Above All Else

by Dana Alison Levy

  And why am I blushing?

  “I should take some photos of the airstrip. For my mom,” I say, but I don’t move.

  “Tate! Rose!” Jordan calls from the doorway. “Come on back. We’re going to head out to a lodge around ten minutes down the trail. We’ll stay there tonight and figure out the rest of the delay from there.” He turns and walks back in.

  Tate drops his hand like he’s been burned, but he doesn’t move away.

  I close my eyes, then open them again. He’s still right there. “Well. We’d better…I mean, risk is part of the mountains, you know? This is part of the deal.”

  Tate blinks and nods. “Sure. That’s the price of climbing big peaks. People die. Though I don’t know, Rose. I don’t know. Like, that sounds simple, I guess, but did the sisters and kids and parents of those poor fuckers agree to that price?”

  Before I can say anything, he shakes his head a little and holds out his arm, like he’s going to escort me back in. “Never mind. I’m being…whatever. You ready?”

  I stare at him for a second, trying to see if he’s okay. If I’m okay.

  But, finally, I take his arm. “I was born ready,” I say, and he laughs, just as I planned.

  “You screw that up every time, Keller. You got to say it with more growl in your voice: ‘I was born ready!’ Go on, try it again.”

  I hip-bump him, and he shoves me as we walk inside, and we both pretend to forget what happened high above us in the mountains.

  Chapter Eight:

  Tate

  (Four Months Earlier) January 6

  Gibraltar Rock, Mount Rainier

  12,660 feet above sea level

  FearFastFallingFUCKFUCKFUCK

  SILENCE.

  Then Rose, screaming. “TATE? TATE, ANSWER ME, DAMMIT! TATE, PLEASE ANSWER!” But it’s faint, so faint-and-faraway.

  I answer. I swear I do. But she keeps screaming. So maybe I don’t.

  I try again.

  And again.

  somuchpainowowowowowowowow

  I work sososohard to make words. To keep Rose from screaming like she’s in pain. Rose can’t hurt like that. So…words. I push my head against the ice, and the cold brings me back to myself, just enough for the horror to wrap around my throat.

  Panic.

  Words for Rose.

  “Rosie, I fell. I, uh.” More ice on my face. Wake up, Tate. “I think I broke my arm. Arms?”

  She hears me, and her voice is closebutnotcloseenough.

  “GOD! Okay, that’s okay. But…Do you know why the rope’s slack?”

  I want to close my eyes, but Rose asked a question. Rose needs an answer. I try. Like school. ConcentrateTate!Focus!

  “My ice axes. On my belt. They both caught on the edges of the crevasse, and I’m…kind of…hanging here.”

  Rose gasps, and she’s soclosesoclose that I can picture her face except that she’s not close, not really. She says, “Wow! That’s…that’s lucky.”

  I’m not moving, I don’t think, but maybe I am, because her voice is farther now, and I know I can’t reach her. “Funny, I don’t feel that lucky…” I let my eyes close, which is goodsogood.

  I can hear them above me, but I’m gone, not-here-not-there-not-anywhere.

  “We’ll have to go down and get him.”

  “I’m the lightest.”

  “Are you sure the rope is strong enough?”

  “Let’s get him up! NOW!”

  Then I hear Rose, closer and louder, and I try to wake up. “Hey, Tate, I’m coming down to get you, and by the way, remember when I told you that someone on the track team said she’d totally have sex with you, and I refused to tell you who? Well, maybe, if you’re awake, I’ll tell you!”

  She keeps talkingtalkingtalking about the hottest-seniors lists on the bathroom wall and a girl named Anya, and I want to answer, want to laugh with Rose, but I can’t. There’s a horrible groaning sound echoing around me. And I realize it’s me.

  Then someone kicks me in the head.

  FUCK.

  That definitely wakes me up.

  “Jesus Christ! I’ve already fallen. Do you have to kick my head in?”

  And there’s Rose, bravest of the brave, with blood and tears washing down her face like rain while she thumps and shoves and—owowowowowowowow—positions me behind her, tries to wrap my arms around her neck, but I scream somuchpainowowow, and she works the ropes, tying the knots we’ve both known by heart since we were kids.

