The Ascent (3 page)

“Did you see the boats?” she said, returning to the kitchen.

“What boats?”

“They’re gearing up for some big race. People from all over the country are in town. You should see the size of the boats down at Ego Alley.”

Ego Alley was what the locals called the downtown dock, where all the silver-haired, retired Annapolis moguls coasted by on their enormous boats, their chests puffed out, while bikini-clad, amber-skinned women decorated the decks. If one were to look closely at these men, it was almost possible to spot a fan of peacock feathers sprouting from their asses.

I piloted my wheelchair back onto the deck, snatching the bottle of Macallan as I went. Sure enough, I could make out a cluster of white sails farther down the shoreline. Uncorking the bottle, I brought the scotch to my lips and took a quick swig. Marta had stopped reprimanding me for drinking while on pain medication, knowing damn well I’d sooner give up the meds than the whiskey. When she caught me now, she would only shake her head like someone who’d just heard of a terrible automobile accident on the news.

It had been six months since the incident at the cave and four months since the last of my surgeries. The result was a steel plate and a dozen or so stainless steel screws drilled into the bones of my left leg. Such things were beyond the assistance of simple pain medication; such things were beyond mere
pain
.

“Is this a new one?” she called from inside.

I craned my neck to find her standing in the vestibule, holding an envelope.

“Another one from New York?”

“They’re always from New York,” I reminded her.

“You didn’t even open it.”

I took another drink from the bottle and watched a pair of Jet Skis carve white tracks of froth across the surface of the bay.

Marta came up behind me, fanning herself with the envelope. “Can I open it?”

“Be my guest.”

She tore open the envelope, depositing a pigtail curl of white paper into my lap, and read the contents of the letter out loud. She’d gotten only partway when she stopped reading and said without humor, “What’s the matter with you? These guys are making a great offer. They want to fly you out and discuss it. Oh, shit. What’s the date?”

“Don’t really know.”

“Damn it. They wanted you to go out
last week
. You missed it.”

I shrugged. “Doesn’t matter.”

“Right,” she said. “Nothing matters. This letter doesn’t matter and neither do any of the others that came before it. There’s a stack of them in a shoe box under your bed, you know.”

“I thought you threw them away.”

“Why would you think that? You never asked what I did with them, and I never told you.”

“Why are you making a big deal about this all of a sudden?”

Marta crinkled the letter into a ball and dropped it in my lap. I could tell, even without peeling apart the ball, that it had been typed on expensive paper. Probably watermarked, with an upraised crest in the header.

“Because it’s been too long,” she said, slipping into the apartment. “Too much time has gone by, and you haven’t done anything to get back on track.”

I turned the wheelchair around and followed her inside. “It was never my intention to get back on that track.”

“Well, you need
some
track. This place is a dump, and you’re running out of money.”

That much was true. Since the accident, I hadn’t been able to teach at the college. I’d attempted to provide students with an online seminar for the semester—something I could teach via the Internet and a digital camera three nights a week—but I was not a very good lecturer. And it was next to impossible to teach an art class over the Internet. Fortunately I was able to take a sabbatical while I recuperated, and I’d spent the past six months watching DVDs and in the evenings crutching from bar to bar through downtown Annapolis.

“I told you,” I said, not knowing if I’d ever said these words to her or not, “I can’t do it anymore. It’s left me.”

“Are you so sure? When was the last time you even
tried
sculpting something?”

“Before the accident, I was sculpting every day in class—”

“I don’t mean at the college. I mean for real, in real life. Not something that takes you fifty minutes to mold out of clay. I’m talking about the kind of sculpting you used to do before I knew you. The work that made you happy and got your face on the cover of that magazine you’ve got framed …” She glanced at the empty square of wall beside the front door—the spot where a crooked little nail jutted erect, suddenly so obvious I was surprised she hadn’t noticed earlier. “Why did you take it down?”

“It accidentally fell and broke,” I said. This was only partially true.

Seemingly defeated, she flopped onto the sofa. She looked like she wanted to hit me. Instead, she shook her head, something like a coy smile teasing the corners of her mouth. She brought her hands up and rested her chin on them. A spray of freckles covered her arms.

