by Ruthie Knox
Or something she didn’t want him to know?
He couldn’t be sure. He wasn’t in the mood to chase the impression. “We’re going in there.” He pointed at the door, which featured the name of the restaurant on a laminated piece of printer paper. “Down the hall, past the cellphone place.”
“Really.” She drew out the word with surprise and a hint of distaste.
“Some big food writer profiled Lhasa Diner a few months ago, so it’s popular with hip New York.”
“I see.”
She retrieved her phone and poked the screen. “It’s already half an hour since he phoned. Why don’t you join us for lunch?”
“Will that be weird, me crashing lunch with your editor?”
“He’s not my editor, I don’t think, only someone my editor wants me to speak with. And meetings are meetings. They’re only weird if you let them be.”
She said it like a woman who’d managed a lot of meetings with a lot of people and never met one yet that could intimidate her, which made him smile. He was curious about her book, and more curious how she would manage him and this editor she’d never met in the utterly unfamiliar environment of Jackson Heights, Queens, U.S.A.
“All right.” He held the door open for her. “After you, princess.”
She swept through, trim and regal in her fancy suit, and amusement in her eyes that was just for him.
—
Rosemary’s appointment showed up twenty minutes late, a dark-skinned man in a gold blazer wearing round tortoiseshell frames. “You must be Rosemary.” He beamed. He couldn’t have been older than twenty-five. “I’m Nikil.”
“Lovely to meet you.” She rose to shake his hand. “This is my friend Kal Beckett. I invited him to join us.”
“Of course. Did you guys order? I love this place. I come here all the time for the momos—best momos in New York. You guys like momos?”
He glanced at Rosemary, then at Kal, who said, “Sure.”
“I’ll go ahead and order. You’re not vegetarian?” Again he looked at Rosemary, with a brief flick of his eyes toward Kal. Back to Rosemary.
“No.”
“Great. Hey!” He snapped his fingers in the direction of the counter. When the woman behind it looked up, he said, “Can we get some beef momos, some chive and beef, um, an order of chicken, and that soup you have with the thick noodles?” The woman said a word that sounded like ten-took. “Yeah, three of those. And drinks?” He turned to Rosemary. “You want a beer?”
“We don’t have beer,” the woman said.
“Right, you guys don’t do alcohol. Some water, then. Thanks.”
Nikil pulled out a chair and settled himself beside Rosemary. Only two of the other tables were occupied, one with a younger white couple, the other with an older Asian man.
The woman behind the counter called, “Kal, you want the usual?”
“Yeah, thanks.”
Now Nikil looked at Kal more closely, discomfited. “You guys know each other?”
“We went to high school together.”
“So you’re from around here, that’s awesome. I love Jackson Heights.”
“Where’d you go to high school?” Kal asked.
Nikil grinned. “Dublin, Ohio. But I lit out for New York as fast as I could after college.” He pointed from Rosemary to Kal. “So you two know each other how?”
“We’re friends,” Rosemary said.
Kal’s friend brought water and plastic glasses. “You have sparkling?” Nikil asked.
“No.”
“Okay, sorry, this is great.” His attention snapped back to Rosemary. “It’s great you could meet here, isn’t it? I was already in Queens for a meet-and-greet thing, and I could just pop right over.”
“Yes.”
“I read all about you this morning, looked over your proposal and your pages. It’s good stuff, for sure, that’s why our rights people snapped it up for the U.S. market, there’s a lot of interest in Everest.” He talked rapidly, without a full stop in sight. “But we’re worried, because the pages you sent are kind of—” He made a noise like air leaking out of a tire, and Rosemary’s heart sank. Nikil’s hand came up, flat palm extended. “Now, don’t panic, authors never want to hear that, but it’s not the end of the line or anything, we were just thinking, you know, maybe that’s not the book you’re supposed to be writing? Especially with the avalanche happening, and I was reading on the train, I googled it, there was another avalanche in 2015, with a massive earthquake, you know about that?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I was there,” Kal said.
