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Never Happened

Tom Gartner

In the first month after Wade died, I did a lot of solo climbing. It would be wrong to say that I was trying to get myself killed, but I was definitely renegotiating my contract with danger. I had started to see risk as inescapable. If you could die of a heart attack at age 38 during an approach hike, it wasn’t crazy to be taking chances. It was crazy to think you were ever safe.

When I came back from a weekend in the Tahoe Sierra with a broken rib and ten stitches in my scalp, Caroline, Wade’s widow, had something to say about it. 

 “I don’t understand, Rob. Wade always told me you were the safest climber he knew.” She frowned at her wine glass. We were at La Cucina, an Italian restaurant near our work: soccer jerseys and Fellini posters on the walls, a porcelain saint on the table. 

 “That wasn’t necessarily a compliment,” I said. “He just meant I was slow. But don’t worry.”

 “Free soloing? How many guys do we know who’ve died doing that?” 

 “A couple. A few. Not me.”

 “You wouldn’t worry if I did it?” she asked.

Hell yes, I thought. “You don’t even climb.”

 “If I did. Would soloing be OK?”

 “You’ve got a kid.” Shari, her daughter with Wade, was six.

 “If I didn’t.”

 “All right, point taken.” I wasn’t going to win this argument. Usually she was soft-spoken, polite almost to a fault, but when it came to the well-being of people she knew, she could be relentless with her gently phrased interrogations. “It’s not like I’m hoping to spill my brains out on some heap of rocks.”

“Good. Survivor guilt is a bullshit sentiment. I’ll tell you that from experience.”

“You don’t have anything to feel guilty about.”

“Neither do you.”

I couldn’t agree with that, so I said nothing. 

She sighed. “If you mean your little race with Wade … that’s ridiculous. You two always did that.”

Wade and I had been in the Tetons, hiking up the talus slope between Garnet Canyon and the Lower Saddle. I’d been pushing the pace, in good shape for once, and Wade had been struggling to keep up. I’d thrown a breathless taunt back at him—the customary stuff about old age and soft living—and then stopped to wait. When he caught up, he swore at me. A few minutes later, with no warning, or none that I noticed, he collapsed.

I couldn’t tell if Caroline and I had just wandered into this conversational cul-de-sac or if she’d deliberately taken us there. We’d come to the restaurant after work, just like we’d done so many times with Wade. Their business was called Wind River Outfitters—a retail store in a mall outside Salt Lake City, another one downtown, a warehouse near the airport, twenty employees total. We sold camping, backpacking, and climbing gear, wholesale and retail. Wade had started the company five years earlier and eventually sold a minority interest to Monsoon, a chain with stores all over the West. Now they wanted the 51% that belonged to Caroline.

“And if you’re guilty …” She leaned forward, gripping the edge of the table, her green eyes all iris. “You must owe a penance to someone, right? But you don’t believe in God. And Wade’s not around. So is it me you owe it to?” She didn’t even let me answer. “Well, I don’t want it. I don’t accept it. So you’d better just forgive yourself.”

Was the light in the restaurant not very good? I was looking at her but she seemed out of focus.

“Are you going to say anything?” she asked.

“Trying to come up with something.”

My thoughts often fly out of my head to women I know, and that was what happened next. “Or is it not that?” she asked. “Not the race?”

“Partly that.”

“And partly what else?”

I figured she’d already guessed, but I felt like I should say it myself. “It’s that thing that never happened.”

“No surprise there.” The tension that had been in her face—creases in her forehead, a tightening in the usually perfect curve of her chin—dissolved into a tired attempt at a smile. “So OK, you do have something to feel guilty about. We both do.”

▪

WADE AND I WERE ORIGINALLY FROM CALIFORNIA, him from a beach town near San Diego, me from the Lost Coast up north. We met in Mendocino, where he was managing a cafe his father owned, and he took me on as counter help. Fifteen years later, after he moved to Utah, married Caroline, and started Wind River, he hired me again, this time to run his warehouse. Our first climb together had been on Mt. Shasta–we didn’t get anywhere close to the summit. But in the two decades since, we’d climbed together in the Sierra Nevada, in the Cascades, in the Rockies from Banff to Boulder. The Tetons had been a summer ritual for us.

