Leaving Everest

by Westfield, Megan

  He’d picked UW because he knew I’d be going to Townsend College? This fact would have normally given me happy butterflies, but now it just made my panic worse. He’d picked a college based on me, and I hadn’t even mustered the nerve to find his email address so I could tell him I was taking a gap year instead of coming to Washington last year as planned.

  He reached down for his backpack and put it on. “I should have known all along that a girl like you would never see me seriously.”

  Still stunned, I watched him take off down the trail.

  “Luke!” I yelled.

  I knew he could hear me, but he kept walking. I hurried to lash my skis to my backpack.

  He had gotten quite a head start, so I pushed into a jog, my poorly attached skis slashing at my calves like giant knives.

  “Stop!” I screamed when I got closer.

  This time, he obeyed, turning back to me.

  “It’s okay,” he said in a voice so hard it could have scraped ice off a windshield. “It will be fine. We’ll just get through the rest of this season. We can be amicable. I know you can. That’s kind of your specialty, right? You’ll go on to do more of this, I presume.” He swept his arm toward Everest. “It’s the most lucrative mountain out there. I promise you this: I will not. I won’t go further than Tengboche. This is the last time. You can have it all to yourself from now on.”

  My blood boiled. These were some vicious things he was throwing at me. “So you’re just going to write me off? Without even giving me a chance to explain? Didn’t it occur to you that my future has been a huge question ever since that bomb Dad dropped on me? And I want to know what you meant by a girl like me? And how is it any less of a lie that you show up out of the blue this season even though you had known months in advance that you would be coming here?”

  “I hardly think the two things are comparable.”

  His tone was haughty. I was going to explode with anger. This time when he walked away, I didn’t stop him.

  So much had happened this season, I couldn’t keep up. So many changes, so many possibilities dashed before they had a chance to ignite.

  It took only about five minutes for my anger to die down. With Luke’s head start, I had no chance of catching up with him, but I did my best not to fall farther behind.

  Dad and I might both be guilty of a lie by omission, but it’s not like he and I had planned it out or anything. We’d never discussed this fact between us. In fact, Dad and I didn’t talk about Amy at all, ever. To him, she was just some woman from the past who’d gotten herself knocked up on purpose. A woman to whom he had paid child support. Before I came to live with him, he’d seen her only two times a year: pickup and drop-off for his designated three-week yearly visit. They hadn’t even been boyfriend-girlfriend.

  I didn’t know about Amy’s caper with the pregnancy until much later, but I’d always sensed what a burden I was to her and how fundamentally different we were. How different I was than all the other girls my age. My childhood in Washington had been unhappy. I didn’t start loving life and being excited for the future until I got to the mountains with Dad. And once I was here, what reason did I have to ever reflect on and relive my unhappy past?

  Luke had so easily jumped to the conclusion that it was Amy who had kept me from Townsend College, just like Doc had that day in the medical tent. He knew nothing about the situation, but in all the turmoil inside me right now, the clarity and confidence of his observation had me second-guessing myself.

  I really, truly didn’t think college was the right path for me, but considering it would have been mostly paid for, would I have at least given it a try had Amy settled somewhere different than Port Townsend when she got out of prison?

  As I hiked the rest of the way, staring at Luke’s back ahead of me made my stomach raw with turmoil. I told myself things could not be over this fast. He was just angry. And hurt. He’d simmer down, and we could talk through this.

  Finally, as we passed Gorak Shep, Luke’s pace slackened enough that I was slowly closing the gap between us. As if he knew I was right on his heels now, he stopped at the Y in the trail before Base Camp.

  It was close to sunset now, and we both had our glacier glasses off, so when he looked at me, I could tell he was as torn up as I was. It stung to know I was the reason, but seeing him hurting gave me hope. Indifference would have been impossible to bear.

  He gave me a weak half smile. “You were right to call me out about how I didn’t tell you I was coming here this season. It was purposeful, so I suppose it’s fair to call it a lie. The reason I did it was because I had to know what your first reaction to seeing me would be. Your reaction when you hadn’t had a chance to steel up and hide what you truly thought. And, yes, I understood that your future is unstable right now, but I didn’t know the whole story, and because of that, I thought there was hope of us continuing after the season. I was sure there was hope. I mean, didn’t you feel it? How can that not be hope?”

  I swallowed. There were tears in my eyes.

  “When I said ‘a girl like you,’ I meant a girl whom I would never be good enough for. A girl who is so talented in the mountains that she could be sponsored by any company if she ever thought of asking. One who is incredibly smart and funny and so perfectly unspoiled that she doesn’t even know it. A girl who is so beautiful that I sometimes think she can’t possibly be real. The girl who all the guys here dream about, the one whose name is on the wind across all expeditions, ever since that year she turned sixteen and climbed Manaslu without oxygen.”

  There were tears in his eyes, too. I stepped in to him, dropping my head against his shoulder. Very tentatively, he put his hand around my upper back.

