You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call “failure” is not the falling down, but the staying down . . .
MARY PICKFORD
Somewhere high in the Colorado Rocky Mountains
Exhausted, her body aching deep in the marrow and covered with a three-day grime from schlepping across the mountains, Rebecca Lear could only pray that she did not stink as bad as she feared. More importantly, she hoped she would not break down and actually eat tree bark, but it was becoming a monumental struggle—she had never been so ravenous in her life.
On the bright side, she was feeling remarkably transformed.
Enough that she managed to give it one more oomph, hoisting herself halfway up the rock . . . only to slide helplessly back down again, unable to make the final push. Dammit! Tears burned in her throat; she wanted nothing more than to lie down on a bed of pine needles to die.
She was the last of seven women, her Partners in Transformation on this Journey to The Vision, and the last to climb this rock, cleverly disguised as a boulder. All the rest of them were up there in a spot that Moira, their Transformation Guide, said was heaven on earth, seated around a crackling campfire, probably roasting marshmallows. Or meat! What if it was meat? Jesus, she was hungry!
Dammit, if they could do it, then she could do it.
Rebecca rubbed her hands on what had once been a perfectly pressed pair of khaki cargo pants and eyed that goddamn rock.
When her younger sister, Rachel, had first suggested the six-track “Transformation Strategies for Women’s Changing Lives” seminars to help Rebecca cope with the aftermath of her divorce, Rebecca thought it sounded ridiculous, and had politely declined to enroll herself in Track One: A peaceful and spiritual communing with the beautiful and wild nature of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, where the vision of a new life plan will emerge for the transformed.
Not that she didn’t appreciate the sentiment—she’d be the first to say she needed some sort of transformation after what she’d been through. But she’d never really been into sports, and God knew “packing out” was definitely not her thing, either, which she had explained to Rachel, who had (at the time, anyway) agreed. Naturally, she was quite surprised, when her older sister, Robin, showed up a couple of weeks later to pick up her son, Grayson, to learn that she had been enrolled nonetheless, was the proud owner of a plane ticket to Denver, and her gear was already assembled. Her sisters thought this was a very cool birthday gift for her. “Go get yourself transformed,” Robin had said cheerfully, foisting the seminar documents on her. “Come back like Lara Croft in Tomb Raider.”
While she had no intention of coming back as Lara Croft, Tomb Raider, it had been clear that Grayson really wanted to go with Aunt Robin (“She’s cool, Mom!”), and Rebecca figured she had nothing to lose at that point, except maybe a manicure appointment. So she had accepted her gift, personal reservations duly noted, and toddled off to Denver, where she met her six Partners in Transformation, all women of various ages and backgrounds sharing a common need to be transformed from a bad situation to a new beginning.
Then entered the fearless Moira Luting, who cheerfully announced that they’d be pushed to their physical limits to clear their mind, body, and spirit, so that they’d be completely free for The Visioning. And lest they doubt her, Moira quickly demonstrated that she meant what she said: Three days of crawling, climbing, hanging, and swimming in ice cold streams had almost killed the group of women, none of whom had ever done anything more strenuous than a treadmill.
The funny thing, at least for Rebecca anyway, was that it worked. She did feel free. And alive! And she had come too far to let something like a little—okay, big rock—stand in her way!
So she gathered up all the grit she had left and jumped again. Her knee slammed into the rock wall, but she caught a ridge at the top and struggled and scraped to hoist herself up. Somehow, she made it, rolling off the other side and landing on one foot and one knee in the little clearing where the campfire was burning.
A howl—yes, an actual howl—went up from the others as she gained her feet, and frankly, it wasn’t bad for a former beauty queen, even if she did think so herself. This was her highest plateau yet, and although she was completely spent and near to starving to death, Rebecca felt nothing at all like the weak and fragile socialite beauty queen she had come to expect from herself. She felt like . . . Lara Croft, Tomb Raider!