Before #2
And then, suddenly, we pulled to a stuttering stop. Up ahead, Bakari was speaking to someone on a radio. I noticed a rushing sound next to us. Like the roar of a river.
“Is that sound melting water from the glacier?” I called up to Kito.
“That is the rocks,” Kito shouted back. They must have been raining to be making so much noise.
An avalanche. “Don’t worry, they are much farther away than they sound.
” He waved a hand. “And we are clear of them now.” He turned to the group and gestured behind us. “Look! Like seeing the face of God.”
We all turned, golden light pouring over our faces as the sun broke above the edge of the rise to the east, sending pink and gold beams kaleidoscoping through the swirl of clouds far below.
The ragged edge of the rock we clung to was bathed in a ruddy light.
It was beyond beautiful. Radiant. Breathtaking.
Luminous. Bliss. And, just like that, all my terror—not just from that moment but from the past twenty-two years—was swallowed by hope.
Van glanced back over his shoulder. “Holy shit. Don’t. Look. Down.”
Reflexively, we all did exactly that. The sun was up, the mist cleared. We were standing on an exposed edge of rock, nearly nineteen thousand feet in the air. Beneath us lay a bottomless abyss. One stumble and that would be it. You’d be gone.
“You’re okay,” I said out loud to myself. “You’re okay.” I repeated it over and over again as we began to move once more, praying it would stick. “You’re fine. Just don’t look down.”
—
For the next thirty or forty minutes, I was okay. I felt less underwater, and my headache had even receded. Maybe my body was equalizing, after all.
But then we hit the scramble. Like climbing an endless rock ladder, hands over feet, hands over feet.
On and on and on. Not straight vertical, but nearly.
The effort would have been intense at sea level, but at this altitude, the force of my racing heart made my chest feel like it might explode.
The clouds rolled back in as we climbed, the temperature plummeting as the wind picked up off the sheer face of the mountain.
I gripped the rocks more tightly. But we’d all put on our thickest gloves and pulled up our balaclavas, which made it hard to hold on, nearly impossible to navigate with the narrow line of sight and the blowing snow and the fog.
No, not fog. It was clouds. We were in the clouds.
Brooks was behind me, Scotty in front of me, Richard in front of him, Van all the way in the back.
Kito last. Always. But the rest of us regularly switched places anytime we paused at the occasional brief flat stretch.
We moved as a single, well-oiled machine.
Despite myself, I kept trying to catch a glimpse of the side of Richard’s face.
It was lovely even in the dull, gray light.
Lovely and reassuring. He turned back toward me then, as if he could feel me thinking about him.
He lifted a thumb, turning it left and right, asking if I was okay.
My chest felt as if it might explode with joy. What was wrong with me?
Or maybe inappropriate feelings were just human. Maybe I was. Maybe there were options other than right and wrong.
I held up my thumb in return.
“I’ve never seen him like this before,” Brooks said behind me.
“Like what?” I was sure I’d misheard him.
“He’s only ever had eyes for Gretchen as long as I’ve known him. But he’s…smitten with you.” He sounded almost impressed.
“He’s just being nice,” I said, my heart thudding. “I am here alone.”
“Seems to me you haven’t been alone since the second he met you.”
—
Three more hours of exhausting scrambling—hands and arms pulling, feet and legs driving, body screaming, fingers and palms aching, Brooks’s words humming happily in my heart—and we finally, at long last, crested the Western Breach.
We stopped and bent over, trying to catch our breath and reorient ourselves to the flat, steady earth.
A second later, Brooks started throwing up.
Richard was coughing. Scotty sat down on the ground; I found a boulder, at least. We’d made it—up the most dangerous stretch, spit out onto the surface of the moon.
Black volcanic sand stretched out in every direction, a huge, bright-white glacier in the distance like an ice cube dropped from the heavens.
Our red tents were already set up about a hundred yards away, flapping loudly in the freezing wind.
The air was so thin and sharp, each inhale felt like it was slicing my lungs.