When I called Caroline from the Jenny Lake ranger station to tell her that Wade had died, I was sick with dread. The fact was still so unreal, and yet so indelible, that I could hardly breathe … and now it was my job to crush her with it too. That I blamed myself made it worse. I couldn’t imagine what it would do to her, or how I could help as a disembodied voice from two hundred miles away.

But she was calm at first, and I remembered my own reaction when I found my mother after her suicide: numbness, a sense of being in some misguided current of time, one that could still be escaped. Once Caroline understood, when we were past that first shock, she started to sob quietly. I put my head against a wall and pushed as hard as I could, thinking maybe I could take the whole building down. That, or snap my neck. When she spoke again, her voice was shaky, but she never lost control. She had their daughter to think of, and maybe that anchored her.

In the weeks that followed, her grief wasn’t conspicuous. Other than at the funeral, I didn’t see her actually crying. But I could tell she was close to it when her voice would roughen mid-sentence, or when she’d suddenly walk out of a room with a hand held to her eyes. I was glad, at least, that whatever she saw when she stared at nothing couldn’t be what I’d seen on the mountain: Wade’s pain and fear in his last moments. 

We did a lot of drinking together those first few weeks, but she didn’t try to describe what she was feeling. It was almost as though she didn’t want to be comforted. More than anything, that was what I wanted to do. But maybe it just didn’t seem possible to her.

▪

THE THING THAT NEVER HAPPENED—a few years earlier, in a thunderstorm on our way back from a funeral in Idaho, I’d kissed her, or she’d kissed me. Not exactly accidental, not exactly purposeful, but frightening to both of us, because she was married to my best friend, they had a child, and I worked for them. More frightening to her than to me, no doubt, because she had more sense than me and more to lose. At any rate, she was the one who decided it had never happened.

And if it had ended there, we most likely wouldn’t have been talking about it at La Cucina. We’d have blamed alcohol, the funeral, the thunderstorm, whatever excuse worked best. We’d have put it behind us and gone back to the perfectly straightforward roles we’d been playing before that.

But two weeks later, Wade was in Colorado looking at a possible location for another store; Caroline and I were working after hours at the company warehouse, just the two of us. I wasn’t getting much done—all I could think about was how much I wanted her, how badly we were trapped by the brutal logic of the triangle. Somebody, probably everybody, was going to get hurt.

I knew things weren’t perfect between her and Wade. She had her doubts and disappointments. They’d met in Colorado when she was in business school and he was a new arrival, fleeing the mess he’d made of his life in California. She’d done a lot to straighten him out. But a woman who’d worked at Wind River had told her that Wade had made a pass at her, and though he’d denied it, and it seemed completely unlike him, still the issue was there.

So was there really a future for her and Wade? And if not, was there a future for her and me?

I couldn’t help asking her what we were going to do. She crossed the room to me, shaking her head—meaning what, I didn’t know. I touched her shoulder and she grabbed me by the wrist, still not saying anything. Her face turned up to mine, I pulled her against me, and there we were.

When she woke up in my apartment around midnight, got out of bed, and started collecting her clothes, I looked a question at her.

“In case you’re wondering …” she said. “No. That never happened either.”

This time the lie worked. It was wrong and unfair, but she made me see the inevitability of it. In the three years from then until Wade’s death, we played our parts convincingly enough that Wade and Caroline stayed together, I stayed with the company, and Caroline and I never touched each other.

▪

NOW, WITH WADE GONE, I wondered whether the kiss in the thunderstorm, and everything that followed, would become real again. I couldn’t pretend to myself that I didn’t want Caroline, though of course I had to pretend to everyone else, even to her. And I had to deal with the knowledge that I’d wronged Wade, that maybe I was still wronging him. It wasn’t just the kiss, or even the night in my apartment. It was all the things I’d felt about her, all the times I’d thought about the parallel universes where I met her first.