“You’re an Everest guy, too, huh? That’s really interesting, I loved that book, the Krakauer one. Did you summit?”
“No.”
“What happened?”
“I’m not a climber. I’m Sherpa.”
“You mean like those crew guys, carrying the stuff up the mountain?”
“Something like that.”
“It’s highly skilled work,” Rosemary interjected. “Kal worked with the icefall doctors, setting up a safe route for the climbers. It’s quite dangerous, and essential to the expeditions’ success.”
“That’s cool. That’s where you guys met?”
Kal’s high school friend brought three massive platters of momo to the table, along with some kind of salad she set in front of Kal. “The soup will be ready in a few minutes.”
“Thanks, jeez, these look amazing. You guys are amazing.” Nikil addressed the food, ignoring the woman. “So anyway, the avalanche a couple years ago, another avalanche this year, that’s a lot of disaster, a lot of death, right, and people love reading those kinds of survivor accounts. So my first question, definitely, for you, is whether there’s anything in that? Since you can’t open your book with the Everest summit, maybe there’s something in the tragedy that will really grab readers. Here, help yourself.” He extended a platter of momo toward her.
Rosemary offered it to Kal. “Would you like any?”
“I’m good with the salad, thanks.”
Rosemary transferred a few of the dumplings onto a styrofoam plate and added chili sauce. She didn’t like this man.
She cut her momo into four pieces with a plastic knife and fork, selected the smallest, dipped it into the sauce, and chewed it slowly and carefully.
Stuck with her silence, Nikil fidgeted in his chair like a small child who needed the loo. Kal tucked into his salad, a tiny smile playing at the corner of his mouth.
Rosemary speared a second bite. The chive and beef momo was delicious, although not quite as good as the fried dumplings Kal had ordered from the street vendor in Kathmandu.
Nikil cleared his throat. “I didn’t mean to be insensitive. If it’s too hard to talk about or something. How’s the food?”
“It’s fine,” Rosemary said. “Kal?”
“The salad’s always good.”
“I don’t think I’ve had that.” Nikil peered at Kal’s plate. “What’s it called?”
“It’s not on the menu.”
“Huh.”
Rosemary finished her momo.
The thing about being fully thirty-nine years old, and having survived a marriage in which she’d been given nothing she wanted save a lovely daughter whose upbringing had challenged and exhausted her for seventeen years—only to come out the other side of that marriage with wealth and experience—was that Rosemary didn’t have any trouble locating power.
True, her book wasn’t good. Yet.
True, Nikil wanted an avalanche story, and she didn’t intend to write him one.
That didn’t mean she had nothing to bargain with. She had a book contract, an interesting life, and a very good idea.
She let him dangle for another moment as she took a third bite of momo.
“I don’t have an avalanche story to tell you,” she said at last. “But I do think you’re right that the book I’ve been planning to write isn’t quite working.”
“You know what�
��s selling right now isn’t so much the women’s inspirational stuff, it’s more of the missing girl books, or the kid who’s got a dark secret and then the story’s all about how the mom figures it out and her life gets turned upside down.”
“I’m not sure that’s helpful.”
“Yeah, I can see that.” Nikil shoved a dumpling in his mouth.
“I’m not trying to write ‘women’s inspirational stuff,’ ”—Rosemary made air quotes, just to see Nikil flinch—“so much as I’m trying to write about women, full stop. What it is to be a woman at present. What women are capable of.”
“That’s good, yeah.”
“Obviously, I can’t write about summiting Everest yet, because I haven’t done it, and won’t be able to for another year at least.”
The thought of returning to Base Camp in a year left her cold. But surely that feeling would fade, with time? She would rediscover her sense of purpose. All she had to do was carry on as though she hadn’t lost it on the side of a mountain in a devastating rush of snow. It was how bravery worked: it didn’t require one not to be afraid, only to act as though one wasn’t, and to keep acting that way until the fear subsided and one’s feelings began to align with one’s intentions.
