Pieces of Hope (9 page)

           
“Crazy is right! That can’t be safe!” I said with
disapproval, my heart racing at the idea of sliding down such a treacherous
crag. But I wasn’t frightened because Brody and I had never rappelled; it was because
Ethan and Brody might break their silly necks. On an average day, rapping was
dangerous. Doing it in this place was downright stupid. Just the idea of
relying on a single rope, a nylon harness, and a puny braking device made me
sick for both of them.

 
          
I
realized my error when Brody burst out laughing. For all they knew, I might as
well have announced a fear of tiny leprechauns.

“It’s
not as treacherous as it looks,” Ethan assured me with a half-grin.

Though
he meant well, his concern only caused my blood to boil.
I
wasn’t afraid of anything; I was afraid for
them.
But how was I supposed to tell Ethan that? He wasn’t going to
believe me . . . especially now, tiny leprechauns and all.

Ethan’s
voice was the epitome of calm. “Hope, I’ve rapped this several times. I’ll tie
a fixed line from one of those pines, and then it’s a straight shot to a ledge
about sixty meters down. There’s a fair amount of holds for the return climb.
I’d say it’s about a 5.8.”

According
to the Yosemite decimal system, a 5.0 was
almost like climbing a set of stairs. The higher the second number indicated
smaller and smaller holds. Maybe it wasn’t as dangerous as I’d first thought.

“Shouldn’t
be a problem for you, you’re part arachnid, I can tell.” Ethan was still
wearing that contented half-grin. Given my flurry of emotions, I couldn’t be
certain, but I detected a hint of sarcasm.

“Part
monkey,” I corrected, biting my lip. To my surprise, his smile widened.
 

To avert
Ethan’s intense gaze, I glanced to the pines he had spoken of. My hands
trembled like an old lady’s with Parkinson’s, but I knew it was more than the
upcoming rap that was causing it. When I stared back at the source my jitters,
Ethan looked cooler than the breeze that blew my hair around.

“Outrageous!”
Brody howled as he returned from the peak. “Wait till Claire hears about this!”
Reaching for his pack, he grabbed a change of clothes, then ran into a stand of
trees. Just a few feet away, Ethan remained stock-still, eyeing me as if he
were waiting on something. What? Was he expecting a high-five from me, too?
          

I
delayed, but couldn’t take the predator-stare thing another second.

“It’s
safe?” I finally asked, irritated. Rescuing people from their own bad choices
was more difficult than I had anticipated. “Please don’t die on me. I’d feel
terrible if you did, you know . . . quite terrible.”

“You’d
feel quite terrible?” Ethan grinned, shook his head. “Well, since you put it
that way, I’ll be
quite
careful.”

Nope, I
wasn’t mistaken. Definite sarcasm.

“Promise
me,” I begged, ignoring his tone.

Ethan
looked into my eyes, and in the lowest tone humanly imaginable, he uttered
sincerely, “I’d do anything for your happiness, Hope. Anything at all.”

Although
I wasn’t in my body at the moment, it felt like I was. My heart stopped, then
started up again. I really needed to sit down and hold onto something—or
someone. It was Ethan’s words that had triggered it. Where had I heard them
before? I wracked my brain for answers, but the pieces wouldn’t come. Ethan
came toward me then and froze, as if the questions racing in my mind had now
jumped into his. The confusing mixture of emotions I was feeling was plainly
visible on Ethan’s face—bewilderment, surprise, and something else I couldn’t
quite place.
  

“Are you
guys okay?” Brody shouted from behind a huge pine. “You both look a little
lovesick. Do you need some privacy? If so, I can take a—”

“What—no!
We’re fine! Fine!” I muttered. Whatever I was wondering vanished; I now focused
on strangling Brody. “We’re talking about the rap!” Then, under my breath, I
whispered to Ethan, “My happiness requires you to be alive. Dying won’t earn
you any brownie points. Remember, you promised to be careful!”

Sighing,
he breathed, “Hope Valenti, you do have the strangest little mind.”

It was
all I could do to not to thump him on the forehead. Little
and
strange?