But after the Tahoe mishap, after that night at La Cucina with Caroline, it was clear enough that I had to abandon my project of alpine Russian Roulette, and that the drinking we did together was not good for either of us, especially not for her. She had so much to deal with: Wade’s enormous share of work at Wind River, the corporate vultures who wanted to elbow her out, the estate (he’d left no will), the impact on Shari– all the while struggling just to deal with the loss. She had friends and family supporting her, but her parents lived 300 miles away, near Zion, and her father had Parkinson’s. The friends who wanted to help weren’t always actually helpful.

At Wind River, I took over a lot of the clerical work she’d been doing—scheduling, HR, bookkeeping—so she could step into Wade’s role as buyer and general manager. She didn’t ask for help at home, but eventually she stopped turning it down. She and Wade had bought a house in the foothills near the university, and I went out a couple of times a week to do whatever needing doing: yard work, house cleaning, anything that involved a hammer, a screwdriver, or a heavy object that needed lifting.

So we were together a lot, which of course suited me. We talked about Wade, the places we’d been with him, the people he’d brought into our lives, the endless tangle of Wind River politics. We were telling the stories, I guess, because in some small way that kept him alive for us. 

And for Shari too. At first I didn’t know how to read her—I’ve never been good with kids, they always seem so distracted, so full of non sequiturs. She’d listen intently when we talked about Wade, and sometimes she’d tell a story of her own about him, or ask a question. She seemed to feel the loss just as much as you’d expect, but she followed Caroline’s lead in not letting it overwhelm her.

She rarely spoke directly to me, though, or even looked at me, and I started to think she saw me as an intruder. 

“It’s not that,” Caroline told me. “She’s just a serious little person, always has been. And she’s sad for you, because she knows you knew Wade longer than we did.”

As unexpected as that logic was, it explained the sympathy behind Shari’s reserve. The catch, though, was that Wade, even as he was a connection for all three of us, was also a wall between Caroline and me. We couldn’t talk to or even think of each other without thinking of him. Six months on from his death, I was still waiting for a clue from her.

▪

A WEEK BEFORE THANKSGIVING, she told me her parents had asked if she’d bring me to Zion for the holiday. “My father’s really grateful for everything you’ve done. So this would be sort of a thank you.”

I’d met Richard just once, at the memorial service for Wade. He was a big man, stooped and slow-moving, in an out-of-date suit. He’d been a mapper for the Geological Survey, one of the people who field-checks the maps that are drawn from aerial photographs. When I told him it sounded like a dream job—outdoor work, mostly in wilderness, no desks, no time clock, government pay and benefits—he grimaced. “Yes and no,” he said. “Ever heard of a fellow named James Watt?” And we spent twenty minutes talking about the environmental mayhem of the Reagan administration.

Now Caroline and I were on the patio behind her house. She and Wade had turned the garden into something like a high desert oasis: piñon pines, ground-hugging juniper, prickly pear cactus, gold and green alpine grass lining an artificial watercourse. In the evenings rabbits would come down from the hills to nibble anything juicy.

I’d come over after work to help her shift boxes from the garage to the attic. Shari was at a friend’s house. Caroline had brought a bottle of Seven Crowns and one of Seven-Up out from the kitchen.

“7 and 7s,” she said. “My dad’s favorite.”

“What do you think about Thanksgiving?” I asked. “I noticed you said ‘would be a thank you’ not ‘will be a thank you.’”

“It’s a little complicated. My father—he’s upset that he’s too sick to help Shari and me out much. He was kind of OK with it when Wade was alive … but now he’s wondering who’s going to fill those shoes. Or maybe not even wondering, he thinks he knows.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously,” she said. “Apparently you made an impression.”

“He’s trying to set us up?”

“He is. And we can’t have that …” Softly, with a tentative smile, trying to make a joke of it.

If Shakespeare was right that true words are often spoken in jest, I should have taken her comment at face value. But Shakespeare wasn’t the one sitting there in a haze of alcohol and pheromones. “Or we could have that,” I said. “It’s a thought.”

She went on, no smile now: “I’m not saying we never could. Never should. But not now. Not yet.”

“Because?”

