Leaving Everest

by Westfield, Megan

  The prudent thing to do would be to call the inevitable now and turn back toward safety instead of making the call after another hour of exhaustion. But this was Phil’s one and only chance on this mountain. After all that he’d been through, and all those years living for this, I didn’t have the heart to call it yet.

  I took a couple of steps so I was right next to Phil. “We’ve got to pick it up so we stay ahead of the cutoff.”

  He froze.

  “Do you think you have it in you to move faster?” I asked.

  “I’ll find it. I have to.”

  I could give him thirty minutes more, but then I would have to reassess.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Somehow, Phil mustered the strength to keep the gap between us, Phurba, and Johnsmith steady instead of opening.

  My hopes raised as we neared the South Summit and that gap had not widened. The spread-out line of the Cuban team passed by us on the way down, exhausted but satisfied. I hugged both Claudia and Theo and gave high fives to everyone else.

  The clouds broke then, allowing warming sunbeams through. As we stopped to change out our oxygen tanks, the radio call came that the first four of the UW team had summited, which included Doc. I joined the chorus of cheers on the radio back to them. These fastest UW climbers had been Luke’s. Wherever he was right now, he’d be happy they’d made it.

  I saw Luke-From-My-Dream again, leaning against that wall, and my blood rushed exactly as if it were happening for real. I realized it had happened for real. That stance in my dream was exactly how he’d stood in the doorframe of Mingma’s house that day.

  I felt the tingles from when his eyes turned serious in my dream. The floating bliss of him taking my hand on the stairs. I felt the utter and total faith I had in him, even though the words from my mouth had been, “Are you sure?”

  What if you came back, for me?

  Luke had no intention of leaving me behind, of stranding me in a world he owned. What had actually happened was that I had left him behind.

  Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.

  All these years, my past had been as silent as death, but it had been there. And it was still there. I hadn’t been able to give Luke a chance because I hadn’t truly faced the villains within it.

  There was a saying carved into a block of wood on the altar in Mingma’s attic. I’d asked her once what it meant.

  He who cannot forgive breaks the bridge over which he himself must pass.

  I could forgive Amy and be free. I could forgive her for using a pregnancy to coerce Dad into marrying her. For treating me like what I’d been to her: unwanted. Difficult. An outcast. I could forgive her for the drugs and be thankful it wasn’t until after the pregnancy that she turned to that life. I could forgive her for being arrested and not caring that she left me alone. Maybe someday I could even let go of my guilt for being the cause of the arrest in the first place.

  Furthermore, just because Luke was the reason for moving somewhere, it didn’t mean that I’d lose my whole world if our relationship went sour someday. I could make it my home, Luke or not. I could embrace western Washington for what it was: an alpinist’s paradise. There was a reason so many of the major U.S. guiding companies were based there. And like the Himalayas, the north part of the Cascades was remote, rugged, and there were even bits of unexplored terrain left.

  I saw myself back in my tent at Base Camp, typing an email to Barrett. There’s been a change of plans…

  If I did this, I could have both Luke and mountains. And if I tagged the summit today—which was looking promising—then I’d have my chance at a sponsorship back. I even had the hope of permanence in Washington, from a people perspective, anyway. Doc lived there, and after what she told me yesterday, I’m pretty sure Dad would relocate if I were living there, too. After working for Global, I also knew even more people who lived in Washington: Hulk and Phil, and the UW clients, and the Walkabout crew.

  “Luke, I’m coming home with you!” I wanted to yell down the Nepal side of the mountain.

  I wished there was some way to tell him this, short of declaring it over the radio. But I’d see him soon enough. I’d be in Base Camp two days from now. Maybe once everyone was safely returned to Camp Four, I’d call him and ask him to switch to a private channel.

  Phil and I stopped at the South Summit to change out oxygen canisters. He was having trouble controlling his cough after the brief minute of breathing Mount Everest’s actual air. “That’s all there is left,” I said, pointing to the summit, the actual summit. “You can do this.”

