by Ruthie Knox
“You’re a magnificent chauffeur. Thank you for your incredible service.” Rosemary meant it to be funny, but the words tasted bitter in her mouth, she felt bitter, and Kal looked away from her. “I’m sorry. I’m knackered, but it’s no excuse.”
“Apology accepted.”
Kal sat with his hands folded on top of the table, his eyes far away. The woman from the counter banged around in the kitchen. Rosemary had chosen a carbonated ginger drink from the refrigerator. She twisted off the bottle cap and tore the paper from her straw.
The soda tasted like ginger soap.
“I’m beginning to feel this entire venture is barmy,” she said.
He pushed his hands across the tabletop, leaning closer. “When did we get into the barmy part?”
“When we all piled into your mother’s car together?”
He shook his head. “Try earlier.”
“When we went salsa dancing?”
“Keep going.”
“When you came to lunch with Nikil?”
Kal smiled.
“When we flew first class to New York in private berths with hot showers and aromatherapy?”
“You thought that was crazy, too?” Kal caught her hand up and held it between his, and the knot in her heart eased a bit. “I thought you flew like that all the time.”
“I’ve never paid more for a plane ticket in all my life.”
“That’s reassuring. Anyway, I don’t think that was the first barmy thing. You passed out on the street in Kathmandu before that.”
“Nearly passed out. But before that, you got robbed.”
“And before that—”
He was smiling now, the good smile, the best smile that showed off his eyes and the gap between his teeth, the one that made her remember that she loved him.
Which was the thing she was most upset about, of course. That she loved him. And tomorrow she would leave.
“Yes, well, we needn’t remind ourselves what we did before that.”
Kal raised an eyebrow. “I was going to say we were on Mount Everest, losing brain cells by the thousands.”
“You were not.”
“Was too.”
“Liar.”
The proprietress emerged from the kitchen with Rosemary’s food. She set it on the table and left them looking at each other, not quite smiling but fond, the black night pressing against the windows, Rosemary exhausted and buzzing with nervous energy and…and sad.
This time tomorrow, she’d be at an airport in New York, boarding a flight back to London. Between there would be people, conversation, a trip to Milwaukee to fulfill Yangchen’s agenda. Rosemary didn’t know where Kal would fit, if he would fit at all. This could very well be the last time she spent with him alone.
That felt like a terrible waste.
At least twenty-nine people had lost their lives in the avalanche on Everest, but Rosemary wasn’t one of them. She would carry them in her heart for the rest of her life, an anchor that tied her to tragedy, a loss she couldn’t make up for.
She’d survived. Kal had survived. Here they were together, and for what? For her to wait for the clock to run out and fly to London to resume her adventure, never to see him again?
Did it mean anything?
Rosemary wanted it to mean something. She wanted Kal to want it to mean something, too—to make it mean something with her.
But she didn’t know how to begin to say any of that, or what it would mean if she did. She took a bite of her burger.
“Is it awful?”
“No.” It was oversized, sloppy, savory, delicious. Rosemary had no appetite. She set it on the plate and asked, “How do you know what you’re supposed to do?”
“You mean in general? Like, in life?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t.”
“So how do you decide?”
Kal’s eyes were wary. “I just take care of people, as best I can.”
“I took care of people my whole adulthood. I’m meant to be taking care of myself now, but I’m not sure I’m doing it right. You said something changed for you, something drove you away from the work you were doing, made you shift direction. What was it?”
“You were listening back at the hotel?”
“Of course I was listening. Why wouldn’t I have been listening?”
“You seemed toasted.”
“You’re too important for me to ignore you when you finally decide to tell me something personal.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Rosemary wished she could take them back. Too important. It wasn’t the sort of thing you said to a fling on your last night together.
She didn’t know how to do this.
Kal plucked a french fry off her plate and ate it.
“Are you going to answer my question?”
“Probably not.”
“This is it, you know.” She spread her hands wide, palms up. “I’m leaving. You’re driving your mother home. The whole barmy thing comes to an end.”
“I know.”
“But right now, I’m here.” She caught his eyes. “I’m listening. So…what happened to you?”
He slid his palms back and forth over the metal edge of the tabletop. “It wasn’t one thing that happened.”
“No?”
“No, it was more like I got tired or—I don’t know. I got to a point where I couldn’t remember why I was doing what I was doing, like I couldn’t remember when it had been mine, if it had ever been mine.”
“What do you mean?”
He sighed. “I told you about being Doctor Doom, but I didn’t tell you about being Kal Beckett.”
“You can tell me now.”
Kal looked at the dark window, and Rosemary listened to the buzz of the fluorescent lights overhead, water running in the kitchen, and waited until he finally spoke.
