Chapter Twenty

CHAPTER TWENTY

No one returned to Yama Parvat for ten years.

As soon as the last climbers left that spring, Nepal decreed it illegal to trek to or around the mountain, at the price of a fine no rulebreaker was willing to pay. All permits were discontinued. The government would not even allow search parties to recover the remaining bodies, citing the dangers of the mountain. It always struck Sophie as strange. The mountain itself was not dangerous; all the teams had summited. They were subject to bad luck—the avalanche, the storm—but death was not unheard-of on an unclimbed mountain. She hated to think that way—of course, she hadn’t wanted anyone to die. In hindsight, the survivors agreed that so many people attempting to climb the mountain at once had probably not helped. They had all gotten caught up in the excitement, the prospect of fame and glory, without foreseeing the consequences of so many mountaineers trying to make a first ascent.

The news reports had focused more on the deaths than the successful summits. After the first week in the hospital in Kathmandu, spent in a haze of grafting surgeries and pain medication, she had befriended one of the nurses and asked for articles about the climb. Reading them, seeing Evelyn’s and Levi’s names listed among the dead in print, didn’t make her feel better, but it did take her mind off the searing pain in her hands, face, and feet. The one she didn’t read was Lowell’s article for Summit magazine. It had been picked up by the New York Times , accompanied by a series of film photographs he had taken. But she knew what the article contained, unlike the others—quotes, not just from survivors, but from the dead. Sophie knew Lowell had interviewed both Evelyn and Levi, and she wasn’t yet ready to hear their voices again. She didn’t know if she ever would be.

In the meantime, Sophie adjusted to her new body. The doctors had amputated some toes on each foot, but miraculously they had saved all her fingers, though they remained a little bent and had lost some sensation. She tried to grip a plastic cup of water and couldn’t tell how much pressure she used until the flexible sides caved inward and the water spilled out.

She spent a month in the hospital, swaddled in bandages, afraid to imagine what her face looked like beneath the white gauze. She had never overvalued her physical appearance, but now she worried that she resembled a monster, that friends would no longer be able to look at her. Her thoughts bounced back and forth between her injuries and Levi. What had she last said to him? Something about hanging on, while she fought with all her strength to keep his deadweight afloat on that exposed mountainside. She couldn’t see anything past that; the moment of his death was blank. Mercifully. She knew that his parents had already held his funeral; she didn’t mind missing it. Whenever the thoughts overwhelmed her, she used the clunky bedside phone to call her mother, who always answered, no matter the time difference. They talked for as long as Sophie needed, racking up the international call fees. She joked that Sophie was talking her out of house and home, but she cried on the phone, too, about Evelyn. Sophie tried not to imagine what would have happened if both her daughters had died.

The doctors released Sophie with instructions for her recovering injuries, along with salves and bandages and pain medication. She felt more like a burn victim than anything else, and avoided looking at herself in mirrors, at the wrinkled, discolored skin that stretched across her cheeks and forehead. Only her eyes were unchanged.

She stayed for two nights at a cheap hotel in Kathmandu, gorging herself on momos to make up for a month of bland hospital food. At the airport she felt like a creature that had crawled up from the depths of the earth, aware of the stares from other passengers. She wanted to yank a paper bag over her face or hole up in the condo and never step into public again. But there was something she needed to do first.

Sophie flew back to Switzerland to box up the apartment she had shared with Levi. His parents drove in from Basel—the second time she had ever met them—and stayed for a week, helping her to clean and organize the remnants of their life together. Each moment felt like a dream, as if any second Levi would walk around the corner and begin helping her pack. In the beginning she told herself that she was packing up so they could move to Wyoming together, but the fantasy quickly wore thin.

She found the wrapped gift box beneath their bed on the third day. She had been sleeping in the apartment while Levi’s parents went to a hotel every night, and that morning she woke up, got out of bed, and sank to the floor, overwhelmed by the task of cleaning up a life she had known for such a short time, but so deeply. With her face pressed against the hardwood floor, she blinked through blurry eyes until they focused on the colorful box. She knew immediately—her birthday present. Her stomach turned and she forced herself to sit up, to drag the box from underneath the bed with shaking hands. She didn’t want to open it, hardly wanted to look at it, but Levi was right—it was too big to bring on the plane.

