by Amy Field
Lance looked back at the way he came. He seemed to realize how difficult it would be getting down without help.
“Now listen, Jacob, I can make this a lot easier for you. You don’t get paid much. How ‘bout a nice bonus? I can…”
“Up here you can do nothing, and nothing you can do. Your money will not buy you happiness or pardon. If you want to try and sue me for abandoning you on the mountain then you’re welcome, but I’ve got a party of twelve here willing to testify that you tried to rape another member of the crew, and then when I tried to prevent you, you physically attacked me. You’re a good lawyer, Lance, but are you that good?”
Lance went, eyes tearing up, by himself, abandoning his pack and all. He took only the canteen around his neck and started down the trail.
A few deep breaths later and one collective sigh of relief and Jacob was right next to Katie.
“Catherine,” he said breathlessly. “I’m sorry that took so long. Did he hurt you? Was I…” He looked torn and unsure of how to say what he wanted. “Was I too late?”
Katie smiled in what she hoped was a reassuring way between her tears. “No, no, Jacob, you weren’t too late. He roughed me up a bit, but I’m fine.” She reached out and stroked his jaw. “Are you okay? He hit you really hard.”
“Ya,” Jacob agreed. “You call this, ‘sucker punch’, back home, yes?”
Katie laughed. “Yes, yes we do.”
“Well then,” Jacob replied. “I guess I must be a ‘sucker’ for you.”
Katie smiled at that and together they and the rest of the party returned to the clearing for dinner and rest. And that night, though the adrenaline was still pumping swiftly through her veins, Katie rested like she hadn’t in longer than she could rightly remember.
Chapter 4
“Catherine,” he said, for what had to be the fiftieth time. “I am so, so, so sorry for what happened. I had my eye on that guy since first we started.” Jacob was clearly beating himself up over the incident from the day before. Of course, in Catherine’s case he was barking up the wrong tree. As far as she was concerned, he was her knight in shining armor.
“It’s fine, Jacob, really. It’s fine. He was really starting to scare me. I’m just glad we got rid of him before something worse happens.”
Jacob nodded sagely. “I know, I know, I just hope he gets back down the mountain safely. The trails can be treacherous after a storm.”
Catherine was a little bit taken aback. How could he be concerned for the welfare of the man who had nearly assaulted her, who had struck him in the face.
“I know their kind,” he went on. “They think that because they have much money they can rule the world, that everyone else should bow down before them. But truth be told, they are as insecure as young boys. They are as likely to fall down before the biggest, strongest one that they meet as any of us are them. And they are totally unequipped for life on the mountain.”
Katie nodded herself. “I understand, I think. It was to get away from those types of men that I came on this trip. But wouldn’t you know my luck?”
Jacob smiled, “Materialism and superficiality are hard to avoid. But in some places you find a lot less of it. This is why, after my heart broke, I came back to the mountain. No careerism here, no real need for the things of the world. There’s no keeping up with the Joneses or following the Kardashians; there are no Joneses to keep up with, and a Kardashian may as well be from Mars. Here, we are content to walk in beauty.”
“Like the night?” Catherine quipped before planning it. If he was going to quote Byron she as going to poke it right back. It was hard to believe that, on top of everything else, this faith-filled, romantic, sensitive man was both educated and poetic, but for all that things seemed to go wrong with Lance, they seemed to be going right with Jacob.
“Is true,” Jacob chucked. “Though unfortunately we do not always enjoy ‘cloudless climes,’ else we wouldn’t be in this mess. Even so,” he raised his voice so that the rest of the crew could hear. “I believe that we can make up our lost time and find a village shortly after lunch. We’ll have an early day today, since you hiked so long and hard yesterday.
They did find the village about mid-afternoon. Lunch that day had consisted, for the first time, of the protein bars, nuts, and fruit. But the lodge they were staying at promised a proper Swiss dinner, and the whole crew was desperately hungry. Most retired to their rooms early for a well-deserved nap, but Catherine and Jacob chose instead to take some tea on a veranda overlooking the nearest mountain pass.
“So tell me,” Catherine said, once they were settled. “After Mona passed, how did you decide to come back here. Would the guards have taken you back?”
Jacob sighed and sipped his tea. “Ya, ya, of course they would have taken me back. A sad story like this? Of course. And the guards accept widowers anyhow; the point is not being married at the time, not having a wife and children to split your time with. The pope even offered me a place in his personal bodyguard detail. But I couldn’t go back. Having known the love I did with Mona, I knew that my heart had expanded, I needed to go to a place without limits.”
“What did you parents think?”
“Hmmmm.” He reached up and tousled his wavy hair. “My mother, she was disappointed. She wanted me to have a successful career in the Vatican, and then maybe come back and work security for one of the big banks in Zurich. My father, though,” he took a long drink from his tea. “I think he was glad. He knew from the beginning, the mountains were in my blood, even as they were his.”
“What do you mean?”
My father gave his life to the mountains, and not just to the Alps. Before he opened the lodge he spent a year with the Sherpas in Nepal, learning the best techniques for leading large groups of people on a trek.”
