by Ruthie Knox
“You’re certain?”
“Yeah, thanks.”
There wasn’t anything to do then but open the door, so he did that, and she leaned into him, hands on his shoulders, and bussed his cheek. “Take care of yourself.”
When she pulled away, her eyes looked too wet, and his throat tightened in response. “You, too, princess.”
The door had nearly closed behind him when she caught it and stuck her head through. “Kal?”
“Yeah?”
“I’ll be here tomorrow at least. Come see me. If you’re free.”
“You sure?”
“Please.”
He leaned in and kissed her, glad to know it wouldn’t be the last time. She might not be in New York long, but while she was here, he could spend time with her. “I’ll do that.”
He thought about her on the train all the way to Queens.
Chapter 10
Kal’s mother hovered behind his chair. She reached out now and then to rest her hand on his right shoulder, then withdrew it. “Are you hungry?”
“I could handle a salad, maybe.” He had no appetite after the spread at Allie’s, but he wasn’t going to refuse food after she’d hugged him a full three seconds when he walked through the door.
“No salad. Quati, I think. You need protein.” She bustled through the swinging door to the kitchen, where Kal heard her barking orders in rapid-fire Sherpa.
He sat at the staff table beside the kitchen doors. The restaurant was busy, all the tables full and a crowd of customers milling around the entryway waiting for seats to open up. His sister Sangmu was hustling customers into chairs and picking up slack to speed tables along—clearing plates, bringing checks, explaining the cash-only policy to the uninitiated who’d failed to read the notice at the door, on the menu, and posted on no fewer than three wall placards.
Kal had seen his brother Tashi at the grocery earlier, and his other brother, Tenzing, was in the back somewhere working on the produce order, keeping an eye on the youngest, Patricia.
Sangmu looked taller and thinner than when he’d seen her last. He hoped it was just growing up, and not strain from having to bear the weight of Kal’s absence. The next time she approached his table, he asked, “Shouldn’t you be at school?”
“It’s a teacher work day.” She pushed through the doors into the kitchen, throwing “Moron” back over her shoulder.
It was good to be home.
His mother appeared with a steaming bowl of quati and a plate of rice with a lemon wedge. “Here.” She set it down in front of him and resumed her place by his shoulder. “Eat.”
She watched him squeeze lemon over the bowl and shovel the first spoonful of thick, gingery soup into his mouth. Nine kinds of beans, plus greens and spices and whatever else she’d insisted the chef stick in there to restore him to health. He nodded over the bowl. “It’s good today.”
“It’s always good.” She took a proprietary interest in the restaurant, though it didn’t belong to her but to her brother Dorjee, who had the sense to leave it to her machinations. She let Kal eat half the bowl before she sat down across from him and said, “You check your messages?”
He dumped rice into the bowl. “Not yet.”
“I get a lot of calls lately for you.”
Kal nodded, wary of the sharpness that had come into her eyes. His mother never sat down unless there was something she wanted, and she never stood up again until she’d managed to get it.
It took a lot of willpower for an eighty-pound woman to drag herself to the top of Everest seven times. Yangchen Beckett had honed her willpower on her five children. Kal was the oldest, and thus had spent the most time facing the sharp, pointed edge of her blade.
“I got a call yesterday, a man who wants you to write a story for him.”
“I’m no writer.”
“You wrote a master’s thesis. Seventy-six pages long. Never turned it in.”
“Yeah, but that’s not the kind of writing he wants.”
“How do you know if you don’t talk to him?”
Kal rolled his eyes, which made his mother frown. He felt dark and heavy, restless with the urge to escape confrontation, and something else—some glimmer of hope he hadn’t managed to kill yet. It was the same way he’d felt in Kathmandu, when Brian had caught him in the street.
He’d blown Brian off in the worst way.
“They want you to write about Everest,” his mother said.
What else? The mountain, the avalanche, the tourist economy, the fragile ecosystem, the future, the way out. Kal watched his sister working. There was a beige stain on the breast pocket of her uniform shirt, the residue of some diner’s meal.
He should take over her shift. Give her the weekend off so she could Snapchat with friends or do homework, whatever it was Sangmu wanted to be doing with her life.
He needed to take a look at the books for the restaurant and the grocery store. Make sure his brothers hadn’t screwed anything up while he was away.
“There’s no shortage of people to write about Everest,” he said.
“They called you.”
“I probably wasn’t first on their list, and I’m sure I’m not last either.”
“You’ll call him back.” She made this a statement of fact, impossible to evade.
“Sure.” He’d call to tell them he wasn’t interested. Throw them Rosemary’s name, if they needed a writer.
His mother’s eyes narrowed. “Where’d you get those clothes?”
“Bought them in Kathmandu.”
“What happened to your clothes?”
“Somebody stole them out of my hotel room in Lukla.”
“They steal only your clothes, nothing else?”
“No, they got all my gear, too, and my phone.”
“They take your credit card, money?”
“Yeah.”
“How’d you get home with no clothes and no money?”
“I was taking care of somebody. A climber I was with on the mountain who needed help. She spotted me the money.”
