The Long Climb

I set my camera bag down by the café counter at The Prow and did the thing I always did first, which was find Kat on the wall. She was easy to spot, halfway up the bouldering area with her tanned, chalked fingers curled around two red holds, one foot hooked high, her whole body quiet the way she got when a problem was giving her trouble. Kat was thirty-one, and she had been climbing since before I met her, and in the three years since a gallery opening where she'd cornered me by the wine table and asked if I was the photographer or just a guy holding a camera, I had watched her do this a thousand times.

Three years. I had done the math on the drive over, more than once, and the math kept saying the same thing. I was thirty-four now, and I felt I had been standing still while everyone around me climbed things.

"Benjamin, you're early." Franklin came out of the back office wiping chalk dust on his jeans, a clipboard under one arm. He was thirty-six and had owned The Prow since before it was profitable, which was a joke between us that had stopped being a joke around year two. "Regional comp starts tomorrow, the whole weekend, climbers from three states, and I need my wall photographer sharp."

"I'm always sharp."

"You're always something." He looked me over the way he did, an old college habit, checking for damage. "You look tired, man."

"I'm fine. Where do you want me for the openers?"

"Main wall, stage left, eight a.m. Kat's first up, you know that."

"I know that."

He went back into the office, and I picked up the camera and shot Kat warming up for a while, the way her shoulders moved, the way she shook out one hand and then the other between attempts. There's a thing that happens when you photograph someone long enough. You stop seeing them and start seeing compositions, and then every once in a while a composition slaps you back into seeing them, and that's dangerous, because it makes you feel things you'd already filed away.

She dropped off the wall and landed soft, turned, found me, and waved with her whole arm like she was flagging down a boat. Thirty-one years old and she waved like that.

"Shooting me from down there is cheating," she called. "Come say hi properly."

"I'm working."

"You're leaning." She jogged over, sweaty, chalk on her forearm, and kissed me on the cheek, quick, easy, the way she'd done maybe four thousand times. "You came. I know I said you didn't have to come to the practice day."

"I wanted the light today. Tomorrow it'll be flat."

"Liar. You wanted to watch me flash that purple problem." She pointed at the bouldering wall. "I've got it to the last move. Last move, Benjamin. Watch."

I watched. She did flash it, both hands on the finish hold, and she hung there grinning down at me like she was eleven feet tall instead of five-foot-four. That was Kat. She never climbed like the wall was against her. She climbed like the wall was a conversation she was winning.

* * *

The café area at The Prow is four tables, an espresso machine older than most of the members, and a view of the main wall through a big window Franklin put in so people could watch and feel bad about themselves. Kerry was there with a protein bar and a laptop, and she waved me over with two fingers, the subdued version of the Kat wave.

Kerry was twenty-nine, captain of the team, Kat's best friend for five years, and a person who had never once in my presence said a sentence she hadn't already edited. She closed the laptop.

"Sit down, Benjamin."

"I'm working."

"Sit down for two minutes." I sat. She looked at her protein bar, then at me, and got it over with, which I respected. "Kat thinks something's wrong. She asked me last week if you were seeing someone else, which I told her was ridiculous, and then she asked me if you were unhappy, which I couldn't answer, because I don't know."

"Kerry."

"Don't Kerry me. Here's the situation. She's got the biggest comp of her life this weekend, and she is climbing out of her mind right now, better than I've ever seen her, and if you are going to end three years over text or in a parking lot or wherever cowards do it these days, then you will do it after the competition. Sunday night. Monday. I don't care. Not before."

"I wasn't planning on doing it this weekend at all."

"Good. Then we agree." She picked the protein bar back up, then set it down again. "For what it's worth, and I'm only saying this once, I think you're making a mistake. But you're both adults and it's not my business, except it is my business, because whatever you do to her this weekend lands on my shoulders Monday at practice. So don't make it ugly."

"I've never made anything ugly."

"You made a gallery opening ugly in 2019, I heard about it."

"That was a different gallery and I stand by it."

Something that was almost a smile crossed her face and left. "After the competition, Benjamin. Promise me."

"Fine. After the competition."

* * *

The afternoon I shot Kat on the overhang route, which is the technical one, the one with the crimp sequence that had torn her fingertips open twice in February. She worked it top to bottom in sections, hanging on the rope while Franklin fed her beta from the floor, arguing with him about a heel hook, and I lay on the mat under her with the camera and waited for the moment her face went somewhere else.

