When I Knew You (7 page)

She'd had that hanging from her rearview mirror when I first met her four years ago. She was the only woman on the crew teaching rock climbing that weekend and was by far the best climber. More than once all of us wannabees would watch her gracefully dance up the rock, making it look so easy that we were instilled with a load of false confidence. Every ounce of which would be dashed when we got our feet off level ground.

We were on a break and I had just gotten off my borrowed climbing shoes. Pilar had a ridiculously long stretch of webbing which she was pulling into a series of interconnected loops called a daisy chain. "Do you want to learn how to do this?" she asked me. At her feet were more piles of brightly colored webbing, nylon strips that were set in place to hold the climbing rope to the wall.

"Absolutely," I said, picking up a length of red.

No one in my family knew I was there that weekend. Rock climbing class was my secret, by necessity. When your mother has a traumatic brain injury, nobody is too crazy about the idea of you increasing your chances to get one too.
 

We were climbing in an area east of town, Hueco Tanks. The desert had the scent of clarity and tenderness seeping out of the ground, set free by the delicate hammer of rainfall that had fallen the day before.
 

It was a big group, about 30 students, clustered in groups. The fit older guys who were adding to their adventure portfolios. Students who considered this a step up in maturity from skateboarding. A handful of older women who were bonding. Two couples with well-worn packs and hiking shoes that looked like they'd been re-soled. Twice. And the meager collection of singles, both men and women, inserting risk in a life that had been, up to that day, as safe as airbags and over protective mothers could make it.

I fit firmly in the last category, taking my first steps in risk and rebellion as tentatively as possible. I'd taken some self-defense classes, even one semester of karate, but kicking and punching was never my thing. Taking on a boulder sounded more interesting. My feet were crushed into tiny black soled shoes, ballet shoes of the rock, the rubber treated to grip surfaces generally left to the toes of geckos and daddy long-legs. I had spent the morning moving up the tiny protrusions in the surface of the boulder, amazed with each step that I was rising above the ground through the power of my arms, balance of my hips and the magic ballet shoes.

When I reached the top of my first boulder on the first day of climbing, I sat there, watching as the sun sliced through the soggy cloud cover, shining golden beams down on the ground. The land glowed in the slices of light, dust traveling up into the moist air. The rope fell flat against the trail I had just climbed, a very vertical trail of crevices and huecos, holes carved by rainwater, a route that as visible to veteran climbers as an asphalt road, but was still nearly invisible to my beginner's eyes.
 

If I can do this, I thought, I can do anything. If I can climb up here, reach the top of a rock I swore was impossible to climb just an hour before, I can do anything in the entire world. Including leaving home.
 

After that, I hooked up with a group of beginning climbers, running into Pilar every now and then. She'd be making her way up much harder climbs with much cooler people. Then two years later, after I finished my training to be a ropes course facilitator, I ran into her again. I'd landed the job at Hill Country Retreat (known as HCR in town) and the group had set up a short trip to Reimer's Ranch, the local crag for climbers.
 

We came around a curve on the trail and saw a group of climbers, seven or so, all looking up at the woman on the rock wall, up about thirty feet. It was Pilar. She was lead climbing a tough route, climbing from point to point with the rope trailing her. She had three contacts on the wall—one hand was holding onto a thin slice of rock, her feet precisely placed to give her the maximum stretch for clipping into the next bolt. The muscles in her legs were taut, cords of veins crossing the surface as she pulled up a length of black and red rope, secured it in her teeth and reached down for another length.
 

Her belay partner on the ground, an older, dark-haired guy with deep brown skin stained from sun and sweat and muscles like a linebacker, quickly played out enough rope for her to work with, never taking his eyes off of her. She was more than fifteen feet above her last bolt, a bolt with a carabiner holding the rope that would normally keep her safe from hitting the ground if she slipped or missed the next move. Typically sport climbers, once they get past the first bolt, are relatively secure. If they fall, they'll swing from the pivot point of the carabiner hooked into the first bolt that had been drilled and glued into the wall years ago.
 

But on some climbs, particularly the more difficult ones, bolts can be much further apart. That means if you fall while climbing between bolts, or worse, right before you manage to clip into the next one, your fall is longer. She now had enough rope out that if she were to miss this move, she'd hit the ground.
 

Everyone lounging below was silent, leaning forward, leaning toward her, mentally pushing to keep her against the rock wall through the force of their own attention. Pilar showed no signs of strain, seeming casual as if she was standing on an escalator instead of mere millimeters of limestone. There was no wasted movement as she lifted the long loop, the "bite" of rope, and clipped it into the carabiner hanging from the bolt over her head. A collective sigh rippled through the gathered crowd.

"Shit, Pilar," her belay partner said, shaking his head as he began pulling in the slack of the rope.

"What?"
 

"You had us freaking out." A few members of the group laughed in agreement.
 

She made a few moves, a smile on her face. "Y'all needed the drama."

"Tell that to my cardiologist."

That day Pilar set up top ropes for our group, lead-climbing routes none of us would dare try on our own. Top roping is the safest way to climb because you are always secured from the top. The rope goes from the belay person to the top of the climb, through two bolts at the top, then back down to the climber. You simply can't fall more than a foot. But someone has to go up the wall first to set the ropes in place, and if you don't have a good enough climber in your group, you're stuck.

Three weeks after I saw Pilar, one of the assistants at HCR got caught with the owner's daughter in the equipment barn. I'd convinced my boss to hire Pilar as the replacement on the facilitating team. Which is why every week I was "catching" on belay one of the best climbers in the state who was falling from platforms on purpose, knowing I would always keep her safe.

She trusted me. Now she didn't have a leg.

 
I stuffed a duffle with clothes I'd bought from the thrift store with the little money I could pull from an ATM around the corner from the hospital. I barely registered the drive until around midnight.
 

