“I’m still not happy about this, but I guess Luke is better than someone I don’t know. But you two need to be more discreet. You do not want Jim to find out about it. In fact, this is serious enough that if you were not my daughter, I’d tell him myself. But because you are, and because I know Luke—even though I’d like to wring his neck right now—I know you two will be responsible and not let a personal relationship get in the way of what you need to do to protect your clients.”
“Of course,” I said, though I didn’t see the difference between Luke and me guiding together and Dad guiding with his own daughter along on the trip. But then, that probably should never have happened, either.
Dad plucked a cookie from the basket on the table. I took this as a good sign that he was going to stop talking about Luke. He took a bite, frowning as he chewed.
“I didn’t make them,” I said.
He set the cookie down and didn’t eat the rest of it. Take that, Randall.
“So how come you thought I was thinking about going to Tanzania?” I asked. “That’s kind of random.”
“You applied for a CentralPoint job, didn’t you?”
I looked at him oddly. “Yes, but what does Tanzania have to do with that?”
“You probably haven’t checked your email since you got down.”
“No.”
“Barrett Browning called me on the satellite phone about it yesterday.”
“Barrett Browning as in the CEO of Esplanade Equipment?”
“Yes. You’ve met him. On that Island Peak trip.”
I barely remembered. I was only fourteen that year.
“CentralPoint’s a pet project of his, and when the human resources department saw your application and recognized your name, they forwarded it to him.”
“Oh, wow. And he called you?”
“I think he just wanted an excuse to catch up, but he also wanted to make sure it was you because he’s going to email and offer you a job.”
I was speechless. I’d have somewhere to go after this! Somewhere to be. A job that didn’t involve French fries in a national park cafeteria. A job with my favorite outdoor equipment company in the world. “That’s great news!”
“Okay, so this is good? He wasn’t sure you’d be okay with Tanzania. Frankly, I wasn’t sure you’d be okay with Tanzania, but I guess you are?”
“Why do you keep saying Tanzania?”
“That’s where the pilot location is. Barrett said it’s opening midsummer.”
There was one major mountain in Tanzania: Mount Kilimanjaro. The highest mountain on the continent of Africa, and therefore one of the highly commercial Seven Summits mountains. It occasionally gets some snow on top, but it was much closer to hiking than alpine climbing.
Dad analyzed my frown. “So are you not feeling Tanzania?”
I tried to look less shocked. It was an amazing opportunity, but one mountain?
Further, Tanzania was remote and a place that had absolutely no connection to Luke.
“It’s okay if Tanzania isn’t right,” Dad said. “I would never do it. It’s beautiful but…”
But there was just one mountain.
“You know, you still have your plane ticket to Washington and, uh, with you and Luke, you might be more interested in using it now.”
“Dad!”
“I’ll be the first to admit, I’m still rooting for Washington, especially since you’d have a free place to stay with your grandparents. Or with Teresa, I hear.”
“Speaking of, do you think there might be something about Doc that you may have conveniently forgotten to tell me, for like ten years?”
His face grew red. “Like what?”
“I should make you say it after what you just put me through with Luke.”
“She’s doing her own thing now.”
“Right. Now she is. But I know it’s not that simple. You still talk all the time, and I saw her picture in your tent.”
He started nibbling on Randall’s bad-tasting cookie for distraction.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not going to press you. Because, really, I don’t want to know. But know that I know. I am on to you guys.”
“Okay, yeah, so, uh, Tshering’s waiting for me back at camp. I want you down for dinner again before you guys leave. Don’t forget.”
“I won’t.”
“And we will be discussing Jim’s decision to send eighty people up the mountain with a storm that was all but a sure bet, and what you will be doing if he tries a stunt like that during the summit bid.”
My temporary upper hand was gone. I nodded obediently.
I walked him to the door so he wouldn’t be tempted to look around for Jim and grill him personally about the storm.
We hugged good-bye.
“Your face is getting chafed, MiniBoss. You need to use more moisturizer.”
I touched my face. Yes indeed, my cheeks were rough. Thank god Dad was not hip enough to put together the low winds on Everest yesterday with Luke’s five days of stubble as the cause of the chafing.
He walked down the rock to the trail, a bit of humor in his shoulders. Shoot, maybe he was hip enough. Now it was my face turning red.
Chapter Thirty-Five
I went straight to the UW team camp to tell Luke that we’d been found out. But right as I was giving his tent a one-two shake I realized being at his tent in broad daylight like this could fuel more rumors.
Luke popped his head out of his tent, nodding for me to join him inside.
I tipped my head the other way, for him to join me outside.
He shook his head and again motioned for me to come into his tent. This was way more obvious than if I had just disappeared inside. There was no one nearby, so that’s what I did, if just for long enough to explain that we had to stop hanging out in each other’s tents. But as soon as the zipper was up, we were kissing like we hadn’t seen each other in months. His touch lit up my body, and my breathing was all over the place.
