Switchback by Matthew Klein Read Free Book Online

genuinely concerned. Either way, that forced his hand. ‘Of course.’
    They followed the trail away from the water and up onto the wall of rocks. The trail started off steeply and then pitched even steeper. At times it was not even a trail at all but rather a set of tiny steps carved out of the rock, a WPA project from back when chiseling sandstone by hand was a good day’s work and shoes only reached size six.
    By the tenth step, Timothy’s knee hurt. He looked down and saw that he had managed to climb only twenty feet. Only another hundred to go.
    The stairs ended and deposited them on a dirt path, which weaved back and forth, a long vertiginous switchback, with a heavy chain running along the ocean side of the path to keep hikers from falling down the cliffs.
    After ten minutes they reached the top, a plateau on the crag. They looked down. One hundred feet below, beyond the switchback trail, the ocean pounded against the jagged seawall, throwing foam whitecaps into the air.
    They stood there for five minutes, silently, at the edge of the cliff. Timothy held Katherine tightly from behind, his hands locked around her ribs. They watched the ocean crash and ebb. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, loudly, so he could hear her over the waves.
    She took his hands and guided them down to her belly. She pushed them into her flesh. ‘Empty,’ she said.
    He understood what the word meant. The word representedthe greatest source of sadness for her, that they could never have children. It was one more strange thing about Katherine: every time she saw something beautiful, instead of being happy, she felt sad, as if she couldn’t allow herself a moment of peace, and needed instead to remember the awful parts of her life.
    They had tried several times to have children. She had first miscarried when they had been married for three months. They waited to try again. A year and a half later, she had her second miscarriage, this time at four months. She was devastated. All the women around her – at church, at her college reunion, in the supermarket – were having children. Some of her peers had already had a second, and dinner parties suddenly became new parents’ forums, where the talk revolved around issues about which Katherine had no idea: teething, first steps, nursery school, doctors’ visits, sibling rivalry.
    Another year passed and Timothy convinced her to try again. This time, when she reached six months of pregnancy and she was showing, they thought she would make it. They decided what to name the child: if it was a boy, Connor, after her grandfather; if a girl, Lisa, after her grandmother.
    At the end of the sixth month she knew it would be a boy, could feel it in her bones, and she and Timothy talked about Connor, imagined what he would look like, pictured him as a schoolchild, then as a teenager. The miscarriage came a day before she started her seventh month. The child was stillborn.
    Katherine stayed in the house for the next month, refusing visitors, turning away company. Timothy cared for her as best he could, but didn’t know what to say, whether to commiserate with her or to downplay the tragedy, to be sad or to be strong. So he did nothing, and instead just waited for her sadness to pass.
    It did, eventually. When Timothy concluded they would never have children, he was disappointed at first, but the feeling passed. He realized that he was secretly relieved: relieved that the problem wasn’t his fault, relieved that he could continue to enjoy his life – going to the office, putting in six-hour days, flying to New York to meet with investors, playing tennis at the Circus Clubon the weekend, traveling to St. Bart’s once each year – without the burden of children.
    At first there was some talk of fertility specialists, or of adoption, but Katherine dropped these ideas and stopped speaking about the subject of children altogether. Soon the entire matter