Sophie unwrapped it slowly, carefully, and when she lifted the lid from the box, she couldn’t stop the tears that flowed down her cheeks. It was a wooden carving of Yama Parvat, large, the entire massif captured in minute detail—every col, every ridge, even crevasses were etched into the mountain. On the very top were two tiny figures—impossibly small, so small that she didn’t notice them for several minutes. She set the mountain down on the bed and lay beside it, still crying, gazing in awe at the mountain that had followed her here, to Switzerland, and would follow her home. When Levi’s parents arrived, an hour later, and found Sophie still in bed, still studying the carving, they offered to mail it to Colorado for her. Weeks later, when the package arrived at her mother’s doorstep, she would repeat the process, crawling into bed beside the mountain and observing it for hours.

On her last full day in Switzerland, Andrew texted her a photo—Sophie and Levi on the summit of Yama Parvat, arms around each other, grinning. Sophie did not look worried and Levi did not look weak. She had three copies printed at the nearest office store. She framed one and gave it to Levi’s parents at their last lunch together. She tucked one copy into her luggage. And she left the last on the kitchen counter of their apartment, at her final walk-through, before she locked the apartment for the last time. Someone would find it soon, a cleaning crew or the landlord, and throw it away. But until then, an image of them, happy, existed in the apartment, as they had a few months ago. Before Yama Parvat.

Sophie said goodbye to Zoe and a few of Levi’s friends. She spent the night in a hotel and flew back to Colorado the next day. Her mother greeted her at the airport, weeping so openly that other people stopped and stared. Sophie held her and let her cry right there at baggage claim, watching the minutes tick by on the nearest screen.

Finally, she let go and said, “You’re home. I thought I’d never see you again.”

Her mother talked a lot on the drive to the condo. Sophie stayed silent and studied her. She had lost weight, and her hands shook whenever she let go of the steering wheel. But she got them home safely, talking all the while about how difficult it had been to keep hearing the news that poured out from Nepal, each new death and disaster. How she had sat in shock the night that James had called from Base Camp to tell her that Levi and Evelyn were dead, but Sophie was alive.

Sophie wandered the house like a ghost for a few days, looking at the pictures of Evelyn—everywhere, the walls, the mantel, the refrigerator. She did not have the sensation, as with Levi, that Evelyn would appear at any moment. She had watched her sister die, held her hand as her heart gave out and she took her last breath against the cold, dry snow. A coroner had confirmed the cause of death, after the guides carried her body back to Base Camp, a painstaking two-day process: heart attack.

The funeral was held on the Sunday after Sophie arrived home, to allow for Sophie’s presence, though Sophie herself was uncertain how much she wanted to be present. Worse, Miles showed up—she hadn’t given him a moment’s thought until she walked into the funeral home and saw him standing against the back wall. She blinked twice, unwilling to believe her eyes, and glanced at her mother, who simply brushed past, heading off to greet extended family.

Sophie knew Miles probably saw her, but they never made eye contact. She stayed silent at the funeral and didn’t give a speech. There was nothing she could possibly say to summarize Evelyn. She still didn’t know if she hated or loved her sister, and that wasn’t what their grandparents wanted to hear. So, she listened to her mother’s tearful speech, to a cousin recounting Evelyn’s intelligence and passion, and to an uncle talk about how Evelyn died doing what she loved. Sophie ducked out as soon as the ceremony ended, breathing in the fresh air as twilight fell over the Colorado mountains.

She mailed the divorce papers to Miles a week after the funeral and he signed them without protest. They hadn’t owned much of value together. All the furniture in the cabin had either come with the house or from a thrift store. The cabin itself belonged to Miles. The artwork that hung on the walls was his. What did she own? Some cooking equipment, maybe, but most of that belonged to Miles, too, always the one to prepare their meals. She had almost nothing to her name.

Sophie came home from work exhausted, her muscles protesting after a particularly difficult day. She stopped at the sight of a large package at her doorstep, addressed to Sophie Wright.

She couldn’t remember ordering anything but stooped to lift the package in her arms and pushed the front door open. Her hands still gave her difficulty sometimes, but after ten years, she had adjusted to maneuvering her way through everyday tasks. She had returned to guiding in the Tetons, too, welcomed back to her old job after she’d proven her ability to make ascents even with the changes to her body. She found her clients were often curious about the damage to her face and hands and asked questions, eager to hear a story of overcoming the wrath of the mountains. The ones who knew who she was never asked. She told the inquisitive ones to search for Yama Parvat when they returned home, to read her story then.