  I want to help, but every movement is black-and-gold blasts of pain, and I can’t, I can’t, I—

  A massive lurch that sends pain sparking through me, and we start to ascend, and I want to say thank you, but I can’t, I…

  * * *

  —

  So much noise. It’s bizarre how loud it is, people screaming and shouting, doors slamming, sirens drilling into my head. I want to tell everyone to shut the fuck up, that they need to be quiet, but as I open my mouth, a wall of pain and nausea slams into me. I throw up, and the pain feels like fire. Softly, so much quieter than anything else, I hear Rose’s voice whisper my name. Then it’s black again.

  * * *

  —

  The next time I wake up can’t be much later, because all I smell is puke. It’s almost enough to make me hurl again, but I breathe through my mouth and try not to think about it. I’m not moving anymore; I’m strapped to a dolly—no, not that but the other wheelie thing they use in hospitals. And I seem to be parked in a hallway. I can’t move my head, and for a second I panic, the nausea rolling back over me, and my body jerks.

  I hear Mom now. Most of the noise is quieter, but she is screaming. Screaming at Dad. The words fade in and out.

  “What do you think will happen if you keep pushing him up these mountains?” she shrieks. “Are you waiting for him to die?”

  “Pushing him? It’s all he wants to do! It’s the only thing he feels good about, Sarah. What am I supposed to do, tell him to quit?”

  I want to tell her no, that it’s not Dad’s fault. But all I can do is moan.

  Rose’s hand touches mine.

  “You’re okay. You’re going to be okay,” she whispers.

  I stare straight up at the ceiling, dirty and pockmarked. “I can’t move,” I say, and even the words hurt, but now the hurt is blurred, faded. The panic’s faded too. My eyes are shutting, the ceiling farther away. I can hear Dad, his voice low and angry, but it’s fainter now.

  “The doctors put a neck brace on you. And…and some other things. That’s why. You’re safe now. You’re—”

  “Stay,” I tell her. The wheelie thing’s disappearing too, and I’m floating, just my body, in the air. It somehow seems important to tell her this before I’m totally gone. “Stay.”

  Her hand’s on top of mine, keeping me from floating off completely. “I’m right here,” she says. Her voice is strong. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  * * *

  —

  When I finally wake up for real, I hurt so much I almost laugh. It seems like a fucking joke, like a cartoon where the Coyote gets run over chasing the Road Runner, then peels himself off the highway.

  Dad’s sitting in the chair opposite the bed, his head back, snoring. At this I really do laugh, but it turns into a moan.

  “You’re up.”

  I whip my head around to the voice, which was a shitty idea. Pain shoots up my neck and into my forehead so hard I literally see stars. I close my eyes for a second, trying hard not to puke again.

  “Rose? What…?” It’s as far as I get. God. I’m so tired. I worry for a second that I’ll fall back asleep before she answers. I go to pinch myself, a longtime trick to try and keep myself focused, but both my hands and arms are wrapped like mummies.

  She sighs, and I see her, really see her, for th
e first time. She’s got big, black Frankenstein’s-monster-style stitches on her hairline and a bruise on her cheekbone. Her eyes are so bloodshot that they’re a bright, scary blue, and her hair’s a wild, frizzy mess. She looks so tired and worn out. I’ve never seen her like this. It scares me. One of the machines I’m hooked up to beeps as my heart starts to race.

  “What?” I ask. “What’s going on?”

  She leans forward, her face even more worried. “It’s okay, Tate. Your arms will be—”

  I cut her off. “Not me, you. Why do you look like that?”

  She reaches her hand up to touch her stitches, then winces. “Oh. Seriously, it’s barely anything. I bumped it against the ice. That’s all, but it wouldn’t stop bleeding, so the paramedic had to sew it in the ambulance.” She tries to smooth her face out, but it still doesn’t look like her.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “You…It was a crevasse. We were moving fast, and…” She trails off. “But your ice axes caught on the sides, and we were able to get you out. Amazingly, you only have one bad break. Everything else, well, the doctors will tell you, but you’re mostly bruised and sprained. The rescue guys said you were the luckiest they’d ever seen. They’re going to set your arm in a little while, so you need to rest now.”

