Read an Excerpt

Getting Out

A Novel

Henry Holt and Company

I didn't expect to love it so much, to come to need it, going out, the trees lit with green or bare as fingers, the open palm of the sky from a peak, the cheese-flavored camp-stove mash, mornings in rocky-bottomed tents with a cold nose and warm feet, or outside, waking up in new air. I never imagined I'd willingly squeeze through the pitch and silty hollow legs of Spider Cave, belly down in an underground river; that I'd walk backward over the edge of a crevasse; that I'd strap teeth to my feet and cut ice-ax steps into the face of a glacier. That I would long for the smells of cedar and old oak leaves and the woody tang of sassafras twigs against my tongue. I didn't realize I would have to keep going, staying out longer and longer until I could see myself clearly enough to come back inside.

In the beginning, it was an excuse to escape my father's silent gravitational pull. It was a way out of the monotony of family, food, work, sex, and comfort, something to keep me busy when my boyfriend, Ben, had to work weekends.

I am short, five foot one, with brown hair and brown eyes that look quite nice together, I think, now that I've forgiven genetics for not making me a green-eyed redhead. Despite my height, I have always been very strong. My butterfly sprint brought the Carleton College swim team reliable firsts and seconds in the relay. I was never the New Cult type; I didn't have the will to try my friends' gym fads: spinning classes and kick boxing and power yoga. Bars rarely enticed me, either, because I got lost in them, standing in a sea of sweaters and elbows.

I joined the Adventurers' Club in October, when my sister, Marla, had just started seeing Reed, and my brother, Ted, and his wife, Abby, were still together and seemed as strong as a single oak. I was working at a design firm where I conjured indoor spaces and displays, signage, and corporate newsletters for businesses. Despite its location in a swank refurbished brownstone on Beacon Hill, the office housed a potent scent of mouse and dust. The partners had called in cleaners and feng shui consultants and exterminators and aromatherapists, and, for a while, overwhelming blasts of Orange Julius emanated from the copy room, but ultimately the underlying dusty mouse funk clung.

Sometimes I designed whole interiors, crafting spectacular rooms to walk through on my computer, and then later I would visit the disappointing coffee shop where they'd replaced my silvery orange and brushed chrome with plain brown paint. At first the projects always looked like they had meat, and I stayed late and woke up thinking about the details: the metal filigree over the menu board, pickled wainscoting, a tongue-in-groove wood ceiling. Then it all got dulled down over a course of meetings — long toxic affairs with donuts staining paper plates and corpulent handouts with endless columns of numbers that, if you squinted, looked like ants sliding down the pages.

The day I found out about the Adventurers' Club, I'd just fled a particularly protracted and sad meeting, in which I had to cut all the velvet wallpaper from my original design and the project manager reminded me of a balloon slowly losing its air. I went back to my cube and spun around in my chair, deciding whether to call Ben. If I called, all peevish, he would probably comfort me, maybe offer to meet me after work at Boston Common. On the other hand, if he was peevish himself, exhausted from having to raise funds for the museum instead of spending them to make exhibits, the bitter price of his recent promotion, he might act dismissive.

Ben was usually wonderful: patient and calm. He never acted dismissive on purpose, but sometimes it slipped out. He said stuff like "Jeez, you'd think you had to live in that coffee shop" or "You know, you could stand to design your own apartment a little more" or even "So what, you hate your job." If I looked at him as he said these mean little things, he got a surprised look on his face, his blue eyes slightly glassy, as if someone had stepped into his body for a second and used his voice.

Maybe his naked opinions were part of the reason he managed such swift promotion at work, but he didn't work for me. I knew he didn't mean what he said, but he would never take it back, so I got mad. Later, after I sulked for a while and tried to get him to apologize, he'd say, "I'm sorry you got upset." I'd say, "I'm sorry you got me upset," and then we'd have a great time relieving the tension of the fight by chasing each other around my apartment.

I was holding my phone but not dialing when my boss slid in my cube's insubstantial doorframe and leaned. My boss, with her short gelled red hair, thought she was arty. She wore faux-bohemian open-toed sandals and tight suits of slightly iridescent fabrics that cost a fortune and made her look like firmly packaged leftovers. She leaned on walls and words and applied posh scents that were not made for her; they warmed against her reptilian skin when she grew excited, and she smelled like an overripe cantaloupe. She got things done, all kinds of things, and kept clients happy. She got promoted. She got my goat. Maybe I was jealous.

"Um," I said, not sure whether to put the phone down.

"Hannah," she said. "I need you."

I noticed the long shadow of her new client from the bike shop on my carpeted wall. Clyde's was a minor account, so at first I hadn't understood her fuss over him. But then I noticed the tilt of her shiny head, the way she always shifted her hips when she was with him. She was deep in lust. Clyde didn't seem to mind the attention.

"Hm?" I said. Clyde sidled up behind her. His greasestained finger brushed an invisible piece of lint from her shoulder.