“That is it,” Bakari said, gesturing to a ridge directly above us.
“That’s what?” Richard asked, wincing at his labored breathing.
“The summit,” Bakari said. Then he motioned to the dining tent as we braced against another gust of wind. “Come and eat lunch. Then we can discuss our options. Check how everyone is feeling.”
—
The escalating gusts of wind shook the dining tent so hard it felt like we were inside a hurricane.
We were all picking at our sandwiches—I knew I should take comfort in the fact that everyone was feeling like shit, but my headache was a vise, my fingers weirdly tingling.
My hands had fallen asleep, but there was no waking them.
It was fucking terrifying. And even worse, the feeling seemed to be creeping into other parts of my body.
Could altitude sickness trigger a stroke?
“Here we go!” Kito called cheerfully as he started circulating the oximeter.
Bakari entered the dining tent. He forced a smile but seemed tense.
“We will summit today,” he said definitively. “It’s only about an hour. Weather is moving in, so it’s better that we go now, if possible. If everyone is feeling good. And sometimes if everyone is feeling bad, it is better to go also.”
“What do you mean?” Van asked.
Bakari shrugged. “We are so close to the summit it can be faster to go up and over, then descend quickly if someone has started to feel sick.”
“Are you okay, Frankie?” Scotty asked. “You don’t look so great.”
I hadn’t realized it, but I was hunched over the table, one hand braced against it. Breathing harder than I had the whole trip. I kept squeezing my eyes shut, but my vision was definitely blurry. “I think I’m in one of those better-to-hurry-up-and-get-to-the-top situations.”
“I have dexamethasone,” Brooks said. “Do you want some?”
“What’s dexa…?” I asked. There were so many medications we’d talked about at various points for the altitude, malaria, stomach issues. I knew all about Diamox, which I was already on, but I had no idea what medication Brooks was talking about.
“It reverses cerebral edema once it sets in. Or slows it down. If that’s what’s happening,” Richard said. “Brooks’s doctor was the only one who offered it. Probably because he’s delicate.” Richard smiled at his own joke, but the concern in his eyes was unmistakable.
Cerebral edema was the part of AMS that killed you, and quickly.
I knew that much. Brooks handed me the pill as Kito gave me the oximeter: “Eighty-five, one twenty,” I said.
My numbers were worse again. A long time elapsed while we sat in silence.
Or maybe it was seconds. Time kept stuttering forward and then reversing.
There was something going wrong with my brain.
I swallowed the pill.
“I’ll be okay,” I said. “I want to finish—I need to.”
Bakari shook his head. “Sometimes it is not your day. The most important thing is to be safe so that there will continue to be other days.” He considered.
“We will wait a little while to see if the dex begins to work. There is a chance…” The usual humor in his voice was gone.
“If your numbers do not improve, we will call for evacuation.”
I nodded.
“For now, everyone eat quickly and drink,” Bakari said. “Especially you, Frankie. Even if you do not want to.” He exited the tent again.
I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it, but the fog lifted slightly as I finished my soup. Even the tingling in my hands had lessened—the dex, maybe. It was designed to act fast, though admittedly not that fast.
“Thank you, Brooks,” I said. “I think the medication is starting to work.”
“Good,” he said, shooting a look in Richard’s direction. “Side benefits of not being overconfident.”
When I’d finished my bottle of water and drunk some tea, Kito passed me the pulse oximeter. Everyone watched as I inserted my finger and fixed my gaze on the flashing red dashes, waiting for the results to appear.
Eighty-eight over 100.
“Improving! Good. How do you feel?” Kito asked.
“Better, actually,” I said. “My hands are still tingling a little, and my vision isn’t perfectly clear. But everything else—the headache and the nausea—is lessening.”
“Her numbers are better,” Kito said to Bakari as he came back into the tent.
But Bakari’s eyes narrowed as he regarded me seriously.
“We can very easily, very safely take you down now. It is always a risk to continue. A very big risk. People do die, Frankie. Not often. But, as we have said, it happens. Do you want to continue?” He wanted to be sure the moment he put my life in my own hands was made very, very clear and for the record.