She set the package on the table and looked about for scissors, distractedly reaching over to pet her black cat, Momo, who meowed incessantly until he received attention. She cut the box open and drew a breath. Inside were two large, heavy plaques. One had Evelyn’s name, the other Levi’s, with their birth and death dates. Below the dates, a quote: If adventure has a final and all-embracing motive, it is surely this: we go out because it is our nature to go out, to climb mountains, and to paddle rivers, to fly to the planets and plunge into the depths of the oceans... When man ceases to do these things, he is no longer man. Sophie recognized it—written by Wilfrid Noyce, one of the members of the expedition that made the first ascent of Everest.

She had heard about the project from James a few weeks ago. The Nepal mountaineering organization wanted the surviving climbers to return to Yama Parvat’s Base Camp—whoever was willing—to place plaques for the deceased climbers, a monument to the fateful expedition. She had agreed without really thinking. Now that she stood with the plaques before her on the table, she had no idea if she could legitimately repeat the journey.

That evening, sitting cross-legged on the couch across from a roaring fire, she called home.

“Do you think Evelyn would want this?”

Her mother paused, a long echo of silence on the phone. They were close again. So much could change in ten years. On the surface, her mother was the same, just older, still managing the lodge at the ski resort. But she had gone through chemo four summers ago, defeated the cancer that had arisen mysteriously in her lungs. Sophie had made trips from her small house in Wyoming back to Breckenridge whenever she had a day off.

Sophie’s gaze drifted up to the mantel over the fireplace, where she had long ago placed the wooden carving of Yama Parvat. Beside it rested Levi’s climbing sunglasses, folded, which she had retrieved from Evelyn’s jacket pocket after her death, and a copy of Lowell’s book, Ghosts on the Mountain , which she had never read, let alone opened. The book was published two years after the climb, on the anniversary of their summit day. Lowell had mailed her a copy with a note— you don’t have to read this, but I want you to have it.

Weeks after the funeral, she had gone through Evelyn’s things with her mother, brought back by Miles from New York. She had ended up taking nothing, left it all in boxes at the condo—climbing equipment, clothes, journals, and books. She had no use for any of it and besides, none of it would bring Evelyn back. Memories of her sister followed her like the clouds of a gathering storm, ready to unleash a torrent of regret and pain. A physical reminder would only concentrate that sorrow.

“I think Evelyn would want to know that she didn’t die for nothing,” her mother said, breaking the silence.

Sophie knew what she meant. Evelyn would want some degree of forgiveness.

She booked a plane ticket that night.

A month later she stood in Pokhara with the handful of others who had come—James, Phil, Danielle, Penelope, Andrew, Lowell, Charlie, Kathryn, Wojciech, Haruki, and Aoki. Sophie had heard, in the hospital after the climb, how the last three had turned up at Camp Three, somehow descending past Camp Four in the early morning while the storm raged. They had suffered less frostbite than Sophie and Lowell had, but still told of a desperate afternoon and night spent bivouacking on the mountain after their successful summit. Nina and Oskar had also slipped from the ridge, which gave Sophie a twisted comfort—perhaps their bodies lay with Levi’s. Perhaps he wasn’t alone.

The two bodies that Sophie had seen past the cliff on the false route were Shiro and Yasuhiko. And the last climber, Takashi, had wandered off from Haruki and Aoki and was never heard from again.

George was in poor health and couldn’t make the journey. Ruslan and Ivan—who hadn’t made the summit, who had been at Camp Three during the storm—had never responded to the original invitation.

Some of the others had brought along a significant other—Lowell’s wife, Anne, seemed the most excited to be in Nepal, in awe of every inch of the country. She seemed to sense Sophie’s apprehension and dutifully showed up at the door of her hotel room every morning with tea and breakfast.

The group shouldered their packs and set out. It felt markedly different from trekking to Base Camp before an actual climb. There were no ice axes or crampons in Sophie’s pack, just a sleeping bag and sturdy tent in case any of the teahouse accommodations fell through. And the two plaques—they were responsible for most of the weight. No porters trailed behind them. Much of the route took them along the Annapurna circuit, which was crowded with backpackers in high spirits. Each day, rain or shine, they rose and marched on, through valleys and mountains and rainforest. Each day, they drew closer to Yama Parvat.

