Leaving Everest

by Westfield, Megan

  “I’m not going to Townsend College. I want to stay here and guide with Winslowe Expeditions. I’ve thought a lot about it. Now that I’m staying, I can officially be on staff this season, and then after I get my seventh summit—Chomolungma willing—I’ll ask Miss Eleanor to release my records. We’d get some good publicity, and we might have enough clients next year to run two Everest teams. And we can—”

  “Emily. Hold on a minute. Our staff roster is full for the season, and I don’t have any more budget on this trip for wages.”

  “I don’t have to be paid, but I could still be on staff.” I was definitely ready for a title other than MiniBoss or Greg’s daughter.

  Dad looked down. His face was significantly more weathered and wrinkled than most men his age because of his lifetime in the mountains. At the moment, the wrinkles seemed even deeper.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I should be paying you. You do as much work as a base camp manager or a trip coordinator, and you have been for years now. Had we talked about this last summer, I would have been open to it, but I can’t bring you on staff this season.”

  “I don’t care about the money right now. We can figure all that out later.”

  He ran his hand through his hair again. Was he going to say no?

  “There’s something I need to tell you, and there’s no way to put it gently. I can’t have you be a guide this season because you’re not going to be on the mountain this year past Camp Three.”

  What? Was this what Doc had been alluding to? That Dad wasn’t going to let me climb this year?

  He pressed on his temple. “Winslowe Expeditions is not in good shape financially. The oxygen is too expensive, and I absolutely cannot have you up there without it. If something happened…”

  I froze. He couldn’t be serious.

  My six Everest summits thus far had broken several records—not that anyone knew it yet—but it was the seventh that would smash about ten more. Major ones. It was my chance at sponsorship. My chance at the Top Five. I had to be able to climb this year.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “The oxygen has never been a problem before. I’m using only what we don’t need for clients. There’s no cost.”

  Dad winced. “I know I always told you that. But I can sell back unused oxygen to the cache in Gorak Shep, or hold it over for next year,” he said. “It doesn’t recoup all the cost, but it’s substantial, and when I let you use the oxygen, I don’t get anything back.”

  I didn’t know which was more shocking: the fact that we were only a week away from our clients arriving and he hadn’t even hinted that I wouldn’t be climbing, or the fact that he’d been paying for my Everest summits. At $2,000 per bottle of oxygen, the cumulative sum of my summits could have easily exceeded $25,000!

  “I’m sorry, Emily. I wanted you to get that seventh summit so badly, but it’s just not going to happen this year.”

  Something snapped in me. “But future years don’t matter. It’s mostly because of my age that I’ve been breaking records. I can’t wait until I’m older. I have to do it now. You said it yourself—Winslowe Expeditions isn’t doing well financially. We need the publicity now more than ever.”

  Dad shied back at the anger in my voice. There had been very few times I’d spoken to him like that. Possibly never. “You’re right about your records being one hell of an international news story, but breaking records is not the reason we are in the mountains. It’s risky. And a gamble.”

  I didn’t care about records and titles, either, but just this one time I needed the attention they could dredge up.

  “I apologize, Emily,” Dad said. “I should have told you sooner, but I kept thinking I’d figure out some way to make it work, or that you might want to fly to Washington early to get ready for the school year, and it would have been a moot point.”

  “And now I’m not going to Washington at all,” I reminded him.

  Dad stared at me. I could practically see the gears grinding in his head.

  “Emily, you can’t not go. We can talk lots more about your college concerns, and you can always change your mind after a semester or two. But for now, you have to stick with the plan.”

  “It’s too late.”

  “I don’t think you understand.” He hesitated. “Our financial situation isn’t just bad. It’s dire. I have no more money. There’s not even money I can borrow anymore. The hard truth of it is that I cannot support you any longer than when you get to the airport in Kathmandu. That’s why you have to go back.”

  Then it hit me: not climbing Everest this year wasn’t what Doc had been hinting at. This was the Big Thing. I’d sacrificed a college education in part to stay with Dad—the only family I had—yet he was essentially kicking me out of the house. My stomach rolled.

