Leaving Everest

by Westfield, Megan

  I asked Tyler what I could do to help, but seeing my unsteadiness on my feet, he told me to go back to my tent.

  But when I got there, Doc was not in the tent. I shook Claudia awake, and she confirmed Doc hadn’t returned yet.

  I found Norbu first. “Where’s Doc Teresa?”

  “Tent.”

  “She’s not there.”

  He spoke rapid-fire Sherpa into his radio.

  “She’s still up at the Bulge. They’re going back up there with a splint and more oxygen.”

  “Why a splint? I thought it was snow blindness.”

  “Yes. Dawa Lama was helping her walk, but she tripped. She thinks her leg is broken.”

  Guilt hit me again. If only I’d said something about her glacier glasses being off! “Who’s up there with her?”

  “Phurba Lama.”

  “You mean Phurba Sherpa?”

  “Phurba Lama. And Hulk.”

  No.

  “Hulk is with Juan and Johnsmith, and I passed Phurba Lama a few minutes ago. He’s over by Phil’s tent.” My mind raced. Was Doc alone up there?

  “I’ll go get Hulk,” Norbu said.

  I shook my head. Hulk was in emergency response mode right now. Of all of us, he was the one with the most medical experience.

  “I’ll wake some Sherpas,” Norbu said.

  It would be another twenty minutes to get them going, and who knew how long Doc had already been sitting up there in the snow, alone? We must have walked right by her, but the clouds made it impossible to see anything past the beams of our headlamps.

  “I’ll go now, and the Sherpas can follow with the splint,” I said. “The oxygen will help her stay warm. How far back is she?”

  “Twenty minutes. Just to the side at the top of the Bulge.”

  Norbu went to wake the Cubans’ Sherpas, updating Jim on the radio as he walked away. After twenty-one hours of aerobic exertion in zero-degree temperatures, part of it without oxygen in the Death Zone, I was in no shape to be doing anything but collapsing in a tent.

  Dad would be pissed if he knew. But this was Doc. I had to go.

  With a fresh tank of oxygen and a spare in my pack for Doc, I headed back out.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  I staggered uphill, carefully sticking to the boot-track trail. The winds were blustery, and the snow was coming down much harder now. Neither was a good thing.

  After about fifteen minutes, I started sweeping my headlamp to the left and right of the boot tracks so I wouldn’t walk right past Doc. Assuming she was huddled in a ball for warmth and had a layer of blown snow on her, she wouldn’t look much different than a rock.

  I found her at twenty-six minutes of walking. Indeed, she was curled in a ball, but only a partial ball, as one of her legs was extended on the snow.

  “Doc, I’m here.”

  “Emily? Is that you? Thank god.”

  I helped her sit up so I could switch out her oxygen.

  “Don’t touch my leg.”

  I pawed the snow off her as I waited for the oxygen to kick in.

  “What in the fuck…are you doing…here?” she asked once the oxygen had revived her.

  “Long story. Norbu’s sending guys up with a splint. You think you broke your leg?”

  She snorted. “Think? I know.”

  “How’s everything else? Are you warm?”

  “Good, considering. I have hand warmers in my mittens. I have feeling in my left foot. My right, I have no idea. I’m not touching it until Hulk gets here with the morphine.”

  Norbu hadn’t mentioned morphine. Did he know to send some? I pulled out my radio.

  “Emily to Jim.”

  “I’m hearing a call, but it’s garbled,” Jim replied. “Say again, please.”

  “This is Emily. I’m here with Doc Teresa.”

  “Emily?” he asked. “Where you at?”

  “With Doc. By the Bulge. Make sure whoever Norbu sends with the splint has morphine.”

  “It’s very hard to hear you. I think what you said is you need more oxygen.”

  After all the hours climbing in the cold, dry air today, my voice was almost gone. I sheltered the mic from the wind and projected louder into the microphone. “No, morphine.”

