The In-Between Hour. Barbara White Claypole

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СКАЧАТЬ cosmic joke that wasn’t funny. And it had spun out of control. Time to bring the charade to a close.

      Tucking the bouquet under his arm, Will scrambled up the slick rock behind the rustic summerhouse. As he sat, his iPhone vibrated in his pocket.

      “Hey, Dad. How did you sleep?”

      “Good, good. Had a great day, son. Had a great day.”

      “Had? It’s only nine o’clock.”

      “Been to Walmart and bought a map.” The old man chuckled. Chuckle was a verb Will hated, a word he would never use in his writing. His dad, however, was definitely chuckling. “Bought me a huge world map, son. To track Freddie’s trip.”

      “I know, Dad. You told me yesterday.”

      “I plan on showin’ it to that new guy, Bernie, down the hall. His grandsons visit every Sunday. Take him to that fancy diner on Main Street for blueberry pancakes. Wait till I tell him the whole cotton-pickin’ story about Freddie. Hell. Five years old and he has a passport. I never owned one, son. Never been outside the state.”

      Will flopped onto his back. Droplets of mist fluttered to his sunglass lenses, but in his mind a slab of grief was falling from heaven, crushing him into dust. Three months and nine days, and each hour the grief took on a more solid form.

      “Willie? You still there?”

      Will positioned the bouquet across his chest like an arrangement of funeral lilies. “Dad, Freddie isn’t—”

      “Able to contact us. Yes, yes, you told me yesterday. Shame on you, son. Just ’cos Freddie’s out of reach don’t mean we should give up on him, do it?”

      “Dad—”

      “Sorry, son. Poppy’s here with some more of them colored markers. Got to go.”

      For real? His dad had hung up on him? Will stared at a flock of gray pigeons moving silently through a gray sky. Always he forced himself to look up, never down, forward never backward, and yet these days his mind lingered in places he didn’t want to visit: the last game of tickle monster; Freddie pumping his legs on a swing and singing “The Wheels on the Bus”; Freddie standing alone on a crowded street because the woman who should have been holding his hand had wandered off to look at a pair of five-hundred-dollar shoes in a boutique window.

      If only he’d paid as much attention to Cass’s personality as he had to her ass, then maybe he would have figured out that she was a total psycho and self-medicating with alcohol. You’d have thought, given his childhood, he’d be able to spot crazy—despite the disguise of a well-cared-for body poured into sexy, couture clothes. Unlike his mom, Cass could’ve afforded the best treatment. When Will was sixteen, he’d found a psychiatrist who would take Medicaid patients, but always his dad had the same answer: “I’ve seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, son. Besides, your mama’s just high-strung. That’s the price we pay for her beauty.” As if his dad were really that shallow.

      Will breathed through his nostrils, panting like a beast.

      He’d spent three decades praying he didn’t have a dark side, since that concept came with seriously twisted DNA. Retreat was his strategy for relationships; anger was a soul-sucking distraction he had learned to push aside...and yet. And yet. If he allowed himself to think of Cassandra, the person who had murdered his son, who had turned his baby into a statistic, another kid killed by a drunk driver with a blood alcohol level of point two-six, Will would have to admit that he was capable of violence. How could he wish two people were still alive for such different reasons—Freddie so he could hold him and never let go; Cassandra so he could kill her himself?

      Will jumped up and scrambled down the rock. There was only one thing left to do.

      * * *

      The light would be fading and the temperature dropping as he down-climbed, but he wanted to feel air on his back, on his exposed skin; he wanted to strip away his layers. If he could climb naked, he would. Will tugged his T-shirt over his head and tossed it into the trunk of the Prius along with his iPhone.

      He pulled back his shoulders and stretched into a swan dive without leaving the ground. The clutter in his brain floated away, disappeared into the blue sky above the Shawangunk Mountains like a handful of balloons set free.

      Nothing existed beyond the challenge ahead: the mastery it would take to scale Shockley’s Ceiling; the choreography of his body moving across the horizontal cracks; the euphoria of standing above the world and looking into the face of God.

      He was going unroped.

      He would ride doubt and push aside fear, and trust in nothing but his own judgment. And the payoff would come as his mind and body lapsed into harmony. When everything reconciled. When he found clarity. When he knew what to do next.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