Twenty Six
Early afternoon when the dusty shadows lengthened through the pines, Rilla met Adeena at Camp 4 and they collected their gear, checking the route map to make sure they’d packed what they needed. It made Rilla proud and nervous that Adeena trusted her to take the lead on the trip. Adeena handed Rilla the aid ladders, and Rilla carefully dropped them into the pack.
In the amber light, they hiked the short hike along the east face of El Capitan.
“Petra won’t be like . . . mad at about this, right?” Rilla asked, even though it seemed weird that an older girl like Petra would do that.
“No,” Adeena retorted. “Why? Do you think so?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I was asking.”
Adeena frowned, then shrugged. “We’re good.”
“I still can’t believe you two didn’t know each other before you showed up for the summer.”
“I knew enough people around the Valley. I knew if it didn’t work out, I wouldn’t be stranded.”
“Still.” Rilla picked her way around a loose boulder. “Do you live close to your family here in the States?”
“My aunt and uncle are like fifteen minutes from where I live now. And I’d visited before.”
There was a trace of defensiveness in Adeena’s tone, and Rilla clamped her mouth shut, worried she’d said something wrong or assumed something she had no right to assume.
“Petra makes you feel like she’s in control of things,” Adeena continued. “I actually didn’t think for a second there’d be a problem, because she’s always seemed so genuine and confident. But, I mean, it’s also the community. Climbers help each other out.”
“Petra does make you feel in control.” But sometimes Rilla wondered how much of it was simply a need for Petra to control a situation.
Adeena didn’t say anything else. She tipped her chin to the wall, scanning for the start of their climb, and Rilla followed her lead.
When they scrambled up the slab to the start, Adeena pulled out the aiders and unraveled them from the cordelette they’d been packed with.
“There’s a rhythm to aiding,” she said, the sun bathing her in amber and highlighting in her dark hair. “Efficient aiding makes all the difference in how long something takes and how tired you get. But it’s not the same as climbing. The better you get at the rhythm, the faster you can move through those sections.”
Adeena pulled out some gear and spent the next fifteen minutes explaining how Rilla would use the aiders. “Always make sure it’s clipped to the daisy chains, okay?” she finished.
Rilla stared dumbly, trying to cram Adeena’s instruction in her head. She dusted her hands with chalk. “I’m going to free-climb. Or attempt to. This tiny face crack stuff is my weakness.”
Rilla stood with the aiders in her hands. “I don’t even know . . .”
“All right, let’s go!” Adeena said, clapping her hands together and looking at the wall as if she was psyching herself up.
Rilla guessed she’d just figure it out. She clipped the aiders to her harness and her helmet to her head and shrugged.
In the same way chimneys had felt awkward and arêtes had felt unclimbable, the first run up the aiders felt frustratingly slow and terrible. Nothing in her body seemed to know where to go. Nothing seemed natural. She cursed and sweated and her neck and shoulders and legs ached by the end of the first pitch.
It was supposed to be faster—but Rilla swore she could have climbed it in half as much time. But this new thing was different than all the others. Now she could remember how that chimney felt and how the arête seemed impossible. She remembered failing and flailing. And she remembered working until somehow the rock relented and everything became easier. Her body had muscle memory of failing. Her mind didn’t panic, because it had been there before. This was normal. This was how she learned. She gritted her teeth and pushed back her helmet and looked upward to the boundless sky and kept on, knowing in her heart the terrible awkward feeling of failure could be sweated out and left behind.
She tried to find a rhythm. Repeating it over in her head like a song to keep time to—left step, right step, left step until you’re as high as you can. Click your heels. No place but home. Smear toe.
Reach.
Clip to the new piece.
Unclip your last ladder.
Then clip your rope.
Place a piece. Check to make sure it’s solid.
Start again.
Left step, right step, left step. High. Click. Smear. Clip this. Unclip ladder. Clip there. Clip that. And again.
Left step. Right step . . .
Pulling over a roof, Rilla’s stomach suddenly bottomed out. Fear rippled up her spine.
Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted the Valley floor—how far away it was. How much space echoed, ready to forget her existence. Every muscle tightened. A good hold was just above, out of reach, but easy to get to if she jumped. But if she jumped—all she saw was her hand outstretched. Zzzzip, zzip, thump as her gear pulled and she fell three hundred feet to smack the ground. She should have triple-checked all her gear placement. Clutching the aiders, she shifted, awkward and aching, and terrified to move.
“You okay?” Adeena shouted.
“I’m fine . . .” Rilla looked down. Her feet swung over a dusty green carpet of pines far below.
“You sure?”
Rilla swallowed.
“Trust yourself,” Adeena yelled.
Rilla readjusted her grip.
“Trust your gear,” Adeena yelled.