  “I can’t go back,” I said, trying to keep the panic from rising into my voice. “I already canceled my admission.”

  He looked at me sharply. “When?”

  “Namche Bazaar.”

  He relaxed. “Okay, good. If you sent the letter from Namche, there’s no way it’s reached the U.S. yet. Let’s hop on the satellite phone with the admissions office right now.”

  “No, I did it online. It was instant.”

  Dad’s head drooped in defeat. “It’s okay,” he murmured. “We’ll get this figured out. If it’s truly too late to do anything for fall quarter, I’m sure your grandparents would be happy to have you stay at their house for a while.”

  In the same house where Amy lived? Absolutely not.

  “I don’t need to stay with them. I have money,” I said.

  “You have fifteen hundred dollars to your name. That wouldn’t last two months in the U.S.”

  I gripped the armrest to steady myself. In a matter of minutes, my entire future had collapsed. It already seemed laughable that I’d ever dared to dream of the Top Five. Now, without warning and with no time to prepare, I had to find a way to support myself. To survive.

  “I’ll stay here in Nepal. It’s way cheaper.”

  “That’s not the answer. You need to hear me and take this very seriously. I’m not proud of the situation I’m in. Ashamed, really. But the truth is, I’m so bad off right now that I had to borrow the money for your plane ticket from Doc.”

  Just when I thought it couldn’t get worse. This was how Doc knew something was amiss. My hands flew over my eyes. I wanted to push it all away. I had to find a job, but what could I do? I had no work experience. Nothing to put on a résumé. Except my guiding certifications.

  Bingo.

  I let my hands drop into my lap and looked right at Dad. “I’ll guide,” I blurted. “With a different company. Maybe on Denali. Their season doesn’t start until summer. I can apply right now. Today.”

  He shook his head and rubbed at the stubble on his chin. “You’ve never climbed Denali. And guiding isn’t the answer, either. You don’t want this to be your life.”

  “Actually, I do want it to be my life.”

  “No, you want climbing to be your life.”

  “Guiding is good enough for you, and it’s good enough for me.”

  “I’m a fifty-year-old man who doesn’t have a penny in his bank account. And this is never what I set out—”

  To do, I finished for him. I knew exactly where he had been going with that and why he’d stopped.

  There was no more to say. I was numb. Worse than numb, actually. This was the woozy, apathetic euphoria that comes just before succumbing to hypothermia. When the body is hot like a fire while frostbite climbs up the limbs.

  I understood everything clearly now. Dad had been an Esplanade-sponsored athlete, hands-down the premiere alpinist of his generation…until he suddenly had to support his ten-year-old daughter. That’s when he started Winslowe Expeditions. I’d always been aware of this correlation, but it had been below the surface, phantomlike. Now this, and the accumulation of all I’d just learned, roared out of the water and knocked me to the ground.

 
I went right to my tent and lay on my sleeping bag.

  I didn’t read. I didn’t listen to music. I didn’t sleep. I just lay there.

  It was like having the wind knocked out of my lungs, only it was taking hours instead of a few seconds for them to reinflate. Until I remembered something.

  The moon last night.

  It had been large and only a few degrees shy of perfectly round.

  I sat up and turned on my phone. The weather app confirmed what I was hoping. The full moon was tonight. In fact, according to the app, it was already out.

  Whenever there was a full moon while Luke and I were in Base Camp, we had a tradition of hiking to the top of the neighboring hill, Kala Pattar, to watch the sunset.

  I popped outside with my phone open to the Circ app. Indeed, the moon had already risen in the blue sky and was a perfect, ghostly sphere over Pumori. I started the Circ with a view of the moon and then tipped the camera straight up into the sky, arcing over the top of Base Camp. Then I lowered it to the barren black rock of Kala Pattar. After skimming south along its humpbacked ridge, I swung the screen back up into the blue sky and around to the moon. The Circ pinged and closed.

