Leaving Everest

by Westfield, Megan

  Luke was already inside our tent when I reached Camp Two; I could tell from his coughs. I took a deep breath and unzipped the door.

  “That’s not sounding good,” I said as I crawled in.

  “It would be better to not have a cough right now, but I’ll be fine.”

  He didn’t look fine. He was pale, his eyes were dilated, and he appeared a lot more tired than he should be.

  I gave him a dubious look.

  “I’m fine, really.”

  He started to say something else but lost it to his cough.

  Was this a standard Khumbu cough or a sign of something worse? If it progressed into altitude sickness, pulmonary edema, or cerebral edema, he likely wouldn’t be in a frame of mind to figure out what was happening to him, especially not once we got higher. I silently checked him against the list of symptoms: rattling breath, extreme fatigue, cough, blue finger beds, drowsiness, shallow breathing. Basically the exact symptoms all of us had while climbing here.

  “I did something big last night,” he said after taking some sips of water and getting control of his cough.

  “And what was that?”

  “I canceled my entire class schedule for fall and registered for the ones in the atmospheric sciences sequence.”

  I gave him a high five. “That’s fantastic!”

  “Some classes I wasn’t able to get because it’s not my major anymore, so I emailed my old advisor to help me straighten everything out.”

  “I’m so happy you took that step.”

  “It’s thanks to you. Because of what you suggested when we were at Camp Three.”

  “It was nothing you didn’t know already.”

  “Yeah, but to hear someone else have the same observation made me more confident. Before that, it had seemed like a lame excuse I’d made up to try to rationalize it for myself.”

  I was dying to tell him what Dad had said about Gyalzen’s love of mountain climbing and how Dad thought Luke had potential for a sponsorship, too. That would make him even happier. I’d tell him before we left this season, but how could I broach that topic now without also delving into my decision about Washington? And the fact that I was giving up my own climbing dreams for the foreseeable future?

  We lay down in our sleeping bags to nap, but neither of us could sleep. Him because of his cough, and me because I felt like a traitor for not telling him I’d accepted a job in Tanzania.

  When we crawled back into the tent after dinner, Luke was noticeably quiet, aside from his cough, which had gotten even worse. We both settled into our sleeping bags. The tension in the air was thick enough to touch.

  “We’re four days from leaving Everest,” he said. “You haven’t answered my question about Washington. That means no.”

  I shook my head to deny it.

  “Then look at me and tell me otherwise.”

  So I looked at him. His eyes were determined. And also really tired. “Not here,” I said. “Not right now.”

  “Yes. Here. Now.”

  I pleaded with my eyes.

  He shook his head. “Say it.”

  I looked down. “I really wish it were different, but I’m not going to come to Washington.”

  He said nothing. Behind him, the tent vibrated with a random gust of wind.

  “I was going to say yes, but yesterday Dad gave me a letter from Amy, and it made everything clear. You have to understand, I’ve spent my whole life being left behind by other people. People who didn’t want me in the first place.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is true. My mom never wanted me. I overheard her on the phone once. She purposely lied about being on birth control. She thought if she got pregnant, my dad would stay around and marry her. He didn’t.”

  Luke slid next to me and lifted my drooping head.

  “Dad lost his sponsorship and entire way of life when he had to take custody of me. He is my whole world, but I’m just a small piece of his. I know he wishes it wasn’t this way, but he’s had to cut me loose, and now I have nothing.”

  “But you have me.”

  The light from my headlamp was low, and it threw odd shadows around the tent, obscuring Luke’s expression.

  “For now, I have you. And when you leave it will kill me. I need to stand on my own.”

  “I’m not going to leave—”

  “It’s way too early to say that. Besides, nothing is certain. I can’t go from following my dad to following you. I need to find a place where I can build a world where I’m its center. If not for you, I’d never consider Washington to be that place. So to go there just for you…it would be a repeat of what happened with Amy, then Dad. You have to understand, I can’t put myself in that position again.”