Rilla flicked her eyes to the gear she’d just put in the wall to hang the higher aider on.
Trust herself, her gear . . . her partner. She had to. If she didn’t, she’d just be stuck. She squeezed her eyes shut and forced herself to move.
“No wonder Petra doesn’t like this,” she huffed to Adeena, pulling to the anchors. “That was a slog.”
Adeena laughed and crisscrossed her legs. “Yeah. A slog, indeed. I like big mountains because just when I’m sick of one thing, it seems to change, at least a little. I get bored easily.”
“I hear ya.” Rilla brushed dirt off her knee, thinking of her piles of homework half-started and never finished. “I’m sorry . . . earlier. For offending you.”
“For what? I wasn’t offended.”
“I mean.” Rilla swallowed. “About your family. Assuming I knew your feelings.”
“Oh.” Adeena shrugged. “You’re fine.”
“Do you still want to climb big mountains, or do you like this more?”
Adeena looked out. The Valley reflected in the sheen of her eyes. “Oh yeah. I thought about doing a big mountain this summer, but I didn’t know how training would work with this first year of school. But, I’ve always wanted to come here. My brother had been here before when visiting family, and he made it seem magical. I needed some time from that kind of climbing. It felt like a good time to come.”
“Is your brother back in Pakistan? He’s a guide, right?”
Adeena didn’t respond right away. She redid her ponytail with her eyes fixed to the Valley. “He passed away last year, on K2. Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un.”
Rilla startled straighter. “Oh no, I didn’t—I . . .” she stammered.
“It’s okay. You didn’t know. Rilla, I don’t expect you to know everything about my life. It’s fine to ask.”
Rilla glanced at Adeena—uncertain whether to believe it was fine, or if she was trying to make her feel less stupid. “I’ve never heard you speak . . .” Shit, what did people from Pakistan speak? Pakistani? No, that was what they were called. Right? Sweat pricked the back of her neck. She had to show Adeena she wasn’t racist. “Your native language.” Nailed it.
Adeena side-eyed her. “Arabic is not my native language.”
“Uh . . .” Shit.
“I can speak it. But my native language is Shina. I was quoting the Quran. We are Allah’s, and to him we shall return.”
Rilla’s face burned. She swallowed and looked at her chalk-dusted fingernails. The Quran. “Oh, that’s why you went off to pray. You’re Muslim?”
“Yep. And just so you know, it’s pronounced moos-lihm. Not muh-slem.”
Suddenly Lauren jumped into her head. You need to apologize. Rilla frowned. No. It was an honest mistake. Not wrong. Just . . . ugh. She bit her lips. “I am so sorry. I just haven’t ever met someone from the Middle East.”
Adeena snorted. “Aaaand, I’m not from the Middle East. Pakistanis are South Asian.”
“Oh my god!” Rilla shouted, pounding her fists on her knees. “Why am I so awkward? I’m gonna shut up now.”
Adeena laughed. “You have got to give yourself a break. I’m sure there’s plenty I don’t know about West Virginia.”
“I’m not a good representative of West Virginia,” Rilla said. “I’m basically the stereotype everyone there hates anyway. Everyone else probably knows Pakistanis are South Asian.” She was careful to pronounce Pakistani like Adeena did.
“I’m not sure I should visit any time soon.” Adeena said with a chuckle. “But I do hear the New River Gorge is nice.”
“It’s not like everyone thinks,” Rilla said. “I know what y’all think. It’s not some totally backwoods, shitty, racist state. Some people are assholes, but that’s everywhere, right? People are nice, we’re just . . . not . . . I don’t know. It’s beautiful. And has the nicest people. I miss it so much.” She looked down. “I hate feeling like this.” This awkward urge to defend the place she’d come from, against things that might be true for some, but were not true for all. “Do you miss Pakistan?”
“Always. It’s my home. But I have complicated feelings about it.” Adeena smiled with understanding. “I didn’t mean to make you feel shitty about where you’re from.”
Rilla ducked her head. “It’s okay. Sorry for being a tool.”
“You weren’t!” Adeena said. “Now, if you’d been shitty after I corrected you, then you would have been a tool.”
Rilla smiled. “Glad I wasn’t shitty.”
“Me too.”
Rilla unscrewed the cap on her water as the wind gusted. “You’re a good teacher with the aiders. I appreciate it. A good teacher makes all the difference.”
“It’s only what I want to do for the rest of my life,” Adeena said. “So I’d better be good at it.”
“Not climbing for the rest of your life? Teaching? Is that what you’re going to school for?”
“I’m in school for an MBA. What I really want to do is run a nonprofit to teach girls to climb. Girls at home . . . girls everywhere . . . need something like climbing in their lives, I think.” She stretched her arms in front of her. “Climbing taught me I own this body. I own my mind. It gave me a safe place to grieve and grow and want something beyond the life I had. I am lucky to have this opportunity—this gift. This is a privilege not afforded to most people.”
