The Art of Holding On and Letting Go (6 page)

It had felt like ages to me too.

“When the skies began to clear, we argued. Max wanted another attempt at the summit. But we were already delayed, and off course. It was midmorning, not a safe time to climb higher up the mountain.

“So we headed down. Max was in the lead. We were roped together since we were off route and unsure of the terrain. We hoped to cross paths with another group, get our bearings, and maybe Max could join them to the summit while your dad and I came back for you.”

Mom's grip tightened over my hands.

“There was a sound. This deep rumbling, trembling. Like a hunger coming from far within the earth. I saw the crack forming, as if it was in slow motion. This massive ledge of snow, like an iceberg breaking free. It was in front of your dad, right behind Max. Then a thundering, a deafening roar.”

My fingers were crushed by Mom's grasp, but I didn't move.

“Your dad and I were knocked to the ground, thrown into the snow.” Her voice quivered. “But Max … he was just gone.”

She finished in a whisper. “I've never felt so helpless in my whole life.”

I squeezed my eyes tight against the heat of tears and folded myself into Mom's arms.

Mom was safe. Dad was still on the mountain. Uncle Max was missing. I stared at the breakfast foods spread across the table. Ceviche with octopus, shrimp, and scallops, guanábana juice, and a bowl of popcorn, which strangely accompanied every meal here. Uncle Max was a mastermind of popcorn concoctions. He'd introduced me to his ultimate trail mix: a blend of caramel and cheddar popcorn with peanut M&M's. Mom had not approved. And Uncle Max would not approve of the unsalted stuff here.

The last food I'd eaten was the cardboard energy bar the morning before. It didn't feel right to be hungry, yet saliva flooded my mouth. My stomach roiled with half hunger, half nausea.

“Eat,” Mom said.

“You too.” I slowly slurped the ceviche, the lime juice tingling my tongue, and I remembered Zach draining his bowl, lips smacking, Becky giggling. It seemed like so long ago.

Despite the food on her plate, Mom only sipped tea. She needed food even more than me after her struggle down the mountain.

She met my gaze. “Mr. S. gave me a meal last night when I got here.”

“Where's Coach Mel?” I asked

“She left this morning for her flight home. We didn't want to wake you. She told me to give you a big hug from her.”

I nodded. I knew she must have been more than relieved to turn me over to my mom.

I ate a few kernels of popcorn and sipped some juice, until my questions could wait no longer.

“Is Dad hurt?”

“No, not that he'll admit, anyway, just bruised. Both of us.” Mom winced and readjusted her position. “I couldn't get him to leave.”

“He's looking for Uncle Max?”

Mom nodded and sipped her tea.

“What about the avalanche transceiver?” I asked.

“No signal.” Mom's face was pained, her voice faint.

“Do you think Dad can find him?”

She set her cup on the table and shook her head. “I don't know, but he's not giving up. He's determined to find him, either way.”

Either way. Dead or alive. I shoved the bowl of ceviche away from me. The liquid sloshed over the rim.

Mr. S. appeared behind me and mussed up my hair like I was a little kid. We smiled grimly at him, and he nodded back. He moved on to clear dirty dishes from the other tables.

“Mr. S. and Coach Mel told me you finished in third place,” Mom said. “I'm proud of you.”

I shrugged. The competition felt far away and insignificant now, but one moment remained raw in my mind. “I fell,” I said.

“It happens.”

“This was different.” I described my fall, how I felt like the earth had tilted.

“It was during the semifinals?”

I nodded. “It's seems like so long ago, but it's only been five days.” I remembered how it had felt as though the universe was speaking to me. “When was the avalanche?”

Mom placed her fingers on her temples and closed her eyes. “It's been hard to keep track of time, it feels like much longer to me too.”

She opened her eyes and met my gaze. “It was five days ago.”

We sat in silence. I looked out the window at the mountains in the distance, blurred by tears. I didn't say it aloud, but I knew. My dad wasn't going to find Uncle Max alive. Max had already said good-bye.

“Let's try to do something normal for a couple hours,” Mom suggested.

