Climb
Going to California tomorrow. Don't know when I'll be back. Stay safe. —Kestrin
Giving up on analysis, Lorona pushed away from the open email that Kestrin had sent the previous night. Amidst the flurry of the wedding, her desktop computer had never moved from its place, and she was suddenly reminded of Kestrin's first email to her, glowing across the screen in a dark room. She'd accepted his crazy proposal a few minutes later.
“At least I used the word ‘love’ in my note to you. Jerk.” She marched to the kitchen and opened the freezer, poking her head inside. Orange sorbet sounded really good right now.
Suddenly she wanted to send him a text. It could be anything: X's and O's or “I miss you.” It could even be an insult. Just so he'd have words from her. She checked her purse and the pockets of her coats. Then under her bed and behind the furniture. “Yuki, I think I lost my cell phone.”
“That purple piece of junk that I've been telling you to replace for years?” Yuki rolled a lump of cold pie dough between her hands.
“I think I forgot it in Kestrin's place when I left.”
“We can run over there and get it, if you want. I've got nothing going on the rest of the day.”
“Yeah, thanks. I don't want to go alone.”
The downpour started as soon as they pulled out of the apartment parking garage. A few minutes later, they stood in front of the whitewashed brick arch that crowned the entry to Kestrin's apartment. The glass doors chattered noisily when Yuki yanked on the brass handles.
“Do you have a key?” she asked.
Lorona shook her head. “There's a little gatekeeper for this one. The key I have is only for Kestrin's room.”
“Password.” A gruff child's voice interrupted from behind the mail slot. It looked like a menacing duck with a metal bill.
“Alcatraz,” Lorona said.
“Pass. Word. Changed. Incorrect.” He bit off the final “t.”
Lorona tried the names of all the prisons she could think of, to no avail.
“Come on.” Lorona yanked Yuki away as Napoleon junior pointed his tongue against the glass, fogging it.
The rain poured in a fluid sheet.
Yuki was ready to retreat. She watched, unbelieving, as Lorona hurried in the opposite direction. “Where do you think you're going?”
“The Green Lake library.”
“What for?”
“To look up a list of high security prisons using their internet.”
Yuki stomped after her, whimpering as her hair flattened in the rain.
A few more blocks and they were standing in front of the library.
Closed for Maintenance, a sign read. A small laminated article explained a black mold problem in the basement. Lorona glared at the warmly lit interior.
Back outside Kestrin's apartment, the little gatekeeper shook his head at them, scowling and rubbing his stomach. Lorona imagined a cigar drooping out of his mouth to complete the picture.
Yuki's teeth chattered in a rhythmic symphony, and Lorona was about to give up when another tenant arrived and graciously let them in. They hurried past before the little gatekeeper could bite their ankles.
At Kestrin's door, Lorona stuck her key in the lock, tried to turn it, and gasped. “I don't believe it,” her voice trembled. “My key doesn't work!”
“Try turning it the other way.” Yuki glanced down the hallway nervously.
“I've turned it both ways!” A Spanish expletive flared.
“Let me try.” As Yuki twisted the key, cursing under her breath, the landlady walked down the hall and stopped to watch them.
“I'm not breaking in.” Lorona forced a laugh, which sounded hysterical. “This is my apartment and the key isn't letting me in.”
“Oh, he must not have told you.” The landlady smiled sweetly and came over. She smelled like gingersnaps. “His mother stopped by this morning, and told me he wanted to get the locks changed after some attempted break-ins that happened over the weekend. I said that would be fine. She said she'd bring a copy of the keys a little later.”
Lorona bit down hard on her tongue, then managed, “His mother changed the locks. I see.”
“I'm sure either your husband or his mom could give you their copy for now. She must have just forgotten to let you know, dearie.”
Lorona's voice was small and weak. “Thanks for letting me know.”
The landlady continued on her way, glad that she was able to help and probably thinking about the doily she was crocheting.
Lorona slid to the floor and whispered, “There were no attempted break-ins, and Kestrin never said anything about changing locks.”
Rain pelted against the hall window, rattling it violently. A door slammed on a floor above them and the crash echoed.
“Are you saying she changed the locks on you? Do you think Kestrin told her to do it?”
Lorona shrugged.
“Let's go home and we'll give his mom a call and set things straight.” Yuki squeezed her shoulder.
“I need my phone,” Lorona insisted.
“You can use mine. I've got lots of minutes left this month.”
“No, I need mine. I need to be able to answer if he calls me. It might be the only connection we have. He's going to California, and I don't know if he'll have internet.”
“You can't do anything here.”
“Either his mom changed the locks without Kestrin knowing, or he asked her to change them. Either way, she's against me.” Lorona covered her face with her hands. The cell phone was growing increasingly larger and vital in her mind.
Yuki wrung her hair and watched the puddle on the floor. She dried her hands on her shirt, and pulled Lorona to her feet. “We're going home.”
“Why is he going to California?” Lorona whispered.
They reached the lower landing and prepared for a mad dash to the car. As Yuki surged forward, Lorona looked up at Kestrin's window. A thought struck her as the first growl of thunder rumbled across the sky.