"I need you to get coffee for us." She held out a twenty, tipping it from the air into my hand, which I hadn't yet volunteered. It wasn't my job, coffee. It hadn't ever been my job at the firm. I wasn't her secretary, and I wanted to say so, and I wanted to take her twenty and slap it across her painted cheeks like a glove in a forties movie. But I also wanted to keep my job.

"Bev's out," she said, referring to her most recent secretary. She gave me her plaintive look, which was frightening. The gloss on her mouth cracked, and her eyes shed scales of Bite-Me Bronze shadow.

My throat itched with obscenities. I commanded my hand to take the bill, but it wouldn't obey and the twenty fell to the floor.

"Skim vanilla double-shot latte for me." She forced a gruntlike giggle. "And I believe Clyde likes plain coffee. With lots of cream."

Clyde started to reach for the bill, but my boss took his hand instead and led him down the hall to her lair. I wanted to scream.

I put down the phone, picked up the bill, and stormed down to the coffee shop. I ordered my boss's drink decaf, out of spite, but then changed the order: somehow, she'd know, and she'd know whom to blame.

Back at the office, her door was shut, so I marched the coffees into the copy room, where we'd all cool off. I made a quick color copy of her change, wanting to waste something at company expense. The quarters came out black from the reflected light. Then I noticed a stack of photographs by the machine, and something about them was clearly not of the workplace — maybe it was their small size, their lack of super gloss. And I could see from the top one that the subjects were not a new branch of a bank or a ficus-filled restaurant in Back Bay. The top photograph featured a blond man attached to a harness and ropes, a cliff and a huge blue sky above him. His mouth was tight with concentration, his body tense with effort. His fingers gripped the thinnest sliver of rock, and somehow I knew he'd bring himself up.

I flipped through the stack. More people, climbing. In every one, the sunshine was fierce, lighting hair and eyes. The man from the first photograph, tall and lean, was joined by an older man with a long nose. They scaled rock faces, peeking over the edge from above, spidermen. There was a woman, who looked slightly familiar, lowering herself over a precipice in successive photographs; there was another woman, with pale hair, stepping backward over the same cliff. She had a scrape on her leg, and the line of blood thickened and spread as her descent progressed.

I was engrossed. Not one of them looked tired or worried. An Indian man had wrapped himself in a red rope; his head was tilted back and his mouth open with laughter. Sun spilled inside his lips.

The scent of crushed leaves wafted around me as I finished flipping through the stack. I almost forgot the coffee.

"If you're so interested," said a woman's voice, "maybe you'd like to come to a meeting tonight."

I looked up to find one of the women from the photographs; she was tall — close to six feet — and wore black slacks and a soft green sweater with an apostrophe-shaped stain on the cuff. She didn't come all the way into the copy room.

"You're Hannah Blue, right?" she said. "I'm Linda from marketing. And I believe those are mine." She gestured toward the photographs, which I was smudging with my voyeur's fingerprints.

"Um, yes," I said.

"It's kind of an adventure club. We're meeting tonight to talk about winter trips. Want to come?" She had small brown eyes surrounded by an expressive network of creases.

"Oh," I said. Guilty. "Oh, okay." Why would I want to climb backward over a cliff? But I still had her pictures, so I felt obliged.

She smiled, and I handed over the photos.

"If you're not Interested —" She took one step and was outside the door.

"Oh, no!" I said. I couldn't let her disappear back into the maw of marketing. "I'm interested. Really. Tell me more."

And that was how I joined the Adventurers' Club, by letting the kind-looking Linda woman take me to a meeting at the Caffe Paradiso in Cambridge, where a group of people who looked normal enough in their button-downs and boiled wool passed around more photographs, from hiking trips and a white-water rafting expedition. All afternoon I had fretted — a meeting. It had sounded so dangerously clubby or cultish. It had sounded like commitment. But as I matched many of the faces to the climbing shots, they struck me as perfectly ordinary people. The trips sounded as thrilling as the photos, though. And as distant. I drank too much coffee for evening and they invited me along on the next excursion: hiking in the Adirondacks.

I hadn't anticipated the very early morning and the very long drive. I'd heard the time-to-meet at the café, and I'd registered the New York destination, but it hadn't really sunk in. I was too excited by the prospect of unearthing my old hiking boots and getting a good whiff of the Great Outdoors; I pictured a dazzle of foliage and hot chocolate by an ember-rich campfire, a star-punctuated arc of night sky. But when my alarm clicked on a Spanish pop station at 4:45 A.M., I assumed it was a bad layer in my dream, one that would soon transition to a chase scene with a sheepdog or the rescue of blue marine crabs from the angry gods of the sea.

I love sleep. I am habitually late for work, or anywhere I have to go in the morning, though come afternoon I become Girl Promptness, arriving at the exact designated minute. But the Adventurers' Club met at 5:30 A.M. at the city hall parking lot in Newton, the suburb where I grew up, and where my mom still lived in her wide-hipped Victorian with curved-glass windows and a dramatic mahogany front door and too many rooms for just her and her second husband.

