The Art of Holding On and Letting Go

by Kristin Lenz

  “Me neither. That hemp rope that Nick always wears, it’s Mike’s. I’ve never seen him without it.”

  Nick’s parents had abandoned his brother when he needed help. It shouldn’t have surprised me after these past few months without my parents. But still, it’s just not what parents are supposed to do. I was in the way, and they pushed me aside. Mom was devoted to Dad, Dad was devoted to Uncle Max, but where did that leave me? Dumped at my grandparents’, that’s where.

  I went home for lunch that afternoon for the first time in a month. I thought I’d let Nick have a chance to talk to Kaitlyn in private. And I needed to think. My thoughts were clumped in my head like strings of cold spaghetti, and I needed to pull them apart. Where was Miss Marple when you needed her?

  Kaitlyn used to have red hair, she wore bright-colored clothes. She said she went through a rough time last year and wrapped herself up in darkness. She covered herself in black, painted her room midnight. Agatha Christie would call it The Mysterious Case of the Transforming Girl.

  And Nick. Always goofing around, hamming it up, dressed as darkly dramatic as Kaitlyn. Wearing a necklace to hold on to the memory of his brother.

  And me. What about me? Hanging out with my new friends, going to school as if everything was normal. Dreaming about me and Tom and destiny. I’d stopped responding to texts from Coach Mel as if that part of my life had never existed. As if the questions about my parents and Uncle Max weren’t screaming inside my chest, trying to pound their way out past my rib cage. Nothing was as it seemed.

  27

  I hopped on my mom’s old bike and sped down the street. The wind whipped my hair back off my face, cold air rushing into my ears. Kaitlyn had missed two days of school. I had tried texting and calling her, but she wasn’t responding. Nick said he tried calling her too, but she hadn’t called him back either.

  I had found the bike in the garage, an old ten-speed with two flat tires. Grandpa pumped up the tires and gave them a kick. “Good as new,” he said.

  A car drove by, and the sound of Fleetwood Mac drifted out of the open window. The beat settled in my chest. I remembered the time I came home to find Dad blaring the stereo, singing along with Stevie Nicks. “Come dance with me,” he had yelled over the music. And we had danced, swaying and twirling around the living room.

  My mother’s hands had gripped these same handlebars. The warm sensation traveled right up my arms to my neck, my skin tingling at the base of my skull. Like I was about to experience another earth-tilting moment, like the day I fell off the competition wall, the day Uncle Max was swept in an avalanche. Where were my parents now?

  Or maybe the sensation had to do with Kaitlyn. Something was wrong with Kaitlyn. I gripped the handlebars tighter, my hands stiff from the cold.

  I leaned the bike against Kaitlyn’s garage and rang the doorbell. No answer. I knocked on the door. No answer. I pounded on the door. No answer. I peeked in the kitchen window; the house looked deserted. I walked around the back to Kaitlyn’s bedroom window. The shade was drawn. I rapped on the window. Nothing.

  What was going on? A bubble of panic was spreading through my lungs. Kaitlyn wouldn’t have gone anywhere without telling me or Nick. She would have called us back unless something was really wrong with her.

  Then I heard it as much as felt it; a faint thumping, rumbling behind Kaitlyn’s window. The rhythmic beat of music. I rapped on the glass again and shouted her name. Kaitlyn’s pale face peeked around a corner of the window shade. I jumped back as if she were a ghost.

  She opened the window and squinted in the afternoon sunshine.

  And I don’t want the world to see me,

  ’cause I don’t think that they’d understand.

  The music pulsed around her like an aura.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  She just looked at me.

  When everything’s made to be broken,

  I just want you to know who I am.

  “I was worried about you.”

  Her eyes filled with tears.

  “Kaitlyn, what’s wrong? Go open the front door, okay?”

  She nodded and disappeared from the window.

  The door was open when I got back to the front of the house, and I followed Kaitlyn to her room. She wore baggy gray sweatpants and her hair was fuzzed up and tangled. She climbed into bed and pulled the purple afghan up to her chin.