We headed to town and wandered down the cobblestone streets. We admired the beautiful churches and haciendas, but there were areas with leaning shacks, cardboard walls, straw or rusted metal roofs, a shantytown. I felt so far from home. A cloud passed over the sun, and I folded my arms against the harshness of this country.

The competition climbing wall was still up in the center of the village. It'd been turned into an attraction for local kids and tourists, and the children scampered up the artificial holds and swung on the ropes. The clamor of the market reached us, and we headed that way

A group of children flocked to us, poking and tugging at our clothes. One grabbed my hand, and I jerked away reflexively. Then I felt bad, seeing her dusty bare feet, her stained clothes. I didn't have any candy or gum to give her. Coins? But I didn't have enough for all of them. The children hadn't swarmed like this when I was here before. Maybe the security from the climbing competition had kept them away. Merchants shouted and held up their goods, beckoning us toward their tables.

This was the real market, not the makeshift one that had appeared for tourists during the competition. The vendors were more organized, with tents for shade and coatracks to display their ponchos on hangers. The tables extended down the side streets too; you could weave your way through here for hours. The smell of roasting meat was stronger, and we passed a table with dark-pink pig heads. A cage of live guinea pigs sat on the ground.

I met my mom's eyes. “Yes, I think they do,” she said. She put her arm around my shoulder and steered me through the crowds.

“Wait,” I said, turning back. We had just passed a bright-red blanket on the ground, spread with jewelry. It was harder to see this time, tucked behind two tables stacked high with colorful blankets and scarves. The same woman greeted us, but her baby was awake this time. The baby gazed at us with enormous brown eyes and gave a burbling grin.

The woman nodded and smiled like maybe she remembered me.

“Mi madre,” I said, gesturing to my mom. I held out my bare wrist. “I lost our bracelets.”

The woman nodded again, then chose a tagua nut bracelet similar to the one I had before, with ivory and chocolate and caramel–swirled beads. She slipped it on my wrist, then studied Mom for a moment.

Her hands hovered over the colorful beads then settled on a bracelet nearly identical to mine. “Buena suerte para una madre y su hija. Ustedes deben permanecer unidas.”

I slowly translated the words in my head.
Good luck for a mother and daughter
. I looked to Mom to see if she understood the rest and was startled to see tears in her eyes. She fingered the beads on her bracelet.

“Don't they look old and weathered, like they really could bring good luck?” I said.

She sniffed and smiled at me and squeezed my hand. “We better get back. Mr. S. will have dinner ready soon, and I want to study his maps of Mount Chimborazo.”

“Gracias,” we said to the woman. The word didn't feel so carefree rolling off my tongue anymore. It felt foreign and heavy.

Mom lit the lantern in our room. The candle flickered and cast a warm glow around us. It almost felt like we were back at home, safe and snug in our cabin in the woods.

I offered the bed to Mom. “I'll sleep in your sleeping bag.”

“Thanks. My back could use a nice mattress for a change.”

She took off her shirt to sleep in a tank top; bruises covered her arms and back. Much worse than she'd ever had from her climbing falls.

“Mom!”

She twisted to examine her back. “I know. I hit the snow hard and slid quite a ways. But nothing's broken.”

I stared at the large, mottled brown and purple bruises.

“Don't worry, it looks worse than it feels.”

I snuggled in the down bag, glad I had offered Mom the bed. She lay on her side, propped up on her elbow, and looked down at me.

“I need to go back to Chimborazo tomorrow and meet your dad,” she said.

I began to think of what I'd need to go with her. If we stayed in one of the huts, I'd need my own sleeping bag. If I needed to trek farther up the mountain, I'd need a warmer coat, waterproof gloves. I already had my harness, but I'd need ice crampons, an ice ax. We didn't have extra money to buy a bunch of new gear for me, but maybe Mr. S. had some things I could borrow.

“Mom, didn't you say you and Dad and Max were roped together?”

She nodded.

“So what happened when the avalanche hit? Did you all get pulled down together?”

“We did. And that's how I got all these bruises, but I tried to stop myself with my ice ax, a self-arrest. Your dad too.”

