind of money Loralei’s franchise makes.
Some men would call that bad business. I call it the only kind I ever wanted my name on. ”
I didn’t have anything ready to say to that, so I sat with it instead, the way he’d taught me to sit with a bad weather report before deciding whether to trust it, and reached across the small table and took his hand, dry and thinner than I remembered it, the same hand that had corrected a hundred beginners’ grips on a rope they didn’t yet trust.
“I never knew that,” I said.
“I don’t tell it much,” he said. “Doesn’t come up, mostly, in a checkers game.” A small, dry sound that might have been a laugh. “Your turn, if you want a game before you go. I believe I still owe you a rematch from Christmas.”
We played one game, unhurried, the light going fully gray outside the sunroom’s east-facing window, his moves slower than they’d have been even a year ago but no less certain once he made them, the same deliberate weighing I remembered from a man deciding whether a rope was worth trusting to a beginner’s grip.
He beat me the way he’d beaten me since I was six, cleanly, without mercy, and told me, setting his king in its final position, “You’ve got your mother’s patience and my stubbornness, which your husband ought to be a good deal more afraid of than he currently seems to be.
” I laughed, because it was true, and gathered the bank box number off the back of a Cedar Ridge notepad sheet before I left, and drove the six blocks into town rather than straight home, because a fact like that one doesn’t sit well in a pocket overnight.
? ? ?
The bank on Main Street closed at five, and I made it in at 4:41 with the notepad sheet still folded in my hand, and a teller I half-recognized from twenty years of Sunday errands walked me back to the vault without asking more than my name and Wade’s, because apparently a Marsh showing up asking about a Marsh box was not, in this town, a thing that required much explanation.
The box itself was smaller than I remembered such things being in movies — a steel drawer, a key Wade had left with the branch manager years earlier against exactly this kind of need — and I opened it standing at a narrow counter with a privacy curtain half-drawn, and found, under my mother’s engagement ring in its cracked velvet box and a manila envelope of the deed to the property itself, a single sheet, notarized, four years old, my own signature at the bottom in handwriting I remembered being annoyed at having to produce twice because the first attempt smudged.
Work for Hire and Rights of Ownership — Hollis Marsh Calder, the header read, plain, unglamorous, exactly as boring as Wade had wanted it to be, exactly as boring as it had needed to stay until the day it stopped being boring at all.
I photographed both sides on my phone, three times each, the way I’d once photograph a permit before trusting it to a single copy in a single bag, and left the original where it had sat undisturbed for four years, because some things are safer left exactly where they’ve already survived.
Day Fourteen. One folder answered. One older story explained, twenty years late, that made sense of every notarized page I’d ever signed without asking why.
And in my own phone now, alongside the original still resting in a steel drawer on Main Street, a second copy of the one piece of paper that had never once needed to be more than boring — until now.