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Suzy smiled, a lovely hazy smile of pure happiness and contentment. ‘Sure I do.’
‘Forget it, pal.’
They eased their way through the crowd to the door. The party was hotting up, in the way that weddings could do.
‘Finch has got to fly home up to Vancouver tonight,’ Suzy explained to the last group.
‘Weather’s turned pretty nasty,’ one of Jim Sutton’s cronies observed.
‘Finch has seen worse,’ Suzy said proudly.
Finch put her arm around her. ‘Go on, go back to your guests. I’ll call you. Have a great honeymoon.’
The newlyweds were going to the Caribbean. Suzy liked beaches.
They kissed each other.
‘Remember what I said. About coming back.’
‘I will,’ Finch promised. ‘Be happy, Mrs Sutton.’
‘I will,’ she echoed. ‘Thanks for being here, Finch. And for everything else, all the times we’ve had. I love you, you know? Plus you were a ripper bridesmaid.’
‘I wouldn’t have missed it. I love you too.’
She blew a last kiss from the doorway. As soon as she stepped outside, the cold and wind hit Finch like an axe blow. She ducked her head and teetered on high heels to the parking lot where she had left the rental car. The moment she was inside it, with the radio tuned in to some rock station and the heater beginning to do its work, Finch pushed her head hard back against the seat rest and let out a yodel of relief.
One more wedding.
She put her foot down and hightailed it for the airport until a twitch from the rear wheels gave warning of how icy the road was. She slowed at once and watched for the glow of tail lamps ahead of her.
At the airport she nosed the car into one of the Alamo slots and dropped the keys and the paperwork into the box at the closed booth at the end of the lot. The wind had strengthened and there were airborne needles of ice in it. Her thin coat over the pale-blue suit was no protection and there was a long hike to the doors of the departure hall. She dropped her bag and crouched to rummage inside it. From the bottom she pulled out her Gore-tex ski parka and pulled it on with a grunt of relief. She’d brought it with her on her three-day trip to Oregon thinking there might be a chance of some hiking, if not cross-country skiing. As it turned out there had been no time at all, but at least the faithful Patagonia was good for something now. Insulated from her hood to the middle of her thighs, Finch put her head back and marched through the wind. She carried her bag hitched over one shoulder and from the other fist trailed Suzy’s wedding bouquet. She had almost left it in the car, but had decided that she could hardly abandon her best friend’s flowers to wither on the passenger seat of a rented Nova.
Inside the sliding doors the warmth was a blessing but the concourse was packed. One glance at the departures board told her the worst and the clerk at the Air Canada desk confirmed it.
‘I’m sorry, ma’am, the airport’s closed. No flights until the weather eases. Tomorrow morning, I’d say.’
Sam McGrath was out running. It was more than a habit, this daily pushing himself through the barriers of disinclination and fatigue to achieve a rhythm and finally the synchrony of muscle and breath and mind that made it all worthwhile. It was a mainstay of his existence. Sometimes, in the blacker moments, he feared it was the only one.
He was skirting the shores of a little lake, and there was ice crusting the dead reeds along the margins and skinning the deeper water. The track wound between trees and bushes with their spring buds blackened by the return of winter; the dirt underfoot was greasy with earlier sleet but Sam knew the route so well that his pace never slackened. He was warm, now, and going at full stretch, his steady breathing making clouds in the bitter air and his footfalls pounding a drumbeat in his head.
He liked this solitude. Mostly his daily running was hemmed in by the city and there were always people within sight.
His father used to bring him fishing for brook trout down here, Sam remembered. Once they had camped somewhere back up in the trees in the old green tent and had fried their catch over a smoky fire. He would have been about ten years old. It must have been some holiday weekend when Michael hadn’t swung it to go climbing.
Memories shivered and stirred in his head.