“But what about Max? If he was struck by the avalanche and couldn't stop himself, wouldn't the rope have pulled you and Dad with him?”

“I don't know exactly what happened, just that at some point my ax dug in, and I was able to stop.”

Mom was quiet for a moment. “The rope was still attached to me and your dad, but it was severed after that. The other length of rope had disappeared.”

A horrifying thought crept into my mind.

“Maybe it severed over a rock or something?” I asked.

“You're not even thinking in a moment like that, it's pure panic and reflex, you're sliding and twisting, caught in a roiling monster … the rope—”

“Dad might have chopped the rope with his ice ax?”

Mom gazed at the flickering lantern. Shadows lurked on the wall.

“He won't leave the mountain. He blames himself for letting Max go. He's determined to find him.”

“But if he hadn't cut the rope,” I said, “you and dad would have disappeared too.”

“But we'll never know for sure. And that's what's killing your dad.”

Because he blames himself for killing Uncle Max. But he saved himself and Mom.

“Or Max severed the rope himself, to save us. I need to go back and help your dad,” Mom said. “And I need you to go stay with Grandma and Grandpa while your dad and I figure all this out. I rescheduled your flight to Detroit for tomorrow morning.”

I sat up in the sleeping bag. “What? I'm not leaving now. I'm going with you!”

“I know you want to be with us, and I don't want to leave you again. But you don't have the experience for Mount Chimborazo. Not where we need to go.”

“Fine, then I'll stay in one of the huts and wait for you.”

“Cara.” Mom said in her warning voice.

“Or I'll stay here with Mr. S. I could help him with the other guests. I'll do dishes, whatever.”

My voice rose higher, but Mom's remained low, steady.

“Cara, I'm really worried about your dad. He's not himself. We've lost other friends before, but not like this, not like Max. Max is like his brother. Mine too. I need you to be safe and taken care of, so I can focus on getting him home.”

“You just want me out of the way!”

“That's not what I said.”

“Just like when you went to Denali. You shipped me off to Michigan then too.”

“That was a different situation. You were younger then, and you didn't seem to mind going to Grandma and Grandpa's.”

“Well I did,” I snapped.

Mom sighed. “I didn't expect you to be upset about this. I thought you would understand.”

“I understand that you almost died, and now you're going back on that mountain without me. What if something happens to you!”

The candlelight waned, and the shadows on the wall grew bigger, darker. I burrowed deeper into the sleeping bag. Uncle Max was like my second dad. That massive, cold mountain had swallowed him alive.

“I just survived one of the worst possible accidents,” she said. “I'm not taking any chances with my life, or your dad's. I want to go home as much as you.”

“Promise?” I whispered.

“I promise.” She opened her arms, and I crawled into bed next to her. “We'll all be home soon.”

I curled up in the window seat, hugging my knees to my chest, and gazed out at a sea of clouds. The pilot announced we were at an altitude of twenty thousand feet and climbing. Almost as high as the summit of Mount Chimborazo.

Everest may be the tallest mountain in the world, but the summit of Mount Chimborazo is the highest point on Earth through which the equator passes, the farthest from the Earth's center.

“See, the Earth is spherical,” my dad had explained once. “An oblate spheroid. It's squashed at the poles like a beach ball that someone sat on, bulging at the equator. So, a mountain rising up out of that bulge is higher and closer to outer space, closer to the Moon, closer to the Sun.”

What would it be like at the top of the mountain, the thin air squeezing your lungs, the lack of oxygen suffocating your brain cells, the wind clawing at your clothes? To be at the top of the mountain, looking down at the clouds. The earth hidden below, your only view the snowcapped peaks of other mountains wreathed with clouds. Would this new land be so startling, so dazzlingly surreal, so consuming that you'd forget about the earth below? Was the power and freedom so transforming that you could forget how to descend back to the life you lived before?

Was that what compelled Mom and Dad and Uncle Max to climb higher and higher peaks? And now that we'd lost Uncle Max, could my parents come back down to earth and stay there? Could I?