The road turned north at a low bluff overlooking a beach like nothing I’d ever seen before. Cloud shadows rolled down it on a light northwest wind, and the breaking section of the angled waves traveled south in constantly changing light. The perspectives took my breath away. My mother would have loved them.
A little way along the bluff I found a steep straight track to the beach. Apparently other vehicles had made it down, but there would be no going back. The incline was more than forty-five degrees, and the surface was loose sandy soil and gravel.
No choice. I eased the Bug over the edge and skidded it down, rear wheels locked most of the way. I’d been afraid it would slew sideways and flip, but it did beautifully. What a machine!
Now the whole beach lay ahead of me. The Bug floated over the soft undulating sand like a dream and I couldn’t resist flirting with the waves, swooping down onto the wet sand after they’d pulled back, up again at the last possible moment when they broke and rushed in. I heard myself laughing wildly over the blat of the exhaust.
Halfway to the horizon was a spout, a jet of steam as if there were an undersea volcano. Two spouts. A pelican surfed the wave tops with the tips of its wings actually making grooves in the glass. A mixed flock of seagulls, pelicans, terns, ducks, and cormorants swirled into the air from a low berm as the Bug bore down on them.
After a few miles, the bluff above the beach steepened and turned to rock. The beach began to narrow, and I went around a steep headland on nothing but a yellow ribbon between the black rock and the blue sea. Beyond the headland was a long cove backed by cliffs, and the narrow beach continued on around a second headland about three miles away.
Halfway there, hoping that around it I’d find the same broad beach as before, I noticed a gray fin in the surf—a dolphin playing in the waves. I stopped to watch as a bigger than average wave caught the animal, washed it up on the beach, and receded, leaving it high and dry. It flopped there helplessly for a while, until another bigger than average wave came up and pulled it back.
Too close for comfort. Anyway, it was safe now.
I put the Bug back into gear and was about to let out the clutch when the fin appeared again in the creamy white water just inside the break.
This time I turned off the engine and just sat there. The dolphin wasn’t just playing in the waves; it wanted to die.
Just a matter of time before a jumbo wave swept the creature up onto the dry sand and left it there, shining gray and glossy. But still it flopped and seemed to be trying to save itself, so I had to help it.
Its tail felt like the hard rubber sole of a hiking boot. When it flipped, it would knock me off my feet. The whole creature weighed about three hundred pounds, but as long as it didn’t flip I could inch it by the tail slowly down the sloping sand toward the water. And after a while it seemed to appreciate what I was trying to do and lay still.
A big breaking wave shot up the beach and slammed the dolphin into my legs while I struggled to keep it from being stranded again. Then we were rolling in the soup, one on top and then the other.
I’d stripped down to my boxers for the rescue, and the inert dolphin was smooth, hard, and cold against my skin. Panting and exhausted, I could only hang on to its fins and try to keep it headed out to sea. Once I got a look at a black shiny eye watching me calmly from smooth gray folds of blubber.
Finally, we were in waist-deep water, just short of the break. Before another wave could come, I pushed the creature out to sea with my last reserve of strength, and it disappeared.
Would it strand itself again? I sat dizzily on the sand knowing that this time I’d have to watch it die. The prospect was terrifying.
But the waves continued to roll in dolphinless. I waited and watched and finally lay back and closed my eyes.
I opened them again when a wave washed over my bare leg. Jesus! The sun seemed a lot lower in the sky.
The whole beach was narrower. Now with the larger waves, there were barely twenty feet between the water and the cliff. The far headland appeared to meet the water with no beach at all. Impossible!
But as I drove the Bug closer, I could see this was the case. The beach around it was gone. Reversing frantically to get turned on the narrow strip of sand that was left, I roared back toward the first headland as fast as possible, the vehicle almost leaving the sand on the sharper rises. Too late.