“The whole time I was growing up, everything I did was a reaction to my dad. Merlin Beckett, first-class climber, first-class asshole. I can’t remember any part of being a kid when he wasn’t hurting me, or hurting my mom, or I wasn’t thinking about what he was gonna do next. And then I was sixteen and it was over, suddenly, in the worst way possible. Merlin was dead with his head bashed in, and I had all these questions. But there was my mom, this tiny woman, walking away up the mountain, her backpack bobbing up and down. She left me there to wait for her, without an explanation or a story to tell people. Just walked off up the tallest mountain in the world. Maybe she’d come back. Maybe she wouldn’t. I didn’t know what to do.”
Rosemary’s heart hurt to think of him in that situation, so young and so vulnerable. “Of course you didn’t.”
“No, don’t.” He held out his hand, palm facing her. “I made up my mind. If she didn’t come back, even if she did, I’m going to change the world, I’m going to fight against all these assholes, get them off the mountain.”
“Assholes like me,” Rosemary said mildly.
“I’m not saying that. But only two kinds of people climb Everest. Megalomaniacs and the walking wounded.”
The statement made her mouth go dry. “Which one am I meant to be?”
“I’m still trying to figure that out,” he said. “Anyway. I went to school all fired up about ecotourism and self-sufficiency and environmental stewardship. I landed some prime internships because I’m brown and they need brown people in these organizations like you have no idea. I tried to push back so it wasn’t just their agenda, their talking points, whatever they wanted me to be for them. I tried to make it about what I wanted, not what they wanted, but I kept failing. When I failed, people got hurt.”
He paused. Took a breath.
“Then, boom”—he smacked the table with both palms—“there’s the earthquake and avalanche in 2015, thousands of people dead, tourism industry fucked, all my plans shaking to pieces, my mom climbs Everest for the seventh time, this woman writes her pack of lies about how Yangchen Beckett probably killed her husband, how she’s probably cheating and never even made
it to the top of the mountain, then boom, another avalanche, global warming really getting into the action, and I’m fucking fed up with it. I’m never going back.”
“When did you decide that?”
“What’s the point? Why the fuck am I here?” He was staring at her, his voice too loud for the empty restaurant.
“Maybe you’re here to ask that question,” she said. “Maybe you missed a step where you were supposed to ask, or to listen.”
Kal shook his head. “I don’t know how to keep going like I’ve been. I don’t know how to put up with failure every day on the off chance that someday I’ll get something back from it. I’m not strong enough, maybe, or brave enough. And I don’t know how to be anything else, including whatever it is you want me to be.”
“I never said I wanted you to be anything.”
“But you do.”
“I don’t think so. I’ve just enjoyed being with you.”
“For as long as it lasted, but that’s the thing, right?” He poked at the rim of her plate, her fake cheeseburger growing cold and unappetizing. “This is our last meal. This is our last night. This is it, because we don’t make any kind of sense—the blond princess mountaineer and the Sherpa. You’ve got seven mountains to climb and a flight to catch. I’m a distraction. Maybe you’re the one who’s supposed to be asking yourself questions, like why don’t I want to be with the rest of my team, for example. Why am I not snooze-walking my way to the top of Kilimanjaro right now so I can bag that peak and move on to the next?”
Rosemary stood. She couldn’t sit at the table with him anymore.
She’d meant to push him, but she hadn’t thought it would go like this. She’d thought he would open up, share something genuine. Ask her for her thoughts or her help. Instead, he’d made her feel panicked, flooded with doubt whose source she couldn’t identify.
No. That was a lie. She knew the source of her doubt, and it wasn’t Kal. It was herself.
Tomorrow, she was supposed to fly back to London and put herself on the path to climb Everest again, then Kilimanjaro and all the rest.
She didn’t want to. Unequivocally. She absolutely didn’t want to.
Only two kinds of people climb Everest.
What kind of person had she been pretending to be?
What kind of person would she be if she backed out?
Rosemary couldn’t imagine what it would mean to walk away from her mountains, from her book, from the purpose she’d been doggedly in pursuit of for the last few years and the dream that she’d held in her heart since the long-ago early days of her marriage. The thought of giving up on the Seven Summits terrified her almost as much as the thought of climbing them.
She picked up her purse and the drugstore bag. “I’ll be back in a moment.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to find out if I’m pregnant.”
She left him at the table.
In the bathroom, her hands shook as she opened the box and tore into the packet containing the test. The directions were straightforward. She peed on the stick. She waited, alone behind the locked door.
She didn’t look at the test.
When she’d fallen pregnant with Beatrice, she’d felt her child in her heart, in her bones. Everywhere.
There was no one in the bathroom with Rosemary.
She was completely alone.
—
Kal waited outside the door for Rosemary to pee on a stick.
The toilet flushed. He thought about knocking.
The first time he’d knocked on her door, she’d come out naked, bombed on adrenaline, and he’d been out of his head, too, dumb enough to have sex with her without a condom, and that was how he’d ended up here, standing outside a different door, halfway around the world from where they started.
It was hard to get a handle on what he wanted the test to make him feel. Relief that she wasn’t pregnant—sure. That would be simple, and probably for the best.
It would also mean there was nothing connecting him to Rosemary, nothing real to tie her to him beyond the way he felt about her and the things they’d been through together.
