Chapter Twenty-Nine
“Wait, Luke. Wait!” I yelled, though it was clear he wasn’t going to stop.
He flew down the slope, angled straight to the fall line, not even putting in any turns.
Oh god, what had I done?
I scrambled to get my boots clipped in, then I pushed off with my poles as hard as I could. There was no pleasure in the five minutes of downhill that had taken four hours to climb. It was nothing but bad adrenaline. I wanted to gun the fall line, like him, but the skis were too long for me, so I was forced to keep my speed in check.
I’d known that I needed to tell him the truth about Amy, yet I hadn’t bothered to follow through on it.
As the slope leveled off, my speed dropped away quickly. I poled with all my might to keep my momentum going. When I reached him, he was in the final steps of reattaching his skis to his backpack.
“Luke,” I blurted. “I’m really, really sorry that I never told you about my mom. It wasn’t intentional. It’s just something people assume, and Dad and I never correct them.”
His jaw was set, and he didn’t bother turning in my direction. “It blows my mind that you lied to me for that long about something of this magnitude.”
“It was out of practicality. An American single dad raising his daughter in the middle of the Himalayas…our situation made more sense to people if they thought Amy had died. And the result is nearly the same. Even though she’s living, she’s still dead to me.”
Now he turned. “That’s exactly it. The result is not the same. Yesterday, Doc told me she offered for you to stay at her condo because she didn’t think you wanted to go back to Port Townsend, where your mom was. Where a person you’ve been pretending is dead happens to live. It all makes perfect sense. You didn’t decide not to go to college, you decided not to go back to Washington.”
“No, that’s not true,” I said immediately.
“Then tell me you’re still planning to come home to Washington after the season’s over.”
“I never said I was! You know what kind of position I’m in financially. I have to take whatever job I can get after this.”
“You said it the other night, when I was talking about roommate boards near Port Townsend.”
“I said it was a good idea, not that I was going to do that.”
His face went hard.
“You have to understand,” I said. “Washington is not my home. It wasn’t even my home when I was living there.” The rising panic choked me. I couldn’t go on. My whole world was imploding.
“You know, I’m not just some guy at a frat party, and you’re not some girl I happened to sit next to in class,” he said. “We’ve known each other for a decade. We were going to climb the Top Five. I lived for your Circs, always waiting, hoping to get one from you. Going a few days without was torture. But it’s clear that you entered this knowing we had only a few weeks together, max. Knowing you had no intention…”
His head drooped. I wanted to reach out for him. Or to say something, only I couldn’t figure out what would make this better.
“Honestly, Emily, I just feel so stupid for ever thinking it was a possibility. My mistake. Even the choice to go to UW in the first place. Yes, it was the best of the scholarship options for being close to good mountains to climb, but it was also the closest university to Townsend College.”
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.”