PART FOUR
Claire was not sleeping well. She hadn’t heard a word from Wendy, and the last she’d talked to Peter had been from the LA airport, three days after the storm, while he waited for the first flight to La Paz. He’d told her that as far as he knew, Wendy had made no further reservations either at the hotel or at the clinic. Her name hadn’t been on the incoming passenger list.
Claire had been shivering as she listened. She and Peter had talked every day since he’d left, sometimes more than once, and she found herself trembling at the tone of his voice and his inflections. His own voice had sounded just as shaky, or was it her imagination? Claire had ventured that a lot had gone down in Montana, and Peter had said it sure had.
But this was a little different, this shivering. She had come up with a theory. If Wendy had decided on having the procedure, a storm wouldn’t have changed her mind. Unless the storm had delayed her too late to have it.
There had been a silence on the other end while Peter had digested this. “You’re right.” Finally. “She would have been on that flight if she was going to go ahead.”
“And now she’s trapped.” Claire had gasped with another insight. “The mechanic that’s working on her car? I’ll bet you anything he’s the father. It’d be just like her. Oh, Jesus, now I’m really being indiscreet.”
“It’s okay, baby. Aren’t we in this together now?”
“Yeah? Oh shit, Peter. Why am I not going with you?”
A slow beat of five. “You are.”
Claire invented excuses to stay home during the day in case the phone rang (she didn’t trust her cell phone’s reception in the valley), and never went out in the evening. She read, cooked, drank, and retired to bed around nine. The writer called to invite her out to his ranch again, but she took a rain check.
She found herself thinking a lot of pregnancy itself. What did it feel like to be pregnant? To feel a new life burgeoning inside you like an idea? Her ex-husband had made a fetish of condom-wearing, so luckily she’d avoided it there. Now she was right in the middle of her cycle, her fertile period. Another wasted egg, and she didn’t have that many more left.
The fourth night she tried smoking a little dope before bed, hoping it would make her sleepy, but it had the opposite effect.
Her left nipple had always been more sensitive than the right. How strange! The right felt prickly and irritated if caressed, and the feeling went nowhere. Whereas the left bloomed like a rose and put out roots.
A useful fantasy involved walking down a city street late at night and becoming aware of someone following her. She would test this awareness by making some turns. Whoever it was would make them too. Scary and exciting.
She’d arrive at her apartment, unlock the door, and hurry inside. In the fantasy, she never had time to relock it. From her bedroom she’d hear the slow footsteps approaching, see the faceless dark form, struggle against it, but inevitably feel the silk cords binding her wrists and ankles to the bedposts, the silk gag in her mouth. Skirt up, panties down, irresistible entry and mounting excitement until AAAHHHHH … panting for breath, snapping on the light, and lying there damply staring at the clock: only 11:00 p.m.
Her ex, Tom, had been smaller than she but strong and wiry as a top climber needed to be. He believed in stock market charts and numerology. Everything happened for a reason; it was all interconnected. A tricky ascent required getting all your ducks in line, psychically, physically, and environmentally. Chance should not be part of the equation at all. Only a perfectly prepared climber could prevail.
Before
they met, Claire, in her late twenties, had been living an aimless life in Bryn Mawr, outside Philadelphia. She’d gone to high school in Bryn Mawr, then to Bryn Mawr College, majoring in English. She was helping run a bookstore in Bryn Mawr. She was a member of a women’s rowing club down on the Schuylkill River near Bryn Mawr and had represented it in the Head of the Charles Regatta in Cambridge in the fours class. The men she knew bored her to tears. Talk about stuck! When she saw an ad in Outside magazine for mountain climbing in the Tetons, a bell rang in her head.
Tom had been the lead guide for her party of six in a two-day ascent of the Grand. His precise, almost automaton-like climbing had impressed her mightily and had made her feel wonderfully safe. His hands felt dry, warm, strong, and very capable. His blue eyes had a faraway look geared to wide-open spaces. He didn’t smile very often. The men she knew in Philadelphia were always smiling.
