CHAPTER NINETEEN
MATEO
“WE FOUGHT ABOUT IT, DADDY and me,” Elizabeth says, nodding back toward the bench and the grave site, purposely out of sight around the corner. After I’d given her three or four minutes, she’d silently risen and walked past me to this place, as if she couldn’t face the small white cross any longer, with Rachel Frasier written in tiny letters on it. I wouldn’t have given her a tissue if I had one. My role was merely to sit and wait.
“Before she died, in those last weeks, Mom said she wanted to be buried on the mountain. Dad said that meant we should spread her ashes — just come up here and toss them into the wind. But she’d said buried. So, I fought him. I told him we needed to dig a hole and put the urn inside it. Mom used to love that spot over there. It’s where she came to be alone, and where we came to be together. If we’d spread her ashes, she wouldn’t be here. She’d be everywhere. I don’t suppose that makes sense, but it’s how I felt.”
I say nothing. I let her eyes meet mine, and I wait.
“You asked why I didn’t want to sell the mountain. Why it mattered so much to me to keep it in the family.”
“I under—”
“You don’t, though. It’s a small spot, and the trail bottom is hard to find. If I hadn’t shown you this was here, you’d probably never have known. Nor would your climbers. Maybe you’d build at the summit—” She looks upward and to the left, to the top of my new property. “—but not here. There’s a lot of sentiment, but I know that her ashes aren’t her. One little final resting place isn’t enough to keep me here, and you’d never have bothered it.”
She sniffs and wipes at her eyes, but we’ve been here in silence plenty long enough for them to stop streaming. Around this corner, I suppose she feels as if she won’t have to face the grave. As if it doesn’t exist. I want to find another way through the brush, so we won’t have to go back to the trailhead. I want to save her from having to see it — to remember — again.
She looks at me. I expect her to continue; but instead, she gives me a sad smile. I see her younger days, the person deep inside — the one she keeps so carefully hidden.
“We’re a lot alike,” she says.
It’s a total change of direction, and I need a minute to find my reply. Even when I do, I want to say, No we’re not — not at all. But I don’t. I can’t. Not right now.
“You want to find people’s limits, right? That’s what your challenge is about.”
“That, or measuring dicks,” I say. My tone is light.
The joke lands as it should. Her smile returns. “I was just messing with you. I do understand. I don’t know if my dad told you, but he used to climb. His personal best was a 5.14 in Yosemite. I forget the name of the route.”
“Jesus. 5.14?”
She nods. “And a 5.12 free solo. He always adds that part. I forget what free solo means, though.”
I won’t derail her, but ‘free solo’ means that Damon Frasier is a badass. Reckless, according to some people, with no respect for life. Free soloing is climbing alone, without a partner or safety gear. Just you and the rock. One mistake and everything is over.
“I get it, is what I’m saying. I asked him why he never had anything on our mountain set up for climbing, but by then he’d had his back injury and lost the bug. But he talked about it like you do. He said that when a person tests himself in one way, he tests himself in all ways. Like each climb made him into a more complete person.”
“After you hit a certain difficulty level, it’s more mental than physical,” I say. “You have to know yourself intimately. You learn what you’re capable of, and to trust it. Same as anything. It’s not the body that keeps you going. It’s your mind.”
“You sound like him.” A smile touches her lips as she gazes across the view. “But I guess I inherited some of that bug. I got it from my mom’s side, too.”
“Your mom was a climber?”
Elizabeth shakes her head. “No. She was a teacher. Not in a school, but online. She taught people to knit. I know how that sounds, but it was so much more than needles and yarn. There was what she taught, and then there was how she taught it. Knitting was the niche she settled into. Her real brilliance was in the business she built around something so simple. She had a network of knitting websites. She held an annual conference. Had a whole staff — 13 people, I think, at the peak.”
“Just to teach knitting?”
“You’ll laugh, but Mom talked about knitting like Daddy talks about climbing. She said it doesn’t matter how a person gets to know herself, just that she does. For her, it was about mastery. She could have chosen anything — making sushi, trimming bonsai trees, growing orchids. It just happened to be knitting. But it was like meditation for her. And weirdly, that gave her and my father a common understanding. For him, climbing was meditation.”
I nod. It has to be. If you free solo anything higher than twenty feet, you're putting your life into your hands. Doing it without dying requires a yogi’s concentration and self-awareness.
“So, she expanded,” Elizabeth goes on. “After a while, she wasn’t just teaching knitting. She started teaching meditation. And self-help, and personal empowerment. She’d hear from students who said that her courses made them more confident. A lot of them got new jobs, leaving the old ones that they’d hated for years. Many left partners and husbands who were wrong for them or mistreated them. It was like she’d built this little group of soldiers who’d follow her anywhere. ‘The Yarn Army,’ she called them.”
Elizabeth laughs at this, but it’s filled with melancholy. She’s looking out, away from me, but her hands keep fussing in her lap. I want to take them. To be the chauvinist she accused me of being — not because she needs saving right now, but because something in me wants to save her. The pain in her every movement is excruciating. It’s as if she’s kept all of this pushed deep down inside herself, never letting the pressure leak. Now here it comes all at once — God knows how many years’ worth of oppression.
