by Ruthie Knox
“What was yours called?”
“Pasty.” At Kal’s furrowed brow, she added, “It’s a sort of pie. He was terribly fat and spoiled. Really more of a pony than a noble steed.”
“What happened to him?”
“He took the rainbow bridge to the boneyard when Beatrice was thirteen. She cried for an entire afternoon, poor thing.” When she looked at him again, her eyes were bright, and he couldn’t tell if she was happy or keeping herself from crying. “You know what I think? We should order dessert and watch a film. They have loads. I don’t think I’m ever going to sleep, or open that up”—she glanced toward her laptop—“and we could use the distraction.”
“Sure.”
“Let’s watch one of the superhero movies. The Avengers or some such. You can tell me everything they’ve done wrong making it into a film.”
Kal let her pull him to the couch and drape him in a cashmere blanket. She called for dessert, ordered one of everything, and spread them out around them while Kal found the movie. They watched Deadpool. He told her all about how Deadpool was an antihero who’d first showed up as a bad guy and then started making guest appearances all over the place, cracking jokes and breaking the fourth wall. She said Deadpool reminded her of Shakespeare, whose villains were often his most compelling characters. They ate a tart and a chocolate thing and drank champagne, and at some point Kal realized the tension had gone out of his shoulders and he felt better.
Also, that she smelled good, and was warm and animated against his side.
He didn’t give it a lot of thought. He just reached over and pulled her into his lap.
“Oh,” was all she said when he kissed her, which wasn’t the answer to the question he was asking. He kissed her again, her mouth softly yielding, her neck hot against the palm of his hand.
“Rosemary?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“That means you’re okay with this?”
“Mmm.” She shifted, straddled his lap, and melded her body to his.
Maybe it was stupid. Probably it was something worse than stupid, but Kal couldn’t think what that worse thing might be, and stupid was a sin he could forgive himself for, easy, if it meant he could keep kissing Rosemary.
She tasted like chocolate. She’d eaten most of the cake and had the ice cream, besides. He palmed her breast through her shirt, ran a thumb over her nipple to feel it harden in response, breathed a sigh into her mouth. He remembered this and didn’t—that night in Lukla felt like it had happened to him in another life, but he knew how she liked him to hold her head, knew to sink his fingers into the hair at her nape and tug to get her to moan.
A soft knock at the door ripped their bodies apart.
The crew member’s “excuse me?” collided with Rosemary’s “who is it?” and then it was just a flurry of flustered movement as she fumbled with the remote to pause the movie, flew to the door, gathered dirty plates and glasses, her cheeks on fire, Kal watching from the couch, amused.
When the attendant had gone, Rosemary flopped down beside him. “Heavens,” she said, and the exasperation combined with her mild language made him laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“You.”
“Why am I funny?”
“You got caught being bad.”
“And?”
He reached out with both hands and tweaked her nipples, hard, just to watch her wiggle away and pretend to be horrified. “I bet that didn’t happen to you much, back when you were wallpaper.”
The grim line of her mouth was spoiled by the sparkle in her eyes and the dimple that kept winking into life in one cheek. “Let’s finish the movie.” She turned it back on and settled the cashmere throw over their laps.
Kal let her watch it. He watched her instead, the glow from the screen flickering over her skin, her excellent posture even sitting cross-legged on a leather sofa in first class.
“Such a princess,” he whispered. Just to see what would happen.
What happened was she gave him a look he couldn’t interpret and said, “Shh. I’m watching the movie.” Two minutes later, her hand crept over his thigh underneath the blanket, settled between his legs, and started to stroke.
She kept up a running commentary on the movie, telling him that Deadpool was charming but unsympathetic, because his problem was Hollywood simple. All he had to do was trust the girl he loved to love him back. She didn’t understand why comic book heroes had such problems with trust. The whole time, her hand worked him through his pants, hard and steady, like she’d read about how to give the perfect hand job in one of her comportment manuals.
Kal felt it was a point of manhood that he be able to contribute something to the conversation, though his balls were on fire and he’d broken out in a sweat. “Doctor Doom hides his face behind a metal mask because he has a scar.”
She shoved the waistband of his airplane pajamas aside, wrapped firm fingers around him, and said, “That’s absurd.”
“Yeah. That’s the whole reason he…” She twisted at the top of a stroke, and Kal lost his train of thought.
“He what?” She kept her eyes on the screen. Her smile was wicked.
“Turned evil,” he choked out.
She glanced at him. “Evil is as evil does, I suppose.”
Kal didn’t last long after that. He came, gasping, thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic, wondering if he’d ever meet a woman he liked better than Rosemary Chamberlain.
Chapter 8
Rosemary slid her passport across the counter to the immigration official. “What is the purpose of your visit?”
“I’m going to see my daughter.”
He scanned her passport and began thumbing through the pages. “How long do you plan to stay?”
“I’m not sure, actually.”
He looked up, thumb pausing in its journey through the document. “Not terribly long,” she said quickly. “Probably only a day or two.”
“And where will you be staying?” He glanced at his screen, then at her, flipped to the front where her picture was, and studied it.