  “But you said you were going to say yes before you got the letter.”

  “Yes, but—”

  He picked up my hand and rubbed it between his. “Long distance, Emily. You wouldn’t mind visiting Washington, right? You could visit me, and I could visit you, wherever you end up living. Montana or Wyoming, maybe? I can drive to Montana in seven hours from Seattle. I’m going to be there for only two more years, then I can go anywhere. We don’t have to be at good-bye yet.”

  The icy weight of dread slowly filled my core, then spread in burning dots all the way into my fingers and toes. Tanzania. A long-distance relationship wasn’t possible. Not in the way he was thinking.

  I swallowed. “There’s something else I have to tell you.”

  A coughing fit racked his body, one that made him wheeze as he struggled for air. He unwrapped a medicated cough drop and slipped it in his mouth. The coughing settled down.

  “Luke, that cough—it’s only going to get—”

  “Don’t. You said there was something else.”

  “I do know where I’m going after this. And it’s not Montana or Wyoming.” I fiddled with my zipper pull. “It’s not anywhere in the U.S.”

  “Tell me.” The jaggedness of his voice sent chills down my spine.

  “Barrett Browning, he’s the founder of Esplanade Equip—”

  “I know who he is.”

  “He offered me a job. In Tanzania.” I forced myself to look him in the eyes. “I accepted the job last night, after I got the letter from Amy.”

  In slow motion, his face went hard. The ferocious depth in his eyes terrified me.

  “Please understand, I didn’t want to, but I had to,” I pleaded. “I don’t have any job offers anywhere else.”

  “I don’t even know what to say.” He dropped my hand and scooted back. “But I think I understand. Of course it’s easier not to face it. It’s easier to bump up against the unpleasant and then go the other way. And when a convenient situation is handed to you on a silver platter, even though it has nothing to do with anything you’d actually want, you take it.”

  My chest constricted as if I was having a heart attack. My whole universe had cracked open, and everything was running everywhere.

  “I would do anything for you. Don’t you know that, Emily? I would leave my scholarship, if that’s what needed to happen. But I can’t do that knowing you wouldn’t do the same for me.”

  A tear chilled my cheek as it rolled down. I reached for his hand. He moved it away.

  “We still have a few days left,” I said. “Can’t we be together for the rest of it? I love you, Luke. I don’t want things to end; it’s our circumstances. I don’t start in Tanzania until July, and I still have my Seattle ticket. Maybe I can come to Washington with you for a while before I leave.”

  There was empathy in his eyes, but his eyebrows were scrunched in resistance. “I wish I could play pretend with you, but I’m just not built that way. It would be a miracle to have even one day with you where we didn’t have to hide in a tent or meet somewhere out in the dark. To introduce you, just once, as my girlfriend. Or for us to have a whole night together, somewhere indoors where it was warm and comfortable, where we could wear normal clothes, or nothing at all. Of course I wa
nt that more than anything else. But it would be a lie because, really, I’d be dying inside.”

  His voice was quieter now, the edge that had been there had faded off. I had to strain to hear him. “Getting closer to you this last month has been a dream. I let myself believe that it was real. But it has always been too good to be true. And now, here in this godforsaken place, so far above life but even farther from heaven, I’m going to have to try to find a way to start breathing again.”

  What had I done? How could I walk away from my best friend? A person I’d fantasized about for more than two years and loved ferociously. He was right. I’d taken the easy path. Out of all the universities that had offered him scholarships, he’d picked Washington because that’s where I had been planning to go. Yet I wasn’t willing to face my demons in order to do the same. I wasn’t worthy of him.

  “Luke, please,” I begged, reaching for him again.

  This time he let me put my arms around him. “I wanted to believe it could be different for us,” he said. “That’s what I wished for when you tied the bracelet on me two years ago. But you’ve told me otherwise in one way or another all along. It’s been me who couldn’t see the truth for what it was.” He ran his hand down the side of my face, his thumb reaching across my cheek to the tear line there. With his tear-damp thumb, he traced my top lip, then the bottom.