  “What else? What’s wrong?” She looks…undone. I scrabble, trying to sit up, but the pain hits, and I gasp.

  “Nothing. My mom’s feeling crappy again, but that’s because we had to rush to get down. I swear, I’m fine.”

  There’s a sound in the corner, and I turn my head, carefully this time, to see Dad looking at us. If Rose looks old and worn, he looks like the undead. He hasn’t shaved, and I’d never noticed how gray his beard has gotten. He looks flimsy and broken.

  “Dad,” I say but stop. I was going to say sorry, but that seems weird. I want to ask what really happened, why I fell, what’s wrong with me. But I don’t. I let my eyes slide shut, seeing Rose’s hand on my bandaged arm before the blackness comes back.

  Chapter Nine:

  Rose

  April 9

  Namche, Nepal

  11,290 feet above sea level

  I don’t even know what day of the week it is; me, who loves a calendar almost as much as I love a list. It is day three on the trail, three days since we sat in a smoky lodge in Lukla and tried not to think about the bodies being cremated a day’s walk away. All of our guides and porters left, rushing off to make the laborious uphill walk as fast as possible so that they could pay their respects before turning around and walking back down to meet us. Search teams found two more bodies in the Icefall, and, amazingly, two survivors. Now the funerals are over, and everyone’s back to business as usual, back to the business of climbing Mount Everest.

  It’s horrible, and I’m ashamed, but excitement drums through me, hot and fierce and stronger than before. We are far from home, far from all the stress and Dread and worry, and I take photo after photo, sending them to Mami in the lodges when the Wi-Fi works, turning off my phone after to conserve battery. It feels great to share as many moments of this trip as possible with her, almost like she’s seeing it herself. It feels great to share my excitement, so long as I don’t let myself think about how frustrated she was with my lack of excitement before. It feels even better to turn my phone off and disappear, leaving Mami and her illness and my guilt far behind. I can love this for her, I remind myself. I can give her that, at least.

  Every day we walk, usually only around five hours or so, acclimatizing to the altitude and soaking in the local culture. We walk by Buddhist prayer wheels and piles of mani stones, rocks painted with the now-familiar mantra om mani padme hum, the jewel in the heart of the lotus. And above us literally thousands of multicolored prayer flags are strung between buildings and trees and temples and flap wildly in the wind. Porters wearing flip-flops and carrying huge loads on their backs, held in place by a tumpline—a rope across their foreheads—pass us at twice our speed. We walk through crowded villages filled with young children and puppies and small storefronts selling Coke and Sprite to thirsty trekkers. We cross the Dudh Koshi, a winding turquoise river, on high suspension bridges that dip and sway as we walk across them. We move to the side of the trail as dozens of donkeys with bells and headdresses and massive loads push past us on their way to deliver goods to the villages above. The landscape changes from lush green terraced fields and flowering bushes to drier, browner land with a few wind-twisted trees.

  It is surreal to be here. I’ve seen photos of these villages, seen documentaries about everyone from Tenzing Norgay to Sir Edmund Hillary, the first guys to summit Mount Everest in the fifties, to today’s top climbers, all standing in the same places I’m standing. Almost everything from home has been dismissed, erased like it never mattered. Gone is homework, worrying about my GPA, trying to remember to put gas in the car—even the frustrating exercise of refreshing my inbox to see if I’ve moved off the waitlist at Yale. I’ve left everything but Tate. He alone is my anchor, laughing over remember-whens, wondering if our friends Will and Gus ever hooked up, pondering scenarios where Ronan had finally made his move on Chessa. I am breathless from laughter. Laughter plus altitude equals burning lungs, but I don’t care.

  * * *

  —

  Today we arrive in Namche Bazaar, the largest Sherpa village in the region, complete with an Irish pub, Italian coffee, and internet—all at 10,000 feet and many days’ walk away from any roads. Everything here is brought up by porters and donkeys, a fact that makes the occasional expensive glass bottle of Sprite feel more than a little guilt-inducing. We will stay here for two days to acclimatize before going higher. It feels good to settle in.