“Let’s play,” I said, placing the bottle of Macallan on the floor. I started setting up the chessboard that sat on the coffee table between us.

“No.” Marta stood.

“What?”

“I’ve got a date.”

“No shit?”

“You always sound surprised.”

“I always am. Who is he?”

“He’s no one you know.”

“That’s not what I meant. What does he do?”

“He’s a bartender.”

“Maybe I
do
know him.”

“Ha. Seriously, he’s just a nice guy, nothing fantastic. But I’m not getting any younger.”

“So you’re thinking a bartender’s the way to go, huh?”

“Cool it. I’m watching my life tick by.” And for whatever reason, this statement caused something to turn over inside her—that much was evident by the change in her expression—and she cocked her hip and looked at me from beneath her brow. “What the hell possessed you to explore the cave on your own that day?”

In all this time, she’d never asked the question. Right now my answer was a long time coming. “Guess I was just looking for something,” I said, continuing to set up the chessboard. I would play by myself if I couldn’t convince Marta to stay.

“Looking for what?”

I shrugged. “Can’t answer that.”

“Can’t? Why not? Someone holding a gun to your head? Or is it some vast government secret?”

“The latter one sounds cool. Let’s go with that.”

“Christ, Tim. Sometimes you’re just goddamn impossible.”

I almost told her about Hannah right then—about how it was Hannah’s ghost that had helped me out of the cave and beckoned me toward the highway. I would have never found that highway on my own, and I surely would have died in that cave if not for Hannah.

But I kept my mouth shut, not wanting to discuss such things, because that story was connected to another story, a
current
story, and I didn’t want to tell that one at all. Given the physical and psychological stress my body had been under at the time of the accident, seeing Hannah’s ghost was easily explained away. Her image was a figment of my imagination, summoned from the depths of my memories to the forefront of my world while in a state of excruciating pain and the onset of hypothermia. I could have claimed to have been led from the cave by Elvis, and it could be blown off with a subtle grin and a wave of the hand. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was where the story led me—to the here and now—and how such claims were no longer dismissed as easily.

Because since the accident I’d seen Hannah in my apartment. Most recently, three nights ago, standing outside on the balcony …

“What’s wrong?” A furrow creased Marta’s brow. “You look frightened all of a sudden.”

My palms were sweating. I swallowed and my spit felt granulated, like sand. When I spoke, my voice cracked as if I were going through puberty all over again. “Guess I was just thinking back on the whole thing.”

“It must have been horrible. But it’s over now. You escaped. You’re alive.”

I cleared my throat. “Stay. Just for one game.”

“Stop it.” She came and kissed the top of my head. It was such a motherly act that I felt a pang of nostalgia for my childhood. “I have a date and I need to go. I’ll stop by and see you tomorrow, okay?”

“Unless you get lucky tonight. You know how sharp those bartenders can be. By the way, tell him I said hello, whoever he is.”

“You’re a regular riot. There’re fresh cold cuts in the fridge. Try to stay out of trouble.”

I winked.

She left.

2

WHEN NINE O’CLOCK ROLLED AROUND. I WAS STILL

thinking of Hannah. The apartment had grown cold and dark, and the air that came in through the balcony doors carried with it the gritty scent of the Chesapeake.

I sat in my wheelchair and watched the first hour of
Rear Window
until my memories got the better of me; I began to trick myself, believing I saw Hannah in the periphery of my vision. Once, as Jimmy Stewart looked out across his courtyard with a telephoto lens, I thought the face of the leotard-clad dancer in the opposite apartment bore Hannah’s face. This was stupid, of course … but I still reversed the DVD and paused it on that frame nonetheless.

After a time, I rolled out onto the balcony with the Macallan. It was good scotch; I approved of the cozy chateau emblem on the label. I sat and drank, watching the sodium lights twinkling farther down the stretch of beach toward downtown. Directly over the water, which was now a vast blanket of darkness, stood the Bay Bridge, bejeweled with the countless headlights of automobiles.