  “So there you have it, Emily,” he whispered. Then he stepped back so that we were no longer touching. “But in the end,” he continued, his voice turning savage, “none of this means anything anymore…because I have no idea who you really are.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Dinner at Global that night was excruciating. The effort of keeping my eyes away from Luke while I pretended to pay attention to conversations was escalating my headache into a raging migraine. One glance at him and I’d be completely and utterly ruined. Just the thought of what had happened made it hard to breathe. This was full-on panic.

  Also, I was doing my best to avoid Doc. She’d see that I wasn’t okay, and I wouldn’t be able to tell her why. If I told her what had happened, she would think it was her fault, which it wasn’t. Regardless of how Luke found out, I was the one responsible for this. I was the one who let everyone believe Amy was dead for no reason other than that it was easier for me that way.

  At my first chance, I bolted back to my tent, taking painkillers to dull my headache. What was wrong with me for being so averse to returning to Washington? It’s not like Port Townsend was the only city in the state. The Seattle metro area had several million people. Chances were miniscule that I would ever run into Amy if I lived somewhere else.

  So what if I’d had an unhappy childhood? People went through so much worse than I had. A mother arrested for dealing methamphetamine, a single night in a holding facility for children, then getting shuffled to a dad I hardly knew. A dad who happened to have the coolest job in the world and ended up loving me and introducing me to the life I was made for.

  I put on music, not for the enjoyment of it but to block out my mind. But every song I owned, it seemed, had a memory of Luke attached. I tore my earbuds out and threw them over onto my lettuce-box shelf.

  Now I was left with the soundtrack of the groaning icefall, hissing generator, footsteps on gravel, and passing conversations. My ears strained for his voice. My mind willed my tent to shake in the one-two rhythm.

  It couldn’t be over. It couldn’t.

  I hid out for most of the next day in the Winslowe Expeditions camp, which was vacant except for the base camp manager, since everyone else was on Pumori. I went into Dad’s tent and lay down on his foam mattress. Even though
he hadn’t been there for several days, his tent still smelled familiar and homey in the same way Winslowe Expeditions’s main tent did. I wondered if my tent had a scent, too, and what it smelled like to Luke.

  I took a look around Dad’s tent. It was practically empty, since most of his things were with him on Pumori, but I was surprised to see a tiny, book-style picture frame on the ground near the sleeping pad. I picked it up to look at it closer. It was plastic and lightweight. One side was a several-years-old picture of me that I hadn’t seen before. There was ocean in the background, so it had to be Railay Beach. The picture on the facing frame was of Doc and Dad in front of a palm tree, both wet from swimming. The pictures and frame must have been a gift from her.

  With the gaping hole in my heart that was Luke, I felt intensely bad for Dad. After all, if he still had a picture in his tent, he must still have feelings for her. It would be the same way for me, years from now, about Luke.

  No.

  I refused to believe it, not yet.

  All those amazing things he had said about me before he walked away—that’s where the hope was. I was going to fight for this. If he could just hear the whole story, he would understand. My lie hadn’t been intentional but one of self-preservation. One that I didn’t think would hurt anyone—but it had. Though I’d considered our losses equal, in reality, they were not. Someday, Amy and I might reconcile. Even the thought of it made me nauseous with disgust. But that possibility was there, and that was the difference. Luke’s dad was dead. Gone forever. Luke would never have a chance to see him again no matter how hard he wished for it.

  It’s no wonder he’d reacted so strongly yesterday. I had been cruel to allow the lie to go on as long as it had. Luke, of all people, deserved nothing but truth from me. I owed that to him.

  The smell of Dad in his tent was taking me back to a memory. All the way back to when I was ten years old and the first nights at Mingma’s when Dad had left me so he could do a previously planned Annapurna expedition for Esplanade Equipment. He’d given me one of his fleece jackets to use as a pillow. That jacket had smelled of him like this tent did. I used it like a security blanket. Those nights had been ugly. I had a concept of the danger involved in that particular climb, and in the darkness of the night, I cried. Big, choking cries that I tried to silence into his jacket so as not to worry Mingma or wake Baby Pasang.

  Looking back now, I knew that Luke had heard me those nights. It had been the reason he’d been extra nice to me, showing me how to play Nepali games, helping me learn my chores, and teaching me soccer moves.

  In all our time, Luke and I had never spoken of those first nights and my not-so-silent weeping. He had to have assumed that I was crying because my mom had died, when in reality it was because I was terrified of what would happen to me if my second of two parents didn’t return to get me.

  I swallowed a guilty lump. All along he’d thought we had something major in common—a deep understanding of each other because we’d both had a parent die. But that had never been true for me.

  Luke was right about me ruling out Washington when I thought about where I would go after this, though it hadn’t been done consciously. Even when I’d filled out the application for national parks summer jobs, I hadn’t checked the toggle boxes next to North Cascades, Mount Rainier, or Olympic—the three national parks in Washington. Washington was tainted for me in the same way Cho Oyu was for Dad. He’d told me once in a rare moment of talking about feelings that he couldn’t see the profile of that mountain without also seeing Gyalzen’s body. Luke’s father. My dad would never climb that mountain again, even though it was becoming a popular and lucrative destination for guided clients.

  The heavy wetness of western Washington’s forests would always take me to that day my happy, fancy-free exploring morphed into a terrifying taste of a battle for survival that landed my mother in prison. Even thinking about it was making the hairs on my arms stand up.