“In the meantime,” Rosemary went on, “my publisher is expecting pages from me that will be suitable for publication in an outdoor magazine, and that’s where I think we need to strategize if we’re to avoid missing out on the opportunity to create advance interest in the book.”
Kal’s friend carried three steaming bowls of soup from the kitchen. The one she set down before Rosemary had a beef broth and wide, flat noodles. “Thank you. This looks delicious.”
“Welcome.” She gave Kal a different sort of soup, with translucent noodles. “You want sauce?” The woman had lovely skin and wide, innocent-looking eyes. Rosemary wondered if she and Kal had ever been an item.
“No, I like it like this.”
“Okay.”
She returned to her place behind the counter. Kal sprinkled his soup liberally with dried chilis from a jar in the middle of the table. Nikil did the same, then swallowed some broth and began blinking rapidly behind the thick frames of his glasses.
“I’d like to write about Yangchen Beckett,” Rosemary said.
Kal’s head came up. “She doesn’t give interviews.”
“She hasn’t given interviews,” Rosemary replied. “I think she might give me one.”
“She’s got nothing to say.”
“A lot of women would be very interested in her story.”
“Her story’s already out there. You wouldn’t be doing her any favors putting it in your book.”
“I’m not looking to do your mother favors, I’m looking to learn more about women who face insurmountable odds and beat them.” Rosemary glanced at Nikil. “I realize it sounds off the subject of the book you bought the rights to, but I think it would work with the core story, which is women’s achievement. If I’m meant to write about my own experiences with a team of women on the Seven Summits, mightn’t readers be interested in learning about the women who came before us, the legends who are still climbing?”
Nikil had taken off his glasses to wipe them on a napkin. “Can we rewind a minute? Who are we talking about? His mom?”
“Yangchen Beckett,” Rosemary said. “She was the first Nepalese woman to summit Everest.”
“The first one to come back alive,” Kal corrected.
“She’s summited seven times, giving her the record for the largest number of summits by a woman.”
“Someone else will beat the record before you even get your book finished.”
“I don’t think so.” Rosemary wiped her fingers on her napkin and took a sip of her water. The soup was delicious, the broth rich, the noodles chewy and satisfying. She wondered if Kal’s soup was even better, but he didn’t look as though he was in the mood to let her try it.
She shouldn’t have sprung the idea on him.
“Where’s the story, though?” Nikil asked. “I mean, yeah, inspiring sports profile, that’s compelling, but I don’t know how many people have ever heard of his mom, no offense, so it’s not grabbing me yet.”
“Why do you think my story is any more sellable than hers?” Rosemary asked. “Is it because I’m white? Is it because I’m rich? Or maybe it’s because I’m pretty?”
Nikil pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Okay, yeah, those are some confronting questions, I like that. Confronting is good, and feminism’s hot right now, big with the Millennials, it’s a good spin. But he said her story’s already out there. What did he mean by that?”
Kal picked up his fork and wound noodles around it, wearing the mild and impenetrable expression that Rosemary was beginning to learn to expect whenever there was something he didn’t wish to talk about.
“Would you like to tell him?” she asked.
“You’re the expert on my mom. You tell him.”
She’d only had the idea of opening her book with Yangchen’s story on the walk over from the kyidug, and as soon as it had occurred to her, she’d intuitively felt that Kal wouldn’t approve. Yet she hadn’t been able to shake how much she wanted, having met Yangchen, to know more about her. To write about her.
Nikil was already tapping the screen of his phone. “How do you spell it?”
Rosemary spelled the name for him.
“I’ll be outside.” Kal pushed away from the table and walked out of the restaurant. Rosemary watched him going, helpless to stop him as Nikil tapped his phone, scrolled, read, and finally let out a low whistle.
