Before
Frankie
I’m legitimately drunk by the time Richard and I leave Las Nacionales.
It’s not an accident. I noticed I was getting buzzed an hour in and decided to double down.
Had that third glass of wine. Maybe I want to lose my grip.
Be too drunk to be fully accountable. I trip on the threshold on our way out and almost take a header.
“Whoa! You okay?” Richard reaches back to catch me, his strong hand grabbing my forearm. It’s sudden and forceful.
“Sorry,” I say. “I think I drank too much.” Ugh. I am a car crash in slow motion.
I was drunk that first night with the Senator. Not drunk enough to have been incapacitated. But drunk enough to let myself make decisions I might not otherwise have made.
This time is different, though. What if this is even real—Richard and me? Yes, he’s married. That’s one thing these situations have in common. But love happens. It changes things. People. The curve of the earth.
God, is that what I’m thinking? That he loves me? No. That isn’t it, exactly. I am not that far gone. But there’s a feeling in my body when I’m around Richard—I’m utterly calm and hyperkinetically alive at the same time. It’s a feeling I don’t want to let go of.
We’re halfway down the block before Richard breaks the silence. “I’m sorry if I overreacted back there, grabbing you. When you stumbled, my brain went straight to Van—”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize. It really doesn’t take much for me to think about it,” he says. “My mind just inevitably goes to…”
“I’m sorry. It must be so hard,” I say. “And I know I’ve said I’m sorry a million times before, but I don’t know what else to say.”
“I don’t think there is anything else to say.” Richard shrugs. “I was talking to his wife today. She wanted some advice about how to invest, now that the sale has gone through.”
“At least she doesn’t have to worry about money.”
“That’s true,” Richard says. “But she was saying how much she wished she still had the restaurants now. They were such a part of Van, you know. They would have been something of him she had left. It was truly heartbreaking. That’s the thing about being married so long…”
We fall silent then. The talk of marriage has shifted things. Maybe it’s for the best.
“You want to hear something awful?” Richard asks.
“I don’t know—do I?” Not if it’s about his marriage.
“Sometimes I wish I’d seen what happened on the mountain.” He sighs. “Maybe it would be easier to process. Because as it is, it’s just a void. It’s hard not to fixate.”
“I understand,” I say. “I’ve thought that myself. That maybe it would feel more real that way.”
“Wait—I thought you did see it?”
I shake my head. “No, I was in front of Van. Behind Scotty.”
“Oh,” Richard says. He looks puzzled. “I thought somebody told me you were at the back. Maybe Brooks—I don’t remember.”
“Who knows? It was all such chaos after. But I was definitely ahead of him. Kito, too. He came up to check on me. Maybe if he hadn’t—”
“No, no. Don’t do that to yourself,” Richard says.
“Scotty was the one who suggested we move out of the deep sand. That put us on that edge. But I’d never blame him for that.
Van tripped at the worst possible moment.
It was an accident. A horrifying one.” We’re walking in the general direction of my apartment, I realize.
“Like I was saying at dinner, it’s better for all of us not to judge ourselves by the mistakes we’ve made…
” He gives me a quick side-eye I know is meant to be playful, but it feels like I’ve been poked with something sharp.
“Ah, so I’m the mistake.” I think about that night on the mountain, after Van died. Of course I do. I haven’t really ever stopped thinking about it. “Or I’m making a mistake?”
Richard stops and closes his eyes, a hand on his forehead. When he finally lowers his hand and looks at me, his eyes are heavy, sad. Their usual bright blue turned almost gray.
“You could never be a mistake, Frankie.”
* * *
As we headed toward Arrow Glacier Camp at the end of day six, the hiking had become much harder.
The altitude was part of it, and the wind had picked up, blowing nonstop in our faces.
There was also the cumulative toll of the preceding days: My legs felt wobbly and my eyes burned with exhaustion.
The ground was more uneven, too. Loose rocks between volcanic sand slid underfoot.
With every passing day, the terrain seemed born of a completely different planet—none of them Earth.
But, my God, was it breathtaking, just as Kito had promised.
Especially when the sun broke free of the clouds, or, rather, once we had broken free of the clouds.