  But couldn’t I train myself out of this kind of reaction? Certainly I wouldn’t let something as trivial as a bad memory keep me from Luke.

  That is, if he ever spoke to me again.

  My radio squawked. “Hey, Emily,” Thom said. “We need to post a pre-departure blog for Rotation Two. Can you get that done today?”

  I forced myself to get up and return to Global City. Mustering excitement to write this post would be impossible. On top of everything else, it was a reminder that this time tomorrow, on Rotation Two, I’d be sharing a tent with someone who loathed me. I had an enormous task ahead in bridging all that had happened yesterday, but I had to find a way.

  Thankfully, I had the command center to myself when I arrived. I scraped together a blog post, essentially writing the same thing Tyler posted before Rotation One, except with a different itinerary. I opened the shared photo file and picked a few candids of the clients hanging out in camp.

  Norbu came in for a fresh radio battery and then left, leaving me again with the command center to myself. I checked my email for a response from CentralPoint or any of the other jobs I’d applied for. Nothing.

  That’s when Luke stepped in, stopping short as soon as he saw me. For a brief moment, daggers of hostility flew from his eyes, then he turned on his heel and stepped right back out. The tent door flapped dully behind him.

  So much for pretending everything was normal. My pulse shot through the roof, and my chest was too tight to catch a complete breath. It couldn’t be over.

  With renewed fervor, I applied for more jobs, anything and everything that was in a mountain town and didn’t require a college degree. Because now, unless I could pull a miracle and turn this situation around, I had two reasons to never go back to Washington state.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  It was snowing as we started toward the icefall in the thick blackness of a cloud-covered, starless morning. Today we were going all the way from Base Camp to Camp Two. The storm Dad had warned about was still on its way. We’d gone over this in detail at our guides’ meeting last night, but Jim was certain it wouldn’t hit until the afternoon, and we were planning to kill two days at Camp Two anyway for acclimatization before our overnight at Camp Three.

  As always, Phurba and I were in the rear with the slowest clients, and we had to wait for the others to start before we could get going. The gaggle of us was nothing but faint black profiles of people with headlamps floating through the air, but even so, I knew exactly which silhouette was Luke.

  “Ready?” Phurba asked in Sherpa when it was our turn. Today, he was wearing his NASCAR bandana as a buff around his nose and mouth to protect from the cold. I nodded, and we stepped off after our clients. It was unbearably cold with the low pressure system in front of the storm, and it was even colder inside the icefall.

  From the start, everything seemed off. My crampons didn’t seem like they were on tight enough, my harness was twisted uncomfortably, and my pack was heavy with all the extra gear I was carrying for the clients, since I was too proud to pass any of it along to the Sherpas. Even the drone wasn’t feeling it this morning. April had it flying up ahead with the Cubans when we started, but the winds had picked up too much, and she’d had to fly it back to Base Camp.

  I’d had a terrible night of sleep, since I had not been able to put the brakes on thinking about Luke. Also, I dreaded crossing through the section of the icefall where the serac had fallen last time. Just being in the icefall again had my pulse at an anxious clip. I kept my eyes straight ahead so that my headlamp beam didn’t light up any of the terrifying ice blocks surrounding us. If I couldn’t see them, they weren’t there.

  I was with Phil again today. He was coughing a lot, but at least he was keeping pace.

  “You’re doing great,” I told him.

  “Sometimes you need a reminder of what it’s like to be alive,” he replied. “That’s the whole reason I came here in the first place.”

  I think he was referring to what happened in the icefall. Chills ran through my body because t
oday the icefall’s normal creaks and groans sounded more like ominous cracks and gasps.

  We continued on in the morning’s gripping cold. I was wiggling my toes and fingers constantly and breathing through my balaclava in an attempt to warm the air before it hit my lungs. Oddly, it was getting colder instead of warmer as sunrise neared, but there was nothing to do other than to keep moving forward.

  “Cold,” Phurba said as we waited for the clients to cross the ladder over one of the precipices. He seemed antsy at the clients’ slow progress, and this unsettled me further.

  “No kidding,” I replied, trying to keep my tone light.

  It was six thirty, and we should have been able to turn off headlamps by now, but it was still too dark because of the cloud cover.

  By the time all of A-Team was through the last ladder bridge of the icefall, it was snowing heavily and winds were picking up. Sensing the degrading conditions, the clients naturally went faster. When there was finally enough daylight to turn off the headlamps, the visibility was so low I couldn’t even see the side of Nuptse.

  Dad would be pissed if he knew Jim had us heading up in this. He would never have left Base Camp with a storm sure to hit, even if it wasn’t forecasted until later in the day. That was one of the big differences between a small outfit like Winslowe Expeditions and a huge company like Global. The cost of a long weather delay when multiplied by the number of staff and clients on our expedition would have a catastrophic impact on the profit-loss margin, and with Jim reporting directly to a corporate oversight panel, these things mattered a lot.

  Though the clients were moving faster than normal, it wasn’t fast enough.

  “These guys need to pick it up,” Phurba said.

  I nodded in agreement.