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.