Leaving Everest

by Westfield, Megan

  My insides clenched. “No,” I said, this time aloud.

  “What if you—”

  “It’s not right for me. There’s a reason I took a gap year, and now that it’s over, I don’t feel any differently about going to college.”

  “I don’t see why—”

  “Just drop it,” I said, my voice sharper than I’d meant. “I already made my choice. I’m not going, okay?”

  And drop it he did. The awkward silence from this afternoon returned. My insides clenched even tighter.

  I turned toward Tinkerbell, putting my hands on her head. She licked my jacket, her tongue as loud as a shoe dragging on cement.

  Luke and I had always occupied completely different lives outside the months we were together in Tengboche or Everest Base Camp, but now we were galaxies apart. Yeah, I’d climbed some new peaks with Dad, finished online high school, and gotten my mountaineering certifications, but other than that, there was nothing different about my life than when I was seventeen. Or fifteen. Or twelve, even.

  It was one thing to let go of my Circ fantasy and rein in my feelings for him, but there was still an important friend behind that. What if we’d grown so far apart that this would be lost, too? The sadness of this possibility crushed me.

  When I couldn’t stand his disappointed silence anymore, I climbed over the fence to go inside. I wished even more than before that Luke’s bedroll wasn’t right next to mine.

  “Good night,” I said, and it stung when he didn’t try to stop me.

  I tiptoed through the house and settled onto the floor, my back to Luke’s empty bedroll. Mingma was breathing heavily in her sleep, and Dad was doing his soft but annoying whistle-snore.

  My pulse was still on the defense, making me restless. I knew I wouldn’t be able to relax until Luke came back inside. My ears strained for the squeak of the door hinges.

  It was a long time before he finally returned, nearly silent as he lay down behind me. It was physically painful forcing my body to stay still as if I was sleeping. I yearned to repair the rift between us. I yearned for him.

  A good fifteen minutes later, he whispered my name. Slowly, I rolled over to face him.

  It was too dark to see, but I could sense he was just inches away, close enough to make me conscious of my breathing. Close enough to kiss.

  “Do you ever think about Cerro Torre?” he whispered. “Or Fitz Roy and the rest of the Top Five?”

  All the time.

  But to admit this, on top of everything else today?

  There was nothing I loved to daydream about more as I drifted off to sleep after a hard and satisfying day in the mountains. Or a day when a Circ from Luke had made me smile so deeply I was sure the feeling would never fade.

  Cerro Torre was steeped in the grandeur and mystique of the jagged Patagonian Mountains of South America. It had a four-page spread in World’s 19ers, and we’d long agreed it was the most beautiful mountain in the world and the one we most wanted to climb someday.

  For us, Cerro Torre was pure and sacred. Here in the stillness of the night, in the comfort of Luke’s childhood home—even despite all that I’d not become in the past two years—it seemed okay to say so.

  “Yeah. I think about it a lot.”

  “Me, too,” he whispered, and shivers ran down my spine.

  Chapter Four

  It was back to dimples and teasing for Luke the next morning as Dad and I said our good-byes after breakfast.

  Luke had always been a big flirt. With me. With everybody. It was one of the reasons he was such a fun friend, and also why it had taken until that afternoon two years ago for me to believe my feelings for him might actually be returned.

  He handed me my pack, pretending to stagger under the weight. “Jeez, what do you have in here?”

  My whole life.

  I said good-bye to Pasang first, then Mingma, who gave me a pristine, white, silk kata scarf to carry with me on the mountain for good luck. I knew she hated that she wouldn’t be with us in Base Camp, especially with Luke guiding this season. She was holding back tears, and so was I.

  “You’ll be back next year,” I assured her as we hugged.

  “But you won’t.”

  Well—

  I’d tell her about that two months from now, on our way back through Tengboche after the Everest season. Or maybe Luke would, once Dad and I were gone.

  I stood in front of Luke. His grin, as always, was contagious.

  “See you on the glacier,” I said.