I had to extricate myself from bed at five to make it from Brookline to Newton, in my unreliable inherited Saab named Lemon. Lemon was once my stepfather's car, and even when new it was likely to let loose a hose clamp on the highway. Owning it was a matter of hope and duct tape and trips to the junkyard for spare parts. I kept an extra rearview mirror and a mysterious clamp in my closet.

Ben was still asleep in my bed. He rolled over, heavy with sleep, his big arm claiming my pillow, as I was trying to untangle my legs from the nest of sheet. Ben always said I danced in my dreams and also that I stole all the bedding, but clearly he was the comforter hog — I could see the mound he'd hoarded even with the shades drawn.

Luckily, I got Lemon to start after only three tries. Also luckily, I hadn't signed up to drive on the trip, but unfortunately this meant I had to park on my mother's street and walk half a mile lugging an enormous borrowed frame pack with too much stuffed into its left side. Everything was empty and asleep in the sharp blue transition between night and morning. It was as if I owned all of it, suburban streets and flashing yellow traffic lights, houses with their eyeshades drawn: Greek revivals with Corinthian entrance columns, square-jawed Colonials, the occasional ranch, bland as a plain white T-shirt among the party dresses of velvet and tulle. I jaywalked happily.

But I was exhausted. So tired, that even among strangers I fell asleep in the backseat of Linda's Volvo station wagon and didn't wake up until it was time to eat lunch and hit the trail. My face was hot and Frankensteined by the seat seams. I had drooled, my arm wedged against the door and my sweatshirt pulled up, baring my back, yet somehow I was sleepy enough not to care.

We had lunch at the trailhead, squeezing peanut butter and honey from tubes onto bread and slicing up cheese and apples with the Swiss Army knives everyone carried. Everyone except me. The air smelled of cedar and oak, and the trail was a tunnel of gold and green. I couldn't believe how lucky I was, how long it had been since I'd been in the woods, real woods. It was cool and sunny and a hawk screamed overhead. I sat on my pack and looked at all these people: Linda, who looked even kinder in the bright afternoon light with woods all around us; her husband, Alan, a biologist she'd met through the club; a Chinese man shaped like Popeye, Shing, who squeezed peanut butter from the tube onto his finger and skipped the bread; wiry Nicky; fair-haired Camilla, about my age; and Noah, who was beautiful, very tall and sinewy with short straight blond hair and pastel eyes that might be blue and might be green, depending on the light. His ears got red as he talked and ate.

It felt very comfortable and chummy and safe at the trailhead. The comfortable part faded, though, as soon as we hit the trail up Mount Marcy. Sure, the leaves were blushing and the creek sang softly beside us. Yes, the air was clean and Linda's happy voice burbled along at the head of the group. But my feet hurt. My back hurt. The boots I'd dug out of my storage bin in the apartment eaves were old but stiff. I could feel the leather cutting into my skin, lacerating it with each step. The pack was hugely heavy. I had packed according to the list Linda gave me: socks (two pair per day), long underwear (preferably silk or polypropylene; I had mothball-stinky cotton), wool sweater, light shell, down vest, raincoat (I figured my dress coat would do, though it was rather bulky), sleeping bag, sleeping bag pad (Linda lent me an extra), flashlight, gloves, hat, fork and spoon, bowl, et cetera. I didn't have a down vest, so I'd borrowed Ben's massive down jacket. It made me look like a blueberry stuck on twig legs, but it was warm. I couldn't find a plastic bowl, so I'd packed one of my father's sturdy ceramic ones. I wasn't really thinking about weight. I had added in a few extras: a little bit of hair gel since there wouldn't be showers, a cotton sweater that looked nicer than the old wool, a book for reading by the campfire. I'd forgotten, in packing, what the term backpack meant.

So by the time we took a break for gorp and water, I was ready to quit. I'd been talking to myself along the steep stretch of trail we'd just finished, counting the rocks and then counting the steps and then telling myself that if I lived through this I would never do it again. I could quit nature completely, except for the occasional walk through the Public Gardens with lightweight sandals and a diaphanous dress, my arm in Ben's so he could help me keep my balance if a pebble disrupted my step. The ceramic bowl was denting my spine. My toes were numb, but that was a blessing, because the other parts of my feet were on fire. I had been watching the backs of Noah's boots, and I could tell he wasn't walking as fast as he could, that he was my designated baby-sitter, because everyone else was at least a mile ahead.

He turned back to look at me, and I knew my face was plum from exertion. I tried to say something. It came out as a wheeze. "Um, is this what it's usually like?" I paused and leaned on my knee to slow my breath.

"Oh." Noah smiled. A quick smile. Beautiful, like the rest of him. Even kernel teeth. His eyes were in a green phase. I hated his ease. "Oh, well, every trip is different. It's sort of an adjustment at first, but it's really great."

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Excerpted from Getting Out by Gwendolen Gross. Copyright © 2002 Gwendolen Gross. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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