“Claire?” Harper called up. Her voice was quite a bit different from Nina’s. More direct. It was the voice she always used in meetings when someone needed to make a decision and seemed to be stalling. “Listen, you have two choices. You can come down, and that’s fine. We’ll be proud of you for just trying. Or you can look at that next hold. Just the next one. Don’t look up at the top. Don’t look at the ground. Just look at the next hold and decide if you can reach it.”
Claire looked at the next hold. It was blue, maybe two feet above her right hand. It was shaped like a jug, which Kai had said was the easiest kind, and it was right there within her reach.
So she reached for it.
Her hand closed around the blue hold. She pulled hard, and her feet found the next foothold. And then she was moving again. It was definitely neither graceful nor fast. She probably looked like a monkey on espresso trying to get to that next hold.
Just one hold at a time, the way that she had seen Nina climb, the way Nina did everything now. Just one grip to the next. She didn’t look down again. She didn’t look up either.
She just looked at the next hold, then the next, then the next. The wall started to pass under her hands and feet.
The sounds of the gym faded, and there was nothing but her, the rock, the quiet, and the stubborn act of going up, even as everything in her wanted to let go.
Suddenly, her hand hit the top.
Claire Morrison, fifty years old, a third-grade teacher, napkin chooser, onion chopper, and wife of a man who watched the ’95 Braves on repeat, touched the top of that climbing wall inside a converted warehouse in Charleston and burst into tears.
These weren’t sad tears, not the kind that she swallowed for most of the last few years. These were the other kind, the kind that came from being proud of yourself when you haven’t felt like feeling in years. Maybe decades.
She hung at the top of the wall and cried.
Below her, she could hear Nina clapping and Harper whistling.
“Get down here so I can hug you!” Nina shouted.
Claire rappelled down.
It was also shaky and graceless, and she did bump into the wall twice, almost knocking herself out. But when her feet hit the ground, Nina grabbed her and held on.
Then Harper grabbed both of them.
And the three of them stood in the climbing gym, chalky, sweating, crying, and laughing.
Kai just stood off to the side, looking pleased with himself and a little bit confused, which was probably his default expression when dealing with fifty-year-old women who were having emotional breakdowns and breakthroughs right in front of his beginner wall. Ah, to be twenty-five again. He had no idea what life would bring him.
The three women sat on a bench in the late-afternoon sun, drinking water and watching King Street do what it did on Saturdays.
It was filled with tourists with shopping bags, couples holding hands, and horse-drawn carriages clip-clopping past, as if Charleston were still in the nineteenth century.
Claire’s arms were shaking. Her hands were raw from chalk. She felt like she’d been wrung out and then hung up to dry.
The wall had shattered everything she was holding inside, leaving her feeling lighter than she had in months. Now, she sat on the bench with her two best friends, feeling unexpectedly free despite having spent the last twenty minutes crying.
“Well, that was month four,” Harper said, smiling. “We’re a third of the way through.”
“Yeah, but one third of the way to what?” Nina asked.
“I don’t know, to whatever we’re becoming, I guess.”
It was an un-Harper thing to say, almost philosophical. The kind of statement she’d normally just deflect with sarcasm.
The horse-drawn carriage turned the corner and disappeared.
“I froze on that wall,” Claire said.
“Yep, you did,” Nina agreed.
“And I kept going.”