“Partly Shari. She doesn’t need more change right now. But more than that … it’s because of what happened with us. Or didn’t happen, take your pick.”

“Pretty sure it happened,” I said. “But eventually, doesn’t it stop mattering?”

“The problem is, I did love Wade. Before that, after that. Even if he did what Darcy said he did. Even if he actually slept with her. And regardless of what I might have felt for you.”

“And so?”

“After that, I didn’t love him absolutely. Which I wanted to. Less than that … it’s not bad, it’s not nothing, but … That’s why I feel like I let him down. Let our marriage down. That’s what makes it so hard for me to put Wade in the past.” 

▪

SHE NEVER ACTUALLY DISINVESTED ME, but in the end I didn’t go to Zion for Thanksgiving. I made plans to go to the Lost Coast in California for a visit with my father and Alice, his girlfriend. On Tuesday night I went to Caroline’s for a pseudo-Thanksgiving dinner—turkey sandwiches, canned cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie, all bought last minute at Albertsons. Shari wanted chocolate cake—in her world, chocolate cake was the appropriate dessert for every special occasion—but Caroline managed to persuade her that for Thanksgiving, pumpkin pie was an acceptable substitute. 

Under the circumstances, we didn’t actually talk about giving thanks for anything.

After dinner, we looked at photos of Zion on Caroline’s laptop: her parents at their house outside the park; a picnic by the Virgin River with all of them, Wade included, sitting under a cottonwood tree; red rock ziggurats catching the light far above Zion Canyon; the Narrows, where the river flows between vertical rock walls.

“My father proposed to my mother there,” Caroline said. “In the Narrows, standing knee-deep in the river. It’s an amazing place. Have you been?”

“I have. Years ago.” I’d hiked up into the Narrows at dusk, wading against the current with a crescent moon visible in a narrow strip of sky. Far above, snow on the tip of a rock spire caught the last sunlight. I didn’t know Caroline then, this was before I moved to Utah, but if she’d been there I’d certainly have proposed to her.

▪

MY PLANS FOR CALIFORNIA fell through. Wednesday morning, after Caroline and Shari had already left for Zion, my father called to say that he and Alice had decided to escape the Lost Coast cold and fog by spending the long weekend in Hawaii. 

So I canceled my flight to San Francisco and spent most of the weekend in the Wind River warehouse, culling old paperwork. I was at home Sunday night when Caroline called to tell me her father had had a stroke.

“It’s not a bad one,” she said, but her voice was trembling. “That’s what they’re telling me. He was having trouble talking, so we took him to the hospital. It’s better now, but his blood pressure’s still really high.”

“Do you want me to come down? I could get there in a few hours.”

“No, you don’t need to. Just—wait, why are you even home? You’re supposed to be in California.”

I told her about the change in plans.

“You should have told me, you could have come with us after all.” 

“So I’ll start now,” I said.

“No, look—it’s OK.” Her normal voice now, almost. “Or it will be. I just need you to keep talking to me. Will you do that?”

▪

SHE CAME BACK FROM ZION a week later. Her father was out of the hospital, with more meds to take, more tests and procedures on his calendar, more doctors and therapists to report to. His speech was slower and he had a limp, but apparently he was acting as if he’d been in a fight and won it.

“Not so easy for my mom,” she said. “All the worrying about himself that he won’t do, that lands on her.”

“And on you?”

She waved that off, the reflection of her hand flashing like a ghost on the window next to us. We were at La Cucina after a twelve-hour day at Wind River: nonsensical meetings with consultants and corporate lawyers from Monsoon who were trying to wrap their tentacles around the company, and after that the real work of the business still to do. 

“I guess I’ve accepted that he might not have a lot of time left,” she said, “but it’s only starting to dawn on her. She’s not big on acceptance.”

“Acceptance is a bitch,” I said. “As if you didn’t know that.”

Her eyes closed for a long moment, and before they were quite open again she grabbed my wrist and squeezed it so hard I could feel her rings leaving imprints. “As if we both didn’t know it.”

She told me that she’d probably have to move back to Zion to help. Selling Wind River was a foregone conclusion now. “Selling the house, uprooting Shari, that’s the hard part. I thought we’d be there forever.”