Babies came into the world all different ways. Patricia had been a surprise, his mom not married, not dating anyone, and she’d never told him who the father was.
Kal had never been sorry Patricia was born. He didn’t think his mom had either.
Rosemary cracked the door open. She handed him the test.
One line in the display. The plastic said, clear as day, two lines meant pregnant, one line meant not pregnant.
So that was settled. Kal waited for the relief, but he didn’t feel anything different. Glad to see Rosemary’s face, even though she’d only been gone a few minutes.
Lost, maybe.
“I don’t know how accurate it is,” she said. “It’s probably fine, but it says it’s meant to be done at most six days before your period comes, and I’ve no idea when that is.”
“There were two in the package.”
“I’ll keep the other one and try it again in a week or two.”
He could only see the crown of her head now, her hair falling around her face, which kept getting closer to the test in his hand. “You okay?”
She looked up at him, blinking. Her eyes wet.
“Did you want it to be positive?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“No, not really. I just—” She knocked his hand to the side and wrapped her arms around him, squeezing him so hard he lost his breath for a second. “It’s difficult to realize part of your life is over,” she said against his chest. “Not because you want it back, although you kind of do want it back, but more…because you have to figure out what’s next. Put your arms around me.”
Kal did. He held her as hard as she was holding him, felt some of what she was feeling, although he knew it wasn’t the same for him. Couldn’t be the same.
He would miss her. He hated knowing exactly how much, and where it would hurt, and how long it would take to get better.
“I like babies,” he said against her hair. “I like you better, though.”
It was an inane thing to say, but she looked up, almost smiling. “I like you, too.”
“I’m sorry I got so intense.”
“I pushed you.”
“Doesn’t mean I had to snap at you.”
“No.” She pressed her cheek against his shirt. “If we go back to the hotel, can we watch rubbish television together, or will your mother wake up?”
“She sleeps like the dead.”
Kal watched her chuck the test into the bathroom trash.
They drove back to the hotel. Rosemary brushed her teeth and got into bed in panties and his T-shirt again. Kal stripped to boxers and laid down beside her.
He turned on the TV and found the guide channel, but he didn’t like reading the listings. He started flipping through the options. Rosemary extracted the remote from his grip and returned to the guide. She entered a channel number.
“What’d you pick?”
“I’ve no idea. Something with an exciting name that isn’t sports.”
It turned out to be a show about a family of eccentric white people who lived off the grid in backwoods Alaska. It kept cutting from bizarre interviews to action sequences where the grown boys did things like go hunting or attach an enormous metal barrel to tree trunks with ropes and attempt to ride it. The only women were the mother, malnourished and careworn, and a teenage daughter, who spoke of her brothers and her cats with the same excessive degree of romantic attachment.
“This is truly unsettling,” Rosemary said after a while.
“White people are terrifying,” Kal agreed.
She flipped the channels until she found another reality show, this one about dropping white people with ADHD from helicopters into the wilderness with rudimentary tools and no map and then filming what happened next.
/> “I suppose he must live,” Rosemary observed. “Or else it would be a very odd sort of show.”
“If he was starving or whatever, he could eat the cameraman.”
“There must be a whole crew of cameramen, sound, lights.”
“There’s six dudes outside the frame wearing fleece jackets and rain pants and eating granola out of Ziploc baggies.”
“Watching this shirtless man talk about how he can filter river water through his bandanna to survive.”
They watched it all the way through to the end, their bodies drifting closer beneath the covers, their breathing falling into sync.
If she didn’t have to leave, Kal wondered, would the day ever come when he stopped wanting to be around her all the time?
He couldn’t imagine it.
She found an old movie about teenagers fighting Communists, draped her thigh over his, settling against his chest with a sigh. Kal powered off the TV and flipped off the light.
“You’d better go bunk up with my mom.”
“In a minute.” She pressed her warm skin against his, smooth and familiar but no less exciting. Like it would always be this good, would always hit him in the gut this comfortable, would always feel like home.
She felt like home. That was what it was.
Rosemary was the only thing that made sense to him in the whole crazy world, and he wanted that feeling to be enough.
It wasn’t. It couldn’t be. But knowing didn’t change how he felt.
Kal held her against him, rubbing his hand up and down her back as her breathing shallowed and she fell asleep. Thinking about everything he’d told her at the restaurant and what she’d said in response.
Maybe you missed a step where you were supposed to ask, or listen.
He’d brushed her off, bristling at the idea she could have anything to say that might help him. But the words came back to him in the dark hotel room, leaving Kal wondering what she’d meant.
The thin light of dawn began to seep in around the edges of the curtains.
Kal wanted more time.
Chapter 19
Rosemary’s daughter smelled of unfamiliar soap and lotion, and faintly of poorly cleaned laundry. She felt perfectly correct against Rosemary’s body.
When she began to pull away—too soon—Rosemary bussed her cheek and said, “You look well.”