“She buy you those clothes?”
He nodded.
“Who is she?”
“Rosemary Chamberlain.”
Kal kept his eyes on his bowl and waited, pushing rice into his mouth, focusing on the familiar smell of the soup, the bustle of the restaurant, the sounds of customers mixing with the voice of his sister, the colors and scents that meant family and home, and had for almost sixteen years.
They had an apartment above the restaurant, with enough bedrooms that no one had to share. His brothers lived on their own and ran the grocery store, more or less. When his mom opened the store it was just Nepalese and Tibetan dry and canned goods, but she’d expanded it over the years to add fresh produce, a bakery, and grab-and-go meals off the restaurant menu.
They’d built something here, his mom and him, his brothers and sisters, the relatives she’d helped come over from Nepal. It had taken sweat and tears and blood, but they’d made a safe place where before there’d been only his father’s mercurial moods and ever-changing plans. He would disappear and reappear without warning, violent and belittling, chaotic.
Only two kinds of people climbed Everest: megalomaniacs and the walking wounded. His father had been a megalomaniac. His mother, the victim.
She climbed Everest every couple years like it was her penance, and she and Kal didn’t talk about it. That was their deal—they worked together for the family, gave each other space, and kept their secrets. She didn’t give interviews. He didn’t ask her what had happened that day at Base Camp, when he’d made his father angry and unleashed him onto his mother, and she didn’t volunteer the details.
It wasn’t like his mom to get involved in his business. He couldn’t remember the last time she’d tried to make him do something that wasn’t about what would be good for the family.
It felt dangerous. Like a crack in the glacier just waiting to open up into a crevasse and swallow him.
&nbs
p; “There’s a prayer service tomorrow,” she said. “Eleven o’clock.”
“Okay.”
“You’ll be there.”
“Yep.”
“All right.” She stood, brushing invisible lint from her slacks. She picked a small bit of nothing off her sleeve as she said, “It’s good you’re safe. Wear something nice tomorrow. Not that”—she gestured at his loose, colorful Nepali pants and loud Annapurna T-shirt–“whatever that is.”
Kal finished his soup, thinking of the names he’d read in the online edition of the newspaper earlier.
The count was up to twenty-nine names. Twenty-nine people who would never go home again.
I love you, too, Mom.
Chapter 11
Rosemary stared at the blinking cursor on her laptop screen. Still in bed, she’d opened the red email folder at five-thirty a.m., immediately after reading the news.
Twenty-nine dead on Everest.
Twenty-nine names released, with the search ongoing.
Katix was dead.
Sajit was dead.
Rachel was dead.
Lapsang was dead.
Beatrice was in Wisconsin and hadn’t responded to the voicemail Rosemary left for her or her texts. Or the email she’d sent in desperation, knowing Bea never looked at her email.
Give her time, Winston had said yesterday, in the kitchen. She’ll come round. I’ll talk to her.
Rosemary wanted to give her time, but Sajit would never meet his baby.
I’m in New York, she texted. Come see me?
The message status shifted from “delivered” to “read.” Three dots appeared on the screen, and she waited for her daughter to reply, but no reply came through.
With a ball of grief in her throat, Rosemary had blown through the red email folder and then the orange one, offering breezy reassurances, sincere statements of condolence, updates, information. She connected with Indira, promising she would return to London in a few days and setting up a meeting time for the two of them to get together to talk about the next steps for their expedition. She booked a plane ticket to London in two days’ time, giving herself a deadline to finish up her personal errand and return to the adventure she had no intention of abandoning. She answered an email from her editor in London, who’d written three times, urgently requesting a meeting.
Happy to meet, Rosemary wrote. When would you like to talk?
The reply had come through immediately. I’m going to hook you up with colleagues at our NY office. Will be in touch shortly with details.
Fifteen minutes later, Rosemary had a new email chain six messages long in the red folder, and texts binging onto her cellphone from a man she’d never met who wanted to get together at the publisher’s headquarters at nine, or ten, or they could do lunch—he’d cleared his calendar, so she just needed to let him know where she’d be, and they would work something out.
She didn’t respond right away. Instead, she answered more email.
At seven-thirty, her head pounding, she got out of bed and made herself a cup of tea. Jet lag. Too much screen in the dark bedroom. Exhaustion. Trauma.
She crawled back into bed with the tea, arranged the blankets around her, and hovered the mouse pointer over the file that contained the beginning of her book.
But she didn’t open it. Nor did she text the New York editor. She couldn’t bear the thought of rousting herself from the bed and walking out into New York City to talk to a man she didn’t know about a book she couldn’t figure out how to write.
A book that had just been hit with an avalanche.
Rosemary opened the yellow email folder and started working her way down the list.
At nine, the doorman phoned to let her know there was a Kal Beckett to see her, and should he let him up?
“Yes, please.”
She answered the door in dirty climbing tights and an even dirtier T-shirt, unshowered, her eye sockets tight and her stomach churning around the tea in a way that told her she was working on a migraine.