I did the math. She and Wade had had six years. 

“If I sold out to Monsoon, would you stay with the company?”

“For about ten minutes.”

She laughed. “That bad?”

“Without you or Wade? What would be the point?”

“Would you go back to California?”

“Not while you’re in Utah.”

No answer. It seemed like she was pondering the meaning of that, but had I told her anything she didn’t already know?

▪

WE SAT THERE LONG AFTER DINNER, drinking coffee until they closed the restaurant. It was freezing outside, a clear December night. We scraped the frost from our windshields and got our keys out. 

She hugged me, and we stood there facing each other, our free hands joined in front of us. She started to cry, just a few tears that I supposed could have been from the cold. I touched her cheek, and she leaned in, her face turned up. The kiss in the thunderstorm three years earlier had been intense, a burst of physicality from out of nowhere. But this one, mild as it seemed, brief and insubstantial, was loaded with intention in a way the other hadn’t been.

Only as I got in my car did I have a moment of panic, of thinking somehow that Wade was still alive, that this was not OK.

▪

IN THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, everything changed. For me, Caroline had always been irresistible, a source of warmth I never wanted to move away from. Being the focus of all her energy— bookish anecdotes, complicit eye-rolls, telepathically shared grief, soft pressure from a hand or a cheek that conjured everything she had to give— made me almost unnervingly happy. At work, all the stress and friction of office life ceased to matter. We had long email conversations about nothing, made up reasons to visit each other’s offices, stole kisses in the warehouse or the parking lot. People guessed but didn’t say anything; we pretended not to know they knew.

If Shari registered the change between Caroline and me, it didn’t show. We were cautious, of course. I never stayed overnight, and we didn’t kiss or even hold hands when Shari was around. Caroline wasn’t sure how much she wanted her to know— because Shari was too young to understand what a boyfriend was, she said, let alone a boyfriend who replaced her father; but also, I think, partly because Caroline had no idea if we would last. I had no idea either; I chose to think we would.

▪

BUT THERE WAS ALWAYS THAT SHADOW, that guilty awareness of why we were together. I got to her house one evening and found her stalled out in the middle of cleaning the refrigerator: sitting on the floor next to a spilled box of baking soda, staring at a forest of condiment jars.

She smiled dimly.

“You’re not looking happy,” I said.

“No.”

“Can I help?”

“Not really.” She stood up, came around the counter, and leaned into me. “You know how it goes. Happy. Sad. Drink. Repeat.”

There were a lot of repeats, not just that night but most nights, some afternoons. I didn’t really think about why the 7 and 7s tasted so good to her, because even if she slurred her words, the grammar was still perfect, the jokes were still funny, the “I love you’s” were still delivered with that amazing uncertainty, as if I might possibly not reciprocate.

▪

FOR CHRISTMAS, we’d planned to go to Zion, but my annual December cold had turned into bronchitis, so Caroline and Shari went without me. Caroline called me on Christmas Day. I could barely talk for coughing; she was depressed and drunk.

 “I should be thinking about my dad, shouldn’t I?” she asked me. “But I just keep coming back to you and me and Wade. I must have been crazy to think I could be over it so soon. Or to think you could be over it so soon.”

“We don’t have to be over it. Not yet, anyway. Do we?”

“But what if that’s the only reason we’re together? To try to get over it?”

“That’s not the reason,” I said. But I knew I could only speak for myself. 

▪

WHEN THEY GOT BACK, Caroline seemed exhausted, barely able to raise a smile. Her father, she told me, was going downhill, and her mother wasn’t coping well. Maybe it was solipsistic of me to think something more was going on, but I wasn’t wrong.

On New Year’s Eve, we had our own Christmas. They’d decorated a tree before they left for Zion. Just as they’d done in previous years—Shari was insistent that it had to be the same—they hung colored lights and a flock of glass bird ornaments on it. Dinner—again, strictly according to tradition—was roast beef, baked potatoes, green salad, and of course chocolate cake. We exchanged gifts, because Shari expected it, but only one for each of us: for Shari, a new aquarium for her goldfish; for Caroline, a silkscreen print of Monet water lilies; for me, a book of Tom Killion woodcuts of the California coast.