“I haven’t found a hotel yet. I’m sorry, it’s just a bit of a last-minute trip, not terribly well planned out. I don’t—oh, shit.” Rosemary’s stomach sank. “I mean, pardon me, I’m terribly sorry, but I haven’t done the visa. The last time I flew to New York it was on the program they have, on the computer, where you put in your travel plans?” She was completely buggered. She’d have to get right back on a plane and fly home without seeing Rosemary or saying goodbye to Kal. “I’d forgotten about it, you see, because it was so easy the last time, I’d forgotten I need a visa. Is there some way I might apply, now? For some sort of exception?”
A tiny knot appeared between the agent’s eyebrows. “With a British passport, all you need is ESTA clearance with the Department of Homeland Security, which you have.”
“I do?”
“You wouldn’t have been allowed to board the plane without it.”
“Does it—? I mean, I don’t think I did that.” As she spoke, she remembered the woman in the airport lounge in Abu Dhabi who’d asked her if she was a British national and said sweetly, Let’s just get you into the system before asking Rosemary a series of questions about her home address, passport number, the names of her children, her occupation. “I might have done, actually. What are the questions like?”
“Just a moment.”
The agent stepped away from his station, turned his back on Rosemary, and walked fifteen feet away to talk to a uniformed woman.
Bugger. Could she possibly have made herself look less reputable if she’d tried? She hadn’t even thought about her bloody visa.
The people who’d been just in front of and behind her in the queue finished up their processing and made their way through the chute to claim their baggage. Rosemary watched them go, jealous.
Her agent returned with the woman he’d been speaking to, who said, “Would you please come with me, ma’am?”
She led Rosemary pas
t an area where travelers sat across from agents at desks, each desk partitioned from the next by a low wall. Rosemary had been taken to those sorts of desks before, back when mad cow disease made travel into and out of England a tedious exercise. Have you spent time in the countryside? Did you use the boot-washing stations? Do you eat beef? Where did the beef come from?
The woman didn’t stop at any of the desks. She took Rosemary to a small, windowless room, flipped on the light, and said, “Please take a seat.”
“Of course. I’m very sorry.”
The woman had dark skin. She wore her hair in thick braids laced over the top of her head, and her uniform tag read, PATIENCE.
Rosemary sat down on one side of the table. Patience took the chair opposite. The male officer stood by the door, his hands clasped in front of him. Patience opened a laptop computer, tapped at the keys, and asked, “What was your city of origin?”
“Kathmandu.”
“Did you travel anywhere inside Nepal?”
“I flew to Lukla and went on foot from there into the Khumbu.”
“Did you leave the country at any point during your stay?”
“No.”
“When did you purchase your ticket?”
“Just before I got on the plane.”
“Which was?”
Rosemary looked for a clock on the wall, needing a point of reference to count the hours since she’d boarded her flight. She didn’t find one. “Yesterday, I think.” She checked Patience’s face. “I’m a little jet-lagged. I’ve been on four planes and a helicopter in the past few days.”
“Mm-hmm. What was the purpose of your visit to Kathmandu?”
Heavens, did this woman suspect she was trafficking in something illicit? “I was there to climb Mount Everest.”
Patience studied Rosemary’s face for a moment, as though assessing whether this seemed remotely likely. Then she tapped the down arrow on her keyboard, peered at the screen, and asked, “You’re a British citizen?”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
“Did you check in with your embassy in Kathmandu before your flight?”
“No. I didn’t think to.”
“And you didn’t fill out an ESTA application?”
“I think I might have done, through the airline. In Abu Dhabi, a flight attendant asked me questions about my passport and typed them into her computer.”
“Were you involved in a crime, bereavement, or natural disaster during your visit to Nepal?”
Rosemary blinked. A bereavement?
She meant had anyone died.
A great many people had died.
“Ma’am?”
“I’m sorry. A natural disaster, yes. There was an avalanche. But as you can see, I’m very much alive.”
“Are you traveling with anyone?”
“Yes, an American. He was also there, on Everest. He put me on the helicopter, actually. Kal. Kalden Beckett.”
Patience looked at the other agent, who pulled the radio off his belt and disappeared through the door.
Rosemary thought of her broken mobile and the laptop she’d been too cowardly to open. While the others on her climbing team had made travel arrangements, no doubt contacted the embassy and set up appointments in Kathmandu, she’d boinked a stranger and slept for seventeen hours straight, then hopped on a plane without even getting her travel documents in order.
“What is the purpose of your visit?” Patience asked.
“I wanted to see my daughter. She lives in New York.”
“Can you give me her address?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know where she’s living at the moment. I usually send things to her father, Winston, my ex-husband.”
“And where does he live?”
“He’s also in New York. I do have his address.” Rosemary reached for her mobile, then remembered. “I did do. It’s on my mobile. But I’ve stepped on it, you see, and the screen’s gone black and won’t come on.” She pasted on a smile, though it had no obvious effect on Patience.
“Where were you planning to stay?”
“Either at a hotel or perhaps at Winston’s. I’ve still got to sort that out. If I’m permitted to enter, of course. Which I’d very much like to be.”