By the
time slowpoke Brody returned from the woods, we had already changed into our
loose-fitting shorts and tees, slipped on our sticky rubber climbing shoes, and
finished setting up the rap. From the sturdiest pine, Ethan had tied a fixed
line using a figure-eight knot on a bite, and added a double fisherman for
safety. I gave it a hearty tug. Twice.
 

Brody
and I watched intently as Ethan demonstrated the process of rapping down. After
pinching the rope, he then pushed it through the rappelling device before
attaching it to his climbing harness with a
carabiner
—a
metal D-shaped link. I avoided thinking of what would happen if the link
slipped, or the knots failed, concentrating solely on the fact that Ethan had
done this before. Many, many times.
  

Ethan
chalked up before descending. Unlike mine and Brody’s, his hands were
glove-free. He held the rope behind him—about mid-back for better control. For
as long as my heart could take it, I watched him rappel down, but his speed was
so brisk that it scared me to look. At the rate he was dropping, I knew he’d
reach the destination in no time. Then it would be our turn, one at a time, to
slide down one hundred and eighty feet to the waiting ledge below.

“Brody!”
Ethan shouted much too quickly. It meant that he had already rapped to the
platform, and was awaiting Brody’s descent. I exhaled. At least he was
safe.
 

Duplicating
Ethan’s demonstration, Brody stepped gingerly off the ledge before lowering
himself down. An achingly long time later, he shrieked happily, “Dude! The
eagle has landed! I repeat, the eagle has landed!”

The way
he’d descended reminded me more of an arthritic chicken, but I kept my comments
to myself, focusing on the daunting task ahead.

I hooked
myself to the fixed line with utter precision, keeping one arm behind my back,
and repeatedly closing my hand around the rope to slow my pace. My new bodiless
form should have left me fearless. Unfortunately, it had the opposite effect.
That first rap down was less than stellar. I dropped as slowly as Brody had,
possibly slower. In a word, it was humiliating.

Once I
stood upon the same shelf which Brody had recently landed, I dared a look at
Ethan who, in the span a few dozen heartbeats, had traveled the same distance
we had taken several lifetimes to achieve. He was truly the rock star; we, the
low-life roadies. I groaned. As Ethan grasped its meaning, I heard him chuckle
quietly to himself.

Looking
around, I noticed Ethan had already managed to set up a belay station. A belay
was a means of securing a climber in case of a fall, and usually it required a
bit of set-up time, but evidently not in this world. Silently, I prayed that
Ethan remembered his promise. If he died on me now, I swore I’d go back and
kill him a second time myself.
 

While
Ethan secured himself to one end of the rope, I attached the opposite end to my
harness. Once Brody and I had made our ascent, Ethan—as the last man up—would
require one of us to take over belay duties from the summit. In essence, we
became each other’s anchor, safety net, and security blanket all rolled into
one.
 

I
removed my gloves, clipped them to my harness, and then chalked up my hands. As
I took over as lead climber, my monkey genes kicked in. Feeling along the steep
rock, my fingers easily found a ridge just a couple of feet above my head, and
I secured my left foot into a small crevice about eight inches up. As my lower
body pushed, my upper body pulled. Every muscle inside me (well, it felt like
muscle) resonated with pure joy.

Around
my waist, I carried various sized cams—metal, spring-loaded devices that
expanded to fit into cracks—which I slipped into place about every six feet or
so, before I secured them to the rope. It wasn’t as effortless as painting a
room with a roller, but to me it was a peaceful, repetitive action. I gripped
along the wall, pulled and tugged on various spots, then squeezed my right hand
around a jutting knob. Higher and higher, I ascended without a hitch. I was getting
the hang of this new fluid form of mine, and I liked it a lot. It was light,
more
liquidy
than my real body, and although I sensed
I could have flown up the crag if I had wanted to, I opted to stick with normal
human behavior for my first visit. As I slid into the zone of climbing, I
stopped thinking and allowed my natural impulses to take over. Hand and
footholds seemed to appear as I needed them—almost as though I’d created them.
It brought to mind the ease of my first experience. Just a cheesy rock wall at
a nearby county fair. My first sweet taste of addiction.

A short
time later, I reached the top of the summit. Releasing the rope from my
harness, I shouted down to Ethan so that Brody could begin his ascent, “Off
belay!”