He was eight years old and standing with his father at the foot of a cliff. The face stretched up so high over Sam’s head that it blotted out the sun. He reached up his hands, palms flat and raised, and rested them against the sandstone. Mike had ceremoniously dusted them with chalk. Particles of grit scraped minutely against his skin. Slowly, tasting nausea in the back of his throat, he lifted his eyes and searched for holds. Then he bent one knee and pressed the tip and side of his sneaker into a crack.
Up.
His fingers bent and hooked. The crevices were too tiny, but still he forced himself to entrust his weight to them. Sweat burst through the skim of chalk dust.
Up.
The grass, sweet and sappy, was a long way beneath him. The rock was close to his face and the air behind and below hummed and expanded, and played tricks with gravity. One minute he was a feather, hardly anchored to the boulder, the next a sack of soaking clothes, too heavy to hold up.
Up one more foothold.
He couldn’t look up or down.
‘Sammy, you’re fine. I’m here to catch you.’
He couldn’t work out if his father’s hands were huge, a great cradle waiting for him, or a tiny cup that he would smash under his weight. He hung on for a moment longer, desperation knocking inside him, then his legs liquefied and his fingers slid from their holds.
He was falling through space. There was a white flash of relief, resignation, before his father’s arms caught him and lifted him at once in a great flourish of triumph and strength and pride, and then they were both laughing in delight, and Michael swung his son through a loop of blue infinity before setting his two feet back on the ground again. He kissed him on the nape of his neck, under the wet curl of his hair.
‘That’s my boy. You’ll climb the Cap before you’re twenty, just like your old man. And then some.’
Sam let him tug his ear and pummel his shoulder, after the kiss, but he knew that he wouldn’t do what his father expected. Wouldn’t, couldn’t, whatever the Cap might be.
Twenty years later, he made himself concentrate on the length of his stride and keeping his breathing even. Running was good for that, always. You could go for miles, lost in your thoughts and memories, if that was what you wanted. And if you didn’t want to think you could edit everything else out of your mind, everything except legs and lungs, and the way ahead.
The track brought him to the tip of the lake, then rose steeply through a belt of Douglas firs to meet the blacktop where it followed the crest of the ridge. With his head up and his breathing still steady even after the hill climb, Sam ran easily along the roadside. One pick-up truck came by, travelling in the opposite direction, but there was no other traffic. It was less than two miles to the turning to his father’s house.
The McGrath place lay back from the road, hunched up against the black trees as if it would disappear among them if it could. The white paint on the window frames was faded to grey and it was peeling in places, and the curtains at three of the four windows were drawn tight, with that dead look of never being opened whatever the time of day. Mike McGrath’s old station wagon stood on a patch of scrubby ground, with Sam’s rental car beside it. Sam had slowed to a walk as soon as he reached the mailbox on its splintered post and the cold wind immediately skewered between his ribs. The sleet had started up again. Sam pulled up the hood of his fleece jacket and skirted the two cars on his way to the door.
His mother used to grow flowers just here. Cosmos and marigolds and goldenrod, he remembered. She loved bright colours. In spite of the cold he loitered deliberately where the margin of her garden used to be, thinking of the way she used to come out here on summer evenings to snap off the heads of fading blooms or pull up tufty clumps of grass from between the clods of earth. The house faced west and the sun would still be colouring the front of it when the woods behind had turned dark.
Sam took one deeper breath. He couldn’t linger out here, he told himself. He would have to go in now and tell him.
He pushed open the front door, putting his shoulder to it because damp had warped it and given it a tendency to stick.
Mike was sitting in his chair, watching daytime TV. There was a pot of coffee on the stove and an unwrapped loaf of pre-sliced bread spilling like a soft pack of cards on the counter. Sam pushed back his hood again as his father looked up at him.
‘Good one?’ the old man asked, without much interest.
‘Yeah. I went along past the Bowmans’ place and round the lake.’
‘Quite a way, then.’
‘Not bad. It’s cold out there.’
‘Coffee’s made.’
‘Thanks.’
Sam poured himself a cup and drank a couple of mouthfuls, remembering not to wince at the taste.
