by Ruthie Knox
The man at the desk pulled up the reservation for him. “I’ll just need your initials here and here. Will you be parking with us?”
“Yeah.”
“Make and model go here, and the license plate if you know it. We have you booked in a double room, with two queen beds. All of our rooms are nonsmoking. In the morning, there’s a complimentary breakfast—”
“There’s just one room?” Kal interrupted.
“Yes, sir. The reservation is for one room.”
His phone was vibrating in his pocket. Kal took it out and stabbed at the button, assuming it would be Rosemary with a drunken request or a question. “Hello?”
“Kal! Glad I got you. This is Chris from the Mountaineering Alliance. You have a minute?”
“Not really.” He lifted his finger to the man behind the desk with an apologetic look. He shouldn’t have answered the phone.
“I won’t take much of your time. I just wanted to reach out because I know you were on Everest this year, right? And we want to do a piece for the website on the avalanche and what it means for the future of climbing there—you know, the whole global warming angle, et cetera. I left you a couple messages already—any chance you’d be interested?”
It was Kal’s fault for not calling back. He’d told his mother he would, but he hadn’t. “I don’t think it’s for me.”
“Don’t say no yet. It pays, if that matters to you—not very much, but at the top of our scale. We want to do a big media outreach on this one, and it would mean a lot if we could put your face on it. Just tell me you’ll give it some thought.”
Kal couldn’t keep telling him no. He’d spent the summer working with Chris in Bozeman when they were both raw college interns. He’d roomed with the guy in a four-bedroom crapshack. Partied with him. Stayed up half the night with him when Chris discovered through Facebook photos that his boyfriend from school was cheating on him.
“I don’t know.”
“It won’t hurt you to think it over. I’ll send you some details over email and we’ll talk again tomorrow, okay? And listen, I had a question for you. This Rosemary Chamberlain who was on Everest with the British women—do you know her?”
“Sure, I saw her around Base Camp.”
“I mean, do you know-her know her? She was on the news giving an interview at the prayer service, after the avalanche? And in the background, milling around, I saw this Sherpa dude I could’ve sworn was you.”
“Yeah, I know her.”
“Could you put me in touch? Clayton wants to connect, find out if she’s interested in being one of our ambassadors, you know, helping with outreach? We’ve been looking at her press file, and she’s a whiz at PR.”
“I guess.”
“Would you talk to her? We could use her. She’s got the kind of face people listen to, plus the exposure, the experience—if she was on our side—”
“Listen, Chris, I’ve got to go.”
“Sure.” Kal could imagine him raking his hand through that chin-length mess of hair he cultivated, imagine the view out the window of his office, mountains and sky and maybe a storm coming in. “I’ll send you that email. Think about what I said. We need you, Kal.”
“Okay.”
“Okay. Talk soon.”
Kal disconnected. The front desk attendant was opening and closing the doors on the printer one by one, trying to clear a jam. You and me both, buddy.
Kal turned his phone off.
“Can we get a second room?”
“I’m afraid we’re completely booked tonight.”
“How?”
“I’m sorry?”
“How are you completely booked on a Sunday night here?”
The man blinked. Kal regretted his tone, but not quite enough to make him apologize, not with the prospect of a single room with two queen beds in front of him.
“We have a wedding party and overflow from a conference at the hotel across the street.”
“So there really aren’t any rooms.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Does anybody else have any?”
“I could call around if you like.”
Kal thought of waking up his mom to tell her he was moving them to another hotel. She wouldn’t like it. She’d picked this one. “It’s fine.” He scrawled the vanity license plate number for his mother’s Outback into the space provided on the form: EVREST7. Even the walking wounded had their shtick to perform. “We’ll work it out.”
It took a long time to find a parking space, longer to wake up his mother and haul their luggage inside while Rosemary chirped cheerfully about American hotels and snack machines and badgered the front desk attendant into giving her twenty dollars in quarters in exchange for a bill she’d fished out of her purse.
“This is a nice hotel,” his mom said of the room. “We’ll share this bed.” This comment she directed at Rosemary, who agreed, unflappable.
It wasn’t until his mom disappeared into the bathroom with her toiletries that Rosemary widened her eyes and drunk-whispered, “We’re sharing a room with your mother.”
“I noticed.”
“I thought we were going to have sex.”
“You’re talking too loud.”
“I’m going to go find the vending machines.”
“Cool. Take a key.”
Rosemary slipped a plastic card into her pocket and sashayed away.
“It’s room 202,” he said to the sliver of the closing door, because she was far enough gone he wasn’t completely sure she would find her way back.
Kal slipped out of his shoes, changed into the loose pants from Kathmandu and a T-shirt, and laid down on the bed. Through the bathroom door, he could hear the taps turn on and off. His mom would brush her hair and teeth, wash her face with POND’S cold cream and wipe it clean. Her routines were predictable, but he hadn’t predicted she would want to be here doing this instead of any of the literally dozens of other things she could have been doing.
She was having fun at least. Rosemary seemed to be, too.
He couldn’t figure out why it pissed him off.
His mom emerged from the bathroom in her pajamas. “Where’s Rosemary?”
