Near Mum. With Mum. But holding herself back, afraid to risk too much, ready to be offended.
Rosemary squeezed her daughter’s thin shoulders and rested her cheek against the top of her head.
“You’re squishing me to death.”
“I’m horribly selfish.”
“I don’t want to go to lunch.”
“All right.”
“I’d rather get back to Nancy’s and start editing this footage, if it’s all the same to you.”
It wasn’t all the same, but Rosemary had extracted as much intimacy from her daughter as she was going to get for the moment.
Still, she didn’t let go. Holding her daughter made her feel…clear. And clear was different. In the past few years, she’d felt directed, ambitious, purposeful—an arrow shot on a course, incapable of anything but one-directional flight. She’d followed that feeling, become addicted to it.
It hadn’t made her happy. It hadn’t made her more herself.
The past week, Rosemary had been so certain that her adventure was merely delayed, that she needed to get back on course, launch herself back into flight, but at no point had she really wanted to do it. She didn’t know what she wanted to do next.
She knew that she wanted to figure it out.
Chapter 20
Rosemary, Yangchen, and Yangchen’s cousin Jigme sat around Jigme’s kitchen table, mugs of hot tea in front of them, a plate of shortbread cookies with jam centers in the middle.
Jigme was taller than Yangchen, her hair entirely white and cut short. Her home sat on a corner in a run-down neighborhood of Milwaukee, near the airport. As she boiled water for the tea and Yangchen made introductions, jets took off and landed overhead every few minutes, the din nearly loud enough to drown out their voices.
Kal sat in the other room on a floral-print sofa, eyes on his phone, detached. No more than ten feet away, but it may as well have been miles. He hadn’t spoken a word on the drive from Manitowoc. Yangchen and Rosemary had talked in the backseat about Beatrice and her film, Nancy and her art, the scenery, as the minutes ticked away before Rosemary’s departure.
She’d left Beatrice reluctantly, with a promise to be in touch soon. She’d thought about staying in Wisconsin—rescheduling her flight, sending Yangchen and Kal home, leaving the book to sort itself out later. She hadn’t done it because she’d been too curious to skip the drive to Milwaukee.
Ever since she first read about Yangchen Beckett, she’d wondered about her. Rosemary’s interest in the woman had only intensified since she met her and got to know Kal. Whatever the point of this journey was, she intended to see it though.
“
It was 1983,” Jigme said. “I worked as a guide.”
“No, 1984,” Yangchen corrected. “She took a man’s name, wore men’s clothes. That’s how she did it.”
Jigme toyed with the tag of her teabag. “I had no experience, but I told them a story of all the climbs I’d done and faked my way through what I didn’t know. I worked hard, trying to make myself valuable enough to earn a chance at the summit. I did very well. They let me work the highest camp, with a chance to guide the group to the very top.”
“Then the weather turned,” Yangchen said.
“Yes. A storm came through. We had to return to Base Camp, and they found out I was a woman.”
“How?” Rosemary asked.
“I drank too much tea. I was trying to rehydrate after so many days on the mountain. I hobbled out of the tent to find somewhere to relieve myself, but I didn’t go far enough from camp. One of the men found me squatting and told the others.” Jigme smiled as though the story were funny, but Rosemary felt the pressure of Jigme’s disappointment deep in her gut.
It raked up her own memories of Everest—the intensity of the experience, the wanting that replaced thinking, replaced faith, replaced sensible decision-making.
She was lucky to have made it off the mountain alive.
“I don’t see why it should have mattered you were a woman,” Rosemary said. “You’d been guiding all season. Obviously you were competent.”
But there were no female Sherpa guides, even now.