We're in Trouble by Christopher Coake Page B

valley—anywhere but at me. His face is perfectly composed, and this is how I know he is still troubled. Our footsteps rasp too loud, maybe because Stane is now too far ahead of us to make much noise—or maybe because Karel and I have not yet said ten words to each other.
    I feel sixteen again, walking with a boy and not knowing whether to take his hand.
    No. I feel twenty, waking hungover in a man’s bed and wondering how I am to make my exit.
    But this is not right either. Maybe it is time to say to myself what is true: that I am a married woman of thirty-two who has come close to her first affair, who wants maybe to fall in love with another man. That it feels like nothing else feels. I blush. A strange gravity keeps pulling Karel and I to each other. Every once in a while our hips bump, and we quickly move apart.
    I try to think about Jozef, the difficulties of the summit headwall. Right now he is almost certainly in agony, gasping, starving—a hair’s width from his death. And whether he has reached the top, or is still struggling up—even if he is on the way down—he is thinking, surely, of me, of Stane.
I will pull myself to you with my hands.
This is happening, right now, out to the east beyond the curve of the earth.
    Then we are next to an opening in the wall, one that leads upward, to a trail.
    I am not in control of my words. I say to Karel, We should go through. That path goes up to a nice meadow. From there you can see most of the valley.
    Karel thinks for longer than he should. He says, All right.
    I call Stane back. He arrives out of breath. I tell him we’re going up to the meadow.
    He surprises me, though, by asking if he can stay down by the road.
    I brought my men, he says. I want to play down here.
    You don’t want to come up with us?
    He shrugs and looks off into the distance. This gesture he has learned from his father. I cannot imagine what plans he really has—or maybe he doesn’t have any; maybe he is just tired of hearing grown-ups speak of art and Romans. If he and I were by ourselves, I might tell him to come anyway. But the guilty joy rises up in me, knowing Karel and I will be alone. Stane plays by himself in the woods all the time, he’ll be fine—this is what I tell myself.
    We won’t be long, I say. Don’t go too far from the path here, okay?
    Sure, Mama.
    The walk up to the meadow takes only ten minutes or so. The path between the trees is shaded and cool, and I am pleased to find that my worries recede here a little, as they always have. I love the pine forests in the summer, the thick padding of fallen dry needles under my feet, the clean smell. Here and there chunks of rock break out of the humus, like mountains in bud, patched by moss. Several of them are marred by chalk marks—where Jozef works on holds and problems. I have helped him before, making sure a mat is always positioned beneath him. Lately Stane comes out here to help him, too.
    Karel’s face is less clouded; he appreciates this place, even if his gravity won’t let him say so.
    And then we are in the meadow. It is on a slope, and at the upper end of it we stop and lean against a rock and look out over our swath of valley. The river curves and gleams. Our house is just visible off to the left, the sun winking from a skylight. The highest peak across the valley has caught a wisp of cloud in the corrie just beneath its summit—from here it seems no larger than the house, but it must be a hundred meters wide. Jozef has said the mountains make their own weather, that sometimes it will rain up there when all the rest of the valley is in bright dry light. The earth and the sky turn independently of each other, Jozef says, and they sometimes grind and catch. As I think this a breeze picks up and the trees on the slope beneath us hiss and sway. The same air my husband climbs in.
    But this is not true. Jozef is climbing at 8,000 meters. We are at 1,200 meters