Annette leaves her mother’s house in the morning dark. It’s too cold for October. The tree branches at the driveway’s edge seem brittle, as though they could be subject to injury. The moonlight lays on the grass like brushed silver. Once she turns onto the state road, it’s a half hour to where she’s driving, but she knows her friend Maggie will be awake already. Annette can picture her in the small kitchen with her cup of coffee by the wood stove Daniel installed only last winter. A thriving heart at the center of their home. A small kindness he’d done for his wife when they all still believed he could be a good man.
She stops at a gas station near the interstate and watches the early pink of the day as she pumps as much gas as she can afford. It’s not much because she needs to buy a few things to take to the river.
Inside, there’s a boy from her grade working behind the cash register. He saw her when she came in and started to pick up some bags of peanuts, energy bars, and a pair of bottled waters. He’s a poor kid with shaggy brown hair and uneven stubble, the result of a bad shave over a pimply chin. No one at school she knows talks to him. She has seen the place where he lives with his family at the county line. A junked Impala out front of a sallow ranch, moldering cord wood up on the porch. When he rings her up, he doesn’t look her in the eye, so she tries to smile. Some small gesture to put him at ease.
Once she’s to the door, he says so quietly that she can barely hear, “You’re the one, aren’t you? You’re the one that got that married teacher to kill himself.”
She lets the door fall shut behind her without saying anything.
Annette first saw the poster for the climbing club the fall semester of her sophomore year. Her mother had remarried that summer, and she was looking for an excuse not to be at home with her mom and Dale and Dale’s mustache. She had no reason to think it would be any different than the chess club or drill team, each of which she’d attended once without wanting to ever go back, but she wrote down the meeting time and showed up at Daniel’s classroom the next afternoon.
There were only two kids there when she came in, both boys. The one, Jeremy, was a junior who wore a Smashing Pumpkins T-shirt so long it reached the bottom of his thighs. He coldly glanced up at her from behind a dirty curtain of hair.
“Hey.” His voice was without inflection.
“Hey.” She matched him.
On the desk in front of him was a pile of straps with several metal brackets attached. She was about to ask him what they were when the other, much smaller boy came out from his desk.
“I’m Chad.” He spat a little bit when he spoke. “I’ve been climbing since I was six.”
She shook his hand. It was clammy and he smelled like overkept cheese. She sat down just as Daniel came into the room.
She’d seen him in the hallways a few times before. He was one of the few younger teachers at school, so it was hard to miss him amid the doddering grandfathers and kindly widows who comprised the majority of the faculty. She wasn’t good at guessing age, but Annette imagined he couldn’t be much older than thirty, though the blond moonshiner beard added a little bit of age to his broad face. When he smiled, there was a crease at the edge of his whiskers that reminded her of the smirk of a porcelain elf.
Once he’d asked her name, he wanted to see her permission slip.
“I didn’t see that I needed one.”
“You need your parents’ signature to go off campus. Here, let me see if I’ve got some forms in my desk.”
She stood. “Don’t bother.”
“No, wait.”
He rifled through the desk drawer, fished out a blue piece of paper.
“This should get it done.”
Annette took the form, stuffed it into the bottom of her bag and turned to go.
“You know. We could maybe bend the rules this one time. Can’t let you up on the rock without the sign off sheet, but you could come out and belay, get some of the basics down. Want to jump in the truck?”
The crag was at the end of a half mile trail that rode the shoulder of gently rising land. The hardwoods were naked early that year, stripped of their autumn leaves from a recent stretch of storms. The bloody and golden colors were scattered underfoot, pressed into the ground like mementos. It made Annette reluctant to tread on them.
“Make sure you touch that rock,” Daniel told her.
“Why?”
“Because that’s the good luck rock.” He demonstrated by lightly tapping it himself as he walked past. Though she didn’t like superstition, she saw no reason to be difficult and followed his example.
They grounded their gear at the base of the crag, a limestone wall nearly a hundred feet tall. The two boys stepped into their harnesses and cinched down on the straps until the equipment looked tighter than could be comfortable. Daniel pulled a black polyester bag from his rucksack and brought out of it a bunched length of climbing rope. He fed one end through a small opening in the carrying bag, tied a safety knot. He then handed the other end to Jeremy and explained the reason for the knot and why Jeremy was looping the rope’s bitter end through the loops of his harness after tying his own figure eight and barrel knots. Then he talked about the use of the different carabiners and the belaying device, its means of assembly and its proper direction fitted to the rope respective to the climber. It was a dizzying flood of detail, but Annette absorbed it with fascination. Even the routine safety checks between the boys sounded to her like deep ritual.