Ahead of us the summit loomed, looking deceptively close even though it was still a day or two away.
Below us on either side, smaller mountains, ringed by their own clouds, marked just how far we had already come.
A vast space opened up inside of me. I felt infinite.
“By the way, thank you for pressing Van to be careful yesterday,” Richard said when we stopped for water.
Scotty, Van, and Brooks were standing a little distance away, all smiles.
Van, who had been visibly struggling the day before, was now eating a package of energy gummies with gusto, an encouraging sign.
“He seems better today.”
“Luckily. But it was good you made him take a second and think,” he said. “As close as we are, we hold back on doing that kind of thing.”
“Looking out for each other, you mean?” I asked.
“Ha. Fair enough.” Richard smiled slightly. “That’s what I like about you, Frankie.”
“What’s that?”
“You’re no bullshit. Most people don’t have access to their own truth, much less anyone else’s.” He hesitated, choosing his words carefully. “You tell it like it is. It’s probably that eye of yours. You see the world more clearly than most people.”
“It’s easy to coach from the sidelines. I’m not sure I’m very good at facing things in my own life.”
“Maybe you will be after this,” he said gently. “Maybe we all will be.”
“I hope so.”
Everyone was slipping back into their packs.
Kito looked our way as he tugged on his hat and clipped his bag closed in front of his chest. He was more patient than Bakari, who didn’t hesitate to shout orders.
Kito would wait, smiling pointedly until we eventually got moving.
Each approach, it turned out, was a comfort in its own way.
Richard stepped forward, adjusting his sunglasses and hiking his shoulders up against a fresh blast of cold wind. “You can see it in your work, too.”
It took me a beat to process. “What do you mean?”
“Clarity. Honesty. It’s in your paintings.”
It was what I aimed for first and foremost in my work—to tell the truth. About love and sex and what it meant to live as a woman, both painfully exposed and dangerously hidden at the same time.
Richard started walking toward Kito.
“But, wait—you haven’t even seen my work,” I called after him.
“Sure, I have.” He paused and turned around. “Before we came, I looked you up, too.”
“But you pretended you hadn’t when Brooks mentioned it?”
His eyes lingered on mine. “Apparently so, Frankie.”
* * *
“Everybody should be eating, eating, eating!” Bakari commanded when he entered the dining tent hours later. We’d finally stopped for the night at Arrow Glacier Camp, 16,076 feet. Such a big number. Yet still three thousand feet to go, most of it in a single day.
Tomorrow we would cross the Western Breach.
I was feeling okay about it, though. Maybe because I’d been so distracted by the way Richard had looked at me earlier, how he’d talked about my art.
The men I dated never looked at any part of me very closely except for my naked ass.
And that wasn’t even a criticism. I loved them in part for their shallowness, didn’t I?
It helped me stay skating safely on the surface of things.
It felt stupid even calling it dating, though.
Fucking. I fucked different people for a little while here or there.
Fucking and going to the movies and to museums. They were nice guys; some of them were even good huggers.
But that was it. In the end, it all felt so empty and lonely.
I did a good job of pretending otherwise, but that was the truth.
“Kito will check everyone’s numbers, and then we should get to bed,” Bakari said. He ladled soup into his bowl and took a grilled cheese sandwich from the buffet. “We start at four a.m. tomorrow. To be ahead of sunrise in climbing the breach.”
“Ahead of sunrise?” I asked quietly. “Wouldn’t daylight be helpful?”
But no one seemed to be listening. Everyone was worried about their numbers, me included. I was feeling much worse than I had all day—unsteady, exhausted.
“Okay, who’s first?” Kito held out the pulse oximeter.
“Let’s get this over with.” Van reached for it, closed his eyes, relaxed his hands, and took a couple of deep breaths. “Ninety-three over eighty-five!” he said, beaming. “Pulled back from the edge! I feel so much better.”
“The body does adjust!” Kito said. He sounded relieved himself. “That’s why we have to be so sure to go slowly. Gives everyone a chance to come back.”
Scotty called out his numbers: 90 over 98. Then Brooks and Richard. All solid. Then me: 86 over 115. I did not say them out loud.