  I wanted that summit with a renewed vigor. I wanted my new home base in Washington and a sponsorship to go with it. I wanted Luke.

  We reached the place where the Hillary Step used to be. Now, instead of having to climb up a two-story cliff—which always caused a dangerous bottleneck of waiting climbers—we simply continued up the snow on the fixed line. Not long after, we met a line of Global climbers. I picked out Doc among them. I was happy for her, but at the moment, all my attention was on Phil and getting him up to the summit. I gave her a quick hug and kept going.

  Thom put his hand out to stop me as we passed him. “You have only forty-five minutes. That’s not enough for Phil.”

  The summit was less than a half mile away. The length of two city blocks.

  I pretended to be confused about what he meant as I slipped away to rejoin the blue marshmallow-covered zombie that was Phil, sludging and lurching along through invisible corn syrup toward the triangle of snow that met the gray sky. No wonder Thom had no faith. But the lurching and sludging were a sign of effort and purposefulness. A client who did not have this would look aimless and wandering, stopping frequently to sit down. Despite his turtle pace, Phil was giving it his all. Surely the high of reaching the summit would put him in good spirits, and that would help him greatly on the way back down.

  The last of the UW climbers, most of the low-support team, and the lead A-Team climbers passed us on their way back down from the summit. All I managed was a nod. Tyler, bless his heart, did not make mention of the time. Up ahead, Phurba and Johnsmith were on the summit already. From behind, Go Big’s climbers were passing us one by one.

  I’d purposely not been looking at my watch, but when the sun disappeared behind the clouds, making it seem much later, I couldn’t ignore the time anymore. We were five minutes past turnaround time, and we weren’t even on the summit yet. My heart rate increased. I couldn’t turn Phil around this close to the summit. I couldn’t turn me around this close. But I had to.

  “Phil, we have to go down,” I yelled over the wind.

  He ignored my order, even when I grabbed his shoulder to stop him.

  I couldn’t blame him. I wanted it, too, and we were so close.

  Instead of trying again to turn Phil around, I caught up to him and pushed myself under his arm like a crutch and helped him to walk a little faster. It took us fifteen minutes to finish the final, half city-block in the sky, but we made it. He practically fell onto the snow bench the Sherpas had carved at the top for photo ops.

  “Two minutes,” I yelled to him. “We’re going down in two minutes.”

  There were about twelve people on the summit with us, all from the low-support Global team and Go Big.

  I took a picture of Phil. The huge smile on his face made it all worth it. I was too nervous about the time to bother taking a Circ, but I gave him a hug, then took a selfie of the two of us together. It would serve as my proof of summit for Miss Eleanor.

  After that, he turned a slow circle, looking at Cho Oyu to the west, Kanchenjunga to the east, Makalu toward the south. How many nights had he fallen asleep to the beeps of hospital machines while dreaming of standing right here?

  He used his hands to pat the snow down and make a place for the Edmund Hillary action figure, which he set there carefully. Then, he opened his pocket and pulled out a tidy stack of thin strips of newspaper, yellowed with age. Only because the summit was
so small could I see what they were as he unfolded them: the obituaries of five people who shared his last name. He held them out, and they flapped from his hand like a flag. Then, he released them to the wind.

  I had almost forgotten my own summit item: the white silk kata scarf Mingma had given me in Tengboche. I silently recited a short Buddhist prayer of gratitude.

  “Luke, this is for you,” I whispered aloud as I knotted the scarf around a picket in the snow, just below a NASCAR bandana that must have been from Phurba. I was so happy that he’d finally gotten a summit.

  As the white scarf whipped in the wind, I made one request, directly to Chomolungma. For my bravery in life to be equal to the bravery I had in the mountains.

  Phil protested not at all when I told him it was time to leave.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  We started back. It was physically easier to move downhill but inherently more dangerous. Two-thirds of mountaineering accidents occur on the descent.