  We lay down to try to get some sleep because tomorrow we had the Lhotse Face to climb. I started crying again when he slid over and spooned his body around mine. I refused to budge, even though his cough rattled my sore shoulder. Because this was the last time he would ever hold me like this.

  Sunrise came. Both of us were subdued as we pulled out of the fog of the subzero night and feverish, oxygen-deprived dreams.

  I was dressed and ready to get out of the tent before Luke, but I wasn’t going to be the first to leave. He didn’t seem to have the same qualms, but then, before unzipping the door, he turned back to me.

  I wasn’t sure what was more alarming, his bloodshot eyes from coughing all night or the depth of the sadness in them.

  “Maybe I just need more time to process everything,” I blurted. It’s what had been running through my head all night on a loop. “Amy’s letter last night was out of the blue. It was such a shock. And I just emailed Barrett. I could write him back and change my mind.”

  Luke examined me with eyes that glistened with sorrow. “I want to believe that could be true, but it’s like you said yesterday about not repeatedly putting yourself in a bad position. I can’t put myself in that position with you again. I can’t let myself hope.”

  He leaned in, presumably to kiss my cheek, but I wouldn’t accept just that. I rose up on my knees and turned my head in to him. When our lips touched, my legs wavered. He put his hand on my waist to steady me.

  I poured my whole heart into the kiss, my entire soul, but it didn’t change the distinct feeling that he was kissing me good-bye.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Somehow, the Go Big expedition, which had been behind us all day yesterday, managed to weasel their way in among the Global teams right before A-Team started up the Lhotse Face. Jim was pissed, swearing over the radio, but no individual or expedition owned Everest, and there wasn’t anything that could be done except A-Team waiting an extra hour in our tents while the Sherpas guarded the route in case the Swedish expedition, also with us at Camp Two, got any ideas.

  In the tent, I tried to close my eyes and get a little rest to make up for being virtually unable to sleep last night, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Luke. He had a pullover stashed here for the way back down, and I hugged it to my body, the smell of him in the fabric making me more heartsick.

  What had I done? I was all set to go to Tanzania, but at the cost of losing the person who was the most important to me next to Dad.

  It didn’t make sense, logically, how a single pink envelope could have that kind of sway over me. I’d kept Amy and all that had happened out of my mind for ten years, so how was it possible for her claws to be in me so deep that they’d overpowered all other factors and moved me to choose Tanzania?

  But I also wasn’t wrong in putting a priority on independence.

  You can’t be cut loose when you’re the center of your own world.

  From outside the tent, Phurba called to me. It was our turn on the Lhotse Face.

  By the time all of A-Team was clipped to the line, it was late morning and even hotter than our last trip up. Between my lack of sleep and not drinking enough water yesterday, I was struggling as much as the clients. Claudia’s brother, Juan, who had terrible blisters and could no longer keep pace with the Cubans, was climbing with A-Team today, and because of that, April was occasionally flying the drone over us. The heat made me so irritable that I wanted to swat at it as it hovered close above our heads.

  Directly ahead of me, Phil somehow managed to get his ascender stuck on the line. It took me several minutes to untangle him. Then, out of the pure silence of the windless morning came a panicked yell, followed by the hiss of something big and heavy flying through the air. I ducked and screamed to Phil and Juan to do the same. It was an ice ax. The most deadly thing to drop. It had to be from the Go Big team; we made all our Global clients keep their axes on lanyards.

  Tashi that no one had been hit. There’s no question the ax would have killed someone, even with helmets on. It made me think about regrets. Because I had one—a big one—that was very presently on my mind. Luke.

  If nothing else, I should have tried harder last night to avoid telling him about Tanzania. He wasn’t faring well as it was, and I’d torn him up further. To not tell him would have been to lie, but maybe it would have been safer, and that was more important right now.