‘Do you want to watch this?’ he asked pointedly. The yammering faces of some talk show filled the screen with stories of outrage, attended by resentment and rancour. Although it was appropriate enough, he thought. There was always disappointment here, in this house. A rich deposit of it, seamed with the ore of anger. So why not on the box as well? Maybe it was why Mike liked all these programmes. He felt at home with them.
‘I thought maybe we could talk,’ Sam added.
He moved his father’s stick from beside his chair so that he could pull his own seat closer, partly blocking out the TV screen. The result was that they sat almost knee to knee. Sam could have reached and taken Mike’s hand between his own, but he didn’t. They had never gone in for touching, not since Sam was a little boy.
Mike’s response was to aim the remote and lower the volume by a couple of decibels. Then he turned to look his son in the face.
‘I didn’t qualify,’ Sam said.
There were two, three beats of silence.
Mike rubbed the corner of his mouth with a horny thumb. ‘Huh?’
‘I ran in Pittsburgh last week. It was the 2000 Trials.’
Sam had been training for the City of Pittsburgh Marathon ever since the USA Track & Field international competition committee had announced that the Olympic men’s marathon team would once again be decided, as it had been for more than thirty years, by a single race. And for Sam it had been one of those days when the running machine had kept stalling and finally quit. He didn’t suffer many of them, but when the machinery did let him down it was usually to do with the weight of expectation binding and snagging. His father’s expectations, specifically. Sam was fully aware of the dynamic between them, but awareness didn’t change it or diminish the effects. Even now.
‘I didn’t know.’
The old man’s face didn’t give much away. He just went on looking at Sam, waiting for him to explain himself.
It was so characteristic, Sam thought, that he wouldn’t have known or found out about the run in advance even though his son was a contender for the US Olympic team. Mike lived a life that was defined by his own ever-narrowing interests. He watched TV, he read a little, mostly outdoors magazines, he saw a neighbour once in a while and drank a beer.
But it was equally characteristic, Sam acknowledged, that he hadn’t told his father about Pittsburgh. He had qualified for the Trials by running a time better than two hours twenty in a national championship race and he had called Mike immediately afterwards to tell him so.
‘That’s pretty good,’ had been the entire response.
In adulthood, Sam had trained himself not to resent or rise to his father’s lack of enthusiasm. It’s the way he is, he reasoned. He wanted me to do one thing and I did another.
But even so, this time Mike had seemed particularly grudging. And so he had not told him anything more about the big race beforehand, or called him with the bad news once it was over. Instead, he had waited a week and then come down to visit the old man. He had played various versions of this scene in his head, giving Mike lines to express commiseration, or encouragement for next time, or plain sympathy – but the most cheerless scenario had been closest to reality. Mike was neither surprised nor sympathetic, he was just disappointed. As he had been plenty of times before. The pattern was set now.
‘So what happened?’ Mike asked at last.
Sam caught himself shrugging and tried to stop it. ‘I was fit enough and I felt good on the start. I don’t know. I just couldn’t make it work.’
‘What time did you do?’
‘Not good. Two twenty-eight. I’ve done plenty better than that, beat all the other guys who came in ahead of me – Petersen, Okwezi, Lund. But not on the day it counted.’
Mike went on looking at him, saying nothing.
‘There’s always 2004.’ Sam smiled, thinking within himself: It should be the other way round. You should be saying that to me.
‘You’re twenty-eight, twenty-nine, aren’t you?’
You know how old I am. ‘Long-distance running isn’t a kids’ game, luckily. You can stay in the front rank over long-distance well into your thirties.’
‘I was looking forward to you bringing home that gold.’ Mike nodded to the mantel, as if there were a space there, among the pictures of mountains and bearded men, that was bereaved of his son’s Olympic medal.
‘I’d have been happy enough just to go to Sydney and represent my country. It never was just about winning, Dad,’ Sam said patiently.
‘No.’