  “See you on the glacier.”

  Even as we said this, I doubted I would actually see him very much. The population of Everest Base Camp during climbing season was a thousand people, and the Khumbu Glacier it sat on was a mile-long stretch of jumbled-up ice and rock that didn’t make for easy travel between the various expeditions’ camps. Besides, Winslowe Expeditions and Global Adventurers would be on completely different acclimatization plans and summit schedules.

  I purposely kept our good-bye hug quick and breezy.

  “Oh, hey, wait,” Luke said, just as Dad and I were ready to step off.

  He ran back in the house and came out holding a small box of banana-yellow Loftycakes. My favorite American snack food from when I was a kid and next to impossible to get in Nepal.

  The tears I’d been holding back broke loose. Not only because he’d remembered my love of Loftycakes and traveled with them all the way here from Seattle, but because I didn’t know how I would ever manage to rein in my feelings for him.

  Dad and I hiked the remaining miles of trail through the familiar terrain of the upper Khumbu Valley, pitching our tent each night in the common area of one of the progressively smaller Sherpa villages. We arrived at Everest Base Camp four days later.

  Tshering, Winslowe Expeditions’s lead Sherpa—or sirdar—had been at Base Camp with the other Sherpas for several weeks, and he’d already constructed our tent city, which consisted of a large cabin-style tent, fringed by smaller tents for communications, cooking, and storing gear. The individual tents for clients and guides were in a ring around the outside of the camp.

  I looked forward to seeing the familiar faces of our Sherpas and hoped Mingma’s temporary replacement cook wouldn’t mind how much I liked to help out in the kitchen, especially on baking days. Everest Base Camp was the most permanent home I had all year, and I was excited to have my very own tent for the next few months, where I’d snuggle down for the night on thick foam instead of a thin backpacking air mattress.

  We were a hundred and twenty miles from the nearest road, but in the Winslowe Expeditions camp, we’d be offering our clients a carpeted dining tent, free wifi, fresh produce, and hot towels and tea delivered to their tents each morning. Some expeditions did even more, like Go Big Mountaineering with their espresso machine and Global Adventurers’s karaoke machine and the gourmet chef Luke told us they’d flown in from San Francisco.

  Dad’s hard-core alpinist friends hate all these trappings of civilization that require such extreme measures and expense to transport, but Everest has never been pure in this way. You don’t come to Everest expecting two months of Spam. On this mountain, you get gourmet. Ever since 1856, when the Great Trigonometrical Survey pronounced it to be the tallest in the world, it was fated to be something different.

  Inside the main tent, we found a Sherpa wiping down the dining table. This had to be Pertemba, the new cook. Dad introduced us and asked if there were any lunch leftovers. “Yes, of course,” Pertemba said, hurrying to dish us up servings of dal bhat.

  Tshering came into the tent while we were eating, barking something at Pertemba. Seeing us, he barked something else into the radio and then set down his clipboard to shake Dad’s hand.

  “Good to see you, Boss,” he said.

  For all that Dad was quiet and considerate, Tshering was straightforward and assertive. That’s why the two of them made such a good team. He’d been with Dad every year since…well, the year after Luke’s father died.
<
br />   Tshering gave me a quick, efficient hug. “Number seven this year, MiniBoss?”

  I nodded. He was one of the few who knew my actual number of summits. A long time ago, Dad had made an agreement with Miss Eleanor Hansen, the Kathmandu-based grand dame of Mount Everest recordkeeping, to not report my summits. The less the U.S. Child Protective Services knew about what Dad allowed me to do as a Winslowe Expeditions tagalong, the better.

  “Doctor Teresa is in the Global Adventurers camp,” Tshering said. “She wants you to go up and say hello.”

  “She’s here already?”

  “Been here two days,” he replied. “Extra acclimatization.”

  This was exactly like Doc. When she set her mind to do something, she didn’t do it halfway.

  “Should we head up after we unpack?” I asked Dad.