“But with your numbers improving, the decision is now yours.”
“I want to finish,” I said without hesitating. “Yes.”
“Okay.” Bakari nodded. “And everyone else is okay to continue? We are one hour with a very steep incline, poor footing, but no scramble. Then—the summit.”
A chorus of quiet but sturdy yeses from the group. All ready. We slowly gathered our things, adjusting our gear as we had done countless times in the preceding six days. But this was it. The end.
There was still a chance for me to become someone else, or maybe to be all the parts of me—even that seventeen-year-old girl I judged so mercilessly.
“Okay, then,” Bakari said, turning to face the mountain. “Slowly, slowly. To the summit.”
* * *
“Frankie—what’s wrong?” Noah sounds startled and half asleep when he finally answers his phone. It’s nearly 2:00 a.m. He keeps his phone on at night only when he is on call, and I’d been crossing my fingers tonight would be one of those nights. “What time is it?”
I hear Max in the background. I can’t make out the words, but he sounds pissed.
“I can call back in the morning. I’m not—it’s not—my life isn’t in imminent danger. I don’t think.”
“Hold on one second. Just let me…” There is rustling, followed by a quiet thud, presumably his bedroom door closing. “Okay, what’s going on?”
“No, I just—” My voice cracks. I try to compose myself. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”
“I’ll be right there.”
“But Max—”
“Will be annoyed. And then he will get over it. Let’s face it: One more knock against you won’t matter.”
—
Twenty minutes later Noah and I sit on my couch side by side. He is holding my phone, studying the texts from the Senator. And the photos.
“I don’t understand. What does he even want?” He scooches closer to me on the couch and zooms in on the last photo.
“To keep me quiet, I guess? But I’ve been quiet all this time, so it doesn’t really make sense…Anyway, I keep asking, and he won’t answer.”
Noah is wearing an old T-shirt and pajama pants underneath his jacket. I still feel bad that I woke him but also validated by how shocked he seems by the messages.
“You need to go to the police, Frankie,” he says. “This isn’t optional anymore.”
The jig is officially up. It is time to come clean with Noah about the NDA. Something I should have done a long time ago. My behavior really doesn’t make sense otherwise.
“I can’t.”
“Frankie, I know you don’t want to, but the way he’s responding to you…It’s really disturbing. Like he’s had some kind of psychotic break.”
“I know. But it’s more complicated than that.”
“I don’t think it—”
“I signed an NDA,” I plunge ahead, before he can respond. “I took four hundred and fifty thousand dollars in return for never talking about what happened between us at your parents’ house, or after. I’m not supposed to ever mention his name in any context.”
Noah crosses his arms. “What are you talking about?”
“I told you that his wife found out, remember?”
“Yeah, I remember that,” he says, and he seems so confused. But only for a beat. “Holy shit. Your ‘inheritance’ from your great aunt.” He seems hurt as he looks around my apartment like he’s tabulating the cost of all my things.
“I was embarrassed, Noah.” My face feels hot.
Noah is on his feet now. “So you lied to me for more than twenty years—because you were embarrassed?” He is really, really angry. Of course he is.
“I didn’t lie,” I lie.
Noah paces, shaking his head. I can practically see him flipping through a catalog of all the variations of lies I’ve told him over the years.
“I’m sorry. I was seventeen, Noah, and I was confused and upset and…”
“No, no, no.” His voice is icy. “Because what about last week and last year and the year before that?” he asks, his eyes glassy.
There is sadness beneath the anger. “Were you young and confused then, too? I’ve risked my marriage to be there for you, Frankie.
Time and again. And you’ve been— I don’t even know who you are. ”
I search his eyes for a way in. He always leaves a crack for forgiveness. “I’m sorry, Noah,” I say. “I am so sorry.” Because what else is there to say?
But it’s clear something is broken between us. “Me, too, Frankie,” he says on his way out the door. “Me, too.”