by Ruthie Knox
Her eyes glistened when she brought them back to Rosemary’s face. “What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to say what you feel. If you’re sorry, you’re sorry. If you’re not, you’re not. But I’m not taking you to lunch if you’re planning to act like a spoilt child who can only deal with her feelings by pushing them onto her mum, or the people her mum is with.”
“You don’t care how I feel.”
It was an old accusation, nearly as old as Beatrice, and Rosemary wished it didn’t sting. It seemed impossible to be a mother and not be vulnerable to your child accusing you of not loving her correctly—because what did Rosemary fear more than that? She was afraid she’d never been good enough as a mother. She was afraid she’d never loved her child the right way, to make her feel safe, and launch her into the world where she could thrive. But she couldn’t let that fear control her. “I’m here, aren’t I?” she asked. “I leave messages on your phone, I remember your birthday—I bought you that camera you can’t stop pointing at people, I’ve covered your credit card bill, which has been shockingly high these last months—”
“That’s only money.”
“That’s me, thinking of you in America, thinking of what you’re trying to accomplish and supporting you. That’s me, reaching out to hear your voice. That’s me, trying to be your mother.”
“You gave up being my mother.”
“Did I? When exactly? It wasn’t part of the divorce settlement. I didn’t write it on a paper and send it to you in the mail. Did I mumble it in my sleep?”
“You left.”
Rosemary shook her head, adamant. “I have a right to my life, just as you have a right to yours.”
“You couldn’t get away from us fast enough. You couldn’t think of anything but your plan, getting what you wanted.” Her daughter’s voice had risen to a higher pitch, the voice of a younger girl. Rosemary knew that voice.
It was the voice of her daughter when she hurt. Always, when she spoke with that voice, she flailed at the people she loved, and she lied to herself. There wasn’t any getting through to Beatrice when she was like this. It took time for her to cool off, sort through her feelings, come back to herself.
Rosemary didn’t have time.
She tried to keep her voice calm and reasonable, steady enough to push through the fog of feelings to the girl inside her daughter’s nineteen-year-old body. “What is it that you think I wanted?”
“Attention.”
She let that sit for a moment.
She’d been starved for attention in her marriage. She’d described herself to Kal as wallpaper—not a reasonable description, or entirely fair to Winston, but she’d felt so many times that motherhood would absorb her, dissolve her, disappear her. Rosemary had wanted attention. She’d longed for the kind of attention that pointed light on the parts of herself no one had cared about in years. But that wasn’t why she’d left.
“You needed your father,” she said. “And your father needed you, very much. I worried if you didn’t find each other, it would be too late for the both of you. I worried that if I stayed, I wouldn’t have anything to teach you but how to become like me. I didn’t want you to live my life. I wanted you to be…”—Rosemary gestured at her daughter, her slouching posture, her strange clothing, her tattoos, her magnificence, her grace, her power—“I wanted you to be you.”
She felt, as she said it, how absolutely true it was. Rosemary had wanted nothing more than for her daughter to have space and time and love, so she could find herself. Be herself. And yet when she’d wanted the same thing for her own life—to identify herself, her authentic wants, her goals—she’d given herself no space, no time, and no love. Instead, she’d made herself an impossible task list drawn from the distant past.
Climb the highest mountains in the world. Write a bestselling book.
As if, by achieving these goals, she could force herself to be happy.
Surely women found happiness by following their hearts, not by following a script.
Rosemary stepped closer to her daughter, who stood still, her arms by her sides. She hugged her, but Beatrice didn’t move. “Bea.”
“What?”
Rosemary closed her eyes and breathed in the scent of her daughter’s hair. All she’d wanted was to hold her daughter in her arms, to see and feel Beatrice and be permitted to love her. She’d wanted to feel like a mother again, to receive something back for her love, to know that even though Beatrice was launched in the world, they still had a bond, still needed each other.
Maybe she’d wanted attention from Beatrice.
Maybe she’d wanted to feel important. To know it mattered deeply to her daughter whether she lived or died.
