Chapter Forty
We set out into the icefall under the best of conditions: there were no expeditions ahead of us, the sky was clear with the moon lighting our way, and the brutal cold of the night was keeping all the mousetrap seracs glued in place as best as they ever would. Despite this, the group’s celebratory spirit from yesterday was gone. Everyone knew we had a long road ahead to the summit and to getting safely back down.
Tonight we’d be at Camp Two. Tomorrow night, Camp Three. We’d spend half a night at Camp Four, then we had about twenty hours of pushing through the topmost—and hardest—section of the climb to the summit and back down to Camp Four. We’d sleep there that night and then take another day and night to descend into Base Camp, where everyone would celebrate, and then disperse out of the Khumbu region and back to their regular lives.
I had one thing on my mind: a prayer that we’d get through this without any of us ending up in an ominous situation like Dad warned about last night.
Just one more time up, and one more time down.
And just one more night alone in a tent with Luke. Tonight. At Camp Two. Because tomorrow night, at Camp Three, I’d be sharing with Doc and Claudia again.
Instead of looking forward to having the excuse to be alone with him, I dreaded it. It put the pressure on about giving him an answer about Washington, but I also believed the middle of a summit attempt of the world’s tallest mountain was not the right place to tell him I would be going to Tanzania, not Washington.
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 want 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.