And then the news had finally come: Vanwasdead. His body already being transported to a hospital near the airport to be readied for the trip home.
We all got drunk. It didn’t take much. We weren’t any less sad, but after a while it became harder to feel. And then, well, I didn’t really remember.
I checked my watch: 6:13 a.m.
Someone coughed—inmy tent. I startled.
“It’s okay. It’s okay,” Richard said. When I rolled over, he leaned across the tent and handed me my water bottle. “Here, drink this.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Bakari was right about the whiskey,” Richard said. “It hit us hard. You most of all. Probably a body mass thing, but you just put your head down on the table all of a sudden. You were half asleep while we walked you back here and got you into your sleeping bag. You okay now?” Richard looked sad sitting on his sleeping bag in the pale morning glow in the tent.
“Yes, I think I’m…really hungover? Or that could be altitude.”
“Both, probably. Or the shock,” Richard said.
“Is Van really…”
Richard nodded and looked away. “Yeah. It’s going to be so brutal—his wife, you know? They just—they were really, really in love. Not just married, you know? She’s going to be dev—” His voice cut out.
“I’m so sorry.” I reached out and put a hand on his hiking boot. I meant to do it only for a second. I intended to lift my hand away. But I could not. I did not.
Richard and I were kissing before I fully realized what was happening. It was tentative at first. But then we exploded against each other, hands digging under layers of clothing to find bare skin. I was on top of him, my hips pushed forward against his. Hands searching every part of each other. It wasn’t until I reached for his belt that I felt a jolt of shame. I was already pulling away when I heard a voice outside the tent.
“Hello, Frankie.”
A moment later, Kito was inside squatting beside me, checking my numbers: 92 over 89. Solid, by any measure. I’d had to stall and stall before slipping the pulse oximeter onto my finger, chatting until my heart had slowed.
“You will be okay,” Kito said. “We will watch carefully, but we are headed down now. You should quickly improve. We will have breakfast and then set off.”
“Thanks, Kito,” Richard said. “We’ll be over in a second.”
After he left, Richard sat back down on his sleeping bag. The silence grew long and heavy.
I will not let myself confuse need with love.
“You really spent the whole night in here?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Richard said, his eyes on his watch as he adjusted and readjusted it. “I was worried.”
“Thank you,” I said. “For looking out for me.”
As the sun broke over the horizon, it set the inside of the tent on fire. We were face-to-face, Richard’s hat off, his hair tousled. I was close enough to notice the streaks of gray at his temples, the fine lines near his eyes. And yet he still looked youthful to me, and his eyes glittered with kindness. How different my life might have been if I’d met someone like Richard first, before the Senator. Before everything about me got turned inside out.
“I’ve wanted to look out for you since the second we met,” he said. Each word felt weighted. Deliberate. He was quiet for a beat. “Do you know what I mean?”
“I know exactly.”
He took my hand. But somehow the moment felt like an ending—inevitable, sad, necessary. I don’t remember who let go first.
A minute later, or an hour or five, we were packed up and headed down the mountain.
Two days later we were on our way home. In between had been hours filled with grief and gutting phone calls to the States, informing people about the accident. No calls for me, of course. I didn’t have anyone I needed to tell. And so my trip ended in a weird, stunted kind of grief. I hadn’t known Van well, and yet I knew him in such a strangely intimate way, which left me with no place to put his death.
All I had left was my longing for Richard, which also felt somehow like grief. And my hope, cut short by tragedy—which made it easy to ignore all the other problems with our connection. We still felt like an unsolved puzzle when we said goodbye at the airport.
A puzzle I knew I should not bring home to New York.