“On belay?”
“Belay on.”
“Climbing.”
“Climb on.”
Jeremy stepped up to the first ledge and suddenly became something else. She could see the change come over him as clearly as if he had stepped into the skin of a new body. He flowed up the route. He became more thought than person, abruptly beautiful. She wanted nothing more in that moment than to tear him off the side of the face and steal that beauty for herself.
That night when her mother refused to sign the permission slip, Annette forged her name. Each day after, she imagined herself becoming something new on the rock.
Maggie seems stronger this morning. Her hair smells good, like she’s just washed it. When she walks, her strides are even and sure. Her MS must be manageable today. There’s some luck in that, at least.
“I didn’t expect to see you today, Anni. Is everything okay?”
Annette asks if she can come in. They sit at the kitchen table. Despite how she imagined things, the wood stove has not been lit. Still, it’s warm here despite the chill outside. Maggie brings her a coffee without her asking.
“I need you to help me with something, Maggie.”
She doesn’t ask her what that could be. It’s the first time they’ve been together alone since Daniel’s death. Annette is certain that this has not been in error. She’s certain Maggie has heard what others were saying about her and Daniel, about how they had spent too much time alone together, and though Maggie had never questioned Annette, there is a change in the way she glances at her, a slight pressure when she takes her hand.
“You look tired, Anni. Like you’ve been up for three nights straight.”
“No, I’m fine. I’ve been thinking about you. Since the funeral.”
“What have you been thinking?”
“What?”
“What have you been thinking about me and the funeral?”
Annette is unused to this hardness behind Maggie’s words, the undeniable edge of suspicion. For the past few months, she has been as important to Annette as Daniel. The three of them a family, Annette had thought.
“I’ve been thinking you might have some wrong ideas about things.”
When Annette speaks, the words hurt coming out.
“Is that what you’ve come to tell me? Because if it is, you could have saved the trip. I need time, Anni. Time to decide if I have it in me to believe you because I believed in Daniel and look what became of that. Time is only something that I can find for myself. Can you understand that?”
Maggie gets up and goes to the drawer at the end of the kitchen island, pulls out a pack of Marlboros. It’s the first time Annette has ever seen her smoke, and by the awkward way she handles the matchbook, it’s a recently acquired habit.
“I’m not asking for you to believe anything, Maggie. I just need your help going a certain place. You’re the only one who can get me there.”
Dale lost his job at the quick oil change garage just after Thanksgiving break, so he was around the house a lot more than before. Annette’s mother was understanding, said that he needed time to “recalibrate.” She had a good job at the UPS warehouse working evenings as a shift manager, so he could afford to take his time before committing to something else. Seemed to Annette that Dale’s recalibration consisted largely of sitting around smoking weed and reading fishing magazines. When he got bored of that he came upstairs to poke around in the spare bedroom, just down the hall from Annette’s room, and shifted through some of the boxes of his old bachelor possessions. He’d brought a lot of junk into the house when he married Annette’s mother, things like chipped coffee mugs with anchors painted on, TV dinner trays, and beer signs that Annette’s mother wouldn’t let him put up because they were too tacky. When Annette would pass him on the way to the bathroom, he was usually in the spare bedroom with the door open seated on the edge of an upturned milk crate, poring over his collection of Clancy Brothers records or collectible Star Wars drinking glasses.
It began to bother her how much time he spent up there on the same floor when it was just the two of them alone in the house each afternoon and evening. Sometimes he’d come around and knock on her door and talk to her about nothing. Even after she would finish the conversation by telling him she had homework, he would linger at the edge of her bedroom or pretend to find some small repair that needed to be made to a window lock or a door hinge. When she put in her earbuds to listen to music, she always locked her door.
One night, she heard him come up to the bathroom instead of using the one downstairs. He was there for a long time. She tried to ignore it, focused on the book she was reading. When he finally came out, he stopped and stood out in the hallway looking at her. He was holding a wastebasket.
“Come look at this,” he told her.
“The trash?”
“Your trash.”
She thought he was trying to be funny, but he didn’t move and his expression was severe.
“Now,” he said.
She came over and looked inside.
“What’s this?” He pointed at a used tampon she’d discarded.
“You know what it is.”
“It’s filthy. You’re filthy. Didn’t your mother teach you better than this?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Take this goddamn thing out of the house right now, girl. It’s making me sick. Put it in the outside can.”
She reached for the wastebasket, but he pulled it away.
“No, you take it with your fingers.”
She tried to slip the inserted plastic bag loose, but he withdrew the basket once more.
“You know what I mean. You need to learn. If your mama isn’t willing to teach you, I will.”