“My mom made me want to own my own business. In her own way, she pushed people’s limits just like Dad pushed his own. Both of them have always believed in something bigger.”
Finally, she looks at me. Her wan smile breaks my heart. “Just like you.”
“Elizabeth …”
“I always wanted to be the best I could be. I’ve driven incredibly hard, especially since Mom died. She hated that the cancer was the only thing she couldn’t master. The only thing she couldn’t find a way to conquer. But she kept teaching through all of it so that at least others could learn from her trials. I was always proud of my mom, but at that point, I couldn’t have been prouder.”
She sniffs, hard. This one has the feel of resetting — of shoving troublesome emotions aside so Elizabeth can finally get down to business.
“I’ll bet you figured I was stupid when you met me.”
“Of course not.”
But I did. The hackathon changed my mind — seeing how well she worked the room and the ideas that bloomed from her head. Then there was LiveLyfe. I saw her groups and how elite they were; I saw her friends and how respected for their minds they all are.
“I kicked ass in school,” Elizabeth says. “And I have a network that you wouldn’t believe. I collect great people with tremendous minds. I’ve belonged to half a dozen masterminds filled with geniuses in business, money, and life in general. I come by it naturally. Like my parents, I want to explore human potential. I want to see what we, as a species, are capable of.”
“And that’s why you want to build a school?”
“It’s more like an academy. For very special people.”
“Like Professor X’s school in X-Men.”
“I don’t know anything about the X-Men.”
“You can’t do it, Elizabeth. You’re not in a wheelchair.”
She squints at me as though I’m a dullard.
“And you wanted to build it here,” I say, bringing this back full circle.
“Yes. People need to get away. To isolate themselves. This place has a spiritual energy. Don’t tell me you can’t feel it.”
I feel something, but I don’t know that it’s spiritual. Elizabeth’s knee is almost touching mine. This woman I thought I hated is now magnetic. A force of nature. I feel myself wanting to spiral into her, to be closer.
“Right now, you might be thinking I’m trying to tell you a sob story,” she says. “So that you’ll back off. But that’s not what this is. I know this is over. And it’s fine.”
I sigh, about to speak. But she beats me to it.
“You’re not such a terrible guy. You wear boots like a wimp, and you dress too nice for hackathons, and you’re a horrible driver, but maybe you’re an okay steward for this place after all. I understand your race. I do. It’s the same purpose as I wanted for the mountain, just in disguise. I wanted a place to develop minds. A retreat for the smartest folks, and a school to develop them. I wanted to call it The Pike. But you’ll develop minds in your way. Her legacy?” Elizabeth nods toward the grave. “You’ll fulfill it, same as me.”
I raise a hand, but Elizabeth cuts me off.
“My plans for The Pike had other problems anyway. What hurts more than losing the mountain is accepting the fact that even if I’d kept it, nothing probably ever would have happened. It’s not about making do. It’s about letting go.”
“What problems?”
“Funding. Finding the people. Attracting them.”
“It wouldn’t be hard to attract people,” I say.
“Sure it would. You’re a businessman. I want an elite academy. It needs to be known as the best before it launches, and you know how hard that would be. But …” She shakes her head. “Can you imagine the ideas that would have come out of a place like that, if it could be done?”
Done properly, the right brain trust would be an incredibly valuable asset. Whoever owned it would be very rich — not necessarily with cash, but with information. The right innovation funnel could take the brainpower spilling off of something like Elizabeth’s academy and develop the ideas by connecting industry to inventors to consumers to distribution. The problem is that the profit model in terms of actual cash would suck. She’d never be able to charge enough in tuition to pay for the place, and without the systems to run with emerging ideas she’d fall flat on her face.
I’m intrigued by her idea. It’s fascinating enough to make me wish I had a few extra billion to spend, and a lot more time on my hands. But it would have to be done right, and that would require a lot more money than I have, and a hell of a lot more resources and connections.
But maybe she could do a smaller version. Not here. Anywhere would do, if she took her eyes off the highest point in the sky. She needs a working business model. My race can fail; I don’t need to make money right now. But Elizabeth does.
I’m warring with myself, considering reaching out for her.
But Elizabeth takes the decision out of my hands. She lays back. Her knees stay bent upward. Her hands go to her belly. I can see right through her. If I blew in the wrong direction, I swear this strong woman would snap like a twig.
She closes her eyes. Those suddenly soft, pretty green eyes of hers. Her mouth settles to neutral. Her downturned lips no longer strike me as a perpetual frown. They’re life-weary. Beautiful in a way that has more to do with spirit than skin-deep attraction.
I want more than anything to lean over and kiss those lips. To try and take away the pain.
Instead, I lay on my back beside her, my pose mimicking hers.
We’ll just be a moment. We can head down soon.
But one minute passes, then two.
Before I know it, I hear the soft, slow rhythm of breath that tells me Elizabeth has fallen asleep.
That’s weird.
But then awareness turns fuzzy, and I’m sleeping, too.