order, there was still time to come back and break through Everest's glass ceiling. The
route's most serious obstacle, the Shoot, was now tamed. They had captured it with
their ropes and it was open to passage. From here to the summit was only another
2,500 vertical feet, a matter of one more camp, maybe two, a week or a fortnight, no
more, and suddenly it seemed they were very close indeed.
'Close,' Abe agreed. 'But we have to go down.' Descent was imperative. They had
wounds to lick. And with Jorgens and Carlos out of the picture, and Thomas on his
mutiny, the entire effort had to be reassessed. Even if the team could pull together
the numbers for a summit bid, it didn't have the strength just now. Plainly they had to
get down to Base Camp, all of them. Only then could they hope to launch the final
assault. To continue on in their condition was simply to hand the mountain three
victims.
'Yes,' Gus said. 'Down.'
'We'll come back,' said Abe.
'Yes,' Daniel said.
'Let me see your hands.'
Daniel held out his palms. Abe hissed inside his mask. On each hand, the flesh lay
peeled open in long flaps. He cleaned the flaps and laid them in place and wrapped
each hand with white tape. He used a special pattern favored by boxers and jam crack
climbers, thick across the palm, strung between the fingers. Daniel would need all the
extra padding possible for the long rappel back to ABC tomorrow.
'Anything else?' Abe asked. He knew there was. Daniel had been favouring his left
side ever since arriving at Four.
Daniel removed his jacket and pulled up his sweater and shirts. Wrapped partway
round his rib cage stood a livid bruise the size of a watermelon. The rock had bounded
between his arms, just missing the abdominal cavity. A little more to the center, the
rock might have punched in a whole section of the chest wall: flail chest sternum. At
this height a flail chest would have killed him hours ago.
Abe prodded at Daniel's huge rib cage. 'Is this tender? Here? Here?' As he probed
and interrogated, Abe took stock. A gruesome furrow tracked along Daniel's spine and
there were purplish surgery scars on his shoulder and the half-moons where they'd
gone after the tendinitis in his elbows. There were other old marks on his arms and
hands, and compared to these gouges and furrows and purpled seams, Abe's own
climbing scars looked like the hesitation marks of a fake suicide.
'Could be some hairline cracks,' he said.
'Probably just bruised,' Daniel said.
'You're lucky,' Abe said. He closed Daniel's jacket and started to lay an oxygen mask
over his mouth, but Daniel took hold of his wrist.
'I wondered about you,' he said.
Abe felt his heart sink. At long last, this was it. But why was Daniel choosing to
resurrect the past in this midnight storm so far above the earth? Their shared past
could easily wait. For that matter, it could go unspoken altogether. Half a lifetime had
passed without Abe feeling this need to dredge up the memory. What did it matter.
Because it's there? he wryly thought.
Above her mask, Gus was frowning. There was an alarm in her eyes, though Abe
allowed that could have been a trick of the light. She started to shake her head.
'I wondered what you'd be like,' Daniel said.
'Then you remembered me,' Abe said. The words billowed from his mouth, cold
layers of frost. He lifted the mask and took a deep draw.
'No. But later they told me. There was a wild kid who stayed through the end.'
'That was me.'
For a minute neither of them spoke, then Daniel did. 'It must have been spooky up
there all alone.'
There had been a time when Abe had meant to say something like that to Daniel.
But Daniel stole the march and now Abe was obliged to answer.
'I wasn't alone,' he reminded Daniel.
'They told me you went crazy,' Daniel continued. 'You quit school. You disappeared.'
This wasn't going the way Abe had thought it would. 'It wasn't that dramatic,' he
said. 'I had to think, that's all.'
'Yeah,' Daniel said.
There was no thanks. No explanation. Abe felt outmaneuvered. He had meant to
ask Daniel what he'd done with the girl's haunting voice, and maybe this was his
answer, that for him there had been no voice or at least no haunting, just a day and a
night of prayer and broken knees and then the peace of morphone and a ride out in
the litter. But Abe didn't believe it was that simple.
'And I heard about your visit,' Daniel said.
Abe looked away.
'You went to her mother's. It took a while to get it all figured out. But we figured it
out. Some kid with wire-rims and a swamp drawl. You.' Daniel paused. 'In the middle
of the night? You terrified her.'
'I know.' Abe barely heard himself.
'She was already out of her head.'
'Yes.'
Behind the mask, Abe bit at his torn lips. This was the part that shamed him. All
over again he remembered the windblown trailer park outside Rock Springs and near
the back of a lone trailer with a burned-out lightbulb over a makeshift porch. It had
been late spring, a cold Wyoming night with no stars, and right through the aluminum
paneling he had heard a dog barking inside and footsteps as she came to the door.
Abe felt old vertigo now, just the way it had been when the old woman's voice had
asked who it was through the door. And then the handle had turned and the door had
opened. Abe felt himself spinning desperately with no solid footing. He could feel Gus's
eyes on him. She had not heard this story yet. Her confusion was becoming wonder,
though. She had pulled off her face mask, too. The oxygen has suffused her features
with color, highlighting their ravages.
'But why?' Daniel said. He seemed genuinely perplexed. Probably he had been angry
about it once, maybe he still was. But right now what Abe heard was pure curiosity.
Indeed, thought Abe. All he'd gotten were more tears and more heartbreak. What
more had he thought there was to get? 'I wondered, that's all. I was seventeen. I could
hear her voice. But I'd never seen her face.'
'But why?'
Abe shrugged helplessly.
'We didn't tell her about how long Diana lived,' Daniel said. 'We didn't tell her for a
reason. She didn't know, not until you came along.'
'I know.' Abe remembered how her eyes had grown wider, but by then it had been
too late to stop and he'd told everything. He had put her through the whole tale. She
hadn't said stop so he'd made her die all over again with her dead daughter.
'It was bad enough,' Daniel murmured.
'I know.'
The three of them huddled there for another few minutes while the hanging
