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“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.
