“You didn’t die,” I offer.
“Nope.”
“Was it awfully dangerous?”
He smiles a bit. “A little.”
“How old were you?”
“I was nineteen…almost twenty. Took a gap year after high school.”
“That’s a year off?”
He nods. “It had been a dream of mine since I was a kid.”
I think of kid Declan dreaming of scaling a mountain. I remind myself to ask later about photos of wee Sailor. Perhaps there are some on his phone. “Who went with you?”
“This guy from my class, Farhad. We didn’t really like each other that much, but we both wanted to do it.”
“At the end, did you care more for one another?”
He smiles. “Oh yeah. We still keep in touch. He climbs for a living now.”
“That’s possible?”
“If you’re fucking crazy.” He smiles fondly, and I hug his chest.
“Do you have photos? Of the summit?”
“You know…I might. I uploaded some old stuff before I left.”
He reaches under the covers and pulls out his phone.
“Ever-present.” I give a teasing laugh.
“Damn Americans. So obsessed with their world-class technology.”
“Touché.”
I peer at the phone’s screen as he scrolls through what appear to be thousands of teeny images. His thumb slows its movement on the screen, and I catch views of what I think must be his journey here. Snapshots of men in baseball garb…a snapshot of a sleek car. The images are so clear; they seem unreal to me.
“The quality is incredible.”
“Yeah, these things are like computers. Let me see…” He slows a bit more in his scrolling, and I see an image that stops my heart: Declan, with his eyes taped shut and stickers on his face and a thick tube in his mouth. It’s gone the moment my eyes focus on it.
I grab at his wrist. “Wait!”
“What?”
“Back there…”
He chuckles. “I just flipped through like five years of pictures.”
“May I see it?”
“Which one?”
I shake my head. I mean the phone. When our eyes meet, he frowns. Then he pulls his gaze away; he tilts the phone’s screen away.