Take Me Higher by Pamela Clare
Chapter 4
Megs stopped recordingand set the journal in her lap, smiling to herself at the memories. “I remember that day so well. It felt like coming home. I was so excited to be there, and then you and Gridwall had to complicate things. I was pissed at both of you—him for being a sexist jerk and you for assuming that I couldn’t handle it myself. Don’t worry. I forgave you.”
She’d noticed him the moment she drove up. He’d been so damned handsome with his bare chest and short sandy-blond hair. But she hadn’t come to Yosemite Valley to meet boys. She’d—
Beep, beep, beep!
The IV pump’s alarm sounded, one of Mitch’s IV bags empty.
Megs stood and moved her chair out of the way just as Debby, the RN, walked in, a new bag of fluids in hand.
“Let’s get this changed.” Debby removed the old bag and began to attach the new one. “How are you holding up?”
“I’ll be fine when he’s fine.” Megs needed to ask. “You must have cared for people with similar injuries before. Do most of them recover?”
Debby finished hanging the bag of fluids, then pressed some buttons on the IV pump to reset it. “Most do wake up eventually, but it’s rare for someone with this level of trauma to return to their life without needing at least some rehabilitation—physical therapy, speech therapy, cognitive therapy.”
It wasn’t the answer Megs had hoped to hear. “Thanks for being honest.”
Debby checked the other fluids, glanced at the monitors. “My husband was a climber when he was younger. He was nowhere near your level of skill. He mostly bouldered with buddies on the weekends. He’s a couch potato now, but he’s told me about you and Mitch and shared some of the things you’ve done. He’s got your old Lords of Stone VHS tapes.”
That was embarrassing.
“Just so you know, we didn’t choose the title—or the music.”
Debby laughed. “I won’t hold it against you. I was really impressed, especially with you—a woman making it in a man’s sport.”
“That’s kind of you. It’s not a man’s sport any longer.” Megs thought of Sasha. “Women are leading the way.”
Debby looked down at Mitch, compassion on her face. “We will do all we can to help the two of you get back to life and living.”
“I can’t ask for more. Thank you.”
Megs got settled again and was about to start recording when a man in a suit knocked on the door. Megs closed the journal, stood.
He stepped inside, held out his hand. “I’m Tom Gordon, the hospital administrator. I’m sorry to meet you under these circumstances, Ms. Hill.”
Megs shook his hand. “What can I do for you?”
She thought she knew.
“We’re getting press inquiries from around the world about Mr. Ahearn. We would like your permission to draft a statement. We’d like to hold a press conference this afternoon and get these folks off our backs. You don’t need to attend or speak at the conference, but—”
“That’s fine, provided I get to read the statement ahead of time.”
The administrator nodded, handed her a clipboard and a pen. “This is what we’d like to say. Read through it, sign and date it, and we’ll take care of the rest.”
Megs read through it, saw that it was all very general information. She approved it, handed him the clipboard, and watched him walk away. She hadn’t given much thought to the public impact of Mitch’s accident. The two of them had retired from professional climbing to focus on their work with the Team. But she and Mitch had friends and followers out there, people who would be deeply upset by this.
“Where did I leave my fucking phone?” She searched through her backpack, found her smartphone, and turned it on. “Sixty-two messages.”
There was no way on God’s green and hilly earth that she could answer that many calls, but she had the time to listen. Some were from media outlets in the climbing community. The others were from friends, including their buddies from their days climbing in Yosemite Valley—Gridwall, Accardo, Cook.
Megs didn’t have the energy or will to call them back, so she did the next best thing and posted a statement on all of her and Mitch’s social media accounts.
“Mitch Ahearn was critically injured by falling rock while climbing on Painted Wall in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. Rangers joined with members of the Rocky Mountain Search & Rescue Team to save his life. He underwent surgery yesterday for a skull fracture and a broken clavicle. He is in stable but critical condition in the ICU at Denver Medical Center. We appreciate your support and concern and ask that you respect our privacy during these difficult days. I will update you as I am able. In the meantime, remember to wear a helmet. If Mitch hadn’t been wearing his yesterday, he’d be dead.”
Within seconds, her posts began getting responses, but she didn’t stick around to read them. Instead, she muted her phone, set it aside, and settled down once again with the recorder and Mitch’s journal.
She glanced at the next entry and smiled. It had been a day that made climbing history, though no one had understood that at the time.
Mitch spenthis morning bouldering with the boys at The Crystals. He, Gridwall, Accardo, John Baker, and Ron Cook took turns spotting each other on a few complex routes. Meanwhile, Ken Yoder, Gene Lewis, and Billy Ansel monkeyed around on the easier stuff for strength training.