When we finally broke, I took off my jacket. It was practically subtropical in his tent with the comparatively thick air at Base Camp and the sun that had been heating it all morning.
I touched my face, which was now even more chafed.
“You need to shave, buddy,” I said, grabbing his chin playfully.
He snatched me in for another kiss.
“Okay, seriously. Mercy. Do you have any lotion?”
He tossed me a tube, and I slathered it gratefully on my face.
“So what’s the deal with Greg?”
“Shhhh. Don’t talk so loud.”
“What’s going on?” he whispered.
“The Sherpas have been talking. Dad knows about us.”
Luke’s eyes went dark. “Do you know who it was?”
“It was Cook-Phurba—talking to the Winslowe cook, Pertemba.”
He relaxed a little at this.
“Do you think the rest of the Sherpas know?” I asked.
“They think they know, and they are watching, but I’m pretty sure they don’t have any evidence, because if they did they would tell Norbu, and he would have to bring it up to Jim.”
It was Cook-Phurba’s first year on the mountain, and Randall and Jim had hired him because he’d been to a culinary trade school in Kathmandu, not because of his Mount Everest climbing connections, so perhaps our secret was safe for now.
“I’m sorry, Emily,” Luke said. “I should have been more aware. Even if we aren’t doing anything obvious, it still might seem that way to others because we’re always hanging out. People here don’t know our history like everyone at Winslowe Expeditions.”
“It’s not your fault. We’ll just have to be more careful from now on.”
He shook his head, looking so sad that I scooted in front of him and put my hands on his knees.
“We get so little time together as it is,” he said, shifting so that we were even closer and he could speak more quietly.
I nodded somberly.
/> He sighed. “This is exactly why I was upset when I found out you were guiding with Global.”
“Not because I didn’t tell you?”
“Oh, it was that. For sure. But the bigger deal was that if we were guiding for the same company, we’d have to hide anything that developed between us because it’s not allowed.”
His lips drew up into a teasing smile. “I couldn’t tell you that part when we were at the puja, could I?”
His smile fell away as quickly as it came.
“It will be really bad if more people figure out what’s going on,” he said. “I’d lose my summer job on Rainier, and it would make it much harder for you to find work.”
I nodded my head in agreement. “I tried to not come in your tent, but you were making a huge scene. Now I don’t know how to get out without being seen.”
“Then you’ll have to stay until the coast is clear. Like when everyone has left for dinner.” His words were joking, but his face was anything but.
We lay down on his sleeping bag, and I snuggled in to him. We were heavy with the knowledge that this bubble of safety we were in right now could be our last time alone together in the privacy of a tent before our night in Camp Two during the summit bid.
The next night after dinner, I snuck out to meet Luke at the place we’d done ice ax pull-ups. There were enough rocks there to partially hide us, and the closest tents were from a different expedition and too far away for people to recognize us in the dark.
He had gotten there ahead of me and was sitting on a large rock. He pulled me onto his lap as I clicked off my headlamp, burying his face in my neck and inhaling deeply. The kiss that followed blazed with yearning, making me think of not just him but of everything that I wanted. My white bungalow. Cerro Torre. Freedom in the mountains. People whom I knew long-term instead of a revolving door of fellow travelers.
“I missed you today,” he said. “I’m always wanting more of you than I can have.”
He wrapped his arms around me and rested his chin on my shoulder as we looked out over the Khumbu Glacier. It was late for Base Camp, and most climbers were in their headlamp-lit tents. Of all the glowing colors in front of us, the Swedish expedition’s tents were the prettiest of all, with their deep shade of violet fading gently into the black places on the horizon where mountains blocked the stars.
I tried to shift so that all my weight wasn’t on Luke, but he held me firmly in place. In the end, I was glad for it. The skies were clear tonight, and without the insulation of the clouds, the air was icy cold.
Satellites shuffled through the faint nebulas overhead, some moving imperceptibly slow, with others as fast as an airplane. I named the constellations silently in my head, stars that were steady like cairns in the sky no matter where in the northern hemisphere Dad and I went and no matter how remote our climb.
Luke’s lips grazed my neck as he raised his head to whisper in my ear.
“Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, enwrought with golden and silver light, the blue and the dim and the dark cloths, of night and light and the half-light…”
It was the Yeats poem. I’d read it to him just that one time, so long ago. I held my breath to see if he would continue.
“I would spread the cloths under your feet…”
His warm jaw brushed against the chilly bottoms of my earlobes, sending tingles down my arms and legs. I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want a single breath to take from the words that were coming next.
“But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet: tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
This morning, most of the UW team and some of the A-Team clients were departing for two nights in Dingboche. The higher levels of oxygen in the air at the lower elevation could be restorative, and it was some time away from the drudgery of waiting in Base Camp for the weather window to open that would kick off the summit bid. I stood behind the big top, holding a cup of coffee and watching the group disappear down the trail. The twins and Hulk were with them.
So was Luke.
