Chapter Nineteen
Deana called Rhys on the morning of Day Thirty-Five, a little after nine, and he took it in the gravel lot with his back to the lodge, which told me before he’d said a word to me afterward that he’d wanted the distance.
The board had approved the guarantee as written, he told me when he came back in — four-point-one million dollars, sole-author language intact, contingent on final signature within ten business days — because that had been the only finished draft sitting in front of them at two o’clock, and a board doesn’t vote on a draft that doesn’t exist yet no matter how many hard conversations happened the night before on somebody’s porch.
He flew back to Los Angeles that afternoon.
He didn’t ask me to come with him, and I didn’t offer, and I understood that for what it was: neither of us had the sentence yet that would have made the offer honest.
I spent the weekend the way I’d spent most weekends since Day One, which is to say I spent it working, because work is the one register I have never once lost access to no matter what else is failing around it.
Frankie ran a two-day intro group Saturday, six clients from a college outing club with more enthusiasm than technique, and I ran logistics from the porch with my laptop open to Simone’s spreadsheet in one tab and the rough cut in another, and told myself I wasn’t waiting for anything, which was a lie precise enough that I noticed myself telling it and let it stand anyway.
Wyatt asked, Saturday night, whether Dad was coming back this time or just calling, and I told him I didn’t know yet, which was true, and watched him accept it the careful way he’d started accepting most things lately, filing it rather than fighting it.
Rhys’s car came up the gravel spur Sunday morning without warning, which had stopped, sometime in the last six weeks, meaning what it used to mean.
Frankie had already taken both kids up to the training slope for a hike she’d promised Wyatt since the intro group booked out the rope wall for the weekend, and the lodge had gone quiet the unbothered way it does on a morning with no group on the calendar, and I was on the porch with coffee and Simone’s numbers when The tires on gravel, before I even saw his face through the windshield, told me whatever this was hadn’t waited for an invitation.
He got out slowly, in a jacket I hadn’t seen before, and stood by the car a moment longer than the walk to the porch required, the way a person stands at the base of a route deciding whether the weather’s actually going to hold or whether they’ve just talked themselves into believing it will because they’re tired of waiting at the bottom.
“I need to tell you something,” he said, before he’d made it up the steps, “and I need you to let me get through the whole thing without stopping me, because if you stop me I don’t know that I’ll find my way back into it. ”
“Okay,” I said, and set the coffee down, and didn’t reach for anything to say next, because I had learned, across a month of porches, exactly how much silence a sentence like that one needed around it.
? ? ?
We walked down to the training slope instead of sitting on the porch, because he asked to, and I understood, following him down the path Frankie had walked with the kids an hour earlier, that he wanted the ground under his feet to be the ground where this had all started — the same slope where a broke twenty-five-year-old had built a lean-to out of deadfall on my father’s orders and failed three times before it held through a storm.
He stopped at the flat rock outcrop near the tree line, the one with a clear line down to the lodge roof and the range beyond it, and stood facing the mountains rather than me, hands in his jacket pockets, and I sat down on the rock and waited, and understood, watching the set of his shoulders, that this was going to be the actual thing rather than another rehearsal of it.
“You asked me once,” he said, “twenty years ago, on the porch, whether I’d rather be the version of my dad that proved something nobody saw, or the version that’s still here to argue about which one was true.
I told you I didn’t know. I told you to ask me again when I wasn’t scared, and you never asked me again, and I’ve thought about that more than you probably know, because I understood, somewhere in the years since, that you weren’t being kind by not asking.
You were being patient with a man who’d made it clear he wasn’t going to give you an honest answer, and there’s a difference, and I think I’ve spent twenty years grateful for the wrong one. ”
He was quiet a moment, working something loose the way I’d watched Wade do it, a man reaching for a memory he’d kept sealed a long time and finding the seal harder to break than he’d expected.
“I’ve told you the shape of it before. My dad, alone on Anseth, no permit, no sponsor, fourteen days before anyone found him.
I’ve told that story so many times it stopped feeling like something that happened to me and started feeling like something I performed — a fact I could hand people that made me sound like a man with a wound instead of a man still bleeding from one.
I never told you the part that actually happened the morning he left.
I’ve never told anyone that part. Not my mother. Not a single film.”
“Tell me now,” I said, quiet, because I understood he needed the door held open rather than pushed.
“He came to say goodbye before dawn,” Rhys said, “and I was seventeen and furious at him in the specific way a kid gets furious when he’s actually scared and doesn’t have the words for scared yet, so he uses the words for angry instead, because angry feels like it has more floor under it.
We’d had money problems all that winter — not new ones, the same ones we always had, but worse that year, and I’d asked him, a few weeks before, not to go.
Not be careful. Not check the weather. I asked him to just not go, to take a season off, get a real job like the fathers of every kid I went to school with, and he’d said he would think about it, and I’d believed him, because I was seventeen and I wanted to believe him.
And then he came into my room at five in the morning with his pack already loaded, and I understood he’d never actually been thinking about it at all, he’d just been letting me believe it long enough to stop fighting him on it.
” His voice had gone flatter than I’d ever heard it, stripped entirely of the measured cadence he narrated everything else in — the register underneath all the others, the one he’d built every performance on top of specifically so no one would ever hear this one by accident.
“I said something to him,” Rhys said. “I’ve carried the exact words for twenty-eight years and I’m going to say them to you now because I think if I keep not saying them they’re going to be the last true thing about me that never gets to exist outside my own head.
I said, You’d rather die proving something than live and watch us not need proof.
I said it standing in my own doorway in my underwear at five in the morning, seventeen years old, and I meant every word of it as a weapon, and it worked, Hollis.
I watched it land on him. He didn’t say anything back.
He just stood there a second, and then he nodded, once, like I’d told him something he already suspected about himself and hated hearing confirmed by his own son, and he left.
No goodbye. A note on the kitchen table when I came down for breakfast — back in nine days, take care of your mother, love you — four lines, nothing about the fight, like it hadn’t happened, like he’d decided the note was going to be the version of that morning that got remembered instead. ”
I didn’t move. I had learned, across every hard conversation this month had handed me, exactly how much a person can say with stillness alone, and I held it now on purpose, because anything I offered him in that moment would have been comfort arriving too early, papering over a fear that hadn’t finished being said yet.
“He was gone eleven days before anyone official started looking,” Rhys said, “and fourteen before they found him, and when they did, he wasn’t on the route he’d filed.
He’d changed his line somewhere along the way, gone up a harder variation nobody had a record of, and nobody ever knew why, because you don’t get to ask a dead man why he changed course two days into a solo winter attempt with no one watching.
I used to tell myself it was just conditions — ice where he expected rock, a call he made in the moment the way any climber makes a hundred small calls nobody records.
I don’t tell myself that anymore. I think —” His voice caught, actually caught, the sound of a man arriving at a sentence he’d never once let himself finish out loud.
“I think some part of him went and found the harder line on purpose. I think he wanted it to count for something, after what I said to him. I think I sent my own father up a mountain trying to prove me wrong, and it killed him, and the paper gave it one paragraph, and I have spent twenty-eight years making sure that never happens to me — not the dying, I don’t think it was ever really about the dying — making sure I never once get remembered in one paragraph nobody bothered to read past, and I built that whole terror on top of the fact that I put him there.
Not the sponsors. Not the money. Me. Seventeen years old, in a doorway, choosing the cruelest true thing I could find because it was easier than saying I was scared to lose him. ”
? ? ?