“Sherpas?”
“Ya, you know, like Tenzing Norgay, who helped Hillary ascend Everest.”
This did sound vaguely familiar. She nodded to show she was following.
“The Sherpas are an ethnic group in Tibet and Nepal. They are mountain people, and have their own ways and customs and even religion. But they have been in the mountains for so long that they know how to navigate in ways that even experienced climbers do not. My father liked to call himself the first Swiss Sherpa. I guess that makes me the second.”
Katie couldn’t help but giggle at that. She was suddenly treated to an image of Big Jacob dressed up like a little Nepalese mountain man. He caught her laughter and together they chuckled at the idea.
“Interesting,” she said after the laughter had finally subsided. Eh was stunned at how broad and deep his knowledge was a far cry from the athletes and playboys she usually found herself spending time with. There were no seduction tactics here, at least as far as she could see, and certainly not nearly enough money to justify the difficulty of the work. Jacob seemed to know the world only in terms of the delight that it brought him, and at the same time with a deep awareness of the pain it can bring—both to himself and others. He was perhaps the first man whom she had ever met that she thought the words, “What you see are what you get,” were actually, literally true.
Their tea finished they both retired to the rooms and Catherine, for her part, slept the sleep of the dead. She rose in time for what was, without any question or qualification, the single best meal she had ever had, amongst the best company she had ever known. She found herself, halfway through, wishing that she could bring Jacob home to meet her father. They could connect over the land and man stuff, and she really felt her mother wound understand her attraction to him, and maybe even approve, in a way that she’d never known before.
Despite Jacob’s continued honesty with her, Catherine continued to hold back. She would, occasionally, refer to ice skating and such, but always in such a way that wouldn’t reveal her true identity. There was white wine at the dinner, a sweet Swiss concoction, which she may have had too much of; Jacob, on the other hand, seemed to grow both more thoughtful and mor
e helpful with the little bit he drank. When she decided to retire for the evening he offered to see her to her room. She dared hope for a goodnight kiss, or maybe something more, but what she got was something else entirely.
Her room was on the third floor of the building, and as they finished the top of the stairs he took her by the hand. “I want to show you something,” he said.
He walked her to the end of the hallway, as thought he’d been here many times before, and opened a door which looked as though it went into a closet. Instead it opened up onto a wide veranda, and though the temperature was chill, she was glad to be up there. He was right; high enough up, and the stars did dance.
“I want to point some things out to you,” he whispered in her ear. Despite the closeness of his body, she felt none of the eeriness that she had with Lance. If anything, she felt aroused.
“Just to me?” She queried. “Aren’t you the guide for the whole group?”
“Sssssh!” He admonished. “Don’t over-think it. Just enjoy.”
And for the next twenty minutes he pointed out constellations and stars, telling each one’s story and making notes of pivotal roles they played in exploration, and pirating, and sea battles, and even religion.
As he finished he sighed loudly, resting one arm on her shoulder. “The difference,” he said with some melancholy. “The difference between the world up here, and the world down there, is that they are concerned with trivialities, and I am concerned with what really matters.”
“You’re drunk,” she said, a little too flirtatiously.
“I am not,” he said with all sincerity. “Though St. Paul says that a little wine is good for the belly, and whatever else ails you.”
“Does he really?”
“Surely. First Timothy, five, twenty-three. It’s the most important verse in the book.”
They both laughed at that. “Really,” she said, after a time. “What is your favorite verse?”
He had to think about that for a long time.
“That’s a little like asking someone to name their favorite child, or maybe better, their favorite grandparent. Different verses mean, and have meant, different things to me at different times. On the whole, however, I’d have to say the one which strikes me most, which I come back to again, and again, and which I think over every morning I watch the sun come over the mountains, and every night I watch the stars dance above, is Job 38.
“What is it?”
“Well, you know the story of Job?” She nodded hesitantly. She knew the broad strokes. “Well, poor job gets a lot handed to him: his crops fail, his kids die, his fortune is ruined, is body racked with sores. His wife and his closest friends are convinced he’s sinned secretly to deserve it, and so they encourage him to lie to God and ask forgiveness for something he hasn’t done. He won’t, but eventually God does come to his aid. When finally Job has reached his limit he calls out and asks why all this has happened, and Job 38 is God’s response.
“What does he say?”
“Job or God?”
“God, silly.”
“Right, well he begins with a kind of modified, “How dare you?” Like he asks Job, “Where you were you when I made the sky? When I set the seas in their courses and the creatures on the land? Where were you when I set the stars in the sky and ordered their arrangement. Where were you…”
“And this gives you comfort?” Catherine wasn’t sure she was following.
“Well, sure. Where was I, or my father, or my father’s father when he raised the alps? When he set these snow-capped beauties in their places? Where were we when the stars were set in the sky? And what does all of this mean for me, and for you? That gives me the greatest comfort of all.”
Catherine thought on that for a while. “Why do you think I’m here, Jacob?” She asked it quietly, so as not to disturb their silence.