It seemed absurd when she really thought about it. Of course it mattered to Beatrice. Of course they needed each other, were bound to each other by ties of blood and tears, arguments and learning and love.
At the same time, of course Beatrice wasn’t about to put her arms around her, or soften, or offer a genuine apology. Why should she? She was nineteen years old. Rosemary had taken herself out of her life and flung herself into danger. Then she’d turned up in the middle of her daughter’s busy day and announced she had a few hours to spare.
It made perfect sense, knowing Beatrice, that she would choose to spend their time together like this.
Near Mum. With Mum. But holding herself back, afraid to risk too much, ready to be offended.
Rosemary squeezed her daughter’s thin shoulders and rested her cheek against the top of her head.
“You’re squishing me to death.”
“I’m horribly selfish.”
“I don’t want to go to lunch.”
“All right.”
“I’d rather get back to Nancy’s and start editing this footage, if it’s all the same to you.”
It wasn’t all the same, but Rosemary had extracted as much intimacy from her daughter as she was going to get for the moment.
Still, she didn’t let go. Holding her daughter made her feel…clear. And clear was different. In the past few years, she’d felt directed, ambitious, purposeful—an arrow shot on a course, incapable of anything but one-directional flight. She’d followed that feeling, become addicted to it.
It hadn’t made her happy. It hadn’t made her more herself.
The past week, Rosemary had been so certain that her adventure was merely delayed, that she needed to get back on course, launch herself back into flight, but at no point had she really wanted to do it. She didn’t know what she wanted to do next.
She knew that she wanted to figure it out.
Chapter 20
Rosemary, Yangchen, and Yangchen’s cousin Jigme sat around Jigme’s kitchen table, mugs of hot tea in front of them, a plate of shortbread cookies with jam centers in the middle.
Jigme was taller than Yangchen, her hair entirely white and cut short. Her home sat on a corner in a run-down neighborhood of Milwaukee, near the airport. As she boiled water for the tea and Yangchen made introductions, jets took off and landed overhead every few minutes, the din nearly loud enough to drown out their voices.
Kal sat in the other room on a floral-print sofa, eyes on his phone, detached. No more than ten feet away, but it may as well have been miles. He hadn’t spoken a word on the drive from Manitowoc. Yangchen and Rosemary had talked in the backseat about Beatrice and her film, Nancy and her art, the scenery, as the minutes ticked away before Rosemary’s departure.
She’d left Beatrice reluctantly, with a promise to be in touch soon. She’d thought about staying in Wisconsin—rescheduling her flight, sending Yangchen and Kal home, leaving the book to sort itself out later. She hadn’t done it because she’d been too curious to skip the drive to Milwaukee.
Ever since she first read about Yangchen Beckett, she’d wondered about her. Rosemary’s interest in the woman had only intensified since she met her and got to know Kal. Whatever the point of this journey was, she intended to see it though.
“
It was 1983,” Jigme said. “I worked as a guide.”
“No, 1984,” Yangchen corrected. “She took a man’s name, wore men’s clothes. That’s how she did it.”
Jigme toyed with the tag of her teabag. “I had no experience, but I told them a story of all the climbs I’d done and faked my way through what I didn’t know. I worked hard, trying to make myself valuable enough to earn a chance at the summit. I did very well. They let me work the highest camp, with a chance to guide the group to the very top.”
“Then the weather turned,” Yangchen said.
“Yes. A storm came through. We had to return to Base Camp, and they found out I was a woman.”
“How?” Rosemary asked.
“I drank too much tea. I was trying to rehydrate after so many days on the mountain. I hobbled out of the tent to find somewhere to relieve myself, but I didn’t go far enough from camp. One of the men found me squatting and told the others.” Jigme smiled as though the story were funny, but Rosemary felt the pressure of Jigme’s disappointment deep in her gut.
It raked up her own memories of Everest—the intensity of the experience, the wanting that replaced thinking, replaced faith, replaced sensible decision-making.
She was lucky to have made it off the mountain alive.