“She went for snacks.”
She turned out the overhead light, sat down on the bed, and got under the covers. Her eyelids were pink around the edges, the only reliable sign that she was blitzed out of her gourd. “Good night, Kalden.”
“ ’Night, Mom.”
Ten seconds later, she began to snore softly, and Kal had the quiet he’d wanted.
It made him restless.
He rolled a pillow lengthways and shoved it beneath his lower back. Sighed at the ceiling. The door opened, and Rosemary tripped over something in the dark. “Bugger.”
Kal flipped on the table lamp for her. She collapsed next to him on the bed and dumped bags of chips and cookies, a soda, and two candy bars on the comforter. “They didn’t have pregnancy tests,” she whispered.
“You’re funny.”
“You’re grumpy.”
“I am.”
“Want some Doritos?”
“No.”
“I adore Doritos. I think they’re my favorite American invention. I’d never had them until my brother-in-law’s girlfriend, Cath, insisted I share hers, and now I can’t get enough of them. Can I borrow a T-shirt? Nothing I have for pajamas is going to work for Victorian bed-sharing with your mother.”
“Sure. You can grab one out of my bag.”
He indicated where he’d left it, and Rosemary rolled out of bed, crawled to his duffel, extracted a T-shirt, and tiptoed to the bathroom to change, knocking her hip against the desk along the way and saying, “Ballocks.”
She came back out with her hair back and her face glowing, the T-shirt just long enough to cover her butt. Legs everywhere. When she sat cross-legged on the bed, he had to make a point not to look at her crotch. There was some kind of situation happening with tiny lace panties and blond hair, and his mom
was snoring five feet away.
Rosemary smirked and shoved the bag of Doritos in his direction.
“You need some coffee or something to sober up?”
“I’m going to soak up all of the alcohol with junk food, and then I’ll sleep the sleep of the righteous. Or get a tummy ache. We’ll see.”
“Living on the edge.”
“It’s like playing Russian roulette with my intestines.”
She pronounced the word funny with her accent, “in-tes-tynes,” and it made him smile despite his mood. He took the Doritos, ate a few. “These are always more delicious than I expect them to be.”
“They’re magic.” She unwrapped a candy bar and laid down crossways on top of the covers. The candy bar waved over her head as she stretched, long and deliciously, her toes curling as the T-shirt pulled up to her navel.
Kal’s heartbeat transferred to his dick with a heavy thud.
“So what’s your deal?” She bit off a chunk of chocolate and caramel. “Aside from the obvious irritations of spending the entirety of the day driving across the country with two women nattering in the backseat and a variety of unplanned and unwelcome detours?”
“That’s pretty much it.”
“It’s not, though.” Her face was soft and a little bewildered. She whirled her index finger at him. “There’s more. Here”—she dropped the candy bar on his knee—“share this with me.”
The chocolate was dry and chalky, the caramel unpleasantly wet and sticky, but Kal ate it because she wanted him to. He handed her back the last square. “I got a phone call from this guy I used to work with.”
She’d given herself too much chocolate at once. She chewed it, a bit of caramel on her lip, her eyes wide and surprised. It made it easier to talk to her, knowing she wasn’t completely listening.
“He knew I was on Everest for the avalanche, saw you on a news clip giving that interview, and put two and two together, sort of. He wants me to write something for them. More than that. He wants me to help them make news out of this avalanche.”
Rosemary raked her hand through the end of her ponytail and pulled out several loose strands, which she dropped on the floor. “I should brush my hair,” she said dreamily.
“All these people calling me, emailing, telling me the avalanche means we’re at a critical moment to talk to the public about Everest, and I’m the person to do it. I’ve got the experience, I’ve got the contacts in Nepal and with the climbers here in the United States, my mom’s Yangchen Beckett, and then there’s you.”
“What am I?” She closed her eyes.
“To Chris’s way of thinking, you’re a golden goose.”
“I thought the goose laid golden eggs.” She tucked herself into a small ball and pulled her hands into her chest. He gave her two minutes of consciousness, maybe less.
She looked sweet like that. He would have liked to pull her up against his body, lull her to sleep with the sound of his voice. But she was going to have to haul herself over to his mom’s bed eventually. No point making the transition even harder.
She made a noise, a moany little sigh, and put her bare feet on his leg.
“I had a lot of things going,” Kal said quietly. “School, a bunch of different internships here and in Nepal, meetings with officials to try to convince them to make it mandatory for trekkers to have local guides because I’m pretty sure it’s the best way to introduce higher standards of environmental protection.
“I had this pilot project out of Kathmandu running in cooperation with that guy we ran into on the street, Brian. Tourism’s the number-one source of revenue in Nepal, and it could make more money and help the country at the same time instead of sucking it dry. They just need better ideas and better planning, and I had that handled.”
The room heater came on with a loud rattle and a rush of forced air. His mom had monkeyed with it before going in the bathroom. They’d be boiling all night unless he remembered to turn it down when he cleaned up Rosemary’s food explosion and tucked her in.