“Yeah . . .” Rilla bit her fingernail absently, terrified to take those feelings and apply them to herself. “I can’t believe I’m here.”
Adeena smiled. “Same.” She glanced at her phone. “Err . . . Petra just texted. She’s wondering where we are.”
“Are you going to tell her we’re climbing?”
“I’m going to ignore the text. We can just meet her at Camp 4.”
They ate their apples and chucked the cores, watching them sail through the deepening afternoon shadows into the abyss. No sound accompanied their disappearance.
The sky shifted to the dark purple and hot pink of alpenglow, and they lowered out and began the short hike along the base of El Cap, back to Camp 4.
“Dee!” Ajeet’s shout echoed as they picked their way through the scree.
Adeena and Rilla both looked up, into a group of climbers in the Alcove, taking turns on a swing that someone had hung from bolts on a climb arching over the slanted ledge.
“Hey,” Adeena called back, and they crawled up the slab, looking out over the Valley and the sloped green-carpeted walls and gray gullys facing them.
A line of dusty climbers waiting their turn waved and introductions were made.
“You going to swing?” Ajeet asked Rilla. Ajeet was the climber who had prayed over her first meal at the Grove.
“I . . .” She watched as a climber clipped the hanging carabiners to their harness and leapt off the ledge—because of the overhang of the arch, the rope swung out into the wide open, before swooping back under the ledge. It took three others to pull the swinger back in to unclip.
“Sure,” she replied.
When it was her turn, Adeena clipped her into the swing. And with the lock of the carabiner’s gate, her heart jumped in her neck. What if this time, it broke? This tiny piece of string she was going to bounce on. She had to trust that the rope would hold for her, just the same as it held for everyone else. Clutching the rope, she jumped.
As the wind rushed to greet her, she laughed with joy.
•
Back at the Grove, she washed her hands and presented herself as assistant to Gage. “At your service,” she said, hands outstretched. It was dark and everyone seemed to be coming in and cleaning up, looking hungrily toward the kitchen.
He chuckled. “I need you to wash the spinach.” He nodded to some grocery bags stuffed with fresh picked spinach sitting by the sink.
“Where did you get this?” She hadn’t seen a garden around.
“A farmer outside the park.”
“I guess it could grow . . .” She shrugged. “Since it’s cool at night.”
“Did you live on a farm at home in West Virginia?”
“No.” She pulled out a handful of spinach and tossed it into a colander, turning on the water. “I lived in a duplex. But my granny had a big garden before she died. I used to help her weed.”
“My grandma gardened too. Flowers. She had incredible roses.”
“Oh, roses are so beautiful. They grew on the side of our house and I always loved it when they bloomed.”
Rilla emptied the other bag of spinach and started washing the leaves of the dry dirt. “What are we making?”
“Gochujang bibimbap. It’s hot rice and beef with vegetables basically.”
“Cool.” She shook the colander and glanced over her shoulder at him. “You’re in school?”
“Structural engineering.” He nodded.
“How did you get into climbing?”
“I went to a friend’s birthday party in fifth grade that was at a local climbing gym, and I just got hooked. I loved it. I had a lot of energy as a kid . . .” He cleared his throat. “. . . and my parents were pretty relieved when I found an outlet.”
Rilla laughed. “A lot of energy is usually code for trouble. Were you a troublemaker, Gage?” She glanced over her shoulder, teasing.
He suppressed a smile as he cut cucumbers. “Of course not. I was a well-behaved, adorable child. I absolutely did not torment my parents by climbing out of my bedroom window when I was six.”
She could just imagine a rambunctious little boy version of Gage with his button-up and a terrible grin. “All I did was practice the piano and read quietly,” he finished.
She snorted.
“I’m kidding, I was a terror.”
“No!” she said in mock surprise.
Something wet hit the back of her head. She squealed as a cucumber chunk hit the floor. “Ah. Spinach is not a good weapon.” She plucked a leaf from the bowl. “On guard.”
He shook his head. “You’re supposed to be cleaning. Not playing.”
“I wasn’t the one who launched cucumbers.”
She handed over the colander piled high with washed spinach and followed his instructions for laying out the food.
And when they sat down to eat, Rilla dug into her bowl of hot rice, julienned cucumbers, zucchini, sprouts, spinach, mushrooms, and radishes in colorful piles, with steaming tenderized beef to the side, and a hot chili paste for the top. “This is my new favorite food,” Rilla said.
Something about it felt like home—maybe just the same things, cucumbers from Granny’s garden, spicy radishes eaten raw, and tenderized beef served over cheap rice. Who knew that food could make her feel the potential for home existed in places she’d never even seen?