Patience spent an interminable amount of time tapping something mysterious into her computer. Finally, she asked, “What is your occupation?”
“I suppose…I suppose I’m a writer.”
“What is your relationship to Kalden Beckett?”
“I’ve no relationship with him.”
“Ma’am?”
“I mean, I’ve only just met him. We’re friends, I suppose. We were stuck in the same situation, and it made sense for us to team up together.”
Rosemary’s neck grew hot. Was there something she should know about Kal, something he’d done or been suspected of doing? She felt woozy and disoriented, the memory of her conduct on the airplane branded into her skin. How long did one spend after surviving a tragedy before one regained the capacity to make rational adult decisions?
What if Beatrice was right, and Rosemary hadn’t made a single rational adult decision since the divorce?
God. Enough of that. She couldn’t begin doubting herself now, there’d be no end of it.
“Are you aware that the British government has flagged your passport?”
“Pardon?”
“There’s a system for notifying border authorities to watch out for certain persons. Your government put your name on it because you didn’t check in with your embassy after the avalanche. You’re officially listed as missing.”
It took Rosemary several long seconds to understand this. “They think I’m dead?”
“It looks that way.”
Oh, Beatrice. Winston. She hadn’t phoned them, had been assured by Kal that her name was on the lists of survivors, but now Rosemary understood how callow she’d been. She’d never known shame could turn her stomach, could weight down her limbs and swell her heart with such a terrible sense of responsibility. “As you can see, I’m right here,” she said quietly.
“Yes. So what we have to do is clear this notice, which means we have to put you in touch with your embassy. They’ll send someone over to talk to you who’s going to want to confirm who you are, and they’ll tell us we can take the notice off. Then you’ll be free to go.”
“That sounds like it will take an age.”
Patience finally smiled. “I’m not going to lie to you, it’ll take some time. Do you need something to drink or eat? I’m going to have to go report all this to my supervisor, and she’ll call your embassy.”
“No, thank you, I’m fine. I’m very sorry for the inconvenience. I did speak with the Nepalese authorities in Lukla after I was evacuated by helicopter. I’d assumed that was all I had to do. I apologize that I was so remiss.”
“That’s all right, ma’am. Did you get to the top?”
“Pardon?”
“Of the mountain?”
“Oh. No. I was at the highest camp, but the avalanche made it so we had to evacuate.”
“Well, at least you made it through safely.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be back in a while when I have some news.”
“Thank you.”
She left Rosemary alone in a beige cell, with nothing to do and no one to talk to.
Rosemary folded her arms on the table, put her head down, and cried.
—
Four and a half hours later, with a fresh stamp in her passport and a printed sheet of phone numbers from the kind woman sent over by the consulate, Rosemary carried her backpack into the arrivals hall of Terminal Four.
She felt as though she’d stepped off an ocean liner after weeks at sea. Her hands shook, and she shoved them into the pockets of her hiking pants, scanning past the drivers with their printed signs and whiteboards for a familiar face.
Kal had probably given up on her by now. She’d wanted to ask about him in the interview room, whether he’d
been detained, whether he knew what had happened to her. But every time, she hadn’t been able to think what to say.
The gentleman I was traveling with—I have no way to contact him.
There’s an exceedingly slim chance I’m pregnant with his child.
He doesn’t have a phone, and I don’t know his number.
He lived in Elmhurst, Queens. She knew his full name. The world was large, but people had connections to other people, and the Sherpa people she’d met at Everest all seemed to be related in some way to one another.
The Indian family in front of her pushed their wheeled luggage cart off to the right, and there was Winston.
Her ex-husband, in a dark suit and polished shoes, sitting on one of the leather-and-chrome airport chairs checking the time on the Patek Philippe timepiece she’d given him for their fifth anniversary.
Beside him was Kal, eating a slice of pizza and speaking to a young woman with an explosion of frizzy hair. She wore a shiny purple minidress and white moon boots, her bare legs as skinny as a supermodel’s.
They saw her, and everything happened at once.
Winston trapped her in a furious embrace, his familiar voice in her ear, words rushing over her too fast for her to make anything of them, Chasity, my assistant, found you on the manifest, I’ve no idea how, she’s a miracle worker, but we knew you’d be on the flight, met this young man as we’ve been waiting, he’s filled us in, so good to see you, I’ve left I don’t know how many voicemails and texts, no worries, though, darling, we’ll whisk you into a hot bath and get some food into you, you’re terribly thin.
Light poured in through the high windows in the arrivals hall, everywhere bright and white and crowded with people embracing, packed full of voices and noise that made it hard to draw in a breath. She felt dizzy in Winston’s arms, limp with exhaustion and obligation and love, too, for this man she’d once been married to, who’d fretted and worried and shown up to fetch her.
“Get off,” she said finally. He pulled away, his face drawn with deep lines of concern. “Where’s Beatrice?”
“She’s in Wisconsin.”
Wisconsin.
She didn’t know where Wisconsin was, or how to get there.
The loss seemed staggering. She sucked in a breath, then another.