“The thing is,” he told the top of her head, “if it was Chris calling me a couple years ago, every assumption he made would have been right. I would have jumped at the chance to write him an article. I would have taken one look at you and started trying to figure out how to get you to help me, fund me, put me in front of a camera, put you in front of a camera and have you sell my talking points. Anything to help Nepal.”
He was no longer as opportunistic and manipulative as he’d been when he was in thrall to his work. He’d stepped back from his own megalomania, fallen out of love with his power.
“Something changed,” she mumbled into the covers.
“Yeah. Something changed.”
Two avalanches. More dead than they could count. Lives ruined, homes destroyed, children trafficked. Something changed.
But the more time he spent with Rosemary, the harder it got to tell himself that what had changed was he’d given up.
If he’d given up, he would have felt some kind of surrender, some kind of peace. What he felt, every time he got a phone call or ignored a message, was tortured. What he felt was alone, without momentum or direction, but just as desperately interested in his ideals and plans as he’d ever been. It was true what he’d told Rosemary in Kathmandu: he never stopped thinking about it.
He thought about his mom, and Merlin, and the avalanche. He thought about all the people he knew who’d died at Base Camp, or in accidents on the mountain, or trying for the summit. He thought about reporters, and stories, and Nepal, and global warming, and global poverty, and Rosemary.
But he did nothing.
The air kicked off. The temperature shifted, and she shuddered.
“Come on,” Kal said. “Let’s get you to bed.”
“I’m hungry.”
“You just ate a truckload of junk food.”
“I know, but I’m hungry.” She sat up. “Let’s go get something to eat, just you and me.”
“It’s late. My mom’s going to be up at the crack of dawn to finish the drive.”
Rosemary glanced at Yangchen’s sleeping form. “You have a curfew I don’t know about?” She smiled at him. “Come on. You need cheering up, and I need a cheeseburger and some french fries.”
“Sure.” It sounded good—some fresh air. Just him and Rosemary. “But I get to pick the music.”
Chapter 18
“Oh, look, they have cheeseburgers!” Rosemary held up the menu to show Kal.
The only restaurant they’d discovered to be open after midnight in this small Indiana city was a highly unlikely vegan Asian fusion cafe with six tables and an excellent rating on Yelp.
“That’s not a cheeseburger.”
“It’s a vegan ‘steak’ burger with vegan cheese, mayonnaise, and butter. And it comes with fries. I’m going to order it. Do you want anything?”
“No, I’m good.”
She left him at the table while she ordered from a sour-faced older woman who seemed to be the only employee onsite.
They’d stopped at a drugstore. Kal had popped inside and returned with a plastic bag containing a pregnancy test, which she held in her lap the rest of the drive. It sat inside her purse now. She didn’t want to take a pregnancy test in a hotel room shared with his mother. That left taking the test in the restaurant’s unisex bathroom—a delightful prospect Rosemary would save for after dessert.
She paid for her food and sat down with Kal. The restaurant was brightly lit by banks of fluorescent bulbs, the blackness outside so complete that the window served as a mirror, reflecting back to Rosemary a clear and beautiful image of Kal doing that thing with his face again.
The nothing face.
He’d done it in the car, too, as they cruised around looking for somewhere to eat, the stereo blaring the blues too loudly for them to have a conversation, which Rosemary had to assume was deliberate.
“Are you simply waiting for the clock to run out?” she asked.
“Huh?”
/> “Between the two of us.” She gestured back and forth between them. “Because you don’t have to. We could end it now, save you the trouble.”
“Don’t pick a fight.”
“I’m not picking a fight, you are. Sitting there with that look on your face, driving me around, humoring me, but you don’t seem to want to be at this restaurant any more than you want to be in Wisconsin. I’d like to spare you the pain of enduring my company on top of all the other things you have to put up with.”
“It’s not like that.”
“What’s it like?”
He looked away, toward the door, and sighed.
“You’re infuriating,” she said. “This entire day has been infuriating.”
“I thought you were enjoying yourself.”
“I thought I was meant to be interviewing your mother. I don’t know if you could hear us from the driver’s seat, but every personal question I asked she evaded. I tried to talk about childhood, and she talked about my fertility. I tried to talk about marriage and she steered me into an hour’s digression on wedding ceremonies. I mentioned the scenery in the United States in comparison to Nepal, and she got me talking about training hedgerows into animal shapes. It’s like trying to get the Queen to discuss her sex life. Your mother is an impenetrable fortress.”
“She does things her own way.”
“You know what she told me at dinner, when you went to the bathroom? In case you were wondering why I got drunk? Your mother informed me she wants me to meet someone in Milwaukee tomorrow.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know who. I tried to pin her down, but she wouldn’t say more, so now I’m meant to zoom up the road to Manitowoc to see Beatrice bright and early—”
“I’m meant to zoom two hours up the road. You’ll be passed out in the back, sleeping off your fake cheeseburger.”
“Yes, well, after I see Beatrice, we’re to get right back in the car and go to a strange woman’s home in Milwaukee where I may or may not get a chance to interview your mother, quickly, before I rush to make my flight.”
“Before I drive you to the airport, you mean.”
“You’re completely hung up on your role in this plan.”
“I just want credit where credit’s due.”