We’d been able to overcome the blowup on Milam Peak, and everything about Amy was out in the open now, but neither of us had brought up the other part yet: what would happen with our relationship when the season was over. There was hardly any time left together as it was, and now we had two days fewer.
I went to the command center to check email. Barrett Browning had, indeed, emailed with a job offer as promised. I replied, thanking him and asking for time to think over his offer.
I didn’t want to go to Tanzania, but with CentralPoint being a new venture, there weren’t any other locations right now. Another problem was that out of the dozens of applications I submitted over the past weeks, Tanzania was the only job offer I had. In my inbox were lots of “application received” notices and auto-responses saying the positions were no longer open. I checked my junk folder just in case and found an email offering an in-person group interview. In Montana next week. Right.
I would apply for more jobs before our summit attempt, but it was unlikely I’d hear back from them before I needed to be on my way to a paying job. So my choice was a great job with a great company in an absolutely wrong location or…nothing?
What about Luke?
I ate lunch with Doc, who had opted to not go down to Dingboche, saying she’d get caught up on her oxygen during the trek back to the Lukla air strip after the summit bid. The next day, she and I hiked Kala Pattar together. She was a fast walker, but she was purposely trying to keep the hike low-exertion, which translated to no exertion for me, and thus my mind had all the energy in the world to wander.
I could have asked her what she thought about CentralPoint Tanzania, but I already knew what she’d say. She’d see Tanzania as something temporary—a Band-Aid that solved what I would be doing after the summit but offered nothing toward a long-term plan. Life as a series of Band-Aids was not Doc’s style.
The thing is, Tanzania was not actually a Band-Aid or temporary fix. I couldn’t just go work there for a few months until something better came along, not with Dad’s connection to Barrett Browning and how Barrett had been personally involved in hiring me. No, this was a program Esplanade was launching for the long run, and I’d need to be there two or three years before it would be okay to cut and run. Two or three years in a place without mountains.
If you don’t climb for yourself in the beginning, you might never get the chance.
Right. And I would be paying my bills how?
Sponsorship.
To get a sponsorship, I needed that seventh summit. But even then, it’s not like I’d get to the top of Mount Everest and find a magical sponsorship offer tied onto one of the prayer flags. There would still be a lot of time, work, and luck involved in this dream, and how would I pay for dinner in the meantime? How did Luke play into all this? It seemed impossible, but could he? Was there a way? And what about that white bungalow? That was a dream, too: having the permanence of a place of my own and people to come home to.
I pictured the house, this time with music playing outside on the porch for a group of people rather than me listening to it alone on my earbuds as I was accustomed. I wasn’t sure who all the people were in this vision. Roommates, perhaps? Neighbors? Friends? And, of course, my dog would be there. And a few hens. Maybe a goat?
Now I was getting carried away.
I pictured the house again, this time in the quiet, when I was the only one home. There were wet-with-dew gladiolas crowding the fence. I was fresh from a short hike in one of the state parks and, while I cooked lunch, I had the front door wide open to the fresh, chilly air.
I sighed. It would be a wonderful life.
When we got back to camp, I insisted Doc go get her nail polish remover for me. We met in the UW tent where she handed me the original bottle of polish. “You sure you don’t want to reapply?”
“Nah. I just want it off.”
She ga
ve in and exchanged the polish for the bottle of remover.
“I’ve got something else for you,” Doc said.
She dug through her backpack. “I’m assuming you’re on birth control, since periods and climbing harnesses are such a bad combo. But birth control doesn’t protect against STDs.”
It took a second for it to register that the handful of colorful, individually wrapped items she was holding out were not some sort of candy but condoms.
“Oh. Doc. No.” I wanted to die. “Not on Chomolungma!”
“You don’t believe all that, do you? You’re not even Buddhist.”
“Well—no, but it is a holy mountain.” The Winslowe Expeditions Sherpas were always linking hanky-panky on the mountain to ill-fated expeditions of years past. “Luke and I just barely started being more than friends. It’s not like—”
She rolled her eyes.
“Are you encouraging this?”
“No. Not at all. But I’m not not encouraging this. Actually, I should officially go on the record here as saying you should not do this. Since I’m old enough to be your mom and all.”
Was I supposed to be doing this, Chomolungma or not? Regardless of the minuscule length of time Luke and I had been more than friends or how little time there was left until the season was over? If this had been anyone but Doc having this conversation with me, they would assume I was playing dumb, but Doc knew me and what my life was like. Surely she knew I was dumb in this area. Was this talk a hint? Is that what Luke expected? He was twenty-two, after all. Had he had sex with Olivia?
She shoved the condoms into my jacket pocket. I was still too stunned to resist.
“I can’t even… I’m going to leave now.”
She patted me on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell Greg.”
I went back to my tent. It should have been funny. I should have been able to chuckle about this.
But instead, the whole exchange had left me ungrounded. I was all too aware of my inexperience in not just that but everything. My remaining time with Luke was slipping through my fingers. All I wanted was him, back here, in my tent under the concealment of a black and starless sky.
Leaving Everest Page 20