He showed them how to tie in, belay, and read the route. He explained the grading system. He also explained that falling was normal, expected, and that they should not be embarrassed about it.
“Everybody falls,” he said cheerfully. “The wall is designed to make you fall. The question is, what do you do afterward?”
“Um, quit?” Claire offered. “Or cry? Maybe crying is better.”
“No, you climb again,” Kai said with the smiley confidence of a twenty-five-year-old who had never even reorganized a pantry alphabetically or chosen napkin colors for a birthday party. He hadn’t lived yet. What did he know?
They started at the beginner wall. It was the shortest one in the gym, maybe twenty feet tall. It had large holds in primary colors that looked like they were begging to be grabbed. This was probably a wall that toddlers with strong forearms could climb. Surely it wouldn’t be much of a challenge.
Nina went first because she was still riding the momentum of being the first, and it turns out she was pretty good at it. Not flashy, not fast even, just steady and methodical, taking one hold at a time.
She climbed the way she grieved, slowly and carefully, never letting go of one thing until she was sure she had a hold of the next one.
Harper went second and scaled the wall like she was late for a meeting at the top. Of course, she had the longest legs and arms out of the three of them. She was competitive and athletic, and this was how she approached everything: with speed and determination, and with absolutely no thought or interest in doing anything wrong.
She reached the top in what felt like thirty seconds and then looked down at them with an expression of satisfaction before rappelling back down as if she had been doing this her entire life.
“Your turn,” Nina said to Claire.
Claire looked at the wall. Twenty feet. A rope attached to her harness. Kai at the bottom, ready to grab her.
Everything was perfectly safe, all perfectly manageable, and all perfectly terrifying.
She put her hands on the first hold and started climbing. She was fine for the first ten feet, actually better than fine. It was as if her body remembered what her brain had forgotten.
How to stretch her arms and reach for things. The satisfaction of pulling yourself up. The physics of just regular weight and leverage.
She had been a gymnast in high school, which was now a lifetime ago. Somewhere deep in her muscles, the memory must have still lived. Dusty but functional, like a book she pulled from a shelf after thirty years. She could do this!
At about fifteen feet, she made the terrible mistake of looking down. The gym floor was right below her, further than it should have been.
Kai was a small figure holding a rope, while Harper and Nina looked up at her with tilted heads and mouths slightly open.
Now the wall seemed less like a fun challenge and more like a vertical surface that was actively trying to take her life. Yep, this was it. The news would say a poor fifty-year-old woman lost her life falling fifteen feet onto a padded floor because she panicked. What an embarrassing way to go out.
And when they asked her husband for a comment, he wouldn’t have even realized she was gone until at least dinner time.
Claire’s hands locked on the holds.
Her feet locked onto the footholds, and then her entire body said, “Nope.”
She froze.
And not in the dramatic kind of freezing that happens in a movie where the character gasps, and the music swells. This was the quiet kind of freezing where all of your muscles suddenly stop cooperating. Your brain says move, and your body just says,” That’s going to be a no from me.”
Claire hung on the wall fifteen feet up and couldn’t go up or down or do anything but grip the hold so tightly that her knuckles went white. Her forearms started to burn. She could hear her heartbeat in her ears.
“Claire,” Kai called up. “You okay?”
No, she was not okay. She was hanging on to this fake rock in a converted warehouse in Charleston, having what she would suspect was either a panic attack or a profound spiritual experience, and she couldn’t tell the difference.
“Just take a breath,” Nina said from below. Her voice was calm and steady. She knew this was the same voice she used with Lucia when there were thunderstorms or she had had a bad dream as a kid. “You don’t have to go up. You don’t have to come down. Just breathe.”
Claire breathed. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t been breathing the whole time, but for some reason she’d needed Nina’s reminder.
The wall was cool under her hands. She could smell the chalk on her fingers. She could hear the gym around her, other climbers, the squeak of their shoes on the holds, someone laughing on the bouldering wall in the next section.
All normal and safe sounds. She was not going to die. She was just going to hang on this wall and breathe and figure out what to do next.