Heaven’s
Peak aside, the view of Ethan was far more heavenly. I sat down on the tippy
edge of the pirate’s plank, hooked the heel of my sticky shoes into a shallow
ridge, and leaned backwards off the bluff. I couldn’t sense Ethan’s emotions,
but I could clearly see his face, and he looked a little angry. It was an easy
guess that he was worried I might fall off the cliff and kill myself. Oh, if he
only knew.

Strange,
I thought, how I couldn’t sense Ethan’s emotions here—almost as if they were
blocked or barricaded—but I could definitely feel Brody’s, and terror was the
word for the day. Either my best friend had suddenly forgotten how to climb, or
Brody was just as self-conscious under Ethan’s steady gaze as I was. With deep
wrinkles creased into his forehead, and sweat dripping profusely from his brow,
he conquered the crag like a baby walrus learning to crawl.
 

In stark
contrast, there was Ethan. More than once I caught him, poised in mid-air along
the sheer rock-face, almost as if he were sunning his handsome self. It was a
blatant case of hang-dogging (and when Brody did it, it annoyed me immensely),
but Ethan was a highly skilled and graceful climber, and every move he made was
captivating. Though I tried to hide it, I sensed I wore a puppy-dog look of
admiration on my upside-down face.
        

On the
drive down, my expression in the rearview confirmed my stupidity. Ethan watched
me from the backseat, his long arms outstretched, almost lazily. The climb had
been good for him. Less tightly-wound came to mind. From the passenger’s seat,
Brody looked wiped-out, but he had that perpetually sunny glow about him.

“Hope,
you should have seen the look on your face when Ethan first mentioned a rap off
that crag.” Brody gave me a goofy grin. “I thought you were going to scream
like a little girl.”

“You
mean the way Claire used to do when I pinched her thighs with my toes?” I
laughed with Brody. He’d witnessed my torture of Claire on numerous occasions.

“Dude,”
Brody announced to Ethan. “Hope’s got toes like lobster claws!”

I
glanced in the mirror and captured Ethan’s eyebrow reaction.

“They
don’t look like lobster claws,” I argued. “They’re strong like them.” I gave
Brody’s shoulder a shove. “Try not to make me sound like a crustacean, will
you?”

Brody
formed silent but exaggerated kisses in the air. Was he all of twelve? Ethan
smiled as my face flushed red. I shoved my head as far back into the seat as it
would go, waiting for the moment to pass. But I did think it most unfortunate
that my Jeep (an early college present) didn’t come standard with passenger
ejection seats.

Brody,
clueless, shuffled through my album of CD’s, pausing at one of my sister’s
favorites,
Heartless Bastards
.
Changing topics without missing a beat, he asked brightly, “Claire’s coming
around. Don’t you think?”

“Absolutely,”
I agreed. “Another twenty or thirty years and she’ll be all yours.”

           
Brody smiled a toothy smile. “Hey, if she’s half as hot
in twenty years, I’ll still take her when she’s old.”

“I bet
you would—toothless and hairless, too!” I started to laugh then caught sight of
Ethan’s reflection in the mirror. My mind couldn’t process what my eyes were
seeing.

“Let’s
not get carried away.” Brody’s voice sounded muffled, as if he spoke from a
great distance. “I have my reputation to con—”

I looked
to my right and Brody was gone. I slammed on the brakes, coming to a dead stop
along the secluded path. Wheeling around in my seat, I turned and faced Ethan.
He was disappearing then reappearing like some unseen hand was flipping a light
switch off and on—and he was the light!

Despite
the difficulty of it, he seemed determined to stay with me. I could see the steadfastness
on his face—his desire to stay with me. The strength of his will was almost a
physical entity. When the flashing stopped, Ethan gently brushed the back of
his hand over my cheek. The effect was mind-numbing. It was all I could do not
to reach out and grab onto him for dear life, but my mind raced with the
possibility of repercussions. Had something gone terribly wrong? What if my
actions made it worse?

My mouth
was moving, but I didn’t think I was saying anything. “It’s going to be all
right,” Ethan assured me, stroking my cheek. “But there’s something I need to—”

“You
think you know me,” I blurted, reaching up to touch his hand.

“Yes,
there’s that, but—” He looked surprised, but, thankfully, also very solid. “I
was about to say I think we once shared a history.”