  Back inside my tent, I added #YCCM to the Circ. But to actually hit send was risky.

  It was one thing for Luke to swing by our camp with a fellow guide but quite another for me to blatantly summon him over the internet in our game of You Can’t Catch Me that seemed to have already had its end.

  Likely, he wouldn’t come. He was a guide. He had stuff to do. And he probably wouldn’t even see the Circ until hours from now, after he didn’t come.

  But at the moment, with my entire life and future in upheaval, I was reckless. I longed for nothing more than to be near him right now, so I released the Circ.

  I would be hiking Kala Pattar tonight, regardless of whether he joined me, so I put on my boots and stuffed some protein bars, a water bottle, a headlamp, and extra layers of clothes into a small backpack. I took off on the trail right away so that I’d be out of Base Camp before Dad’s daily meeting with the Sherpas was over.

  Once I reached the turnoff for Kala Pattar, I dropped my pace to a crawl. I hadn’t heard the ping of a Circ come in as of the last point I would have been connected to internet, but I didn’t let this bother me. If Luke got the Circ, and if he was free, and if he wanted to, he’d catch up.

  I hadn’t made it five minutes into the grind of the thick gravel when someone grabbed my shoulders from behind.

  It was Luke, in an attempt to scare me. My insides grew warm.

  “You know better than to hike alone with both your earbuds in.” His tone was scolding, but when I spun around, his eyes were crinkly and his dimples deep.

  Chapter Seven

  He came, was all I could think for the first few seconds. He came!

  “How’d you catch up so fast?” I asked.

  “Great minds think alike.”

  I scrunched an eyebrow in confusion.

  “I was getting ready to come find you when you sent that Circ.” He looked west, where the sky was already lavender with the approaching sunset. “It’s going to be an amazing one.”

  Joy lifted my spirits like helium. Luke and I were back on the same page, back to how it used to be when things were easy and spontaneous and we acted in tandem without even thinking about it.

  “Yes, it’s going to be an amazing sunset. And it will be even more amazing for whoever gets to the top first,” I challenged.

  Without waiting for a response, I took off upward. Laughter poured from me as my feet sank into gravel while I pushed to get ahead. It was freeing to extend myself to full exertion in the race against the setting sun and the perception of Luke closing in behind me.

  After we’d been at it for a half hour, the switchbacks straightened out, and I got the sense that Luke wasn’t close on my heels anymore. I took a quick peek back and found him about fifty feet behind. He wasn’t as acclimated as me, so I slowed enough to keep the gap between us from widening.

  The summit of Everest, which wasn’t visible from Base Camp, was now in front of us as we reached the final section of Kala Pattar. It was just a bitty, asymmetrical triangle dwarfed by the breathtaking side-angled slope of Nuptse across the gorge. With each step gained upward, Everest grew taller. By the time I scrambled through the jagged, crushed boulders at the top of Kala Pattar and reached the stone stupa with its spokes of prayer flags, Everest was nearly peak-to-peak with Nuptse. The incredible full moon floated between them, as large and as white as a dinner plate. Despite my lungs straining for more oxygen, the beauty of it all entranced me.

  Luke reached the top about a minute later, immediately doubling over to catch his breath.

  “Nice job, ol’ boy,” I said. “I didn’t think you were going to make it.”

  All he could manage was a good-natured head shake.

  I put on my hat and jacket and sat on the leeward side of the stupa, watching the hard line of the black shadows rise up the glowing, yellow-pink surfaces of the monster peaks around us. My hair, loose as it almost never is on a summit, whipped in time with the prayer flags and snapped against my wind-burned cheeks.

  Luke sat next to me, pulling a thermos out of his backpack. “Hot chocolate?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s just the powdered kind.”

  “Like I care.”

  He poured some into the lid and handed it to me. It was nice and warm, moistening my throat, which was dry from the cold, thin air. Silently, we looked across the gorge to Everest’s oh-so-familiar, blocky summit pyramid. A plume of snow flowed from it like a pennant, announcing the presence of the 140-mile-per-hour jet stream winds that blow directly across its top every day of the year except for a handful of summit-able days in May, and sometimes a few in September.