“I don’t see why it should have mattered you were a woman,” Rosemary said. “You’d been guiding all season. Obviously you were competent.”
But there were no female Sherpa guides, even now.
“It wasn’t obvious to them,” Jigme said. “I had lied about being qualified.”
“You only lied because you saw no other way to have what you wanted,” Yangchen said.
“I wanted to go to the top.” Jigme’s voice was wistful. “I think it must be very beautiful there. I used to dream that it would be like a meadow, with golden and blue flowers.”
“It’s windy and cold,” Yangchen said. “The view is poor.”
“I’m not stupid. But I wanted to see for myself.” Jigme turned back to Rosemary. “I have a nephew who has been to the summit. He was lost in the avalanche. Not this one, the one before. I minded him as a baby alongside my daughter, nursed him when his mother had to travel to another village for work. So I think, at least some part of me has been to the top of the mountain.”
“I’m sorry you lost your nephew.”
Jigme sipped her tea. “It’s dangerous work.”
Kal shifted on the sofa. Rosemary wondered why he’d decided to keep himself apart. Was it anger over their desire to climb? Only megalomaniacs and the wounded climbed Everest—that’s what he’d told her. Did he think his aunt was a megalomaniac, too? That Rosemary was? Or wounded, like his mother?
Rosemary didn’t feel mentally ill, and she didn’t believe she’d lost her mind on the mountain—at least, not any more than the other climbers had. Jigme and Yangchen seemed perfectly rational. Jigme had her reason for climbing, just as Rosemary did.
“Do you have a recorder?” Yangchen asked.
“I have an app on my phone.” Rosemary tapped the app open and showed it to Yangchen.
Yangchen took the phone and examined the app’s display. She pressed the record button. The milliseconds began whirring by, preserving the sounds of Jigme measuring sugar into her cup as a jet passed by overhead, of tea being poured, of silence.
“Merlin climbed Everest three times,” Yangchen said. “They gave him endorsement money selling carabiners and water bottles. Never mind that I knew Jigme, she’d been up and down the side of the mountain ten or fifteen times in one season. She didn’t go to the top only because she was a woman. They want to look at the men, even when the women do the work.”
Yangchen looked at Rosemary. She nodded.
Go on.
“So Merlin, he starts his own guide service, fully booked. Forty-five thousand dollars a person. Merlin didn’t know how to outfit climbers. He had me in charge of buying oxygen, regulators, hiring his Sherpa team. I took the phone calls, bought permits, everything. But everyone looked at him. They looked at him so hard, and they saw nothing. They didn’t see him shouting, getting angry all the time, so I have to manage his feelings like he is a small child. They didn’t see him hit me. They looked away from the bruises on my face and my arms.”
She stared at the recorder.
Rosemary felt the silence move across her skin, knew that Kal was listening, unmoving, in the other room.
“He pushed me to the ground at Base Camp in front of a dozen men, but no one saw it. He was still Merlin Beckett, legendary Everest climber. He hit my children, broke Kalden’s arm, cut open Tenzing’s eyebrow when he was only a baby and I had to take him to the emergency room by myself, with no health insurance. Somehow, nobody saw.” She sighed. “I told myself, you have to get away from this man. I went to the legal aid, learned how to fill out the divorce papers. I asked for custody of the children, and Merlin told them I was crazy and didn’t speak English, that I couldn’t take care of them and he should have my children.
“We went to court. Kalden spoke for me. I testified also. Merlin was so angry, he tried to choke me in front of the judge. He screamed at the judge. They arrested him. I got my divorce. I thought, this should be the end of him now, in jail, everybody saw him. I can go to Everest and climb, myself, all the way to the top. It’s my turn.”
Yangchen looked at Rosemary. Not the walking wounded. A woman who knew exactly what she wanted.
“I was wrong,” Yangchen said. “That spring, there was Merlin at Base Camp, with a dozen climbers who paid him fifty thousand dollars to lead them. I’m supposed to go to the summit the next morning. Merlin is arguing with my group leader, his people should go, not my people. The Sherpa tell me, maybe you should go home. Maybe it isn’t your time to go to the top.”