Mitch battled a route someone had named Pride—probably because it stripped a man of his pride pretty quickly. He got a little closer to making it to the top each time, his body learning the moves. But it wasn’t easy to focus with Gridwall there, tripping on acid and having conversations with birds.
“Fly, man! That’s what you were meant to do. Fly and be free. The whole sky belongs to you, man. The whole fucking sky.”
On the way back to camp, the guys decided to try their luck again with White Lightning, a route on Columbine Boulder. Close to Camp 4, this monster of a boulder was thirty feet tall with a nasty overhang that had defied everyone. Dean said it was unclimbable, and Mitch thought he was probably right.
One by one, they tried and failed, none of them clearing that damned overhang. There were no holds they could use to pull themselves over the top.
The sound of an engine turned his gaze toward the road. Megs drove up and parked, Janis Joplin’s Me and Bobby McGee blasting out of her open windows.
Everyone looked her way, except for Accardo, who was climbing.
“She looks like a schoolgirl.” Gridwall watched her as she crossed the campground, walking toward her tent.
Jim might be tripping, but he was also right. She did look like a schoolgirl—blouse, skirt, knee-high socks, real shoes. She glanced their way and then disappeared inside her tent. When she stepped out a few minutes later, she was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, her hair in a ponytail, climbing shoes in one hand.
Accardo struggled with the overhang, tried to reach a crimp to pull himself over the top, and fell, skinning his elbow on the way down. “Shit!”
“She’s coming this way. Does she think she’s going to climb?” Gridwall shook his head. “That would be a joke.”
Gridwall went next, reaching the overhang just as Megs joined them. She watched, her gaze moving over the route as if she were studying it.
Mitch walked over to her, hoping she wouldn’t get the wrong idea. He wasn’t trying to hit on her. He just wanted to say hello. “I’m Mitch Ahearn. I’m a friend of Dean’s, too. Good to meet you, Megs.”
She looked up, her gaze meeting his, eye contact sending a jolt of awareness through him. “I’m … I’m Megs.”
It was the first time he’d gotten a good look at her face and…
Damn.
Big gray eyes. Long lashes. High cheekbones. Clear, tanned skin. She was a foot shorter than he was, only an inch or two above five feet. Her body wasn’t just slender but also strong, with well-defined muscles, her breasts small, her waist narrow. She looked so young, like a kid not even out of high school. But here she was, alone in Yosemite, driving a car. She couldn’t be much older than eighteen.
She was so pretty that it took him a moment to realize that he’d left her flustered. He knew her name. He’d just used it. Still, she had repeated it.
That was interesting.
“You were all dressed up this morning.” He spoke before he could stop himself.
“I got a job at the cafeteria.”
“A job?” None of them had jobs.
“Yes, a job. You know—gainful employment. Don’t you have to eat to climb?”
He did, but he got by on instant oatmeal, canned food from home, and expired items from the Village store. One time, he and the guys had brought back an expired case of canned dog food and fried that up. But he wouldn’t admit that, not to her.
He lowered his voice. “Sorry about Gridwall. He isn’t a bad guy. He’s just—”
She shifted her gaze back to the boulder. “A chauvinist pig.”
Mitch couldn’t help but grin. “Yeah. A chauvinist pig.”
Gridwall fell from the overhang, landed in the dirt with a grunt.
“Dean said he had a big mouth and a bigger ego.”
“True.” Mitch had to ask. “Did he say anything about me?”
“He said the two of you learned to climb together at…” She frowned, as if trying to remember. “Tahquitz Rock? He also said you’re smart.”
“That’s true, too.” His lack of humility brought a half-smile to her face. “You must be good if Dean climbed with you. He doesn’t waste time with—”
“Ahearn!” Gridwall brushed the dirt off his hands. “Are you going to try, or are you too distracted by the blonde?”
Mitch saw fire in Megs’ eyes, knew she was furious. “Her name is Megs. Why don’t you let her try?”
He knew he was probably putting her on the spot, but the only way for her to earn their respect was to show them that she, too, could master stone.
Her gaze moved from him to the rock and back again, and he saw nervousness in her eyes—and defiance.
Gridwall laughed. “If we can’t do it, there’s no way a little girl can. She’s too short. She doesn’t have our reach or our strength. Asking her to try is just unfair to her.”
“Sure, I’ll give it a shot.” Megs sat in the dirt, changed into her climbing shoes, got to her feet, and strapped on her chalk bag.
Determination on her face,she walked over to the boulder, studied the holds, clearly thinking through the moves in her mind. Then she chalked her fingers and stepped onto the route.
