'It's the monsoon,' Kelly said. 'It's late.' She might have been talking about her
period, she was so morose. Her eyebrows were dark dashes in the failing light and her
golden hair black ink. Her nose was burned the cancerous red that only comes from
repeated delaminations.
'So we're finished,' Abe said.
'Not necessarily. It comes on in waves like this. There's usually breaks in between,
especially on this north side. We're in a rain shadow here. Chances are, we'll see a
window. The summit will open.' But she didn't sound pleased.
Above the rattling of snow pellets on their dome, thunder blossomed in the distance.
Without the lightning. Abe would have thought it was avalanches.
'I hope I can sleep tonight,' Kelly said.
Abe said, 'That thunder's loud.'
But Kelly shook her head no, it wasn't that. She was agitated, and her worry was
more complicated than thunder or a mere threat to her summit bid.
'Is something wrong, Kelly?'
Her white eyes flickered at him, then darted away, and she dropped her head. A
moment later she looked at him again, weighing some enormous risk, judging him.
'Yes,' she started. 'But I don't know how to tell you.'
'Don't tell me.'
'Just don't laugh.'
Abe nodded his assent.
'To tell the truth...' She faltered, then found the words. 'The other night I had this
dream.'
'Tell me,' he said.
'It's not like me,' Kelly quickly had him know. 'I don't believe in dreams. I don't talk
about them.'
'But this one...' He opened the way for her.
She looked him straight in the eyes. 'Something's going to happen up there.'
Abe let her finish.
Her voice turned timid. 'Abe. I think I'm going to die.'
For a minute, the snow clattered against the drum-tight walls and the poles creaked
under the wind's weight.
'There was a woman in a storm. She was trapped on the Hill, tangled in a rope,
upside down. Her hair was long. It was blowing in the wind. Her eyes were wide open.'
She whispered the woman's identity as if telling a ghost story. 'It was me, Abe.'
Abe didn't know what to do, argue or agree or touch her or otherwise make it all
right to have premonitions of death on the eve of danger. He suddenly seemed very
young to himself and Kelly very much older.
'I know what that sounds like.' Kelly grinned mournfully, and Abe sensed she was
about to detour into a joke at her own expense. She didn't, though. She just quit
talking.
In another setting, Abe might have tried snuffing Kelly's anxiety with some sort of
label – cyanotic hysteria or rapture of the heights, something poetic or at least
polysyllabic. But an unusual somberness had been afflicting the other climbers in the
last two days, and now he realized that it was apprehension. Except for Daniel, who
had been spared Li's vacillations, they had been plunged into their own futility and
had resigned themselves to leaving the mountain. They returned to the mountain
with all the joy of a chain gang off to hard labor.
'I want a child.' Kelly spoke it with a certain grief. 'I wasn't sure before. Now I am.'
'It was just a dream,' Abe tried to reassure her.
'I saw it.' She was clear.
Then Abe had a bright idea. 'Maybe you shouldn't go up,' he ventured hopefully.
'Don't think I haven't thought about it.'
Abe had no other solutions, so he pursued this one, even though it would not satisfy
her. 'It's okay to stay down, Kelly. You've pushed it. Nobody will say different.'
'You know that's not true.'
'It doesn't matter. Nobody has to know why. Just stay down.'
'I can't. You know that.'
Abe did. Maybe a man could have stayed down. Not Kelly. She was healthy and
strong and proud. And blond. Eventually it would get out that she'd had a bad dream.
The word would spread. The men would expect nothing less than for her to bail. She
would hear the worst from Gus. Kelly swallowed hard.
'Damn it, Abe.'
Abe heard the need. He laid aside his hesitation and slipped his arm under her
shoulder and wormed closer to hold her tight. Kelly came into his embrace with the
familiarity of a longtime lover. She settled into the crook of his arm and placed one
bare hand against his chest. It was one of the few times on this mountain when two
people could comfort each other. Usually the bad times and fear came when you were
critically alone, at the far end of a rope. This embrace was a luxury.
'Unzip your bag, Abe.' They had learned, through someone's joke about them one
night, that the expedition-style sleeping bags could be zipped together. Now they
made a common bed. It was the first time they had lain together, unhampered by
separate cocoons.
They didn't make love, that wasn't the point, and besides it would have been
ridiculous in this tent at this altitude, a cold, short-winded fuck, hardly the way Abe
wanted it. Maybe they would make love someday, he thought. Maybe not. Tonight, at
any rate, they didn't even kiss because their lips were so shredded by the sun.
What they did do was more precious still. They just lay there, Abe with Kelly in his
arms. On the verge of sleep he was full of wonder at what this virtual stranger was to
him and what he might be to her. She could have been practically any woman – Jamie
or Gus or some other – a softness against his hard rib cage, a warm weight where her
thigh dangled across his. But she was Kelly, and he held the thought of her as he held
her long back and big shoulders. He tried to imagine what he was to her just now
beyond a heartbeat and whiskers like sandpaper against the tip of her forehead. She
could be thinking of anyone else. But Abe hoped it was him she thought of as she
drifted off to sleep.
'There's something I've wanted to say to you,' he started to confess.
But she stopped him. She knew. 'Not now,' she said. 'Another time. Please. Another
time.'
There was only a trace of her coconut shampoo left.
Her hair smelled almost entirely of smoke and sweat and human grease and Abe
inhaled it. She smelled like an animal. Before this, he'd never thought about how much
mountain air smells like a mountain, like snow and still rocks and ice sweating under
the stars. Nor had he ever craved human company so fundamentally. Up here it was
the sight of blood or the smell of raw humanity or a simple embrace that married you
to what you had become, an animal on a mountain.
Love reduced to this quiet possession, then, this touch and shared warmth.
By dawn, the squall had passed, leaving behind six inches of snow. The sky hung
gray, but nothing was coming down out of it, and that was worth a day more of hope.