I pulled into a truck stop in Fort Stockton as my eyes began to shift in their sockets, desperate to close. I crawled into the rear camper bed and woke to the strafing of semi truck headlights pouring through the narrow opening in the curtained windows hours later. I cleaned up, heated up a burrito in the truck stop's micro and hit the road.

The terrain had changed completely from the plains I'd driven through early in the evening. Desert valleys stretched between small mountains, distant brothers to the Franklin Mountains of El Paso. I began to relax, feeling at home in the place I was born, where cactus and granite shared space and solitude. On the passenger seat next to me was a cassette tape recorder from the thrift store, and an unopened pack of batteries. I should listen to it again. Later, I thought.
 

Streaks of purple were slicing across the sky, sunrise reaching into the night to unlock the darkness ahead of me. When you drive west in the morning, time elongates. Sunrises last twice as long as when you drive away from them, but you can never get going fast enough to really escape. The light will come soon enough, ripping off the comforting darkness that had reduced the size of your world to the glow of your dashboard lights. Then you have to face what the universe has thrown at you, there are no more safe shadows, no warm spots under the covers. The next day arrives, refusing to be ignored or avoided.

I'd be in El Paso in a matter of hours, but I had no idea what to do when I got there. Was it safe to see Abuela and Antonia? Would I be putting them in danger? Did they know what happened? Who was the man they warned Pilar about?

Eliah's face flashed across my mind. Not the face he wore for months while I attempted to avoid him in social settings. The face at the fire. The one that made the pit of my stomach get cold and hard and my courage shrink into a tight little ball. I checked the review mirror, wondering if he was back there, somewhere, figuring out that I wasn't dead.

Getting home made so much more sense hours ago, but with miles under me it started to seem dangerously idiotic. If Eliah was looking for me, it would be the first place he'd go. He knew I was from El Paso, although I'd never gone into much detail, I didn't imagine it would be hard for him to find my family there. Who the hell was he? He obviously wasn't the glad-handing geeky insurance guy I thought he was when he came to the ropes course.
 

There were dozens of times I'd seen him over the last few months, but I couldn't remember anything that came close to the face I saw at the fire. I never saw that coming. What else was I missing?

Fabens was the next place with a decent size gas station. I had to try to call home, maybe pick up one of those prepaid cell phones. But first, church. Antonia said to go to the church, to see Father Henry.

Chapter 11

The church in San Elizario was the less popular sister of the missions in El Paso, resting in the historical shadow of Ysleta and Socorro, but no less beautiful. The plaza in front of the church still had the pecan trees, their trunks circled with a dirty white skirt of paint to discourage ants who, as the story went, disliked the feeling of the paint on their feet. Ants never seemed that picky to me.

The plaza itself was hard packed dirt, a few spots of grass surviving the pounding of fiesta goers over the years. Images of a dozen fiestas flipped through my mind: little girls dancing on the tops of their father's shoes, high schoolers walking in hormone-laced circles around the plaza holding hands until they could sneak off out of the view of their protective parents, mothers yelling across the plaza at little boys running away from them through the crowd, the metal legs of lawn chairs straining underneath abuelos and abuelas, and dull brown sparrows picking through fallen popcorn and nachos.
 

The church sat above the plaza, a plump old tia, observing with warm affection the antics of her nieces and nephews. White-washed like the trunks of the trees, the church looked pristine, its slopping sides easily shielding decades of necking teenagers, its wooden doors swinging wide open when they invariably returned years later with their tiny babies wrapped in yellow blankets.

I pulled into the side parking area, taking note of the cars but realized it was largely worthless. Would they know I was here? Who were "they" anyway? Who the hell was I running from? The engine ticked off heat with an impatient beat.
 

Sunlight brightened the curves of the walls of the adobe church, adding to the sense of serenity and sensuality, a strange and compelling mix for a Catholic church. What may have, at one time, been meant to be austere was revealed by countless painters to be something altogether different.

I got out of the truck, careful to pack the recorder into my bag, and headed inside.
 

The foyer was cool, as it had always been when I was a child. In the doorway was the marble container with holy water and I automatically reached out and dipped my fingers in to make the sign of the cross. Across the foyer were the red votives lined up at the feet of the statue of the virgin and child, their right hands raised in frozen blessing above the few flickering candles. Rows of pews, dark wood with kneeling pad raised, lined up neatly toward the altar. On the ceiling was the mural depicting some long-dead artist's odd vision of heaven, a heaven populated with the homeliest angels ever to inhabit a church. They floated above the empty pews, carrying incense and playing harps, each one with a face so odd, it was as if someone insisted they be perfectly androgynous, but in the ugliest way possible. Even their feet were big and rough as if Heaven's roads were tough on soles.

I'd sat through mass hundreds of times in this church as a child until my mother had stopped believing in just about anything. I remember the mumbling priest, the seemingly endless standing and sitting and kneeling, playing on the kneeling pad, which was the only softness seat in the entire place.
 

"Can I help you?"

I whirled, startled. I didn't see anyone at first.
 

"Down here."

I looked down. A tiny man in a priest collar stood there, an oversized smile on his face, thick hands clasped in front of him. He couldn't have been four feet tall.

 
"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to startle you. I keep doing that. The ladies in the office are always telling me to get louder shoes."

"Really?" I said, confused. Certainly they wouldn't see him coming, I thought, then winced, waiting for lightening to strike me down. Making mental fun of a little person priest had to be pretty high on the sin parade.

He leaned in conspiratorially, and I found myself crouching a bit. "I catch them gossiping. Now they never know when it's safe."

"That's... ironic," I said.
 

He looked surprised, then let out a delighted laugh. "You know, you're right about that."

"I'm actually looking for Father Henry," I said. "Is he here today?"