A plane flew overhead, forcing Yangchen to pause. Rosemary heard the words as a refrain. Maybe it isn’t your time.
You wanted to go to the top. You thought it was your turn, you did everything you could to make it happen, but maybe not. Because you’re a woman.
Her fury was clean, white-hot and satisfying.
“Then Kalden is at my tent, he’s moping, he said something to make his father angry. I told him to stay away from Merlin, but he couldn’t stop himself from poking the tiger, and I leave to go to Merlin’s tent, because it’s what I have always done, for many years. I think it’s my job to fix Merlin so he won’t be angry with Kalden. But Merlin isn’t himself. He’s angry, that’s normal, but he doesn’t make any sense. He grabs a fistful of his shirt, again and again, pulls his clothes away from his neck. I think, I know what that is. He’s sick. His lungs aren’t working right. Maybe he got a virus in the Khumbu, that happens, and he came to the mountain with his lungs weak, but he didn’t know it. Or something else.
“I tell him he needs to see the doctor. He attacks me, holds me down with his hands on my throat, hits me, and I think I’m going to die, finally he’s going to kill me. Then he grabs at his shirt again and I get away, run out of the tent. He comes after me. Nobody sees. No one is there, this big camp always full of people, but I’m alone with Merlin, running, and I realize he’s not behind me anymore. He’s nowhere. I go back to look. He’s fallen, tripped on a rock and hit his head. It’s broken. I know there’s no way to save him, and I don’t try. I watch him. I feel nothing, watching him, but relief.”
Yangchen crossed her arms and looked into the room where Kal was sitting, though she couldn’t see him from her position.
Rosemary imagined Kal as a young man, waiting at Base Camp for his mother to return.
She imagined Beatrice at home, angry and confused as to why her mother had needed to leave.
“I knew right away,” Yangchen said. “People will say I killed him. He was sick, he had fluid in his lungs, but he was Merlin Beckett, dead, someone has to be blamed. I decide, I don’t care. I’m going to the top of the mountain. He can’t stop me. No one can stop me. I left in the morning. It was the easiest thing. Only wal
king. I walked right to the top. Merlin did it, everyone gave him praise, said he was special. But I did it seven times, and nobody cared. That’s okay. I didn’t do it for them.”
She went to the kitchen, took a glass from the drain board, and ran water from the tap. The house was silent as she drank it, and Rosemary thought, yes.
Yes, this was it.
This was what she was meant to be doing. Pursuing these moments, in rooms like this one, among women like Yangchen and Jigme, Beatrice and Nancy.
This was her Everest, her Seven Summits.
These were the stories Rosemary wanted to tell—women’s stories. Her own story. Not just because they inspired and interested her, but because she felt instinctively that it was right for her to dig deeper into this world in the aftermath of the avalanche and her failed plan to climb the Seven Summits, in the flotsam and jetsam of her divorce and what she’d tried to do afterward.
She wanted to live in this broken-open emotional place, to walk the turned earth of her ambition, to get more intimate with life and death and the space in between by gathering other women around her and listening to them, feeling with them, thinking with them.
This was her work.
At the base of the mountain, she’d wanted to climb it because it was so big. Not for attention. Not because she’d gone crazy, or was so wounded that she required a journey to heal. It was the same feeling she’d had as a young bride, when Winston showed her the massive pile of rot and disaster that was to be their home. She’d felt certain the work was too enormous, too overwhelming, for her to be able to hold it all in her head at the same time, but in the end that was the part she liked about it: that she could tackle the task, break it down into smaller pieces, count her steps to the top.
It was never about the mountain. It was about the work. Her work.
This was the work she wanted to do now, and in the future. To find stories like Yangchen’s or Jigme’s or Nancy’s and make them louder, to make them so loud they became impossible to ignore.
“Thank you,” she said, from her heart.
Yangchen replied, “You’re welcome.”