“Wait a minute,” she squinted at the brick wall. “Four stories isn't that bad.”
“Lorona Maria Connelly, don't even think about it.”
“She isn't thinking about it. Don't worry.”
“Good. Because I thought you were planning to climb up and break in from the outside.”
“Lorona Maria Feather was thinking that, however.” Under her breath Lorona muttered to herself, “You will find your first answer on the wall.”
Yuki didn't hear her. “You look like a wet marmalade cat,” Yuki whined. “We're going to get hypothermia.”
Lorona rubbed her hands together. “Then I'd better move fast.”
They shuffled to the side of Kestrin's building. Yuki eyed the interior of a café where rotisserie chickens spun past the window with crackling brown skins. “I'd let them skewer me like that if I could feel warm right now,” she groaned. “I hope you know how much I love you.”
Lorona tried to pick out an ascent on the brickwork. This wasn't going to be like a rock climbing wall, which she'd only attempted once. She touched the wet brick and made a face. All surfaces would be slippery and, if she was really lucky, coated with moss. She pulled off her shoes and stood barefoot on the pavement.
“You're going to climb that?” Yuki yelped and covered her eyes. “I'm not watching you kill yourself. Call me if you're alive ten minutes from now. I'll be around the corner.”
“I can't call you! I don't have a phone!” Lorona laughed.
Yuki disappeared and Lorona shook her head. Yuki clearly didn't understand that this phone meant a connection with Kestrin. There was something about needing to defeat Amanda in all of this, too.
An oil slick floated in a puddle with iridescent blue and silver swirls. Lorona used its beauty to draw her strength and murmured a prayer.
Looking up at the second story, Lorona saw the beginning of a fire-escape. If she could climb up to there, the rest of the ascent to Kestrin's window would be easy. She scrambled up a nearby dumpster, and as soon as she tried to stand, her soles slipped on the smooth metal. She pitched forward and slammed onto both knees with a gong-like crash.
“You okay?” Yuki panicked from her blind spot.
“Stay where you are. I'm bleeding and my intestines are showing. It's not pretty.”
“Knock it off!”
“Stay put. I'm fine.”
Yuki growled loudly, but she didn't reappear.
Lorona laughed again. Her optimism rose buoyantly under the weeping sky. Was this the shy, rule-abiding girl who was risking her neck for a chance to talk to her husband? Lorona's smile widened.
Amanda isn't going to stop me.
A large oak grew close by the dumpster, devoid of almost all its leaves. This would offer a better bid on survival than mossy bricks, she decided. Lorona wrapped her arms snugly around a lower branch and swung herself up. She gritted her teeth as her palms slipped on the wet bark. The fire escape was only ten feet above her head now. That was less than the height of two Kestrins if you laid them down toe-to-head.
“Of course I measure things by your height!” she muttered. She paused to catch her breath.
What if he doesn't want me back?
Her arms shook. She was needlessly fatiguing herself with angry fantasies. But her mouth wouldn't stop working. “‘Call me if you want me back’? Did I really write something as dumb as that?”
She absolutely needed that phone.
Lorona fixed her eyes on the window again. Behind her, over her shoulder across the alley, steam rose from a small turbine fan. Wet brown leaves smeared across the surface of the flat roof of the beer and wine mart. She'd enjoyed several mornings peering out at this roof, mug of coffee in hand as she searched for images in the mass of leaves, like looking for shapes in the clouds.
Lorona racked her brain to try to remember if the window was open. She vaguely recalled setting her phone on the window shelf, right beside her used copy of Ovid's Metamorphosis. Hadn't a breeze been stirring the apartment when she'd packed?
Call me if you want me back.
Lorona's shoulders burned. The wet numbness had reached her toes and was slowly working itself down from her head and neck to paralyze her back. She'd already waited too long, clinging to the tree as her blood congealed.
She couldn't tell if she was imagining it or if she was actually hearing the faint jingling ring of a cell phone. Her heartbeat tripled. She reached for another branch and realized only as she heaved her weight onto it that something was wrong. The rotten limb crunched away from the trunk as she gave it more weight. Lorona fell forward, hugging the main branch with fierce determination. A fall from here would have made a belly-flop from the high dive look like child's play.
Recovering herself, she reached for a healthy branch and pulled higher, mercifully closer to the wall and the window. She visualized her book and phone. If the window was open in this downpour, the book would be completely drenched, but perhaps her phone was shielded by its bulk from water damage.
Lorona leaned out one careful inch at a time. Her numb, white fingers grasped a branch as thick as her forearm, and her feet slid along one of similar size. Both branches shrank as they neared the building, offering false hope. The fire escape was still not close enough for her to reach it from the tree and the window was higher still. She squinted at it and saw water droplets clinging to a clear surface. The window was closed.
Lorona fit her lip fiercely and dropped her gaze, trying to convince herself not to panic.