  The music had stopped, but a Goo Goo Dolls CD had been tossed on the carpet. I sat down on the floor next to her bed and looked up at her. “Are you sick?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Did you go to the doctor?”

  “No.”

  “What did your parents say?”

  “They don’t care.”

  “I tried to call you. Nick too.”

  “I broke my phone.”

  I saw her phone then, on the floor by the bookcase. The screen was cracked, nearly shattered. I sat with her in silence for a couple of minutes, unsure what to say. Then Kaitlyn said, “How do you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “You had to move all of the sudden. Your parents sent you away. Does it make you feel like they don’t care about you? You don’t even talk about it. How do you do it?”

  It was like she had plucked the thoughts right out of my head. How did she know? I picked up her busted phone and fingered the cracked screen.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t even know what I’m doing half the time. You should see my grades. It’s like I’m just starting to feel again. I miss them. But I’m mad too. I’m mad at them for going off and leaving me, and … and for not staying home where we would all be safe together, especially after losing Uncle Max. He lived with us for almost my whole life. It was like I had two dads.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kaitlyn whispered. Her eyes were wet again.

  I looked away as tears sprung to my eyes too. Kaitlyn sat up and wiped her eyes with her fingers. A faint smudge of black shadow encircled her eyes as if she had been rubbing them with her fists. She reached for a box of tissues on the nightstand, pulled out two and handed one to me.

  I dabbed my eyes and tried to laugh. “If you had a dog, she’d be licking our tears right now.”

  Kaitlyn gave me a sad smile, then took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  “Something happened last year. Around this time, after Halloween.” She took another slow breath. “I thought I was dealing with it. I keep trying to let it go, to put it behind me, but …”

  She pressed her hands against her stomach.

  “My first couple of years in elementary school, my teachers would talk to the class about my hand. They let me show the kids how I could still use it, and this other boy would show everyone his glasses and how things looked different through them. It was the same kids for years and years, and they just accepted me. It was like, ‘Yeah Katie has a funny hand, so what, who cares?’

  “Freshman year was so awful, switching school districts. We had this seminar where the teacher had the awesome idea to teach us all how to properly shake hands to prepare for job interviews and stuff. No limp, dead fish handshakes to turn people off. She actually wanted us to walk around the room shaking hands with everyone.”

  Oh no. My eyes fell to Kaitlyn’s deformed right hand, the smooth pink skin where fingers should be.

  “All these kids are coming up to me, holding out their hand to shake, and so I do it too, thinking maybe … maybe—” Her voice wavered. “They couldn’t get away from me fast enough.

  “For weeks afterwards, this stupid group of guys … they’d come up to me in the halls and hold out their hands to shake, pretending to introduce themselves.”

  My face flushed with heat. “Assholes.”

  Kaitlyn nodded and pressed a tissue against her wet eyes. She released a big huffing breath. “Everyone always says high school is better than middle school, that everyone is maturing and more accepting. Right—not if you’re the new girl with a freak hand.

  “But t
hen sophomore year, I met a guy, and I thought he really liked me. I thought we had something special.”

  I breathed a little easier. Kaitlyn wasn’t sick. She wasn’t dying. This was about more than her hand; she had a broken heart. I was used to hearing broken heart stories from climbers like Becky.

  Kaitlyn continued. “Eric. He was in my brother’s fraternity at State. It just started so randomly. I had called to talk to Josh, but Eric grabbed Josh’s phone, goofing around. And we just started talking. He was so funny. We texted and followed each other. He looked so incredibly hot in the pictures. Not like the guys at school. A college guy. He was really interested in me, what I had to say. He called me Kaitlyn, not Katie. He made me feel so grown-up.”

  Kaitlyn looked up at the ceiling and sighed. “A few weeks later, it was Siblings Weekend at State.”

  I adjusted my position on the floor to get more comfortable, settling in for Kaitlyn’s story. It was going to be okay. Broken hearts can be made whole again.

  “I didn’t even care about seeing my brother, I was so excited to see Eric in person. I never told him about my hand. I just thought that Josh had probably told him, you know? I wanted to believe that he could look past it. That he knew the real me.”