  We forged on ahead. Foot down, slide hand, step, pull. Foot down, slide hand, step, pull. As if my mind and heartbeats weren’t already a mess, the dropped ice ax further exacerbated my tangled mess of anxiety, franticness, unrest, and regret. What was the worst thing that could have happened if I had decided to go to Washington? That it wouldn’t work out? Ironic, because every mountain I’d climbed in the Himalayas had higher stakes than that.

  If I could get my head together, maybe I could talk things through more with Luke. Maybe he could help me see my errors. That is, if he was even willing to talk. He’d clearly said this morning that he wasn’t going to put himself in that position with me again.

  Either way, thinking straight was not going to happen until I was on bottled oxygen. As it was, my blood pressure was high enough for me to feel my pulse in weird and painful places, like my temples. Why did people do this? I mean, look at us here, this huge gravy train of people. This morning, we’d all walked right by a corpse from last season and it didn’t faze anyone. All of it was totally irrational. But if Everest was proof of anything, it was proof of the power of irrationality.

  By the time we made it to Camp Three, it was eighty-six degrees. I battled through deliriousness to help Phil, Glissading Glen, and Johnsmith with their oxygen. I meant to just rest in the sun break of the ladies’ tent for a few minutes before going to find Luke, but I collapsed to sleep practically upon impact and didn’t awake until Doc was shaking me.

  “Emily, Thom has been calling you,” she said. “He wants you to meet with them over at the twins’ tent.”

  I sat up groggily. My boots were still on, and I hadn’t changed out of my sweaty layers. Stupid. Even though it was warm in the tent, the sun would soon be setting, and I had a chill from being in damp clothes. In a majorly delayed reaction, I realized that the reason I was so groggy was because I’d gotten everyone else’s oxygen set up except my own.

  I put on my oxygen mask and cranked the valve to max, taking some long, full breaths. In less than a minute, I was back to full force. Whew, ecstasy! I dialed the valve back to the minimum setting and quickly changed my clothes, hanging the damp ones over the tent poles to dry alongside Doc’s and Claudia’s.

  Over in the twins’ tent it w
as Thom, Tyler, Hulk, and Norbu. Before I could even wonder where Luke was, I realized I’d walked into the middle of a conversation about how to rearrange the teams now that we didn’t have Luke anymore.

  What?

  Tyler filled me in: Luke had been in such bad shape by noon that he didn’t even argue when Doc point-blank ordered him to descend.

  “How long ago did he leave?” I asked. If it was just a few minutes, I was going after him to make sure he was okay.

  “Almost an hour.”

  And where had I been through all of this? Sleeping!

  “He’s with Phurba,” Tyler said. “Phurba will catch up with us in the morning before we leave for Camp Four.”

  Jim came on the radio then, apparently not finished being angry at us for having let Go Big get ahead of us earlier. He ordered us to wake up early enough to not let that happen again, which was a legitimate possibility since Go Big’s tents were higher than Global’s and it would be easy for them to cut us off.

  After Jim was done, I learned that Luke wasn’t the only one having serious medical problems. Two of the UW geologists were still recovering from the food-borne illness they’d picked up in Dingboche. Johnsmith’s knee was too stiff to bend, and some of Juan’s blisters were so bad Jim was considering not letting him continue on the summit bid.

  Back in the ladies’ tent, Doc was eating a Toblerone candy bar. It was her favorite, but with the way she was biting each small triangle in half to chew and swallow, it might as well have been spoiled cheese or something.

  “What’s going on with Luke?” I asked. “Is it pulmonary edema?”

  “I honestly don’t know, and I didn’t get to properly examine him. He’s been coughing for a while now, so that points to a run-of-the-mill high-altitude cough, and I suspect he has a cracked rib from all the coughing. But I didn’t like how gray his lips were and how he was practically incoherent. It’s likely a combination of things, but he had to go down. He’ll be at Camp Two tonight, and if he doesn’t improve, the Sherpas will put him in the hyperbaric chamber.”