The monosyllable was a taunt, expertly flicked, that dug into Sam like the barb of a fish-hook.
It’s the way he is, Sam reminded himself. It’s because he’s bitter about his own life. And he’s entitled to a grouse this time. He would have been proud of me if I’d made it, so it’s understandable that he should feel the opposite way now.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t make it this time. It was tough for me as well. But I won’t stop running. It means a lot to me.’
‘Keep at it while you still can,’ Mike agreed. ‘You’re lucky.’
Do you want me to say I’m sorry for that, as well? Sam wondered.
Mike had already turned his gaze over his son’s shoulder, back towards the jeering audience on the television. The volume went up again.
Sitting in this house, with its fading wallpaper and the same old sofa and chairs, and the blandishing blue-sky covers of his father’s magazines – he still subscribed to Climber and Outside and the rest – it was hard for Sam to head off the memories. They lined up in the kitchen space and in the closets, and behind the curtains, waiting to ambush him. Where he lived now, up in Seattle with work to do, and Frannie and friends for company and distraction, he could keep out of their way. But not here, not even most of the time. He supposed it was the same for everyone going home. Whether or not you enjoyed your visit depended on the quality of the memories.
They had moved to this house when Sam was six. Before that, Mike and Mary McGrath had lived on the Oregon coast near Newport, but then Mike had started up a rental cabin and backwoods vacation tour business, with a partner, and had brought his family to the little town of Wilding. The business had only survived a year or two, and the partner had made off with most of the liquid assets and none of the burden of debt, but the McGraths had stayed on. They had put money into this house, a couple of miles out of town, and Mary had dug a garden out front and started to make some friends. Sam was in school and seemed happy enough, and in any case Mike was as willing to stay where he was as to move on. He took a job as a transport manager with a logging company. Mike didn’t reckon much on where he lived or what he did for a living, just so long as he could feed and house his wife and child, and get to Yosemite and the Tetons whenever possible, and to plenty of big boulders for climbing when his budget didn’t stretch to proper expeditions.
Other kids had plenty worse things to deal with, Sam knew, but he found the climbing hard.
He went on the camping trips, and while his father solo-climbed he played softball with the other boys and swam in icy streams, and hiked and rode his bike, always in fear of the moment when his father would call him.
‘Come on, Sammy. It’s your turn.’
‘No.’ Trying to climb with his father watching, with the hammering of blood in his ears and the shivering of his joints, and the sipping for breath with the top inch of his lungs because to breathe more deeply might be to dislodge himself from his precarious hold – all of these were too familiar to Sam.
‘Watch me, then.’ Mike sighed.
His movements were so smooth as he climbed, his body seemed like water flowing over the rock. But Sam’s arms wound tight around his knees as he sat watching and his breath came unevenly.
Don’t fall, he prayed. Don’t fall, Dad.
A moment or two later the man reached the crest of the boulder and disappeared, then his broad grinning face looked down over the edge. ‘See? Easy as pie.’
Sam felt his cheeks turning hotter, not from the sun’s brightness. His father was already down-climbing, smooth and steady. And then midway he suddenly stopped.
‘Now what can I do?’ he demanded, flinging the words back over his shoulder into the still air. ‘I’m stuck. Tell me what to do.’
The boy raked the reddish cliff with his eyes, searching the sandstone for a crack or a bulge. There were no ropes, nothing held his father safe except his own fingers or toes and now he was stuck and he would surely fall … he would fall and fall, and he would die.
‘See anything?’ Mike McGrath called more loudly. ‘Any foothold?’
Sam gazed until his eyes burned.
The red rock was flat and hard, and there wasn’t a dimple in it, even to save his father’s life. Terror froze the sunny afternoon and silenced the birdsong, and stretched the moment into an hour.
‘Wait. Maybe if you go that way …’ He rocked up on to his knees, so that he knelt at the rock face, and took tufts of long grass in his clenched fists to hold himself tethered to the earth. There was a little nubbin below where his father’s feet rested.