I’d lied to Marta earlier when I said I thought she’d thrown all those letters away. I knew very well she’d tucked them inside that shoe box under my bed. I’d gone through them a number of times since, though not with any sense of remorse or regret at having missed the opportunities. In fact, I felt very little emotion when I looked at them, except maybe for a sense of anchoring, of stabilizing, the way a ship gets tied to the docks when it growls into port.

They were letters requesting my services as an artist and a sculptor. Usually they came from multinational conglomerates and faceless corporations throughout the country’s major metropolises, requesting some titanium twist of modern art for their marbled courtyards. Or some board member I’d never heard of from a company of equalanonymity would pen a letter, explaining he’d read such and such an article and would love to have me chisel the bust of their CEO in granite, something they could prop on a pedestal in their lobby.

Over the past few years, these requests dwindled dramatically but not to the point of extinction. The latest—the one Marta had read this afternoon on the balcony—was from a textile company in Manhattan. The company’s vice president was infatuated with the number three, the letter explained, and it was this man’s desire to hire Timothy Overleigh to design a wrought-iron numeral to be displayed in his office. His reasons for choosing me were appropriately threefold: the magazine on whose cover I’d once been pictured was called
Three Tiers;
I was once named the third best sculptor in young America by the
Washington Post;
and lastly because of the sum of the letters in the abbreviated form of my first name.

I finished off the last of the Macallan and was feeling pretty good. When I squinted, the lights along the shore blurred and spread out in a greasy smear. The chill from the strong breeze caused my injured leg to ache. I turned the chair around and, thumping over the rubber doorjamb, rolled back into the apartment.

Hannah stood across the room, mostly hidden in the dark.

My breath caught in my throat. I felt the empty liquor bottle slide from my hand and strike the floor with a hollow thud. Suddenly I forgot all about the pain in my left leg. Unable to move, I sat frozen in the wheelchair, staring across the room, trying to dissect the shadows to better view my wife.

“Hannah.” It came out in a breathy whisper, the sound of it—the foolishness of it—forcing rational thought to override my panic. She wasn’t there, of course. She was dead. Hannah was dead. She was—

I watched her move along the far wall, an indescribable shifting of depth, until she reached the section spotlighted by the moonlight coming in through the balcony doors. I anticipated her coming into relief the moment she crossed that panel of bluish light … but shenever did. She vanished before she reached it, dispersing into granules of dust in the darkness.

“Jesus,” I uttered, my voice choked and nervous. I forced a laugh; it came out as a bark.

I decided to get the hell out of the apartment for the night. My eyes locked on the pair of crutches leaning in one corner of the room. It was not difficult to maneuver on the crutches, although they certainly provided less comfort than the chair, and I quickly rolled over to them and dragged myself out of the wheelchair while leaning against the television for support. I winced as I carelessly banged my left leg against the credenza, a million fireworks exploding before my eyes, then took a number of slow, deep breaths as I situated the crutches into the sockets of my armpits. Upright, I balanced precipitously for a moment before lunging toward the front door.

My apartment was in walking distance of downtown but not crutching distance, so I had the building’s doorman wrangle me a cab. It was a feat getting into the cab’s backseat, even with the assistance of the doorman and the cabdriver—both of whom spoke little English and looked as though they may have hailed from the same South American country—but I was soon shuttled off and deposited at the city dock.

It was a beautiful night, and the streets were alive. I could faintly hear live music issuing from a number of the closest taverns and beyond that the distant growl of boat engines. The bars along Main Street would be packed at this hour, and I was not in the mood to have my leg bumped by drunks in Navy whites, so I hobbled down an alleyway to seek out a more reclusive haunt hidden from summer tourists.

The Filibuster was as reclusive as one could hope for. A narrow, redbrick front fitted with iron sconces, boasting none of the typical Annapolis fanfare in its windows—goggle-eyed ceramic crabs or miniature rowing oars crossing each other to form an
X
—the Filibuster was easy to miss if you weren’t looking for it. Brom Holsworth, aretired Department of Justice prosecutor, owned the place ever since I could remember. Inside, it was musty and dark, the walls adorned with yellowing photographs of disgraced Washington politicians, many of whom Brom helped to disgrace.