  She looked down at the tissue crumpled in her fist. “As soon as I saw him, he ran over and gave me a huge hug. It felt so good to be in his arms. But then we pulled apart, and he grabbed my hands, and … and …” Kaitlyn’s voice broke.

  Oh no. I inched closer to her and touched the purple afghan, poking my fingers through the loops of soft yarn.

  “The look on his face … I’ll never forget it. It makes me feel sick … my stomach …” She sucked in a sob.

  “Oh, Kaitlyn,” I said.

  She sniffed and started tearing the tissue into shreds.

  “He couldn’t even look at me after that. He just ignored me and made an excuse to leave. I was supposed to be up there the whole weekend, but Josh drove me home that night.

  “I actually thought I was in love. Just from talking to him for a few weeks—I can’t believe I was so dumb.”

  “You weren’t dumb,” I said. “He was a jerk.”

  Kaitlyn was quiet a minute, looking down at the pile of shredded tissues.

  “He texted me the other day, out of the blue. To say sorry for how he acted. My brother probably put him up to it.”

  “Maybe it’s been eating him up,” I said. “He felt guilty. As he should.”

  “Well he wasn’t calling to try to start something again. Nothing has changed. And he has a girlfriend.”

  “He told you that?”

  She shook her head. “I had blocked him before, but like an idiot I looked him up again. I should have known better.”

  “That’s how you broke your phone?”

  “Against the wall.”

  I followed her gaze to the wall where the midnight paint had been chipped, revealing a streak of lavender beneath.

  Her voice turned hard. “It’s always going to be like that. The revulsion and pity in people’s eyes. God, it has to be my right hand, the one that everyone automatically tries to shake. You have no idea what’s it like to see them recoil in disgust.”

  She thrust her hand in front of my face and I jumped. Smooth skin wrapped over the stubs of her missing fingers. I grabbed the hand with both of mine and squeezed. “No, Kaitlyn. It’s not always going to be that way.”

  My voice was thick and quivery. Tears dripped to my lips. Tears for Kaitlyn. Tears that I’d kept tucked away for all these months. I released her hand to swipe the wetness from my cheeks and moved to the bed next to her.

  We hugged each other and cried.

  28

  I pumped the pedals on the bike as fast as I could, wind stinging my face. To have to dread something as simple as a handshake. She fell hard for a guy who turned out to be a total creep. I had crushes on guys, other climbers, and now Tom, but nothing like what Kaitlyn had experienced. I didn’t even talk to Tom outside of school and driver’s ed. Kaitlyn thought she was in love. She trusted Eric, and he broke her heart. It was so unfair.

  What a different person she must have been before then. Katie with red hair and a sprinkle of freckles, happy and in love. Anger squeezed out all of my other feelings, and I pumped the pedals even faster, gasping for breath.

  Back home, I stowed the bike in the garage. I wasn’t ready to face my grandparents. My eyes were probably red from crying, and tears threatened to spill again, remembering the pain in Kaitlyn’s voice. I tried to push away the panic that was creeping around my throat. Was this how Grandma’s anxiety attacks started? I swallowed a rush of saliva, feeling like I could puke.

  I sat down next to the goose on the front porch, focused on my breath, and waited for my heart to stop hammering.

  I knew how Kaitlyn felt to some degree. Both of our lives had changed course in the past year; we couldn’t go back to the way things were. Kaitlyn had confided in me, trusted me to share those painful feelings with her. I still hadn’t told her much about my parents and Uncle Max. Why was I having so much trouble opening up to her?

  I looked at the goose, and she looked back with her knowing glass eyes.

  Because, if I talked about it, it would make it real. And I didn’t want it to be real. I didn’t want to open up to anyone. I didn’t want to feel settled here. I wanted to go home. And some part of me truly expected my parents to show up tomorrow, the next day, two weeks from now. And we’d all go home together.

  I thought about the woods surrounding our cabin and the walks I used to take with Dad. When I was little, we’d walk hand in hand. I’d feel the pressure of his fingers squeezing mine and knew that meant to pause.

  One time, he whispered, “Shh. Can you hear it? The trees. They’re talking.”