My numbers had crashed. I had a blinding headache, punctuated by waves of dizziness. But when you feel so consistently subpar for days, it’s hard to register when things get worse. A pulse ox lower than 85 meant mandatory evacuation. I wasn’t there yet, but I was uncomfortably close.
“Ninety over one-oh-five,” I lied, pulling my finger out.
When I glanced up, Richard, who was sitting next to me, had a taut look on his face.
He must have seen my real numbers. I wanted to ignore his concern.
But it was like being handed a poisoned glass of water when you were dying of thirst. The liquid disappeared inside me before I had the chance to consider the consequences. Love me. Love me. My need felt frantic.
The idea of Richard had crept in to undermine me. I needed that summit, now more than ever.
“Ah, we’re catching up to her finally!” Van joked.
The other men laughed somewhere out in the ether, too. But the world felt muffled and far away. Was that anxiety? The altitude? “She’s still moving faster than the rest of us,” Scotty said.
“Way faster,” Brooks added, then raised his hands. “But we’re not calling a first-place finisher until we’re all the way to the top.”
“Thank you, Brooks, for maintaining your title of most competitive man on the planet,” Richard said.
“No, no,” Bakari said. “The mountain is always the only winner.”
* * *
There’s a subway station at the end of the block. My apartment is only a couple blocks away, but Richard doesn’t know that. It’s a subway I could ride somewhere, anywhere other than here.
“We should go,” I say, gesturing vaguely. Ending the night there, before anything happens between Richard and me, is the right thing to do.
Richard seems surprised. Or maybe he’s just disappointed. I am, too. But then he nods. “Oh, okay. Yes.”
I realize he thinks I’m saying the two of us should go somewhere else—together. Somewhere more private. He’s willing to do this without any debate. Cheat on his wife of—what—thirty years? Maybe I am not the first time. I try to brush the thought aside, but now there’s a tear in our delicate fabric.
“This is me,” I lie when we reach the subway station.
Richard looks down the steps as if he has no idea what’s hidden in such a strange subterranean space. It seems possible he’s never ridden the subway.
“Let me at least drop you off at home,” he says, running a hand through his hair. His face is flushed. Mine must be, too. “My driver is around the corner.”
“Your driver?” I ask. “We took an Uber to Joyface.”
Richard smiles a little sheepishly and stuffs his hands into his pockets. “Yeah, he was, um, outside your studio. I texted him to follow and meet me there.”
“Why didn’t we—”
“I didn’t want it to seem…A driver. It’s a bit over the top. I didn’t want you to think that I…” He’s actually stammering, and it is cute. There’s no getting around it. I feel my resolve slipping.
“Oh,” I say, trying to avoid the way the streetlight is hitting Richard’s eyes. Or the way my heart is beating so hard that I think my body may be rocking along with it.
“It’s silly to take the train.” Richard points again in the direction of his car as he starts past the stairs. Simple, matter-of-fact. Let’s go.
But there isn’t anything simple about Richard and me sliding into the back seat of his car after this dizziness.
Or the conversation that will surely take place when he walks me to my door.
When he suggests he come up for a quick drink.
When I say yes. When we kiss behind a closed door, my bed within easy reach.
We are a freight train. We will crash if someone doesn’t pull the brake.
It has to be me. Right now. I will not be this person again—the other woman. No matter how different, how real, this feels. Real and right aren’t the same.
“I have to go.” I manage to smile in spite of the burn in my throat. I give Richard a quick, stiff hug before darting for the stairs. “Thank you for dinner.”
“Frankie!” he calls after me.
But I keep rushing down the stairs until I’m at the first landing, caught between one staircase leading up, one down. I look up at Richard. Ringed in light at the top of the steps, he looks beautiful. So beautiful.
The silence stretches out. But it’s light now. It feels like alchemy.
“I miss you,” he calls down finally. He presses a hand to his chest like he’s trying to wrap his fingers around his own heart. “I miss you.” The second time he says it, his voice breaks.
I grip the handrail, afraid my knees are going to buckle.
But I don’t reply. If I try to speak, I’ll start crying. Or, God forbid, I might start back up the stairs. Instead, I raise a hand, intending to wave, but it ends up more of a salute.
I hold it together for a second more, then the tears begin to fall as I run down the rest of the stairs.