  “Well, this is pretty much the nicest place I’ve seen since the Shenker,” Tate says, dropping his pack in our room. The room, like the others we’ve stayed in on the trek, is basic: plywood walls, two twin platform beds, a shelf by the window, and a row of hooks. But it’s large and well-built, with huge windows that open up to a ridiculously gorgeous mountain panorama.

  I sit on one of the beds. “Ooh, this is good,” I say. “The mattress is actually more than a few inches thick.” Lying down, I stretch long and hard, twisting my back this way and that to release the tension from the day’s walk. Namche is bowl-shaped, and our lodge is at the tip-top rim of the bowl. We thought we’d arrived thirty minutes earlier, and the endlessly ongoing walk up the dozens and dozens of stone stairs through the bustling village has nearly worn me out. I try not to think about the altitude waiting for me. I lie back, waiting until the blood stops pounding in my skull.

  I look over at Tate, who is lying facedown on his own bed. “I heard there are solar showers here. Which is good. Because I stink like whoa, and if I can smell me, I can’t imagine what you’re smelling.”

  Wrinkling my nose, I turn toward my armpit and sniff. Ugh. Definitely not the right choice. Baby wipes and deodorant only go so far.

  “Showers sound good,” he mumbles, facedown. “But so does napping.”

  I don’t expect to be this tired, this soon. A tiny sliver of fear darts through me. Like a mantra, I run through the mountains we’ve climbed to train: Rainier, Denali, Aconcagua. We can do this. I can do this. I can do this for me and Mami. I am strong enough.

  A knock on the door sends me flying. Apparently, I fell asleep, boots still dangling over the edge of the bed. Tate’s out cold.

  “Yeah?” I call, moving upright. “It’s open.”

  Silence, then the door opens a crack. “Hello? I don’t want to interrupt…” It’s Yoon Su.

  I open the door wider. “You’re fine. I’m up and Tate’s out. We’d have to work harder than this to wake him. Come on in.”

  From his face-plant position, Tate mumbles, “Notasleep-I’mtotallyawake. Don’tgotalkingaboutme.”

  I look at Yoon Su. “Whatever. What’s up?”

  She
glances over at Tate and smiles her fast smile again. “Luc and I are walking back down to the village. He wants to see the sights, and I will buy a few supplies. Namche is the best-stocked spot until we are back in Kathmandu. If you want anything—from post cards to chocolate bars—now is the time.”

  I groan a little. Those stone steps, waiting for me. But I do want to get a few things. “Sure. Sounds good,” I say, trying to sound less pathetic. Yoon Su has moved fast up the trail every day, often ahead of our porters. She’s the first to finish our tea breaks on the trail, first to jump up and start walking again, as though she can push us to Base Camp by the sheer force of her will. I’m not used to lagging behind.

  “Bring me a Snickers,” Tate mutters. Then adds, “Please.”

  I roll my eyes at Yoon Su. “His mama raised him right, but he’s still lazy,” I say, grabbing my down vest. It is warm, hot even, in the late afternoon sun, but I’ve learned the hard way that as soon as the sun goes down, it will be freezing.

  We clomp out of the lodge, meeting Luc by the door. Luc has been insistently friendly since we left Kathmandu. Like me, he’s clearly delighted to be here, and his booming “Salut demoiselles!” to me and Yoon Su makes me smile.

  “Getting to walk with not one but two beautiful women—if only ze men back home could see me now,” he says, trying to put an arm around each of our shoulders.

  I shrug him off without saying anything, but Yoon Su stops and puts her hands on her hips, facing him. “We are not here for decoration!” She gives a little hiss of annoyance. “Honestly! Would you say this to Tate, who is also lovely to look at?”

  I grin at the expression on Luc’s face. He’s so bug-eyed it’s almost funny.

  “But he is a man!”

  “And I am a woman! And a climber! So. Think of us as you think of Tate or Jordan or Paul. As climbers. Okay?” She starts to walk again, and after a second Luc scrambles after her.