She took a step back and slammed the door in his face.
From that day forward, Annette was sure never to be at home when her mother wasn’t there. When the climbers didn’t meet, she stayed after school volunteering at the library or in the cafeteria. There wasn’t much for her to do, but she preferred being there to trying to make friends with girls her own age. The older ladies were nice, but they had their own lives and never questioned her much about her own. By the time school came back into session in the new year, the days had gotten so short that the climbing club meetings were suspended until after spring break.
One afternoon, she found Daniel working at his desk grading papers after his last class.
“You know why I like to teach biology?” Regardless of how long it had been since they talked, he had a habit of beginning his conversations with her like they’d just left off a moment before.
“Hi to you too.”
“It’s because there’s something about being outside that seemed holy to me. Holier than anything I ever felt inside a church house growing up. If I’ve ever been slain in the spirit, it would have been when I was walking in the woods.”
She shrugged out of her backpack, sat at a desk in the front row.
“Yeah, I can get that.”
“You ever wonder what the soul of a rock must be like? What it must have suffered and learned across such an enormous span of time?”
She laughed. “You’re bizarre.”
“Maybe. What’s on your mind, Anni?”
It was the first time he called her that. She was unsure how it made her feel.
“I miss going to the crag.”
He smiled. “You’ve got the bug. Can’t get enough.”
“I don’t want to wait until the club starts meeting again. There’s an indoor climbing gym over at the college. I thought maybe I could get you to go over with me sometime. I know I need someone to coach me if I want to get better.”
“You want a climber tutor, huh?”
“Yeah, I guess I do.”
“I’m not sure that’s the best idea.”
She shrugged. “I can go on my own then. Just thought I’d ask.” She stood up, scraped the legs of the desk harder across the tile than she’d intended. In her flustered embarrassment, she missed what he said to her.
“You mind if I bring someone?”
“What?”
“You mind if I bring my wife along with us to the gym? I think you two would get along pretty well.”
“Sure. Yeah, that sounds nice.”
It is mostly up to Annette to get the canoe in the back of the truck. Maggie holds up the stern end as well as she can, but she lacks the strength to secure the loading straps. Annette wrestles with the clips more than she’d like, but Daniel was typically the one to take care of the supporting details when they went to the river. Finally, she ratchets everything down and they load the paddles and the rucksacks of gear into the cab and drive out of Maggie’s place under the muted morning sky.
They don’t have far to travel, but the silence between them makes every mile long. Annette tries the radio, but it’s no good and she switches it back off. She begins to wonder if all of this isn’t a mistake.
They drive over the bridge to the local airport—a flat stretch along the riverbank barely suitable for piper cubs and other small recreational planes—and park at an empty spot above the put-in. They sit and watch as a plane cuts its engine and glides in, a slight screech as it touches down. Weirdly absurd yet graceful. It pleases Annette to notice it. They get out to unbind and lower the canoe.
Annette ensures Maggie is securely in the front seat before she settles into the rear of the boat and gently pushes off with the paddle blade. Once on the water, she becomes aware of a changed sense of physics. The delicacy of balance. The nuance of each paddle stroke. It’s like being on the rock, in a way. Everything she does matters more importantly when she gives herself to the river.
“You must trust me an awful lot to ask me to do this.” Maggie’s words are clear and strong even though she is facing away, her speech directed at the waterway ahead.
“I do.”
Maggie rests her paddle athwart her knees, turns her head slightly so that Annette can see her in profile.
“I’m not sure that you should, Anni.”
Annette met Maggie that first evening at the climbing gym. Annette would find out later that it was one of Maggie’s good days, so she didn’t seem especially ill. A little tired and shy maybe. She did not get on the wall herself but didn’t seem to mind spectating.
“Come stop by the house after school tomorrow, Anni. We’re going to cook some steaks on the grill,” Maggie told her as they packed up their gear as the gym lights were being shut off for the night. “I’ve got some pictures that I bet you would like to see. If you don’t have something else already planned?”
“No, I’d like that.”
“Good, you can follow Daniel over after school.”
Annette loved everything about their place. It was a small cabin on ten acres with big fallow fields leading up to a ragged stand of cedars on the brow of the hill. They walked up through the tall swaying grass to where they had set out some chairs and looked over the sloping shoulders of the encircling valley. A barn cat twined between their legs.
“This is paradise.” Annette reached down and scratched the knobby tomcat head.
Maggie smiled. “We were lucky to get it. It’s part of a property my great aunt owned. She willed it to me with the promise we’d never break it up. It was important to her to pass it along intact.”