  “I’m not hearing a response. I think something’s wrong with your mic. Try blowing onto the button to warm it up.”

  I did what he said, then repeated myself. There was no response. I tried again.

  “Emily, I’m not hearing you if you are trying to respond. Just hold tight right there. Norbu has guys on their way right now.”

  Doc and I hugged for warmth as we waited.

  “You want to know something funny?” she asked.

  “What?” We were both too cold and miserable for small talk, but we had to keep each other alert and functioning as we waited.

  “I signed up to climb this year only because of Greg.”

  “Why? Everest isn’t a big deal to him. You’ve climbed way harder stuff than this. Like in the Alps.”

  “I know he doesn’t care about Everest, but I thought it would piss him off that I was going to do it after all these years and that I was going with Global Adventurers instead of him.”

  “Doc!”

  “Yeah, I know. I’m real mature, right? Well, you know what they say about karma. Chomolungma got me back good.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in any of that.”

  “I don’t. It’s just kind of funny—high-altitude funny. It was such a stupid, drastic thing to do. And completely unnecessary. I was the one who had broken it off in the first place. Greg. He’s such a nice guy through and through.”

  “Too nice sometimes.”

  “Yes, like not telling you bad news, or giving those refunds, but aside from that, there’s nothing wrong with too nice.”

  “What refunds?”

  “The ones from the icefall avalanche year, when the Sherpas shut down the mountain.”

  “Dad gave the clients refunds for that?”

  “Not a hundred percent, but all that he could. With the earthquake the following year, he couldn’t recover.”

  That certainly was nice of him. The best Global had done for clients was to give a 10 percent discount on return bookings.

  “Is that why he has no money?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  The reason for Winslowe Expeditions’s bad financial situation didn’t change the fact that it existed, but it was a small weight off my shoulders. Even though Dad had assured me otherwise, I worried that my gap year and all the costs of having me tag along had been one of the reasons for his downfall. It also meant that Dad hadn’t been an incompetent businessman, just one who had been too nice for his own good.

  Doc and I shivered against each other. Where were the Sherpas? God, it was miserable to be a sitting duck outside in these temperatures with no break from the wind.

  “So what did your mom’s letter say?” Doc asked.

  “I never read it.” Ironically, it was here with me on Mount Everest, in the breast pocket of my jacket where I’d shoved it the night Dad gave it to me.

  “You should.”

  “I will.” And I would. Someday in the future, when I had truly achieved forgiveness, I’d actually read it.

  “Ever thought about it from her perspective?”

  “What? Doing drugs?” Or getting pregnant to ensnare a guy and then abandoning the child?

  “Not that. Just…being in love with someone who doesn’t love you back?”

  Doc was getting crazy.

  “People change,” she said. “People grow.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  The wind was really picking up now, making it hard to talk. If the Sherpas didn’t get here soon, our boot path would be covered up by the blowing snow.

  I called Norbu on the radio. There was no answer. I called again, to Jim, and then to Thom. I even switched channels and tried Dad. I wasn’t hearing anyone else’s radio calls, either, and surely th
ere would be a ton of talk with all that was going on right now.

  Shit. I reduced the flow on our oxygen tanks as a precaution.

  Your clients are under no illusions about the danger of this mountain. They know there is no guarantee that they’ll come back down.

  No. We were not at that point yet.

  Doc and I huddled together again. I was shivering like crazy. She wasn’t shivering at all, now, and that was even more alarming.

  We couldn’t wait for them any longer. We needed to somehow start down.

  With her broken, unsplinted leg, walking was not an option. We’d have to try scooting. I helped her turn so her back was downhill. She used her good leg to push and then screamed into her oxygen mask.

  There was blood on the snow where she’d been sitting. I tried not to panic.

  “It’s not from the break,” she assured me when she’d recovered enough to speak. “Just a gash from the crampon when I fell.”

  “Scoot more,” I said.

  She pushed again. And screamed again.