  “Tshering and I have a lot to go over,” he said. “Why don’t you go on ahead? I’ll catch her another time.”

  I rinsed off my dishes and went out to my tent. Inside, I spread my sleeping bag on the thick cut of foam the Sherpas had carried to Base Camp and staged in my tent, as they had in all the other tents. I lay back on it, breathing in the familiar scent of a tent that had been baking in the sun all morning.

  I folded my clothes neatly into the first of two waxed lettuce boxes I had grabbed from the kitchen. The other box doubled as my night table, and that was where I laid my headlamp, earbuds, sketchpad, World’s 19ers book, and toiletry kit. Inside it I organized my stash of arts and crafts supplies.

  Luke had been right about my pack; carrying around a bunch of extras like craft supplies made it very heavy by backpacker standards. But as Dad had once pointed out, my pack was featherweight compared to the loads Sherpas and porters ferry.

  Now, the fun part: decorating. I untangled a length of thin cord to string across the tent ceiling like a clothesline to hang decorations from. The feeling of the cool nylon cord against my fingers made me pause. I gripped a section of it and drew it slowly through my closed palm. I repeated the motion, this time closing my eyes to the sensation. It was déjà vu back to two years ago. I’d done the very same thing that day—the day of the earthquake.

  Luke and I had been lying around in my tent, playing cards and drinking hot chocolate. He’d already graduated from his boarding school in Kathmandu and would be leaving for University of Washington when the season was over. He’d been working with our support Sherpas that season, hauling bottles of oxygen to the upper caches on the mountain, but on that particular day he’d stayed down in Base Camp.

  The winds were blustery that morning, scraping across the tent and pushing it this way and that. Our game of rummy had ended, and we were arguing whether to go another round of rummy—his stronger game—or switch to cribbage, my stronger game. As we bantered back and forth, he plucked the end of a piece of cord from the bag I hadn’t put away after teaching advanced knots to a few of the clients.

  He flicked me with the cord. “Remember how mad Greg would get when you used to braid this stuff?”

  It was a piece of Dad’s vintage, ultra-thin Prusik cord.

  “Yeah,” I said as I tried to snatch the piece away from him.

  Though we were being playful, my crush on Luke was full force, and I was nervous being in the tent with him despite the dozens of hours we’d spent in tents together over the years.

  I tried to snatch the cord again, and this time our fingers touched. His skin was hot. He let go of the cord.

  I dug through the bag and found two more lengths of cord, which I pulled through my palm a few times before setting them up to macramé into a bracelet.

  As I started, Luke grabbed more pieces and followed along with my steps. It was funny. Not in a laugh-aloud way, but in a warms-my-insides way.

  What was there not to love about this guy? He was so relaxed and carefree, and being around him made me feel that way. He was incredibly smart but never showed it off. His smiles—with teeth that were straighter than mine—were perfection, and when his dimples appeared at the sides of his mouth, I turned into putty.

  We worked quietly on our bracelets as the wind roared outside, blocking all the other Base Camp sounds and making it seem like our tent was the only one on the glacier.

  “Do you think you’ll get homesick when you go to Seattle?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so. I’m hardly here anymore as it is.”

  “Mingma will miss you.”

  “Yes, but she wants me to go.”

  I wanted to ask if he was scared, but this question was more for myself than him, so I didn’t. A year from now, I’d be in his shoes, getting ready to head to Washington for college myself. Would he fit in? Would he feel at home there once he got used to it? Would I?

  We still had about six weeks left at Base Camp, but already the thought of saying good-bye made my throat thick.

  When I finished braiding my bracelet, I knotted the end and untied it from the anchor point.

  “What are you going to do with that?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Probably give it to one of the Tengboche kids or something.”

  “Well, don’t. I want it.”

  “You want this?” I asked. The cord was light purple, which was kind of girly.

  He nodded. I noticed that it was me he was looking at, not the cord. My body tingled.

  For once I didn’t crack a joke. “Only if you’re giving me that one,” I said pointing to the one he’d made.

