All We Have Left (24 page)

My stomach drops sickeningly as I recognize the pale writhing things coming through the cracked elevator doors
as the fingers of the people trapped inside. Now I can hear their frantic voices and what they are saying.

“It’s so hot, and people are hurt in here!”

“The fireball burned him. I don’t think he’s breathing!”

“Get us
out
of here!”

I feel sick.

The two men are talking in low voices, and one of them catches sight of me.

“What are you doing?” he yells at me, and I’m surprised by the ferocity in his voice.

“I’m looking for—” I begin.

“You’ve got to
get out of here!
” He advances toward me, making shooing motions with his hands. “Get out!”

I back away from him, but my chin comes up. “I’m just looking for my friend,” I say loudly, but then I see that he’s not angry. He’s scared. More scared than I’ve ever seen anybody in my life.

I take another step back from him, and over his shoulder I see the young guy come out of a door with something in his hand. A leg from an office chair, I realize numbly.

“Two have already hit—do you think there can’t be a third?” the man in the blue shirt screams at me. “Go!”

I turn around and go.

The Saturday before the Fourth of July is gloomy and dripping, but I hardly notice as I’m sitting on the floor of Hank’s closet, going through his and Travis’s stuff.

Okay, so I don’t feel exactly right about it, but Hank still hasn’t gotten back to me, and it’s been over a week. I know now that he’s avoiding me, and that makes me want to catch a plane to Somalia and kick his ass. But since I can’t, I’m going to do some good old-fashioned invasion-of-privacy.

I open an old, battered instrument case, and run my fingers over the tarnished saxophone inside. I’d seen stacks of music scores, and guessed they were Travis’s, as his obituary mentioned that he was in a band. I close the music case and put it carefully back where I found it.

There’s an entire box of trophies of all shapes and sizes, Travis’s and Hank’s, and stuck at the bottom of the box is an old stuffed animal of Hank’s he kept around even when he got older.

My phone buzzes, and I pull it out and see I have an e-mail from Anne Jonna.

I found a woman who remembers a young man in the towers who might be your brother. I gave her your contact information. Her name is Julia.

I stare at the message for a moment, feeling a flutter of excitement in my belly, and then turn with renewed determination to the closet. I’m getting closer. I can feel it.

A stack of yearbooks teeters on the top shelf of the closet.

I stand on tiptoe to lift them down. I pick up one from 2000, because that was the year Travis graduated. There are actually two of them, because Hank was a freshman in 2000, but a quick look at the inscriptions inside shows me which one is Travis’s. The scrawled notes across the front pages are mainly generic, like
Stay sweet, Travis!
and
Let’s keep in touch!
But a few are more interesting:
I’ll never forget that party when you rode the pig
and
When you hit the big time don’t forget us little guys.

I turn to the senior section and find Travis’s graduation picture, a twin to the smirking, shaggy-haired kid they use every year in the articles. I look up Travis’s name in the
index and there are two listings for him. One for his senior picture, and one on page 21.

I turn to page 21, and see a picture of Travis holding a saxophone, with two other guys. One is behind a drum set and the other holds a guitar. Travis is in baggy jeans and an oversized T-shirt, with a small, kind of wistful smile. The caption reads: “The Do-Gooders: Greg Laramore, Travis McLaurin, and Graydon Hunt.”

Wait a minute
.

I bend over the yearbook, studying the picture until I’m sure. The guy on the left, Greg Laramore, is Mr. Hipster himself, my Entrepreneurship teacher. He’s wearing a floppy hat and shades, but it’s definitely him.

It’s a small town, so I don’t know why I’m surprised that I would know one of Travis’s old friends. But a teacher? What would Travis be doing if he were still alive? He’d be turning thirty-four this year. What did he want to do when he grew up? Travis had never seemed like me and my friends. He’d been this mythical figure who vanished in smoke and flames. As crazy as it sounds, I am just realizing that he was just a little bit older than I am right now when he died.

Shaken, I run my fingers over the picture of Travis, like I can feel who he was through the cool, glossy picture.

My phone buzzes, and I pull it out of my pocket and see there’s a text from Drew about climbing today.

I wonder if he’s forgotten I’m on the message list and sent it to me by mistake. He must have heard what I did.

But I haven’t been climbing in months, and the thought of being on a mountain, away from it all … it’s almost too hard to resist.

I stare back down at the picture of my brother. He looks relaxed and happy. A year later, he’d be dead.

I need to talk to Mr. Laramore, but first …

First, I need to go climbing.

I’m early, sitting on a blocky boulder on the Undercliff Road trail, with a mist-shrouded view of fields and trees behind me, and the jangle of climbers’ gear singing like wind chimes on the cliff in front of me.

“Slime the rock with your feet! Right below you,” a guy yells up at his petrified girlfriend.