  We’d never get all the way to Camp Four like this.

  Just to our right was a bank of snow that might offer some protection from the wind.

  “Has anyone left yet?” I asked into the radio. There was no response. Again, I tried not to panic. If only I knew for sure that the Sherpas were actually coming. But with these winds, and the badly drifting snow…it would be questionable for Jim or Norbu to allow someone out in these conditions.

  “This is Emily. We are moving fifty feet to the northwest,” I yelled into the radio.

  “We have to get to that windbreak,” I told Doc. “Five or six scoots. Let’s do this.”

  Tediously, painfully, we made progress. Doc was halfway unconscious with pain by the time we got there. Sadly, the windbreak was so little it was hardly noticeable.

  I tried the radio again, hoping that the bad reception would be miraculously gone in our new location. No such luck. But I seemed to have sound back.

  “Emily, there is no visibility,” someone was saying. Jim, I think. “The guys have gotten back down. All tracks are snowed over. They couldn’t locate you.”

  “We’re still right here; we had to move because of the wind!” I said.

  Jim couldn’t hear me. He kept on talking. “…it’s a whiteout. Can’t send them back out.”

  Just like that, we’d gone from waiting around to a dire, life-or-death situation.

  Jim kept talking, but panic made me unable to listen. We could not spend the night exposed in the Death Zone with windchill at negative fifty and increasing. And we had only three hours left on our low-flow oxygen, if we were lucky. How much should I tell Doc about what Jim had just said on the radio? I looked back at her. She was lying down. “Doc?”

  She didn’t respond.

  I shook her. Still no response.

  I ripped off my mitten and felt for her pulse. Still there. Her oxygen was flowing okay. I could give her a shot of dex, but if she’d already given herself a shot—or two—within the last few hours, it could be lethal.

  But being unconscious and breathing wasn’t a completely bad combination. Hope overtook the panic. Being unconscious, she’d be able to bear the pain from her broken leg.

  I struggled to stand and then hooked my arms beneath her armpits so I could pull her like a sled down to Camp Four. With seemingly superhuman power I lifted her up, then gave a yank to get her moving.

  There was a searing in my shoulder like it was going to pull right out of the socket. In my oxygen-deprived, frozen, and exhausted state, I found it nice to have feeling in my ice-block limbs, even if it was pain. And then something popped, and I fell backward. Everything went black.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  My eyes opened to a blinding white light. I was cheek-down in the snow, and the light was my headlamp beam shining onto it.

  My first thought was Luke. I could not die on this mountain without him knowing that I had changed my mind about coming to Washington. I could not die without seeing him one more time.

  I had no idea how long I’d been lying there, but I was terrified of that light running out. I tried to push up into a sitting position only to realize I couldn’t feel or move my right arm. I tried again with the other side and was able to struggle upright.

  Doc.

  She was lying on her back in the snow like she was getting ready to make a snow angel. I looked away.

  I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t bear to see her body. She was my mom. My mom-sister. Sister-friend. Mom-friend. Role model. Prospective stepmom. Friend. She’d been a better mom to me in the few months a year we’d see each other than my actual mother’s ten years combined.

  But if there was a chance she was still alive, I had to check.

  I forced myself to look back, praying her face wasn’t iced over. I would vomit.

  Thankfully it wasn’t, but the bits of skin on her face that were exposed were well on their way to black. The snowflakes that were falling on her cheeks were still melting. That was a good sign.

  A familiar voice came on the radio. Dad. At first, I thought it was a hallucination, but he kept talking.

  “Jim suspects your radio isn’t functioning, or that you might be in a position where you can’t make a call out. But that doesn’t mean you can’t hear, so I’m radioing at the top and bottom of each hour from here in Base Camp. This is the fifth call.”

  I fumbled for the button. “Dad! I hear you!” My mouth was so dry that hardly any sound came out.