  “Deal.”

  I always tried my best to pretend my crush on him wasn’t there, but it was. Its force drew me to him, making me wonder things like what would happen if I followed the pull of his eyes and scooted closer? What would it be like to kiss him? What would it be like to be his girlfriend instead of just a buddy?

  I craved him. Sometimes, like at that moment, it made me dizzy trying to resist it.

  I pushed up my sleeve and held out my wrist. He wrapped the bracelet around it and then bent close to knot the ends. His warm breath flowed up my forearm as he focused. I shivered.

  “What?” he asked, glancing up at me.

  “Nothing.”

  Very carefully, he cut the excess with his knife.

  “Do you have matches?” he asked.

  I dug around in a bin for the tiny, waterproof container of backup matches for the rapid-boil stove. He flicked one against the flinted lid. Very carefully, he fused the knots with the wavering tip of the flame. I forced my focus onto the smoky, waxy smell of the melted cord instead of how close his face was to my hand.

  When he was finished, he held out his wrist. It took me a lot longer to tie the knots on his bracelet because my hands were shaking, and it kept slipping off. He rested his forearm on my knee to make it easier. Beneath the soft skin of the inside of his wrist, his pulse was beating fast like mine. This should have been reassuring, but instead it made me even more nervous. I prayed he wasn’t noticing.

  Once I finished the knots, I grabbed the matches. I paused before striking. “Promise you won’t sue me if I burn you?”

  He didn’t laugh. Instead, those heart-melting eyes of his cut directly to mine, ratcheting my pulse up even higher.

  I flicked the match, carefully lowering it onto the knots, holding my breath so I wouldn’t accidentally push the flame onto his skin. The purple cord grew wet in the yellow flame, and then I pulled the match back and extinguished it with a single puff.

  After I was done, his arm lingered on my knee. I dared not move as we watched the thread of smoke at the end of the match twist leisurely toward the ceiling, unaffected by the winds raging outside the tent.

  It hit me stronger than it ever had before that he was leaving. I longed to tell him how much I was going to miss him. To throw our entire friendship away on the chance that the quick pulse in his wrist had been a sign that he felt the same as me.

  He lifted his arm, looking down at his wrist as he pulled his sleeve back into place.

  “Pound Rescue?” he asked. It was my favor
ite reality show.

  “We finished all of them.”

  “Walkabout Media’s surfing show?”

  “Okay,” I said, setting up the portable DVD player one of last season’s clients had passed along to me when he went home.

  For once, it was warm enough to lie on top of my sleeping bag rather than under it, and that’s what we did. This time, though, he twisted into me slightly as I lay next to him. As the show began to play, I put the right-side earbud in and handed him the left. He’d already snagged my pillow, so I rested my chin on my folded arms. Our hands were so close that I hardly noticed when he started twisting my new bracelet around my wrist.

  And then I did.

  The air turned explosive. Even though I had no idea how he felt about me or what it would mean, it was like I knew with absolute certainty that something was about to happen. We moved closer, one imperceptibly slow movement flowing into another as the endless aqua ocean waves rolled across the screen.

  Now we were both on our sides, his chest tight against my back, his hand still holding my wrist around the bracelet. My eyes were closed with the sensations of it all: the heat of his body, the woodsy smell of his deodorant, and his heartbeat against my ribs.

  That’s why it took me a few seconds to notice the tent was no longer being pushed by the wind but shaking like a dog after a swim.

  What was going on?

  The foghorn-low rumble grew into a roar all around us. With terror, I realized what it was.

  Earthquake.

  Rocks were shifting and crunching. People were shouting in panic. There could be climbers in the icefall being buried right now. Where was Dad? Where were our Sherpas?

  Luke and I threw on our boots and scrambled to get out of the tent.

  Then, the unmistakable blast of an avalanche rattled our eardrums. The entire west face of Lingtren Peak had let loose, and in an instant, there was a monstrously large, roiling cloud of snow and debris careening straight toward Base Camp.