“You look sharp.” Kal wore a blue dress shirt and black trousers. His shoes shone, recently polished. She touched her hand to her hair, dismayed not to have brushed it.
“Thanks. Can I come in?”
She stepped back, and he slid past her. He smelled clean and warm. She wanted to reach out with both arms and crush him against her body. “I would have called, but I thought…I don’t know.” He smiled. “I wanted to see how you were doing.”
“I’m well, thank you.” She heard how stiff the words were and tried to soften them with, “How are your…things?”
Kal ran his hand up the back of his neck. “You saw the news, I assume.”
“Yes.”
“Not so great.”
“No.”
She saw the same thing she felt in his eyes—the same desperate grief, the same physical exhaustion, the same hopeless casting about for what was supposed to be next when there was no script to follow anymore.
“I wrote emails all morning,” she blurted. “I haven’t showered.”
“That’s okay.”
“I’m working on a monstrous headache, and they’ve only stale black tea to drink, which isn’t going to touch it.”
“I wondered if you wanted to go to a service with me. Not a service, more like a prayer vigil. It’s at the monastery out in Elmhurst.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know if it’s your thing. It’s Buddhist, the monastery. They’ll be going all day, chanting and doing offerings at the altar. They always do it when there are deaths on Everest, because there are so many Sherpa with connections who live around there. I thought we could swing by for a while, maybe it would be good for us both.”
“Yes,” she said again. “Thank you.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I’d like to. Is there time for me to…” Rosemary looked down at herself.
She should leave these reeking, ruined clothes in a pile on the bathroom floor and come back later with a match and a can of gasoline to finish them off properly.
“Yeah, we’ve got time. However long you need. If you want, I could go out and grab you a coffee.”
“That would be heaven.”
She gave him her order and let him out, then called down to the doorman to send him back up when he returned.
The hot water felt better than doing email, better than lurking in the empty apartment alone, and Rosemary gave herself a stern lecture to always remember that when she felt blue, it helped to make herself go out among people. She’d never been one to thrive shut up at home alone.
She shaved her legs and armpits, toweled herself dry and rubbed lotion into her skin, made herself shiny and clean and new on the outside, because it was something she could do.
The prayer service was something she could do. There might be media there—she’d seen articles in the past following disasters on Everest about how the New York Sherpa responded to the tragedy. If the press were on hand, she could give an interview if she felt up to it. Speak for herself and her team, keep the awareness of their expedition in the news.
That was a plan. Rosemary felt better for having one, and when she returned to the bedroom she sent a quick text to Indira to keep her informed.
Nothing from Beatrice.
In the bedroom closet, she found a tidy row of blouses and trousers, skirt suits, and a high-necked dress, all in shades of drab and proper. Allie had equipped her with English-lady clothes. Rosemary selected a St. John suit in cream check and a black blouse, laid it out on the bed and slid her legs into pantyhose, slithered into the outfit with a conservative pair of heels.
The clothes fit.
Still. Rosemary felt like a snake trying to slip into discarded skin—everything tight in the wrong places, the fabric making it impossible for her to draw breath all the way into her lungs as she tried to wrestle her hair into a French twist.
She gave up and left it hanging loose.
Kal sat on a stool in the e
fficiency kitchen when she emerged. His gaze lingered on her legs and at her throat, making her uncomfortable in an entirely different—and not unwelcome—way. He handed her an enormous coffee.
“Thank you so much. Four shots?”
“I give the girls what they want.” He winked at her. “You look very nice.”
“It’s not my suit.”
“Could’ve fooled me. You all ready to go?”
“Yes.”
He gestured toward the door. “Ladies first.”
“That’s very chivalrous of you.” Rosemary took a sip of her coffee. It was strong and dark and very sweet—exactly what she needed.
“I just want to watch you walk in that thing.”
She laughed, surprised. Then she put a wiggle in her step, because he’d given her a reason to. It was a gift she knew better than to turn down.
—
The cab dropped them off in front of a brick church with bright red front doors surrounded by elaborate, colorful carving.
“It’s very attractive,” Rosemary said.
“Yeah, it’s nice. There’s a group, the United Sherpa Association, that does ceremonies and cultural stuff here. They have sports teams for kids, classes, the works.”
“Do you worship here?”
“When my mom makes me.”
He held the door open for her, and she followed him through a knot of people into a large wood-floored room facing an altar of the Buddha. Rosemary’s first impression was of gold and red, the royal palette accented with arrangements of flags in blue, green, and white. Some people kneeled on the floor, chanting; others spoke quietly in small groups along the exterior walls. High-up windows had been thrown open to the sunlight. Butter lamps burned on the altar, the rich scent of their oil mingling with a cool spring breeze.
“What are we meant to do?” she asked in a whisper.
“You can chant if you want, or say your own prayer. Or you can hang out. There’s a monk who will lead a ceremony later on.”
Rosemary felt out of place, but in a familiar way she recognized from her travels. She’d been to a number of religious sites, participated in blessing ceremonies, learning what she could about the cultures of the places her travel as a climber took her. “I think I’ll join them, at least for a bit.”