Then she saw it. A few bricks below the third-story window, near its bottom left-hand corner, was a message. The only word she could think for it was “graffiti,” but it was tinier than any graffiti she'd seen. No can of spray paint had been used for this. The writing was delicate enough to be calligraphy, written with a small nib or paintbrush. It took up the space of three bricks, relatively fresh because the cerulean paint was still bright.
you vandalize shalom
it read, one word on each brick. Lorona couldn't help smirking that the word vandalize was part of an art piece classified as vandalism. Then the blue words sank deeper and touched something tender.
What had the psychic said? Lorona let the memory surface. You will find your first answer on the wall. Was this it? Madame Ovary had also said that Lorona had betrayed Kestrin. And now here she was, looking at blue writing that seemed like a piece of holy text, with the word “shalom,” which she knew was Hebrew for “peace.” But why would a graffiti artist put that word with the verb made from vandalism and then proceed to vandalize a small patch of wall into an accusation? It didn't make any sense.
And even more, why would someone else climb here, just like Lorona, to create this message in this exact place? It wasn't anywhere near the fire escape, so a tree scramble or a ridiculous brick ascent were the only two options, unless somebody owned a very long ladder. And yet the words seemed to be especially written for her.
I took his peace. I don't even know how I did it, but I did.
“Lorona!” Yuki stuck her head out of a third-story window. “One of the neighbors let me in. I told him you were crazy and I couldn't make you come down.”
The solemn thoughts washed away with a fresh spatter of rain. “Did he let you in before or after you kissed him?” Lorona teased. She shook the water out of her eyes. “I'm climbing up to Kestrin's room.”
“You're stark raving mad!” Yuki sounded hysterical.
Lorona used the authoritative voice she employed when closing the bookstore and telling studiers they had to leave. “Hand me your cell phone.”
“Why?”
“It has a camera. I want to take a picture of something.”
Thunder pealed somewhere close.
“Lorona!” Yuki wailed. Someone exiting the wine mart stopped to watch them.
“You're making a scene, Yuki. Just give me your phone so I can get out of here. This guy on the street is checking out my butt.”
Yuki's head disappeared and then she was lowering the cell phone in a pillow case with a corner tied to a broom handle. Lorona checked her hand and footholds and cautiously reached in and grabbed the phone.
She held it close to her body to shield it from the raindrops, but her drenched and dripping hair made this pointless. The muscles in her palm began a steady chorus of cramps, so that by the time she'd lined up the phone's camera with the blue message, her muscles roared like an angry mob. She punched the Capture button with her thumb, squinted at the saved image to make sure it was clear, and tossed the phone back into the sopping pillowcase.
There was something trophy-like about this photo. It proved she'd climbed in dangerous conditions and still lived to tell the tale. It showed that Amanda wouldn't blockade her easily.
Lorona assessed her situation. As she did, the adrenaline dropped from her muscles to a sick spot in her stomach. She couldn't feel her feet at all, and when she tried to move them, she felt a cold stiffness above her knees, and no shift of position allowed her to stretch them.
When she dropped her gaze, the alley below her spun. “Oh God.” It was now or never. Lorona gauged the number of shuffles and slides it would take before she'd have to jump the remaining feet to grab the ledge of Kestrin's window. It was all the strength she had left. She didn't stop to think about how she would break the glass.
She took a deep breath and, moving as quickly and carefully as she could, launched herself toward the wall. If she didn't hesitate, she could make it. Lorona pressed as hard as she dared with her knees. The flimsy end of the branch gave her less resistance than she'd anticipated, and her flight trajectory dropped several degrees. Her hands barely fastened onto the sill as her legs slammed into the bricks. She struggled to hoist herself as a cold tentacle of fatigue dragged her down.
“Yuki!” she shouted. “Where's that broom handle? I need help!”
She heard a metallic screeching above her head, the sound of something giving away.
Had the heavy rain filled the crevices of the fire escape and pushed it into a forced extension? She couldn't tell from its angle, but she imagined it might knock her off the wall to land in a bloody heap in the dumpster below. They wouldn't have to bother to move her corpse. They could just let her be cleared away with the rest of the week's garbage. The rain fell on her unprotected face, forming tear-like rivulets as if helping her cry.
Before any of her life could flash before her eyes, the fire escape ladder was zooming downwards, almost within arm's reach. It was falling too slowly. Then a man with thick glasses and a halo of gray hair dropped into view. He swung around the ladder so that he was on the side nearest her. He planted his boot in the sill of another window and wrapped a steady grip around her wrist.
“My name's Pete. I'm the janitor.”
“Oh God,” Lorona managed as relief jellied her muscles.
He chuckled. “I'm just Pete. Take my arm and dig your toes into that ledge. Easy does it.”
With the window closed and the janitor unable to allow her into an apartment that didn't have her name officially added to it, Lorona surrendered to defeat and a dry towel.
An hour later, back at Yuki's apartment and wearing dry clothes, the defeat of returning home empty-handed didn't dampen their moods for long. Yuki logically claimed Lorona's life as the consolation prize. Yuki baked a blackberry pie using frozen berries from their picking expedition in August along the Burke Gilman trail, and after they'd eaten, she opened a bottle of wine from her collection. After two glasses, Lorona burst out, “You want to know something funny?” at the exact time that Yuki said, “I think there's something you should know.”
