The In-Between Hour. Barbara White Claypole
He grabbed his chalk bag and his nylon shoes. The rest of his rack was still in the car from his last climb. He would sort it out when he returned to the city.
Will began walking. He followed the connector trail to a twenty-foot-wide toe of rock and ignored the small group of tourist spectators. A woman with a pair of binoculars giggled.
Loss of concentration leads to poor self-control and frantic climbing.
Already, he was reading the route, decoding the puzzle, figuring out individual moves. He could climb left of the roof, but no, he would not avoid the crux. He would face the obstacle and crank it. A deceptive 5.6, pitch three demanded more skill than less-experienced climbers realized.
He strode past the large flake to the right and arrived at the base of the climb. He cracked his knuckles and stared up at the rock. No doubt, no thought except for one: I can do this.
* * *
An easy mantel would get him over. Don’t think, don’t hesitate, don’t stop.
Will pushed down on the ledge with his hands, swung his feet up, balanced and stood. Hard not to feel a little gripped. He had cleared the roof; he had nailed the crux. But he had to keep going. Momentum would take him the last sixty feet to the top. Soon he would rest but now wasn’t the time. His mind was often ready to quit before his body. He was not going to flame out.
He stepped around the corner to the second roof and eyeballed his next hold, trusting his left hand for balance.
He dipped into his chalk bag, blew on his fingertips, reached up with his right hand, found a roundish hold, gripped with his finger pads. The muscles in his shoulder stretched out. Taut. For a moment he hung, suspended in air. Time grew still, stripped down to a single camera shot, a study in absolute control. The world stopped breathing. There was nothing beyond the rhythm of the climb flowing through his limbs, through his muscles, through his breath.
He pictured his next move—a heel hook—held it in his mind, executed it. He was over the second roof.
Grabbing, pulling, swinging, Will kept moving upward into the sky.
When he topped out, he threw back his head and let his spirit soar toward the heavens. He released his voice into the air: a scream of triumph, a scream of existence, a commitment to life issued in his own private chapel. The echo floated down to the forest below, to the vast seascape of green speckled with advancing fall. Green, the color of rejuvenation, the color of life. His mind was clear; he knew his way forward. His work-in-progress may have grown cold, but Freddie’s adventure had a heartbeat. So what if it was fiction with an audience of two? He was crafting a better version of the truth, crafting a story worth living for, a story to remember. Giving his dad the gift of untainted memories when he had so few left.
Will flung his arms wide. Standing above the world, he got it. He finally got it.
In the four years since his mom’s death, his dad had been a mess of binge drinking and misfiring brain signals. Only a few weeks ago the old man had said, “People tell you it gets easier, son. But that ain’t the truth. Every day I miss your mama more.” Despite the mashed-up memory, his dad never forgot how much he still loved that one person who’d meant everything.
Just as his dad had never let go of his mom, he would never let go of Freddie.
He would never stop missing Freddie, and he shouldn’t have tried. He shouldn’t stomp down the memories. He should bust them open. He should celebrate Freddie’s life.
As soon as he got back to his apartment, he would start researching Freddie’s adventure. His last, great adventure. And for as long as it took, he would hold Freddie in the present tense.
* * *
The second he picked up his phone, Will knew he’d screwed up. Four text messages from Ally, all variations on a theme: “Where the hell are you, and why are you not answering your phone?” Then one message that said, “Have you lost your freakin’ mind?”
As he tugged his T-shirt over his neck, he glimpsed the tiny scar Ally’s teeth had left on his bicep. Thanks to his mother’s stories, he’d grown up believing that true love was a narrow path with room for only one. What a masochistic legacy to hand a commitment-phobe.
They were five years old with his-’n’-hers scraped knees when Ally bit him. It was the first time he’d tried to kiss her. He tried again at seventeen, adding a declaration of love, and she slapped him. There hadn’t been a third time. When her husband lost his Wall Street job five years ago and Will hired her, even he hadn’t been sure of his motivation. But the moment Freddie entered his life, that whimsical decision to put Ally on his payroll proved to be the wisest move he’d ever made. After all, Ally had been guarding his secrets since grade school. She’d always had his back.
He hit speed dial one and pictured five feet two inches of brown-eyed female indignation.
“You went soloing?” she yelled.
“How did you know?”
“I wouldn’t be a very effective P.A. if I couldn’t weasel information out of your publicist, would I?”
Damn. That was a silly mistake. Why had he felt the need to explain his absence from the weekly spin session?
“So, what’s up?” he said.
“A journalist from the National Enquirer. She was prowling around outside the apartment when I stopped in to check messages. She wanted to know if you were the father of Cass’s little boy.”
Will ground his teeth. “What did you tell her?”
“To move or I’d call the cops, you dolt.”
“She’s just fishing, eliminating former lovers by the math of dates. No one’s buying the story that the poor loser who died in the crash with them was Freddie’s father.” Will and Cass had only agreed on one thing outside of the bedroom: keeping Freddie’s life private and his paternity secret. Will had expected everything to change once Freddie entered the school system, but Cass, who loved to travel on a whim, kept insisting on private tutoring. No preschool, no kindergarten, but Will had been gearing up to fight for first grade. A kid needed friends. How else could he survive his parents?
“No one knows the truth except you and Seth.”
“Not strictly true. Your entire P.R. office knows. And so does Cass’s publicity machine—”
“Ally, I just worked hard to clean Cass out of my mind. Can we not talk about her?”
Ally sighed heavily. “You scared me. I thought you’d do something stupid.”
Will fiddled with the beads wound around his wrist. A one-of-a-kind gift of mini skulls strung together like shrunken heads, the friendship bracelet had been Ally’s idea of a joke the first time he hit the New York Times bestseller list: In case you get bigheaded. The one person who knew him better than anyone, and even she didn’t understand. He hadn’t driven to the Gunks that morning to end his life. He’d been trying to save it.
“Come on, darling. You know me better than that.”
“Will, you’ve barely left the apartment in three months, and suddenly you want to shimmy up a rock face alone and unroped?”
“I picked a climb I’ve done many times before.”
“When you had good reasons to live.”
“I still do.”
“Not that I don’t agree with you, but since you refuse to talk with a therapist about any of this, it’s my job to make sure you’re thinking straight. What, exactly, do you have to live for? And if you answer the Agent Dodds movie deal, I’ll bite your other bicep.”
“You. Your poor, long-suffering husband. The chocolate mimosa you guys gave me for my thirtieth birthday. My dad. All good reasons to live. Happy?”
“If you’d told me you were going,