“Did she do it?” he asked. “She killed that guy’s dad?”
“No, of course not.” Although the truth was she didn’t know. She only suspected.
“Nobody would blame her. It says he beat her, attacked her in front of a judge in the divorce court. Unless that part’s not true?”
“It’s public record. There are also records of a full inquiry in Nepal into the circumstances of Merlin’s death. Yangchen was never charged. Revenge murder is not the story.”
“It sounds like the story.”
“It’s not the story.” Rosemary had stood, her hands planted on the table in front of her. Kal’s friend was watching her from behind the counter. The other diners, too, had paused in their eating to watch.
Nikil lifted both hands in a gesture of surrender. “Tell you what, let’s leave this to settle for a while, I’ll chat with your editor, and we’ll go from there. I’m intrigued.” He pushed his chair back, pulled out several twenty-dollar bills, and placed them on top of the table. “I like your drive, I like the story, there’s a little scandal, the whole inspirational feminist angle, it could be good, and you know, you’ve been through a thing, right? You’ve been through something, she’s been through something, you talk to each other, you find the story that wraps a fist around your guts and pulls hard, right? That’s the story we want, if you can get it, and if you can tell it.”
“I can tell it.”
“We’ll talk next week, okay? I’ve got a thing, Midtown, half an hour, I’ve got to get moving if I’m going to make it on time, but this was really productive, confronting, like I said, and I like confronting, it’s good for the spirit.” He stuck out his hand. “I like you, Rosemary Chamberlain.”
“Thank you.” She shook, her warm palm against his damp one, and she didn’t know when he turned and made his way out of the diner if she’d completely cocked up her plan or transformed a setback into an exciting opportunity.
She didn’t know, either, if Kal would be waiting for her at the end of the hall, or if she’d driven him away for good.
She hoped not. She wasn’t ready to say goodbye to him. Not just yet.
Before she could find out, her phone buzzed, announcing the arrival of a text from Beatrice. Can’t come to NY, it said. Filming.
After a pause, another text arrived. You can come here if you want.
Rosemary didn’t hesitat
e. She tapped out her reply and sent it off.
I’ll come tomorrow.
She had time to fly to Bea and visit before her flight to London—just.
Forty-eight hours, give or take, and she would put her life back in order.
Chapter 13
Rosemary found Kal on the street, leaning against the plate glass display window of a jewelry store. He wore his impassive face.
She was beginning to hate that particular expression—the water-over-stone look he hid behind, the look that meant, Nothing bothers me, nothing hurts me, nothing means anything. He’d looked just the same when the avalanche struck, when he must have been as frightened as she was. And on the street in Kathmandu, when his old friend had called his name, as well as afterward when Rosemary tried to find out more about it.
She knew she’d acted badly at lunch. She was prepared to apologize for putting him right in the middle of a conversation he didn’t want to have.
But she didn’t intend to talk to that face.
“You want some bubble tea?” Kal asked. “There’s a good place a couple blocks down.”
“We just ate.”
“Think of it as dessert.”
“I suppose that would be fine.”
She followed him to the shop, let him order for her, let him pay for the tea, let him make conversation about nothing while his face and his posture made an impenetrable wall she couldn’t see a way over. Then she stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “Kal.”
He turned. “You want to go to the zoo?”
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” she said. “I need to go to Wisconsin. My daughter can’t get away, or won’t, so I haven’t a choice.”
Rosemary wanted him to acknowledge this in some way, to tell her he wished she didn’t have to go or that he would miss her.
Kal looked at his phone. “For real. Let’s go to the zoo.” He opened an app, arranged for a car-share ride, all while keeping up a running patter about the neighborhood and the history of the park where the Queens Zoo was located, and without meeting her eyes.
In the taxi, Rosemary drank Hong Kong coffee milk tea with boba, milky and not too sweet, with chunky bits. She began to feel hostile.