That's the picture. Every climber has it, the moment the body stops being a body and becomes a solution, and Kat's version of it is her jaw going slack and her eyes going still, and I had about six good frames of it by the fourth attempt and maybe a hundred bad ones. On the fifth attempt she linked the whole sequence, shook out at the rest point, looked down at me hanging there under her like an idiot, and said, "Did you get it?"

"I got it."

"Was it good?"

"It was the best thing I shot all year."

And I meant it, and meaning it did something to the plan I'd been carrying around in my chest for a month, the tidy little plan, the quiet exit, the you're going to do amazing things and I'm going to step aside and watch, all of it written out and rehearsed. Her concentration up there on the overhang was the same concentration she'd had at the gallery opening when she'd told me my photos were technically fine and emotionally dead, which is a hell of a first conversation with a stranger, and I had liked her immediately and been terrified of her for about a year.

I packed up early and sat in the café area and didn't talk to anybody.

* * *

The first day of the competition went the way it was supposed to go. Kat qualified second out of the women's field, Kerry third, the gym was packed with climbers from three states and their nervous families, Franklin walked around all day looking as if he had bet his house on himself and won, and I shot about nine hundred frames and kept maybe sixty. Kat found me by the café counter at five, still in her comp bib, chalk to the elbows.

"Second place, Benjamin."

"I saw. I was the guy with the camera going crazy."

"Tomorrow is finals, that purple problem is in the set, I can feel it." She pulled her hair tie out and shook her hair loose, and then did that thing where she looked at me and tilted her head, reading me, which she was annoyingly good at. "You're staying tonight, right?"

"Staying?"

"At my apartment. You always stay the night before a comp, you make the eggs, you complain about my coffee, you tell me my hips are tight." She said it fast, like it was logistics and not a question, and then she stopped being fast. "Please stay."

Here is where I should tell you about the plan, the tidy one, the one that said sleep at your own place, keep it light, don't confuse her, exit clean. I had it all rehearsed. And here is Kat, sweaty and second place, asking me for eggs.

"Sure," I said. "I'll stay."

She hugged me, hard, chalk and all, and I told myself it was just to keep up appearances, just one more night of being the boyfriend, and then I told myself it again on the drive over, and then once more at a red light on Ninth, and none of the tellings took.

At her apartment I made the eggs and complained about the coffee, which was terrible in the specific way her coffee was always terrible, something about how she stored the beans next to the stove, and she ignored me the way she always did, and for about forty minutes it was any other night before a comp in three years of nights before comps. She ate sitting cross-legged on the floor with her plate on the coffee table, still working the tape off her fingers, and I sat on the couch with my camera bag at my feet like a guest, which apparently I was about to be.

"Look at this," she said, and held her left forearm out across the coffee table, inner side up.

I knew about the fall. Everybody knew about the fall, two years ago, the boulder problem in the gym with the bad landing, the five hours in the emergency room, but I had never actually looked at the scar up close, because it lives on the inside of her arm where she never points it at you. It ran about three inches from near her wrist up toward her elbow, a pale ridge with a slight puckered kink in the middle where the surgeon had done whatever surgeons do.

"They reopened it twice," she said. "Infection, which was gross, don't ask. But look, it's mostly flat now."

I put my fingers on it before I thought about it, which I don't recommend doing to a climber the night before finals, and her arm was warm and the skin around the scar was soft, softer than the callused fingers and the hard shoulders, and the scar itself was smooth and raised like a seam in good fabric. She let me. She turned her hand over slowly so I could follow it with my thumb.

"Does it still hurt?"

"Not anymore. Sometimes it itches, which is worse, honestly, because you can't scratch it politely in public." She watched my hand instead of my face. "You've never touched it before. Three years and you never once touched it."

"I didn't want to remind you of the hospital."

"It's not the hospital, Benjamin, it's my arm. It's where the bone went through and came back." She said it plainly, the way she said everything, and then she pulled her arm back and flexed it and the scar stretched and whitened and settled again. "Anyway. Eggs were fine. Coffee opinions noted and ignored."

That night I lay in her bed listening to her breathe and thinking about a scar I had never touched on a woman I had decided to leave, and the plan sat in my chest like a stone I'd swallowed, and I got no sleep worth mentioning.

I heard the bed shift and then her voice in the dark. "You're awake."

"Barely."

"You've been awake for an hour. You breathe different when you're asleep." She rolled toward me, and even in the dark I could see her eyes on me, and I could feel the heat of her forearm when she laid it across my chest, the one with the