“It just doesn’t make sense. All you do is climb, work a little, live out of your van, whatever it takes to spend as much time as possible on the rock and then you quit for no good reason? Don’t you miss it?”
I flexed my hand the way I used to before I reached up for the first hold, but that had lead me to ice, to nightmares, to being on the move.
“No.”
He shook his head, smiled. “You’re like a one page story. More details would make for a better read.”
I was driving when we crossed the border into Mexico, after six days on the road.
“ID please,” the man in uniform said. He lowered his head to see into the cab better. “And your husband’s.”
I smiled at him, liking the way it rolled off his tongue, one word connecting me to Kyle indefinitely.
“We’re not married.” Kyle leaned across me to catch his eye, severing that connection quickly before it was fully formed in anyone’s mind.
After the border, hours of silence settled between us. I watched the dusty landscape through the window and tried to figure out why he had answered that question so definitively and why I cared so much. A shiver ran through me at the idea of him walking away one day. I glanced over at Kyle. Somehow he had stepped in between the nightmares and me without even knowing it. If he walked away, I would be left with them.
After a full day of confusing side roads, Kyle announced, “Here we are.” I climbed down from the truck into the small downtown. The heat rushed at me, a big cushion making everything comfortable. The sea spread out just beyond the buildings, a friendlier version of itself. He reached for my hand.
We rented a one room hut on the beach for twenty-five dollars a week. It had a bed, a hot plate, a table, one bare light bulb and a thatched roof. The bathroom was a separate building down the beach, shared with several other huts. I cleaned rooms at one of the nearby hotels and Kyle worked construction, but never full time. We didn’t make friends, although we could have. The rest of the world began to happen farther and farther away as our world narrowed to each other.
We browned in the sun, the edges between us blurring. It had been a solid month in which I’d thought only of the future and not once of the past, but it was still there, looming. It seemed heading north had only sent me farther south.
We sat on the beach in front of our hut every night after dinner and watched the polite water barely disturb the smooth sand of the shore. The warm air rested against my skin like a favorite sweatshirt. On a night a few months after we’d arrived, I dug my feet into the sand looking for the cool layers underneath while Kyle sat next to me.
“Why doesn’t everyone live like this?” he asked.
“Because they like money in their bank accounts.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
“Why do some people work their ass off just to pay off some lame house?” he asked.
“Some people like to invest in their future.”
“Why is everyone so convinced they have a future? Why not enjoy everything now?”
I looked over at him in the bright moonlight. “Some people like to build on what they have, create something—you know, a life.”
“Oh come on. That’s all an illusion. You build a life, then one day it gets pulled out from underneath you. Why bother building it in the first place?” He rolled on top of me, pressing my body into the soft sand. With his mouth inches from mine, he assumed the voice of an interrogator. “Have you ever bought a couch or had curtains that matched one?”
“No.”
“Have you ever said no to some crazy plan?”
“Not in awhile.”
He rolled off me onto his back in the sand, spread his arms wide and closed his eyes. “I have found the perfect woman.”
I laid my head on his stomach and stared at the sky. I thought of everything he did not know and swore I’d never tell him. Another night on the beach, I asked about his parents. “You never talk about them.” I studied his face. I knew he was an only child, that he had grown up with his mother, but no other details.
“There’s nothing to say.” He looked away, something closing between us.
“Do you ever talk to either of them on the phone?” I persisted.
“My dad took off, I don’t know where he is.” Kyle glanced in my direction. “Same old story. Half the population has a dead beat dad. My mom hates Alaska, she doesn’t understand why I want to be there. Every time I talk to her she guilt trips me about coming home, so I don’t call. Why are you asking me this? It’s not like you go on and on about your family. Or anything else.”
I thought about what I might say, remembering the sound of my mother’s heels in the entryway of our house. Always a fast, definitive clip. The way she whipped her long coat onto the hanger in the closet when she got home from work. Every day she headed straight for the dish rack and the wine glass that never made it to the cabinet. She filled it full, always pouring a few swallows worth into a juice glass for me. She didn’t like to drink alone. This was always Our Time. The rest of the time was Her Time. She clinked her glass to mine. I swallowed dutifully, wincing as always, as she refilled both our glasses.
My older sister always made sure she was in her room when Mom got home. She employed the same tactic Mom used with us at all times except during Our Time. That sliver between the first glass and the second when she was happy, before Dad got home and the bickering started, before the bottle was empty and she was loose with too much wine.
I tried to be gone, I tried to avoid it, but the sound of her heels, the way she stirred the still air of the house, slow and comfortably at first, pulled me toward her. I endured the information handed over in Our Time in exchange for the way she looked me in the eye, for that half smile directed at me alone. It was during Our Time that I learned that my father preferred oral sex to the real thing, that my mother had wanted to be a dancer, had auditioned and been accepted, had kept her pregnancy, me, a secret until she no longer could.
I looked over at Kyle in the hazy evening light. “All I learned from my parents is that it’s easier to be alone.”
“And that’s why you move.”
I shrugged, remembering the scratch of crampons on ice, the slide of the heel and the eventual grip of the toe.
“Maybe both our parents had it all wrong,” I said. “Maybe there’s another way.”
As the days in Mexico began to get longer and hotter, we set out north again to make it back for the start of the next fishing season. The cab of the truck pressed in, felt smaller than when we had driven down.
“Do you think we’re close?” I asked somewhere in British Columbia.
“No,” Kyle said, eyes on the road. “We’re still three days from Neely.”
“I mean you and I—do you think we really know each other?” I tried to imagine the words, how I would start to tell him.
He kept his eyes on the road. “We just spent six months living in a little hut. Of course we know each other. Or at least we do until you move.”
I studied the side of his face. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“How am I supposed to trust that?”
“Because I said I’m not going anywhere.”
“Hmmm,” he said, still looking straight ahead. “But that’s what you do.”
“That’s what I did.”
Later that day, we stopped for gas and I snuck around the side of the building to the pay phone. The piece of paper was rumpled from so much time in my pocket,