He pulled her close against himself and smelled her hair. “I don’t know, Catherine,” he started. “But I do know you’re here to find out the next step, the next move for your life and that you’ve ready for something different than you’ve know before. How is it that we make decisions normally? We add up pros and cons and then try to balance the list. But at the end of the day, it all comes down to what we think is right—it all comes down to our conscience and what it will permit us to do, and what it will demand of us to do likewise.”
Katie thought about what he said. That was how skating had worked for her. When she first tried on skates at her brother’s practice all those years ago, she just knew she liked skating. It was only after the fact that it became “exercise” or “a sport” or “a source of revenue and a chance to go to college.
“So how do you know what you want?” Katie wanted so desperately to sound the question and not sound needy. It didn’t work.
“I have wondered the same thing; many, many times over,” he admitted. “The best I can come up with is that there is no easy answer.” He pressed his lips against the top of her head. She leaned back perfectly, finding the hollow in his chest for her head. “I think the only thing we can honestly do is fill our lives with things we know are good: faith, family, home, honest work. The stars, the fresh snow, a good meal, the delight of a new friendship—these are the things I think shape us, help us know what we ought to do.
“A delightful new friendship?” She said with a grin.
“Would you call it something else?”
“If I could. You?”
“I would.”
“Give it time.”
“I will, Catherine, I will.” He looked down into her eyes. “What would you tell me if I said that I couldn’t explain why it was so delightful?”
Katie giggled. “I’d say it fits you—that you didn’t make the stars, you just enjoy them.”
He laughed and grabbed her hand. Together they looked out on the horizon, seeing nothing but beauty before their eyes; distilled, almost, as in a liquor.
“The Sherpas,” he went on. “They used to say that when you look out on the horizon you can see your whole life ahead of you.” He paused and licked his lips. “Catherine,” he whispered. “What do you see?”
Catherine could see her whole life stretched out, or at least as much as she could conceive of at this moment, which seemed to involve multiple possible futures. She decided to avoid making hasty decisions she might later regret.
“Right now,” she said. “I see nothing but hope and optimism. I see beauty eternal. I see peace. I know now, right in this moment as I have never known before, that I will be loved and taken care of—no matter what.”
Later on, as she went over it in her head, she would not know who moved first. Did he raise her chin with his fingers? Or did she draw his face down with the baleful cast of her eyes? In either case, within a moment their lips had met and all was changed. She was his as he was hers, and that was, and would be, all that mattered.
A short time later he did walk her back to her room, and then went quietly back to his own. And though her legs were heavy, she felt light. And though her body was tired, her heart quivered with energy. Katie—Catherine—had found what she had come so far to find.
Chapter 5
The next morning the crew slept in, and as they departed mid-morning, there was a distinctly new spirit to the group. Lightness and freeness characterized the gathering, and would mark all of their interactions for the next two weeks. It was like the honeymoon that Catherine and Jacob were destined never to have, at least in the conventional sense. But their friendship blossomed, and their love grew. Days were spent in long hikes and quiet meditations over scenic mountain vistas. Nights were spent around campfires and in bars, closing the places down not for drinking, but for talking. And Dina, ever-faithful Dina, became a loyal member of this trio, and by the end of it was treating Catherine as though she were truly her sister.
For his part Jacob felt he could be comfortable with Catherine in a way he hadn’t know since Mona and her coffee cart so may years before. He was never weak
, or mealy, but was not afraid to show emotion, to express anger or rage or disdain, and o a couple of very had occasions even to cry. He was strong and rugged but vulnerable with her, and she felt honored by his trust, respected by it. He was more a man than all the other men she’d known combined. By the time the trip was coming to an end she was totally and completely in love with him and was willing, even to leave everything and move to the mountains full time to be in his embrace. The problem was, of course, coming clean bout her past; being honest about who she was, and reasonable about what was possible with her future.
Nearly three weeks after they had started, with the delays owing to the weather, Jacob and Catherine and the rest of the crew found themselves back in the lodge where it all began. She was convinced that, whatever else would happen, she could not live long term without Jacob. He simply had come to mean more to her than anyone else ever could, and she was not prepared to leave that behind.
On the night of their last supper together, both had expected the other to be melancholy, but instead they surprised each other with their excitement.
“Catherine,” Jacob finally admitted over dessert. “I really, really, really don’t want to see you go.”
She nodded her head in turn. “I know, Jacob, I know. And I don’t want to leave. But I have to go back home, at least for a while. There are people there waiting on me, and I have a lot left to do if I want to be free to come back here and be with you.”
Jacob was quiet for a long time, then nodded his head. “I understand,” he said. “And I’m willing to help you do that, however I can.”
And with that he rose from the table and got down on one knee.
Marriage had always been a theoretical option for Katie, but not a very live one. She’d always appreciated relationships in the abstract better than in the concrete. Even the night she’d lost her virginity had been more about seeing what it felt like and not making the guy feel bad than about connecting with another person. She had genuinely, literally, never thought about what it would be like to have the guy down on one knee in front of her, and so in that moment she kind of understandably lost her mind.