Her first several moves were like everyone else’s. The opening crimp holds carried her up to that undercling crimp off to the right. From there, she shifted her left hand to the crimp high above, adjusted her feet, then used the muscles in her legs to surge upward to the next hold.
Mitch was impressed. She climbed with both athleticism and grace, making it look easy when they all knew it wasn’t.
For a few seconds, she hung there by her fingers, the reach to the next hold far even for a six-foot-tall man. She searched with her feet, found a couple of small holds to support her—and lunged upward once again, her fingers closing on the thin lip of stone on the top edge of the overhang.
This is where they all fell. It was damned hard to hang on to that lip with one hand and reach over the top with the other. There was nothing to hold onto up there, no way to pull one’s self over the top.
Then she did something completely unexpected.
Once again hanging on by her fingertips, she caught one heel on the edge of the overhang and used it to bring herself almost parallel to the ground. Then she shifted her left hand and used her arm as a lever, lifting herself up and over the edge. From there, it was just a bit of fifth-class scramble to the top.
She turned, looked down at them from the boulder, still out of breath, a bright smile on her pretty face. “Hell, boys, it’s not that hard.”
The guys stared up at her, some with open mouths.
Mitch found himself grinning like an idiot.
Megs stopped recordingand set the journal aside, a smile on her face. She hadn’t been familiar with Yosemite, so she hadn’t realized that she was the first person ever to finish that route.
Not the first woman. The first person.
The climbing world took note of that first ascent at the exact moment when the sport began to take off. The Yosemite free-climbing revolution had begun, and she’d found herself at the heart of it—thanks to Mitch. Even before they’d gotten together, he’d been there, lifting her up every step of the way.
“Gridwall spent the next week trying to duplicate what I’d done, and when he failed, he started saying I’d succeeded only because I was lighter. I’d forgotten what a jerk he was in the beginning. You put him in his place, remember? ‘Is she lighter, or are you stronger? Make up your mind.’”
It had been one of the most exciting times of her life—and Mitch was part of the reason for that. He was right. She had gotten flustered when he’d introduced himself. It had been pure hormones, a physical reaction. He’d been so damned good-looking, his T-shirt stretched across his pecs, a smile on those lips, his brown eyes warm.
“How like you to notice my reaction. You’ve always been able to read people. You knocked me off—”
His body jerked, and he went rigid.
Pulse spiking, Megs jumped to her feet, pressed the call button. “He’s seizing!”
But they must have seen something on their monitors.
Debby and other nurses rushed into the room. “Please wait outside, Ms. Hill.”
Megs managed to squeeze Mitch’s hand and then got the hell out of the way, medical staff speaking medicalese, their words clipped, their tone urgent. She left the ICU, stood in the hallway, her heart still racing.
Hadn’t the doctor mentioned something about seizures?
She struggled to remember through her exhaustion and fear.
If she’d been the praying kind, a believer, she’d have said a prayer, but it felt hypocritical praying to a god she’d ignored all of her life. So she paced the hallway instead, stopping every so often to lean back against the wall or look at her watch or check her smartphone.
After about forty-five minutes, Debby opened the door, a smile on her face.
“You can come back in now.” Debby walked with her to Mitch’s bedside.
He lay still, just as he’d done before the seizure.
“Is he okay?”
“Seizures aren’t uncommon after a craniotomy. They’re especially common in the first twenty-four to forty-eight hours after surgery. The fact that he had a seizure doesn’t mean his condition is declining or that he won’t recover. We’re taking him down for an MRI in about an hour.”
“Another one?”
“It’s routine after that kind of surgery.” Debby rested a hand on her arm. “I know it’s hard to leave, but you need to take care of yourself, too. You must be exhausted. Do you have a place you can stay nearby?”
Megs nodded. “The Marriott.”
“You should go get some sleep. This is a long haul. You don’t want to wear yourself out on Day One.”
Some part of Megs wanted to rage at Debby. Mitch was the man she loved, the only man she’d ever loved. She didn’t want to leave him, but she knew Debby was right. She was exhausted. She still had her climbing clothes on, Mitch’s blood on her leggings.
“Can you please call me if anything changes?”
Debby nodded. “I promise. I’ll keep the recorder playing, too, except for when he has the MRI. Then it has to come off.”
Megs understood. “Thank you. I’ll just take a minute with him.”
“Of course. Stay as long as you like.”
Megs set the recorder to play. “I’m just going to go take a shower and grab some sleep. I’ll be back. Don’t go anywhere while I’m gone, okay, bud? I love you.”
She put the earbuds in his ears, pushed the PLAY button, took the handle of the suitcase Rain had brought, and reluctantly walked out of his room.