  I was right about the high of the summit helping Phil. To my great relief, we were making good time now. If we kept this up, we’d be within sight of the rear of A-Team, and hopefully everybody would be too tired and oxygen-deprived to notice that we’d missed the turnaround time by twenty minutes.

  The high of Phil and I both getting the summit had helped me, too. I was practically hallucinating that I was already back down to the relative safety of Camp Four, lying in my warm sleeping bag and calling Luke on the radio.

  But then, ahead of me, Phil came to a stop.

  His body moved a little from side to side, like he was looking around, or deciding what to do. Then he sat down, and he didn’t get back up.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  “Phil, you have to stand up.”

  “Give me a minute.”

  “No, now! You have to keep moving.”

  I grabbed him by the armpits and yanked. My injured shoulder protested, and I let him go.

  “We can’t be wasting time right now,” I said. “We have very little oxygen left to get back to the South Summit.”

  Not to mention very few hours before dark. Or before the jet stream assumed its usual position right across the top of Everest.

  I gave another yank, and this time Phil stood. He wasn’t being competent with his ascender on the fixed line. He stumbled on his crampons and fell face first into the snow.

  Oh shit.

  I yanked his pack open, quickly confirming my suspicion: he’d exerted himself so much getting to the summit that he’d blown through all of his oxygen. His tank was on empty.

  I helped him sit and then called Jim on the radio. I prayed Dad wasn’t eavesdropping on Global’s channel, because if he was, he’d hear an edge to my voice that Jim and the rest of the guys wouldn’t notice.

  No one rogered up. My gut churned. Were they busy with something else going on? I realized I hadn’t been paying any attention to radio calls in the last hour or two. At altitude, your mind sheds things without you even knowing it.

  I waited, then repeated my call, practically yelling into the microphone to make sure I could be heard over the wind.

  “Emily, did you just call?” Jim asked.

  “Yeah. Phil’s out of oxygen.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Midway to the South Summit.”

  “Hello, Jim, it’s Norbu. Ang Dawa is right at the cache. I’ll have him walk a canister back.”

  “Okay, good,” Jim said.

  In the meantime, I had to get him moving. I administered a shot of dex, and then short-roped him.

  I stood in front of Phil, pulling at his arms like they were the reins of a stubborn burro. Eventually, I coaxed him to his feet and let him walk ahead while I held onto the rope I’d tied to his harness. It was like walking a Great Dane straining against its leash, and I had to brace with my full body to help stabilize him. I eyed the sixty-degree slope to our left and the eleven-thousand foot drop-off at the end of it.

  Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit.

  Jim called me on the radio. “Norbu’s sending Ang Dawa your way with oxygen for Phil.”

  “Okay, roger,” I said.

  “Emily, did you copy?” Jim asked.

  Something was wrong with my radio. I clicked the button to see if it was sticking, which it was not.

  “Yes, roger, copy,” I repeated.

  “Good. Thanks, Emily.”

  I tried not to be anxious with our slow and sloppy progress, but every minute that ticked by was a minute colder, a minute closer to darkness, a minute more of oxygen deprivation. Further, there was a lot of chatter on the radio, and being oxygen deprived and exhausted, I couldn’t make sense of any of it. Some sort of incident on the Yellow Band.

  Ang Dawa appeared in front of us like an angel. With a fresh tank of oxygen, Phil came alive, like one of the windup dolls in the Nutcracker ballet my grandma had taken me to a couple of times. Now he was apologizing profusely, like Amy used to do when she was high.

  “Never mind that,” I said. “Let’s get moving.”

  It was way too late to still be above the place where the Hillary Step used to be. Dad would be losing his mind about now, but I gave him kudos for not interfering and tying up the channels. In the middle of the Cornice Traverse, my vision darkened like a tunnel. My oxygen had run out. I insisted Phil and Ang Dawa go ahead because I wouldn’t be able to keep their pace without oxygen.