It was all over by nine. Caroline put Shari to bed. I started to leave, but she waved me back to my chair. “Let’s at least have a glass of champagne at midnight,” she said. “If we can stay awake that long.” 

We didn’t make it. By ten thirty we were both narcoleptic, fading into sleep and jolting out of it. She hauled me into her bedroom and we lay on top of the covers. She put a hand on my hip and I finger-walked up her arm to the point of her shoulder. I think we both had it in mind to make love, but our eyes kept closing.

“Well,” I said, “Happy New Year, I guess.”

“Oh God.” Her face fell against my shoulder. “Happy? I don’t think so.”

▪

LIGHT ONLY HAD STARTED TO SEEP into the bedroom when I woke up, but a chaotic symphony of birdsong was in progress, backed by one clear melodic line. Caroline was at the open window, listening, not looking at me.

I started to get dressed, thinking she’d rather I left before Shari woke up.

“Rob, I think it’s over,” she said. “I think it has to be over.”

I sat down on the floor, suddenly exhausted. But I can’t say I was shocked. Certainly I’d seen signs, and looking back I saw more.

“If it’s something you want me to do,” I said, “or not do… you know I will.”

“I do know. And it’s not that. There’s nothing wrong with you I couldn’t fix.” It wasn’t much of a compliment, but I knew she meant it literally, because she’d fixed so much about Wade. “It’s just too soon for me to be with anyone but Wade.”

I didn’t want to let this happen, but how could I tell her it wasn’t too soon? I tried anyway. “It’s two separate things, Caroline. What you feel about Wade’s death and what you feel about us.”

“No, it’s not. Rob, I’m sorry, this might hurt.… But you’re the reason I feel so guilty about him.”

“You don’t need to feel guilty,” I said.

“It’s not a need. It just is.”

In the end, what could I say? I’d made the mistake of thinking she was ready, she’d made the mistake of letting my feelings persuade her, I’d made the mistake of pretending not to notice. 

▪

AS I DROVE OUT OF THE CITY on I-80 three days later, the Great Salt Lake was on my right, a barren snow-crowned mountain on the left. A side road led me across fields of shattered rock and dry brush to a trailhead parking lot.

Wade and I had climbed here—a long slog to a peak just over 10,000 feet. I didn’t recall the rating, but it hadn’t given us any trouble. Without a partner or a rope, it would be more serious. Still, very doable.

I was clambering up a talus slope to the base of the climb when my phone rang. Caroline.

“Rob, where are you?”

“I took a half day. I’ll be there for the meeting.” Our would-be overlords from Monsoon were sending a fresh wave of consultants at us.

“OK, but where are you?” As if she had somehow guessed.

“It doesn’t have a name. Just 10,359 on the map.”

“Oh, hell. Rob. By yourself?”

“Caroline, don’t worry.”

“I do worry, though. Are you OK?”

“I’m OK.” I looked up as a few loose stones rattled past.

“Good. It’s good to hear you say that.” 

“Great.”

“Can I believe it?”

“You can believe it, Caroline.”

“OK.” Reluctantly. She took a breath, adjusting to the fact that she wasn’t going to get any other answer from me. “Well, anyway, Shari thought we should have you over for dinner. Spaghetti and garlic bread?”

“Shari thought that?”

“She’s upset that we broke up.” 

“I thought she didn’t know we were together.”

“So did I. She totally knew. And she figured out we broke up. She’s not happy with me, but she says she understands.”

“She understands,” I said slowly. “I wonder what that means.”

“Me too. But anyway, seven o’clock?”

They always say you should make a clean break. I haven’t ever found that to work better than anything else.

“I’ll bring the chocolate cake,” I said, and turned around to start my descent.

▪ ▪ ▪

Tom Gartner’s fiction has appeared in numerous journals, including Madison Review, Headlight Review, Kestrel, and Summerset Review. He lives just north of the Golden Gate and works as a buyer in an independent bookstore in San Francisco. Read the author’s commentary on his story.

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