  He kept talking. If only I had a swallow of unfrozen water to drink, I might be able to bring my voice back. I tucked into a ball, shoving my hands in my armpits and stilling my shaking body the best I could so I could listen.

  Dad was perfectly calm. This fact was unbelievably soothing.

  “Hand warmers,” he was saying.

  Yes! I had unused hand warmers.

  “Wiggle your toes. Rub your fingers.”

  I obeyed.

  “Now for the unpleasant part. Last we all know, Teresa was snow-blind with a suspected fracture. Jim said you had two tanks of oxygen and that Teresa was approximately twenty minutes from Camp Four. We don’t know that you reached her, so you could have plenty of oxygen. But if you did, and you each have only one tank, you’re both nearly out by now. If you can get yourself down, you need to leave. Right now. If she’s with you and she’s conscious, I know she’s telling you the same thing.”

  Thank god Doc wasn’t hearing any of this.

  “It’s a whiteout up there. I know you can’t see, but you’ve been across this stretch into Camp Four a dozen times. If anyone knows it, you do. Just go very slowly so you can catch your mistake if you get turned around and are heading for the Kanchenjunga Face.”

  I shook my head no. I wasn’t leaving Doc.

  “I’m going to repeat this. If you’re in a place where you cannot help any more, you need to go down. You need to leave Teresa.”

  Dad! My heart twisted for him. It was a situation a thousand times worse than the one he’d warned me about, with two people he loved—the only two people he loved—being unaccounted for in the Death Zone. Never could he have imagined he’d be ordering his daughter to leave his girlfriend to die alone on the mountain.

  What would I do if it were Luke unconscious next to me? I wouldn’t leave him for anything. So I wouldn’t leave Doc, either.

  Luke.

  “I’ll be back on the radio in another thirty minutes, and I’ll be listening in the meantime,” Dad said. “Keep trying to communicate with us. If you absolutely cannot do anything else, don’t let yourself fall asleep. Stay awake at all costs. As soon as it’s light or the winds die down, there will be people looking for you. I love you, Emily.”

  After more than twenty-four hours of exposure in the Death Zone, you don’t just pull yourself up by the bootstraps, stand, and walk out of there. Besides, I wasn’t nearly as confident as Dad that I could find my way to Camp Four in these conditions. If I cou
ld even walk on my frozen feet. And I hadn’t done all I could for Doc yet. I had one thing left: heat.

  Jim was on the radio now. “Greg is right. With the windchill tonight, it is better to try to reach Camp Four than wait for light. Sunrise is still a long way off. If you can get yourself down, you need to do that. Then you can lead us right back to Teresa if you were with her.”

  It was a trap—he wouldn’t let anyone back out in this, especially if he knew the frailty of Doc’s condition. Her chances were not good considering that we’d have to get her all the way down the Lhotse Face before a helicopter rescue was possible. As Dad had bluntly said four nights ago, you don’t risk staff for clients who don’t have a chance.

  I tried not to let my immobile right side terrify me as I used my other hand to dig for the hand warmers. I had three packages left. I tore them open with my teeth and slipped them into Doc’s mittens the best I could and put two down her jacket. I distributed what was left along my own body. Dexamethasone would be okay now. I had three syringes with me. I stabbed one straight through my down suit into my thigh and did the same for her.

  I lay down next to her. All that was left was time and body heat, and the hope that the friction of my shivering body against her down suit would provide a little bit of warmth for us both.

  The freeze of the snow radiated up from the ground like an ice bath. The wind drove pellets of snow into me with the force of a lash. It hurt so badly. Part of me longed for it to be over—really over—as soon as possible.

  I heard Luke’s voice. I was truly losing it now, slipping out of reality, like the dream last night. Was this what it felt like to die of exposure?

  “Emily, Greg just got ahold of me. We’re in the Global command center now.” He started coughing and let go of the mic button for a few seconds.

  “I don’t know if you can hear me, but I’m going to be doing the same thing as Greg,” Luke said. “I’ll be calling every half hour.”