Chapter Forty-Three
It was drizzling, the sky low and gray. Waves came to the shore near my feet, turning the smaller boulders as the water filled in. I picked up a wet rock and threw it into the water, and then another. Drops of accumulated drizzle fell from the rim of my hood onto my nose and cheeks.
A dog ran up. A big, yellow dog that seemed to know me. It dropped a stick at my feet, and I threw it into the sea. The dog splashed into the water, but on the way back out, ran past me.
I turned and there was Dad, and suddenly we were indoors at somebody’s apartment. It was modern, with big windows, tall ceilings, and white couches. Doc was in the kitchen, pulling something out of the oven. The dog was circling frantically, the stick still in its mouth, mud from its paws layering on the carpet with each circle until the whole floor was brown.
Out in the living room, there were other people. I knew all of them, but the only faces I recognized were Theo, April, and Hulk.
The yellow dog was still circling. Something was beeping. A fire alarm? No one else seemed to hear it. The dog barked. I looked back to the kitchen, but there was no smoke. The dog barked and barked. Someone whispered my name.
I looked the other way, down the hall. Luke was leaning against the wall, watching everyone in the living room. Watching me. The dog ran to him, then back into the kitchen. Luke’s mouth lifted playfully, then it went serious. He turned away from me and walked toward the stairs. He stopped when his foot hit the first step, looking back to make sure I was coming. And I was, I was coming.
The fire alarm was still going off, but he didn’t hear it, and it didn’t bother me anymore. I reached him, and he put his hands on my waist, drawing me in for a kiss. I was no longer wearing my wet jacket, and I didn’t care who saw us. He slipped his hand up my shirt, running it across my stomach before sliding it down my arm and lacing his fingers with mine.
“You sure?” I asked.
He moved up to the next step, still holding my hand. Our arms stretched across the distance.
The beeping wasn’t a fire alarm; it was my watch alarm.
I took a step closer to Luke.
The beeping.
I had to wake up. But I wanted to go up the stairs with Luke. Where was he going? He peeked back and his dimples were showing. I took a second step, then another.
It was cold. There was something on my mouth. I couldn’t move my arms. I couldn’t see.
I sat up, frantic to unzip my sleeping bag and free my arms. I tore off my oxygen mask.
Luke.
I leaned on my knees, trying to catch my breath.
Luke. Luke. Luke.
I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to lose the dream. The feeling. It was just out of my grasp, and it was slipping further away. No.
I wanted to be anywhere but here on Mount Everest. I wanted to be back on those stairs, following Luke to a bedroom, where it would be nothing but us. Indoors, where it was warm and where we had all the time in the world.
Reluctantly, I felt for my headlamp and turned it on. Every surface inside our tent was covered with a crust of hoarfrost that glistened in the light. It wasn’t pretty. It was ugly and very, very cold.
Where was Luke now? I wanted to assume that he was doing better, but altitude sickness was illogical. Just when you think someone’s in the clear, they don’t pull through.
I leaned over Doc, shaking her gently until she awoke. Claudia was awake already but not wanting to get moving. I helped her sit up.
With the severe cold and the lethargy of the altitude, it took us the rest of the hour I’d allotted for us to choke down a few bites of food, make tea, drink the tea, and finish getting ready.
When we finally left the tent, Theo was waiting next to the door with his handheld camera to get a shot of Claudia departing for the summit. He asked her a question, but his voice was so slurred that I didn’t have the faintest idea what he said. Or what her response was.
The three of them walked in the direction of the lights of the hovering drone, where the first members of the Cuban team had already started climbing.
The best summit days are the ones where there is no wind, with no clouds blocking the light of the moon or the stars. On these days, it feels like you are walking on a trail right through the nebulas of the Milky Way.
This was not one of them. Thick clouds made the night pitch-black and ghoulish. All any of us could see was what was directly in our headlamp beam, and up ahead, the line of pinprick dots of the team members’ headlamps disappearing into the distance. This was the scary kind of outer space. The lonely kind, like the Apollo had gone back to Earth, leaving us alone on the dark side of the moon.
We trudged at our dreadfully slow but steady pace up the relentlessly steep, never-ending Triangle Face. I kept running through my dream, doing everything I could not to lose the feeling of it. As long as I could recall it, it was like Luke was happy and healthy and here with me.
The beach in the beginning of the dream looked a lot like Golden Gardens in Seattle. Amy used to take me there. It was a wealthy area, and in retrospect I knew our visits there had something to do with the meth. She’d go inside a house, and I’d go out on the beach by myself. But I was never sad to be left alone there. I’d simply felt free, which had been the same feeling in the dream.
The beach could also be the one from the Circ where Olivia had sat on the rocks while Luke was out paddleboarding.
What did the dream mean? That beautiful things didn’t have to be spoiled because of Amy? That there was a place for me in Luke’s world? To not be afraid of being alone? Because in that dream I hadn’t been alone. There was that dog, and then my dad and Doc. April and Theo. All those people at the party. Luke.
We took a short break when we reached the relatively flat section at the top of the Triangle Face called the Balcony. The front portion of A-Team, led by Hulk and Tyler, were already well ahead of us, moving up the southeast ridgeline.
It was daylight by the time we reached the knife blade ridge of the Cornice Traverse, which provided clear views down the sheer faces on either side of us—eight-thousand feet below into Nepal on our left, and eleven-thousand feet below to Tibet on our right. I was too cold and my head too foggy to appreciate the beauty of it.
We hadn’t gone much farther when there were reports of the Cuban team’s summits. I checked my watch and did a quick calculation. With the distance remaining and the time taken thus far, we were ahead of the turnaround time, but only by a hair, and with the distance we still had to go, we were bound to slip behind it.
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.