  By the time I got to the cache on the South Summit, I was so woozy that each step was like trying to stand up in a canoe. I dropped onto my hands and knees to swap out a fresh oxygen bottle and put my mask back on. The air was warm and moist, immediately easing my dry cough and spreading warmth through my veins. I let myself enjoy a few minutes of full flow, during which I was so high, I could have paraglided off the South Summit, no matter that I didn’t have a rig.

  I clipped back onto the line to catch up with the others. The light was starting to fade. I was haggard and practically hypothermic, but this was normal on Everest. My mind went right back to where it had been before the summit.

  Luke. Luke. Luke.

  I had to get to Camp Four to tell him I was coming to Washington.

  As I walked, I let myself dream. Would we switch our flights so we could fly out of Kathmandu together? Those long hours in the air together would be paradise. We’d play cards and watch movies and joke around and, since we wouldn’t have to hide our relationship anymore, we could also be holding hands freely and kissing.

  There was still a lot of chatter coming across the radio, some of it in high-speed Sherpa. Now that I was on oxygen, I channeled my focus into the broken conversations to figure out what was going on.

  “…I’m really concerned at this point.”

  “…blood in the snow…frozen mincemeat…”

  “Yes…bad situation.”

  I couldn’t tell who was talking or who they were talking about. My body tensed. What if they were talking about Luke?

  No, it wouldn’t be Luke. They wouldn’t be talking about him on this channel.

  “…how long were they off?”

  “At least thirty minutes. There was…”

  How long was what off? It was Jim now, talking to Thom. There must be more than one situation going on down below us. I continued listening, trying to make sense of it. That’s when I heard something that made me stop in my tracks. Thom used the word “she.”

  She’s totally blind.

  The Cuban Team, minus Juan, had gotten into Camp Four a long time ago. There was only one other she in the entire Global outfit.

  One of the people in trouble down below was Doc.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  I picked up the pace to catch up with the others.

  “What’s going on down there?” I asked Ang Dawa. “Is it Doc? Is Luke okay?”

  “Luke’s not with us.”

  “I know, but where is he? Is he okay?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What about Doc?”

 
“She’s snow-blind.”

  I’d heard correctly. Guilt struck me. When I’d given her a hug on the summit slope, she hadn’t been wearing her glacier goggles. I hadn’t been thinking clearly, or else I would have said something.

  “She’s doing okay otherwise,” Ang Dawa said. “Dawa Lama’s walking with her.”

  I relaxed. Doc was strong, and the snow blindness would likely be gone by morning. “What else is going on down there?”

  “Juan’s feet,” Ang Dawa said. “Can’t walk.”

  The blood from his blisters had probably frozen his feet solid inside his boots. Not being able to walk this high on the mountain was a really bad thing because he was still a long way above the highest altitude a helicopter could land, which is Camp Two.

  The small group of us continued descending. The last of the light disappeared sometime before we reached the Balcony, and we turned on our headlamps. The winds were picking up, and the cloud bank that had been gradually rising from the valley all afternoon was upon us now, greatly reducing visibility. All we had left ahead of us was the steep descent of the Triangular Face, then the last bit of gentler slope before Camp Four. But at this pace, that was probably another three hours of walking on top of the eighteen hours we’d already been going today.

  I kept thinking about the tent awaiting me at Camp Four. I could practically taste the warm tea on my dry lips and feel the cozy heat of my thick sleeping bag. Talking to Luke on the radio would be wonderful, too. I’d finally have relief from my gnawing unease about his health, and I’d find some way to secretly tell him I was coming to Washington so that he wouldn’t have to suffer any longer from thinking everything was over between us.

  At last we saw the lights of Camp Four through the snow that had started falling. I practically collapsed with relief. But as we got closer, it was clear that the camp was in chaos. Several of our guides were caught up in the critical first steps to save Juan’s feet and more were responding to Johnsmith, who had passed out while drinking water. Furthermore, there had been conflicting reports of four people dead in a Camp Four tent from apparent carbon monoxide poisoning, and Thom and some of the Swedish guides were trying to locate them.