  My shoulders sagged under the knowledge that I would not be among the people who would stand atop it this year.

  I felt Luke’s eyes on me, so I glanced over.

  “Something’s up,” he said.

  It was tempting to let some of my troubles spill out. Luke was good at listening. But to tell him any part of the mess would be to reveal how badly my world was upended and how little I had going for me at the moment.

  “I’m just tired,” I replied.

  “What are you tired from? Napping all day?”

  “Don’t you know? Sleep begets sleep.”

  I looked across the distance to Everest and its neighbor, Lhotse, all but the tiniest sliver of Lhotse’s west ridge hidden behind the majestic Nuptse in the foreground. My mind kept spinning around the question of why Dad had hidden his money troubles from me. I could have handled it. I could have helped.

  I had given up a college education for the mountains and to stay with Dad, yet I would still be losing them both. What would Dad and I do from now on? Email back and forth like pen pals? Meet up at a hostel somewhere in the world once a year? He had no money for plane tickets, and whatever I ended up doing, I probably wouldn’t, either.

  What had happened today was identical to what had happened with Amy. When she was my mother, I was satellite to her planet, and then I’d been cut loose. Now, I orbited Dad, and he was doing the same thing: cutting me loose. It wasn’t fair to compare Dad to Amy in this way, but the end result was the same.

  Luke cleared his throat. “I know it’s been a long time since we’ve hung out, but you can talk to me.”

  I tested him with my eyes, searching for a hint that he was asking because he felt obligated, but his face was pure, and the concern on it lined up accurately with the tone in his voice. It was tempting but, still, I resisted. “It’s nothing. Just a lot going on at Winslowe Expeditions right now.”

  What he said about it having been a long time since we’d hung out was exactly what made it not okay to spill my thoughts. Our game on Circ had been a buoy of sorts with that subtle yet constant excitement of planning what I’d send him next, or the zing that went through my body when a new #YCCM arr
ived. It had amplified everything that happened in my life that was good, while giving a buffer to everything that wasn’t. But there’d been absolutely nothing in two years other than that.

  I’d given him my email address when he left for Washington, and in the months between that and when my email account was hacked, he hadn’t written. After this season, he’d be going back to UW, and I’d go on to who knows what, which would likely be nowhere near Washington. I didn’t have any reason to go back there and a lot of reasons not to.

  I pulled the protein bars from my backpack, automatically handing Luke the peanut butter chocolate chip one and unwrapping the oatmeal raisin one for myself.

  We ate, looking out at the huge white moon. Only the tips of the very tallest peaks were illuminated now, and down to our right, deep in the blackness of the valley, Everest Base Camp was a beautiful array of tents glowing like yellow, green, blue, and orange paper lanterns.

  “The wind’s picking up,” Luke said after we finished our bars. “We should probably head down.”

  With the sky clear and moon so big, we didn’t need our headlamps until after we’d picked our way down the rocks into the shadowy side of Kala Pattar. After the gravelly switchbacks, the slope tapered off, leaving us at the trail junction back to Base Camp.

  As soon as we started walking the wide and well-traveled Base Camp trail, I began dreading my arrival. Once Dad knew I was back, he would want assurance that I wasn’t mad and that we could call Townsend College in the morning and get this all figured out. My whole body bristled with the thought.

  I wanted to remain in this bubble of now with my old friend. Just being near him was like having a layer of protection between me and all that I didn’t want to face about the new reality looming in front of me.

  Luke stopped when we were downslope from the Winslowe Expeditions camp. He looked back at me, blinding me with his headlamp.

  “Jeez!”

  “Sorry.”

  We both clicked off our headlamps, neither of us making a move to go. We stood there, listening to the great quiet of the Himalayas, where, for the moment, the Khumbu Glacier wasn’t groaning and there were none of the typical booms of avalanches letting loose on distant peaks.