The best part of the climb for Claire had been a three-hundred-foot rappel down a vertical granite cliff. Only one other member of the party (a nineteen-year-old boy) agreed to do it; the rest took the long way. The green-and-yellow Dacron rappelling rope reached all the way to the bottom, passing in a figure-eight pattern through a descender ring for friction. The ring was attached to a harness that the rappeller sat in, letting the rope slide through the fingers to control the rate of drop. Tom demonstrated how you push away from the cliff with your feet as you let the rope slide, dropping as you swing out and back in, and then push off again in a series of moon-man bounds. It gave Claire the rush of her life. Tom had been waiting at the bottom with one of his rare smiles. “Looks like you have a talent for this.”
Six months later they were married in the mess tent of the climbing school, a local Episcopalian minister officiating to appease her family, and Claire started working to fulfill Tom’s ambition to make her the country’s top woman climber.
She loved the mountains, and she loved the teamwork of climbing, the feeling that each person was totally dependent on the rest. Ultimate stakes and crystal-clear goals in a spectacular setting. And wonderful sex at the end of the day.
Solo climbing was something else again. No one to talk to, no one to laugh with, no one to rely on but yourself. A terrible, often terrifying loneliness, and the triumph of reaching the top couldn’t be shared. But as Tom kept saying, it was the quickest way to make a name. Quite a few ascents remained to be climbed for the first time by a solo female, and she did a couple of the easier ones for him. She knew they were only warm-ups, and that seriously compromised whatever good feelings she might have had about them.
Some years passed, and finally the hot August evening came when he looked at her with that rare smile and said, “Know something? I think you’re ready.”
Heart sinking. “Ready for what?”
They were standing just outside their tent in the climbing school campground. He pointed at the 13,770-foot granite peak of the Grand Teton, spiring up practically in their backyard. “The North Face. This is the right year, too. Hot and dry like I’ve never seen.”
“What makes you think I’m ready?”
“You’re hot right now. You whipped up Space Shot like it was a gopher mound. Even Kim was impressed. You’re on a roll, kid, this is your year. By the end of the season you’ll be famous.”
“If I make it.”
He took on his holier-than-thou guru look. “Don’t ever start thinking that way. You’ll always make it. I’d never ask you to try something you couldn’t do. Trust me.”
She was getting tired of these speeches. “Tell me something, Tom. Why does this mean so much to you?”
“Oh, come on, baby. You’ve got it. You can be the best.” He rubbed his right thumbnail back and forth along his sunburned lips (they’d just gotten back from climbing in Utah, and the sun had been fierce). “You, uh, have an obligation to realize your potential, you know. Everyone does.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t answer my question.”
“Why does it mean so much to me?” With a thin smile. “Well, I figure that’s my role in life. To help you realize your potential.”
What about your potential, she was going to ask. But she thought better of it.
Someone had scored some primo bud, and Tom and Claire shared a few tokes just before bed. In the dark, when she felt Tom’s hand drift onto her bare breast (the sensitive one, as he knew from much experience), she said, “You know, I don’t think I’m ready.”
Tom didn’t take his hand away. “Awww, come on. We haven’t fooled around for days.”
“No, I meant the North Face. I’m not ready to climb it. I don’t even want to climb it.”
She could feel the hand on her breast tense, and then it was gone. He rolled onto his back, and she could hear him breathing through his mouth. She waited for him to say something more, but he’d never been a big one for talk. Finally, he rolled away from her, pulled up his knees, and pretended to fall asleep. Or so she thought.
She could hear her heart beat loudly behind the dope…. about eighty-five beats per minute, quite a bit faster than her usual resting pulse of forty-five. Did she really not want to make the climb or was she just being rebellious? It wasn’t that hard—Alex Lowe had soloed it in the middle of winter not too long ago—but it was two days’ lonely climbing, the weather was unpredictable, and the rock was weathered and treacherous in places. Worst of all, she just didn’t like the place. She didn’t feel at home there. The crags were dark and forbidding.