  I stood perfectly still, head tilted, listening. Then I said, “I can hear them breathing!”

  And my dad laughed and laughed. It became our private joke. “Wait, I hear someone breathing out here,” Dad would say in a scary voice. “Oh, silly me, it’s just the trees.”

  Since they were homeschooling me, Mom and Dad would often recite poetry when we were hiking and climbing. One of my dad’s favorite lines was, “Give me my scallop shell of quiet.”

  “That’s our cabin, Cara, and these woods. Our own scallop shell of quiet.”

  That was what I needed right now, and I wasn’t going to find it inside my grandparents’ house.

  I was careful not to meet Grandpa’s eyes when I finally went inside. Somehow he always seemed to read my mind. He was watching the news on TV from his usual spot. Grandma’s phone voice drifted out of the kitchen. Then she came into the living room, phone to her ear with one hand, smooshing ladybugs with a tissue in her other hand.

  “Damn things all over the house,” she muttered. “They’re not ladybugs. They’re Japanese beetles. They bite.”

  I curled up in my papasan chair and watched the news with Grandpa. A West Coast correspondent came on the air with an update about the wildfires raging in Southern California. As they had feared, the Santa Ana winds had fueled the fires. Thousands of acres were burning out of control, and neighborhoods were threatened near the Angeles Forest. Evacuations were underway.

  I could feel Grandpa glancing at me. I was already feeling overwhelmed by Kaitlyn’s story, her pain poured on top of my own. I was like a cup filled to the brim, and now the liquid was foaming and spilling over the edge.

  The fire had to be near the cabin. My skin crawled with the heat. Heat from the flames, heat from the parching, gusting Santa Ana winds. The urge to run away flared inside me like a struck match. Run away from all the bad news, run away from the panic clutching my throat, run away to the shelter of the mountains, hide from the crackling winds, hide in my scallop shell of quiet. I didn’t know where my new life in Michigan was leading me. I only knew I wanted to turn around and run through the flames.

  29

  Kaitlyn was at school the next day, wearing he
r goth face, looking the same as always except for a slight redness in her eyes. It was the end of the trimester and grades were posted.

  Kaitlyn and Nick received their usual good grades, mostly As, a couple B+s.

  “You saved my butt in physics, thank you very much.” Kaitlyn high-fived me.

  Physics was easy to understand in the climbing world. You could see the theories in motion; weight, gravitational pull, velocity. You name it, it’s there. The other subjects were a different story.

  “How’d you do?” Kaitlyn asked.

  “No comment.”

  “Come on, it can’t be that bad,” Nick said.

  “Oh yes it can.”

  And it was. One B, two Cs, and three Ds. I shouldn’t have been surprised. It wasn’t like I had been doing my homework. I would have aced an exam about Agatha Christie. My teachers were probably feeling sorry for me, otherwise I would have gotten Fs instead of Ds.

  Grandma and Grandpa didn’t say anything when I got home from school. I guessed they were waiting for me to tell them. Grandpa finally brought it up at dinner.

  “We got a call from your school counselor today about your grades, and we saw them on the computer. Not like it used to be in my day when you brought home a piece of paper.”

  His voice was light, but Grandma was tight-lipped. My jaw tensed.

  “Well, I guess we should have been asking you about your homework every week,” Grandpa said.

  Grandma’s lips pinched even tighter.

  I stabbed my fork into the rubbery chicken on my plate. “I’m not used to school like this.”

  “No, I guess you’re not,” Grandpa said. “This has been new for you. You’ve been through a lot. I can see how it would be difficult to concentrate on your schoolwork.”

  Blood pounded against my skull. That’s right, Grandpa. This is all new to me. Uncle Max disappearing off the face of the earth. Being dragged clear across the country. My parents traipsing around the Southern Hemisphere with barely a thought about me. And you expect me to even care about idiotic schoolwork?

  Grandpa continued. “But now it’s time to buckle down. You’ll have to put your mystery novels away for a while and limit your time at the climbing gym. I want to see you doing your homework every night. And I’ll look it over. I know they do things differently nowadays, but I should be able to help you with some of it. Or we’ll find a tutor for you if necessary.”