They sat for a while in easy company. To Annette it was like breathing a different kind of air.
“Let’s go back down and eat.”
Daniel set the table and served them dinner. Annette listened to stories about renovating the cabin from its debilitated state a few years before. The great aunt had lived alone for the final decade of her life and disrepair had worked its way into just about every timber of the cabin, but step by step they had brought it back, made many mistakes but finally restored it to a respectable degree. They laughed easily with one another as they talked about it. Their eyes were warm. Annette admired them both profoundly.
“Let me show you those pictures.”
Annette got up to help clear the dishes, but Daniel said for her to stay put while Maggie brought the scrap book down from the shelf. She spread it open and slid it across the table. Annette flipped through to find several photographs of Daniel and Maggie from years before, from when they must have been in college, climbing routes on western sandstone faces, the desert stark and severe in the distance.
“Maggie was the most fearless climber partner I’ve ever had,” Daniel told her as he turned the page and pointed at a dizzying ascent up a vertical crack, Maggie in lead climb. “She’s the one who taught me how to climb.”
Maggie smiled. “He’s not lying. I was good until I started to fall apart.”
“What do you mean?”
“I have multiple sclerosis. It’s not the worst kind, but it’s not the best either. Some days I almost feel like I could get up there. Some days I barely feel like rolling over in bed. So, I’m afraid whatever climbing I’ve done is in the past. Just a broken-down old lady at this point.”
“You’re not old,” Annette told her. “At all.”
Annette felt Maggie’s warm hand on her shoulder.
“You’re nuts, kid. Nice, but nuts.”
By the time the climbing club started to meet again, Annette had learned patience and creativity. She no longer expected the route to reveal itself to her. Instead, she learned to trust in the difficulty without fearing it. She understood that given time, the rock would yield.
“You look like a natural up there, kid!” Daniel shouted.
She looked down from the top of the route, responded with a thumbs up. Daniel took in the slack and lowered her back to the ground.
Jeremy tied in as soon as Annette was clear. He had not acknowledged the route she’d topped, one of the hardest at the crag. As soon as she was off belay, he called out that he was climbing and mounted the route.
“Helmet?”
“I don’t need it.”
He moved rapidly up the lower portion of the face, muscled through a move efficiently but with more upper body strength than Daniel had coached.
“Settle into it, Jeremy. No rush.”
The cautionary advice seemed to drive him up with greater haste. He lunged for a hold, his feet gave way, and he swung limply from the rock.
“Try it again, Jeremy. Remember to take it slow.”
The boy glared down accusingly at Annette.
“No, lower me. I’m fucking done.”
The canoe hisses against the sand as the bottom touches bank. Annette waits for Maggie to climb out before she steps onto the shoal and heaves the boat above the waterline. The beach is on a remote bend in the river, screened by bushes and some scrub growth. Anyone not looking for the inlet would pass by, though even from the center of the river the ragged chimney of rock is clearly visible. It looks much like the remains of an ancient temple, which is in a way what it is.
Annette slings the pack of gear over her shoulder and follows Maggie on the trail leading to the rock. Part of her feels like she’s following in the wake of a priestess. Daniel had told her that Maggie had installed the protective bolts along this route. She was the one who first climbed the rugged face of the chimney and gave it a name—Crying Woman—because that’s what she was when she climbed and beheld the lovely heartbreak of everything she could see downriver.
It doesn’t take long to reach the base of the climb. It’s a troubled rock, like something designed by a cubist. The holds are slick, the pitches wild. There are a few vertical cracks that appear to offer places to rest and plan, but they are thin and shallow, hard to jam. Annette has never been able to climb the entire route. It’s the first time she’s been back here since Daniel fell from one of the ledges above.
“I feel sick to my stomach.”
Maggie smiles. “Yeah, me too.”
Daniel began to take her on more difficult climbs. At times Maggie would come along to watch, but she was often too tired and stayed behind. If her mother asked, Annette said she was doing something with a girlfriend from school. One weekend she and Daniel drove up alone to the Obed wilderness preserve, climbed all day, then drove back so late that Maggie was already asleep. When she gathered her things to leave, Daniel made up the couch and said for her to stay. He insisted. Once she lay down in front of the fire, he placed his hand to the side of her face and kissed her goodnight.
They began to spend more time together. It felt natural. Sometimes, they would drive out to the crag early and hike the trails for an hour or two before they roped in and worked the routes. He began to treat her like they had known each other for a long time. He told her that he felt he could talk to her in a way that he couldn’t talk with Maggie because things had changed once she became ill. She changed. He told her about their intimacies. It made Annette uncomfortable, as though something was being revealed that she had no right to know, but she said nothing, not wanting to upset the trust that Daniel had placed in her.