The spirits of the place were unfriendly to her.
Now Tom was pretending to snore faintly, but she was sure he was as wide awake as she was. Years ago, there had been a dramatic rescue on the North Face: a climber’s leg had been badly fractured by falling rock; he’d had to be lowered thousands of feet down on a stretcher. There was a documentary film about it, and the rescuers became heroes.
Something bad would happen to her on the mountain, and Tom could come to her rescue. Perfect! His little puppet. She was beginning to understand why he was so involved. In the end, wasn’t it all for him? Maybe he’d been planning this thing for years.
And after years of apprenticeship, that was what climbing was turning out to be: not happy teamwork but a struggle of monumental egos for fifteen minutes of fame. It was a stoned epiphany.
So Claire did not solo the North Face that summer, and Tom became eerily malignant. She was scared. She saw her shrink friend (who’d hosted the earlier sessions with Peter and Wendy) in Jackson during the winter, even had a fling with him, and in the spring she moved to Livingston.
As she’d been doing since Peter left, Claire woke before dawn the next morning and walked over to the river to watch the sunrise. The painter from her gallery was fly-fishing in a molten silver riffle downstream, and they exchanged waves. The writer was his close fishing buddy, she knew, but luckily he wasn’t in view. Back home after granola and espresso, she dialed the shrink’s number in Jackson. She left her name and number with his secretary, made herself another cup of espresso, and sat back down to read the New York Times, which had just started delivery in Livingston.
Almost two weeks after the attack, the body count had stabilized at a little over one thousand. The flood of wounded expected in the city’s emergency rooms had never materialized; only bodies had been recovered, but rarely whole ones. Some of the debris had been moved to Staten Island, where people picked through it, looking for parts. An invasion of Afghanistan was obviously in the works, but Claire had a suspicion that bin Laden never would be killed or captured. That wasn’t how the twenty-first century was going to go.
To hell with the twenty-first century. She was part of the twentieth, and she just might have a shot at some long overdue happiness. But she didn’t want to dwell on it too much, because that could jinx the whole thing. The weather had suddenly turned warm again, steam rising off the damp asphalt, so she carried her coffee outside and sat on the stoop in the sun, smelling the wet leaves and listening to the shouts of children in the playground at the M
ontessori school on the next block. In one of their phone conversations, Peter had told her about the feeling he’d had waking up on her pull-out couch. The right place at the right time. Why hadn’t she told him it had been right for her too? She’d been scared of a jinx, that’s why.
The shrink’s name was Daniel. She’d forgotten how dry and nasal his voice was, or maybe it had changed. He was eager to tell her about his new life: he’d turned New Age, drumming, chanting, vision quests up in the Wasatch. He and his wife had had a child.
“Really! That’s wonderful! Boy or girl?”
“We named him Spruce. After that one I planted in front of the house. You should see it now.”
“I’d like to. I remember it perfectly.”
“What’s up with you?” he finally asked offhandedly. “I heard you and Tom are no more.”
“We are no more,” she agreed. “I’ve been holed up here in Livingston since last spring. It’s nice. You’ll never guess who passed through the other day.”
“Who?” She heard him tell his secretary that he was going to need a few more minutes.
“Peter Davis. Wendy’s long-lost brother.” She wondered if he could hear anything significant in her voice, but when he didn’t answer, she went on, “Remember them? You saw them a while back. Before me.”
“Ah yes! How are they doing?”
“Not too good. Listen, Daniel. I’ve got a favor to ask you. It’s kind of an emergency: Wendy’s in trouble.”
“Sorry to hear that.” There was a drumming sound, as in pen on desk.
“She’s in some kind of hot water in Mexico. Her brother has gone down to try to help. He came here right after the attack to find out where she was, and I told him. So now I’m involved, you know? The trouble is, ah …”
“Well, I’ll be happy to see her again. And her brother. Anytime.”
“They haven’t talked since you saw them the first time. As you know.”