This could only get worse, Abe decided. 'Find your medicine?' he asked. End of
conversation.
'Screw it,' Thomas said. 'Don't listen.' He stood up and left.
As a matter of principle, some climbers had a fierce aversion to women on big
mountains, reasoning that Fay Wray never belonged in the jungle in the first place
and had only accomplished getting a natural-born climber killed off in the end. Women
couldn't hack it, lacked mountain sense, and threw an expedition's clockwork off. Abe
had seen the same logic work among firemen and Colorado miners, and he passed
Thomas off as one more dinosaur.
But while the man was wrong, he was also right, for the very sight of Kelly was
starting to do something to Abe's heart. At night, Kelly's lithe silhouette trembled
against her tent fabric as she readied for sleep, and in the morning she emerged to
unfold her beauty like an angel in the clear dawn light.
She was a fraction of an inch shy of six feet tall, half of it blond hair, the other half
Hollywood legs laced with childlike scars and bruises. Abe had heard how Kelly
treated her masterpiece body with dreamy recklessness, and each time he saw the
scars, it struck him as a sort of vandalism. But that was just how Kelly proceeded
through life, bumping and tearing and scraping her way up climbs, through brush, and
across the lava fields and coral reefs and hot asphalt of countless triathlons.
Abe had seen the advertising shots of Kelly and heard the stories about how she
sometimes played to her appearance, donning slit skirts and painting her nails with
fuck-me glitter. But, like a snake shedding its skin, she would plunge into the
wilderness all over again where her nails would be broken, her hair tangled with pine
needles, her arms and legs bruised and torn.
Their other women, Gabriella Gustafson – Gus, as she preferred it in her clipped
British Columbian manner – lived with Daniel on the opposite side of the hospital, and
she was a different concoction. Abe thought of her as night, in part for the color of her
cropped hair, but more because Kelly so completely inhabited what he thought of as
day.
Gus was all business, Kelly all play. Gus had the green eyes and carved cheekbones
of a Highlander princess, but a stern homely slash for lips, and she was notorious for
her hair-trigger readiness to compete at the top levels, what was known as 'punching
out the guys.' Her resume as a hard-core mountaineer included some of the wildest
routes in North America. She and Daniel had once pioneered a new line in the
Karakoram range of Pakistan, and two separate parties had suffered casualties trying
to repeat it. Abe had heard of Gus, though always in terms of her machinelike
strength and endurance. No one gossiped about her being a girl climber or a husband
hunter or a black widow. She was a climber – a climber's climber, and she belonged to
Daniel, or Daniel belonged to her, Abe couldn't quite tell how it was, not until their first
night of the full moon.
It was after dinner. The afternoon winds had died early, giving them a respite from
the cold. Their garden thermometer, tied to a ski pole beside the mess tent, was
registering a relatively balmy 10 degrees Fahrenheit. In the distance, Everest
hovered like the ghost of an Egyptian pyramid, triangular and alabaster and remote.
No need for his headlamp. When he entered his tent it was in darkness. It took a
moment to see that someone was already there.
Stripped to the waist and bent over in the semidarkness, the climber was busily
scrubbing his face with one of the hundreds of surgical wipes Abe had made available.
The moon was cutting the tent's interior into black and silver tatters, and that made it
impossible to tell who the person was. He studied the bare glittering back, sorting
through the possibilities, and decided it was probably Robby.
Zebra-striped with moonlight, he had one of those precision-built climber's bodies,
95 per cent fat-free. Flaring latissimus dorsi joined at the spine in tightly knit
striations. An ugly lightning-shaped scar scuttered off one trapezoid and across the big
rib cage. And a tattoo of some kind peeked insolently above the elastic waistband of
his surfer pants. His physicality was branded sharply. He belonged to the wilderness.
'It's a warm night,' Abe greeted the climber.
'Doc?' the climber answered, straightening up and turning around.
It wasn't Robby. It wasn't even a man. It was Gus.
Abe didn't know what startled him more, her quicksilver nipples or the corrugation
on her stomach or her indifference to his shock. Indeed her attitude seemed to dare
him.
Gus made no attempt to hide her nakedness. She just stood there, her white eyes
locked on Abe's. He felt paralyzed by Gus's metamorphosis from man to woman. Her
red hair was bunched up beneath a baseball cap. Abe saw that now. And her skin was
gleaming.
'I was just washing up,' she said. Warshing hoop.
'I didn't know you were here,' Abe said. 'I'll step out.'
'Why? It's your tent,' Gus dryly observed.
So it was. She was telling him to stay.
Abe passed his eyes down her body. He did it quickly, trying to disguise it as an
afterthought. She had a bodybuilder's pectoral ridgeline, and to the sides stood her
breasts, almost supernaturally round.
Gus was watching his eyes. She was letting him look. For a moment, a vain instant,
Abe thought she was trying to seduce him. In a way she was.
'I know about you,' she said, then started to towel herself off. 'Daniel told me.' Still
facing him, she took her sweet time with the towel, but the eroticism was gone. If it
was his attention – or confusion – Gus had wanted, she had it.
'What did Daniel say?'
'No big secrets. I've known about his dead Diana ever since I met him. And I've
known as much about you as Daniel has, which is next to nothing. You did the
death-watch with his girlfriend. Your name is Abe. That's all we knew.'
All? Abe wondered. He wanted that to be all they knew. He wanted the past to be
done.
'So you buried her,' Gus said. She reached for an undershirt and pulled it over her
head. For all her seriousness, she could not help but luxuriate in her cleanness. The
shirt slid across her bare skin.
'You could say that.'
'Yeah,' she said. 'Anyway, I have a favor to ask.'
Abe felt oddly exposed. This stranger had just washed her body in front of him as if
his desire were irrelevant. Something close to contempt laced her attitude, and that
threw Abe because he'd done nothing to deserve it. Not if she knew nothing.
'What do you want?' Abe asked.
'Between you and me, okay?'
'Fine.' Was that her reason for presenting her nakedness then, to create a precedent
of secrecy between the two of them?
'Good,' she said. 'I know this is the very beginning of the climb. But I want you to
stay away from Daniel. And I'll keep him away from you.'
Abe gawked at her with a mute farmboy look. First Thomas had warned him away
