Completely (New York 3)

He studied his hands, folded in his lap. Rosemary thought of Beatrice. What time was it in New York? What might her daughter be doing now, what might she be thinking?

“Do they know we’re alive?” she asked.

“Does who know?”

“The rest of the world?”

“Yeah. I mean, everybody who came off the mountain, they’ve got your name. The officials will be talking to the reporters, giving them lists of the survivors.”

Strange to think of herself as a survivor.

Strange to think that she’d been living at Base Camp, climbing the mountain, focused on the summit for weeks, months, and now abruptly it had ended in disruption and death, leaving her a survivor.

They were in Lukla. It had taken her…eight days? ten? to hike the trails from Lukla to Base Camp. But she’d been evacuated in a blink. Lukla was the only village in the Khumbu with an airport. She could walk down the road and be on a plane to the Nepalese capital city of Kathmandu inside an hour.

“What happens now?” she asked.

“We go back where we belong.”

“That seems…” She didn’t know what word she was searching for. Something like impossible, or irresponsible. Neither of those things.

She’d spent two years planning, and she’d never planned for this. Rosemary didn’t know what it meant. Either her adventure was over when it had barely begun, or this was merely the first dramatic setback in a longer tale, like the moment in a Nile adventure when they lost the boat, found themselves stranded on a spit of sand.

It was times like this that people discovered what they were made of.

You fucked a stranger.

Unhelpful.

“Where’s the rest of my team?”

“They flew out already.”

“To Kathmandu?”

“Yeah.”

Probably there would be a message on her dead phone’s voicemail from Indira. Her laptop would hold the first of many emails she and Indira would exchange to put the pieces back together.

Rosemary found she didn’t want to look. Not yet.

“Isn’t there more we could do? To help?”

He shook his head.

She knew he had to be right. The dire medical cases would have already been evacuated, and as for assisting in the rescue efforts, digging for survivors—there were only two ways to get to Everest Base Camp. No one would put her on a helicopter, not given what she’d just been through. She had no useful skills, even if she could make the eight-day trek back to Base Camp, there wouldn’t be anything for her to do by the time she got there.

She looked at her companion. His shoulders were broad, the muscles of his upper arms well developed, powerful. But the soft bed yielded to his weight in a way that made her aware of his resignation, an ache in his heart that matched the pain she couldn’t quite catch up to.

He’d survived, too. Neither of them had begun to figure out a way to put it in any kind of frame or context that might lighten it, make it more bearable.

She didn’t know how to go home.

She didn’t even know, really, what home meant to her.

Beatrice.

“I killed my mobile,” she said. “When I got out of bed.”