Climb[*]

            Her mother’s e-mail said simply, “Climb your mountain with my love.”

            It volleyed in my mind for the entire 30 minutes from when I woke and when I gently kissed her awake. I fumbled through the phrase as I scurried around the house, desperate for a place to stash the hinged black box. Eventually, a zippered red shoulder bag for water bottles ended my search before I could unlock the mystery. As we drove from the suburbs through the desert, I thought about those words so much. Like a child, I feared they were visible on my face.

            But I put all childish things away and stared at the paint-peeled wooden map of the Sears-Kay Indian ruins we would see at the top.

            “From what I hear, it is the most beautiful sight you will ever see,” I told her, looking into her eyes like it was the first and last time.

            She stared at the graying sky, unimpressed by the gravity I tried not-so-subtly to instill in an early Tuesday morning hike. Two routes shot off from the trailhead and we chose left together. She gave me her hand. Not long after we took our first steps, I looked at her legs. I did not notice how they shone in daybreak, or the sinewy, athletic cut her calves held on the incline. I simply saw them walking at a pace different than mine.

            What did that mean? Shouldn’t she and I be in step by now?

            A year earlier, maybe even a week, I would have paused to answer. But I wanted to take her to the top. Besides, I had another question locked in my head. What did it mean … Climb your mountain with my love?

            Was it a prophecy? A blessing? Was she naming Katie as “her love?” Was she lending me “her love” for the climb? I had a mile of cracked rock, morning-dried mud and cactus views to find an answer.

            We spoke sparsely as we walked — rare, because we love and live for hours on the telephone with her in North Carolina and me in New York. Somehow, in a vacant park in Arizona, when we’d never been so alone, neither of us had anything to say.

            We walked and held hands and breathed with each other. She looked at me, kicked at a large rock and started to race. I ran enough to chase her, but relaxed enough to let her win to the unspecified finish line. She stopped at a cactus and posed for a photograph of her above the valley below, which widened with each step. She gave an all-lip smile, just enough to keep my stare locked on her blue eyes.

            The trail narrowed to a crude, granite staircase. I swung my right arm diagonally behind my back and grabbed her left hand. I needed no effort to pull her; she glided behind me until she stood at my shoulder. We looked at all 360 degrees before we breathed together as if the air had been made seconds earlier, and just for us.

            We walked into the ruin until we were surrounded by calf-high piles of rocks older than our ancestors. Then all sound stopped. The intermittent traffic on the road that wound through the canyon ceased, as if I called ahead to request no interruptions. Even the wind paused for us.

            “Is this not the most beautiful sight you’ve ever seen?” I said, slightly trembling by the time I got to beautiful.

            “It’s beautiful,” she said, with no idea I planned this whole day contingent upon her answering that question with a yes or no.

            “Right, but is it the most beautiful?”

            “I guess not,” she said and raised her eyebrows.

            Close enough, I thought.

            And I dropped my right knee onto a stone that was once stood at the foot of someone’s hearth. Perhaps, I fell to my knee because that is what I’m sure no one expected me to do. Perhaps, I fell to my knee because that is what I saw in the movies. Perhaps, I fell to my knee because my legs atrophied from nervous doubt. Likely, I collapsed under the weight of my love for her.

            So she already cupped her mouth when I reached for the zippered red shoulder bag. She continued a second longer than doubt when I struggled to slide the zipper past the box and the water bottle I was too nervously parched to open. Her tears already formed before I looked up from my knee on the mossy, cold rock below, and held up a shining stone of my own.

            “How about this … Is this the most beautiful sight you’ve ever seen?”

            Her numb hand fell from covering her mouth to flopping at her side. I slid the platinum circle over her knuckle, careful to point the diamond into the sun over my right shoulder. It glistened bright as her teary cheeks, the only wet sight in the desert. For 20 minutes, she shuddered and hugged me and gawked at her finger and shuddered and hugged me and gawked at her finger. If I had not asked, “So?” she may not have stopped that cycle even now, two weeks later, to say “Yes.”

            And then her mother’s words popped up in my mind. Of course, she was blessing me with love, and at the same time, she gave me her truest love, her daughter.

            As Katie and I dangled our feet over the precipice of our mountain, she fired off questions like a child who read a book by herself for the first time. When we stood, I looked at her eyes still glistening with tears, her finger still reflecting the sun, and I finally noticed her calves — shining in the daylight, sinewy and athletic. I stared so intently I ignored the two women who passed us on the barely-wide-enough-for-two trail. Their British accents broke my trance and I asked them to take the first pictures of my bride and me. They happily obliged and we walked a few paces beyond the trail.

            I knew Katie’s joy overtook her because she didn’t wince when a cactus needle lodged in her ankle and I had to pull it out. I kissed her tiny wound and rose to grasp my bride at the waist and smile at the Britons, who fumbled with my camera until they took pictures of us way in the background of a nicely composed desert landscape.

            We continued down the trail until we returned to the paint-peeled sign. Katie stopped like a mare that spotted a cliff at the pinnacle of a gallop.

            “I don’t want to get off the trail,” she said, fearing she would be transformed from a dreamy reality, like Moonlight Graham walking on gravel. “I don’t want today to end.”

            “Honey,” I said, “this is not the end of anything. This is the beginning of our life.”

            And she took my hand. And we left the mountain, which we climbed with love.