Close to the end of the semester, he began to take her to the rock at the river bend. He said that she needed to try something new to challenge her. That was the only way she would continue to grow.
“Should I tell Jeremy?”
“No, I’d rather it just be us.”
He let her take lead climb, let her fail. But each time they went to the chimney, she began to comprehend the route more completely. She stayed on the rock until her muscles failed and then was lowered back to the sandy ground where they sat and watched the river roll. It was better with Daniel now when they fell into a mutual silence.
It happened that next fall semester, the beginning of her junior year. He couldn’t bring himself to say it, gave her the note one day after class instead. She sat and read it once uncomprehendingly, then a second time with dread like a falling weight. It was like something written by a teenager. A love letter heedless of who he was or what he owed to Maggie and to her. A fantasy of declared passion and running off together.
“I don’t want to read this.”
His eyes were hot with tears.
“I’ve kept this to myself for so long. I’m sorry, Anni.”
She flinched at the way her name sounded on his tongue.
“I thought I was your friend.”
He nodded silently, folded in on himself like a hidden hinge had given way.
“What would Maggie do if she saw this?”
“Divorce me, I imagine.”
“I’m only sixteen, Daniel.”
“I know. I know. I wish I’d left this alone. How can I be good again?”
She was furious that he asked her that.
“Get rid of this. Burn it. Do whatever you need to do, but I don’t want to see it again.”
He sat at his desk. He had suddenly become old.
“Yes. Yes, I will.”
The following week she heard that Daniel had left the note on his desk. Jeremy found it and turned it over to the principal. Two weeks later Daniel was dead.
Annette ropes in. The sun has just cleared the treetops, and the light strikes so that the rock line is detailed. The route reveals its complexity in stages. Part of it is memory, a catalogue of previous climbs. But much of it must take root in her imagination as well. She must believe the stone will not deceive or betray her. It must be immaculate.
She is ready to mount but checks with Maggie first.
“How are your hands?”
“Good, I think.” She flexes them to be sure then nods. “I’ve got you.”
“Okay. Climbing.”
“Climb on.”
The first bit is trickier than most beginnings. Narrow footholds that curve around a bulging wall, but she finds it easily enough, and Maggie gives her a bit of slack so she can clip in to the first protective bolt. That’s one.
Annette wonders if she would trust her if she were Maggie. Annette told her that she had never expected Daniel to express anything like what he had written in the note. Had tried to ignore the times when he talked to her about his unhappiness, about what he had lost. How he had looked at her with a sadness she couldn’t solve. Another clip in. Two.
She’s at a ledge twenty feet up. There’s a move here that requires some finesse, a jam in a slight crack and a quick surge up a polished crease of limestone. She rehearses it twice in her mind then commits. She’s through the worst of it and has an easy climb for another dozen yards. Big, juggy handholds. Three and Four.
There’s a place to rest, so she shakes both arms out to keep her muscles from getting over pumped and prematurely exhausted. This next move was where Daniel always struggled. The rock goes glassy for several feet as it spirals up and around. There’s a blind reach to the outside that will stabilize her, but she must trust that it’s there. No matter how far out she leans, the horn of rock remains hidden.
One toe slips as she grasps the hold with both hands. Still, she stays tight to the rock, and she can relax as she uses her strong legs to climb a slim ladder of split stone. She reaches as far as she can to clip in. Five.
This is the first view she’ s afforded, and it’s stunning. From here she can see the river as it moves though the autumn fields toward the city, a bright geometry against the horizon. It’s easy to forget how close she is to it, especially here higher up with the lonesome sound of the wind. It makes her feel that she’s capable of being in two places at once. She leans out from the rock at first to test her strength and then to feel it. She knows she can hang here as long as she wants, a new aspect of the face.
She had cut her knee coming over one of the ledges, though this is the first time she’s noticed it. The injury is clean, painless, and precise. The blood runs the length of her leg until it drips and splatters against the stone.
It’s rather beautiful.
Charles Dodd White is the award-winning author of four novels and a story collection. His newest book, A Year Without Months, is a fragmented memoir available from West Virginia University Press. He teaches English at Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville, Tennessee.
The fad for eye miniatures in England began when the future King George IV fell in love with Maria Fitzherbert, a woman unsuitable to his rank (widowed, Catholic, a commoner). He covertly sent her a painting of his eye with a proposal to marry. The overture was welcome, and after a long and tumultuous relationship, he was buried with a painting of her eye. From Public Domain Review, text by Sasha Archibald.