It’s a cloudy day, but even so the trail is full of backpacks and water jugs at the base of the cliff, the climbers swinging above like multicolored metronomes. Hikers with walking sticks and dogs dressed in colorful backpacks saunter by, preferring the horizontal path to the vertical one.

I’m in the process of strangling a light green spicebush when Drew and a couple of people come around a curve in the path. They are laughing and chatting about Fourth of July plans, and I notice with a small shiver that Adam is with them. I’m not surprised, but it doesn’t make me feel less nervous.

Adam is wearing jeans and a dark blue stretchy climbing
shirt. The gear on his belt jingles as he walks, and he is laughing at something one of the pretty blond college girls has said. I watch him, unable to stop myself, even when his eyes meet mine and he falls abruptly silent.

Drew is already talking a mile a minute as he approaches. “The third pitch of CCK is one of the best photo-ops on the mountain,” he says. “I hope you brought your cameras—this is one you’ll want to show the kiddies. Who needs a partner?” Drew’s gaze falls on me. I struggle to meet his eyes, and something flickers across his face.

He knows.

Climbing is all about trust. You have to trust your partner. In that one flicker, I know what Drew’s thinking:
You’re not the person I thought you were, so how can I trust you as a climber?

It’s a small group today, since many of the college kids have gone home for the summer. Everybody here knows I don’t have a partner, and people are already pairing up, avoiding my eyes.

I feel the hot prickle of tears, but try to act like the obvious snub isn’t bothering me.

“I’ll climb with Jesse,” Adam says, and the blond girl he was talking to looks at him in surprise.

“Good, fine, I’ll climb with Clara,” Drew says, obviously relieved.

Adam walks over to me, and I say in a low voice, “You don’t have to climb with me. You don’t have to do this.”

He shrugs. “What if I want to?”

For the first time in months, I see the flash of his dimple.

Adam leads the first pitch, and I belay him as he moves up the cliff like silk, his muscles rippling in his back as he reaches for the next handhold. I barely know anything about him, but I know everything I need to watching him climb. He is confident, and sure-footed, and careful when he needs to be, and sometimes he stretches farther than he should to get a good handhold, and every once in a while he just goes balls to the wall, like,
Eff it, I’m going all in.

I lead the last pitch, an exhilarating stretch of white billboard rock that makes my teeth and spine tingle with fear and excitement. At the top, I kneel on the jutting overhang so I can see Adam on the sheer face of the cliff. I watch his face, knowing that he won’t see me, because he’s concentrating on finding a foothold. His jaw is clenched, his clear blue eyes shaded by dark eyelashes as he sets his right foot and then reaches up to feel for a crack over his head. His gaze flicks up to mine, and I’m busted. Not that I shouldn’t have been watching him, that’s my job, but I can tell he sees that it is more than that. I blush and look away, but when I peer back over the edge he’s got his eyes closed, and his face is drained of color.

He’s not moving.

“Hey,” I say. “Adam? Are you okay?”

He nods, but he doesn’t open his eyes.

“Adam!” I call again, more sharply.

He doesn’t answer.

I tie off his rope and scan for a tree where I can build a second anchor. I find one, and loop the webbing around a tree trunk, twisting the ropes on either side so I can slip a carabiner on the whole thing to equalize the anchor.

Then I walk backward over the edge, my hand tight on the rope coming out of my belay device, and rap down to Adam.

“I’m okay,” he says when I reach him, but he doesn’t open his eyes and his face is white and sweaty.

“No,” I say. “You’re not. What’s wrong?”

“Just give me a minute. I did something kind of stupid.” He leans his forehead against the rock and takes deep breaths.

“I know the feeling,” I say. Below us the cliff face drops straight down to the tops of trees.

After a few minutes, he opens his eyes. “I’m feeling better. I just got light-headed for a minute there.”

“Are you sick?”

“No, I’m fasting. I thought I’d be okay, but it was hotter than I expected.”

“Why are you fasting?” I ask in exasperation. “Are you trying to lose weight or something? That’s a stupid thing to do when you’re going climbing.”

“Tell that to God,” he says wryly.

“What?” I stare at him.

“It’s Ramadan. We don’t eat or drink between sunup and sundown for a month. It’s sort of like Lent.”

I don’t know what to say, so I start moving cams and ’biners around with one hand, clipping and unclipping them like a cowboy in an old western drawing a gun.

“Ready?” Adam says. He slips his sunglasses back on and looks up at the blocky boulder shading us.

“Up or down?”

“I made it this far, I might as well go the distance.”

“You first,” I say.

We’re only a short distance from the top, and Adam takes it slow. I stay beside him as much as I can and still keep out of his way, pointing out cracks for foot- and handholds. When he starts giving me dirty looks, I know he’s feeling better.