Sophie stood outside on the porch of a teahouse the evening before they were due to reach Base Camp. The forest had given way to icy peaks that towered overhead. The teahouse itself was hard to see from a distance, built from rock, nestled into rock. They were off the main Annapurna circuit now, so the accommodations were quieter, less sophisticated. Twilight turned the ridges purple and orange.

“Beautiful evening.”

She flinched at the voice and twisted to see Lowell. His face, too, had been reconstructed, the skin of a thigh stretched over a cheekbone. It made him look older, more weathered. “Yes. We’ve been lucky.”

“Have you been...” He trailed off, as if trying to find the words. “Anxious this entire trip? An increasing sense of dread?”

She tilted her head, considering. “Yes. No. Somewhere in between.”

He shrugged and leaned against the stone porch railing. “Maybe I’m being too sensitive. But that mountain wanted no part of us ten years ago. Who’s to say that will change tomorrow?”

“I think we’d be very unlucky to die at Base Camp.”

Lowell waved a hand. “You know what I mean.”

“What does Anne think?”

“She’s just happy to be here, away from her job.” He looked down at his gnarled hands.

Sophie found herself looking at his hands, too, and then at her own. Strange, to share a mark of survival with someone she hardly knew. “I know you still write. Do you still climb?”

He shook his head. “Can’t. Not after what happened. I used to climb in the memory of a friend who died. I’ve known other people who have passed away over the years, of course, but nothing like this. Not so many in one season on one mountain. Besides,” he said, lifting his hands, displaying them in the evening light, “I just didn’t think I could. Physically or mentally. Anne is convinced I had PTSD. Saw a therapist, had me on all kinds of medication. Nothing worked. I couldn’t sleep through the night. We moved back to Anne’s hometown near Montréal and now I walk the dogs in the woods and occasionally travel to write about an exciting expedition. It’s changed the quality of my work, not climbing. But I can’t give up both things I love.” He cleared his throat. “And that’s my story.”

Sophie could tell he was self-conscious about speaking so much; she waved him off. “It’s okay. I didn’t really stay in touch with anyone else who was there, and I feel bad about that. We all went off to live such different lives. I still climb. I guide. I tried to stay away from it but I couldn’t. Nothing else satisfied me. It took a lot of practice and frustration to figure out what I could and couldn’t do. I don’t think I’ll ever climb a giant again, but I’m happy in the Tetons.”

He looked at her sideways, a smile on his face. “Maybe there’s a lesson in this for some of us. We only ever needed small lives to be happy.”

“Honey? Dinner is about to be served.” They both turned to see Anne standing in the doorway. She waved to Sophie, grinning.

“We’ll be inside in a minute,” Lowell replied, and Anne ducked back through the door. He turned back to Sophie. “I don’t know if you know this, but I got pretty close to Evelyn. She seemed—how do I put this—tormented by the state of your relationship. She loved you so much, Sophie. I hope you never doubt that. People make complicated, senseless mistakes all the time. It’s part of life. You can love someone and still want to hurt them. But I don’t think she wanted that, either. She just wanted to find her place in the world. Maybe she didn’t in this lifetime, maybe she did. But she loved you. I have no doubt of that.”

Tears sprung to Sophie’s eyes as she listened. Before she could reply, Lowell continued.

“I have something for you.” He reached into his back pocket and extended his hand toward her, a flash drive cradled in his palm. “I debated giving this to you. I don’t know you that well. I don’t know how you’re doing now. So, if you don’t want this, my feelings won’t be hurt.”

Sophie didn’t have to ask what it was. She knew.

“I recorded all my interviews. There were a lot with Evelyn and a few with Levi. Yours are here, too, although if you’re like me and cringe at the sound of your own voice, you’ll want to skip those. There are some pictures, too. They’re in the book, but—”

Sophie blinked back more tears, still looking at the flash drive. “I never opened the book,” she said, her voice a soft squeak.

“I figured. But this is different. It’s—it’s hearing their voices. I listen to the interviews every year, on the anniversary of—you know. Of everyone who passed. A sort of memorial.” He paused, tilting his hands toward her. “So?”

She opened her hand to accept it, the tiny object that contained Evelyn’s and Levi’s ghosts, and slipped it into her pocket. “Thank you. Just having it means so much.”

He touched her shoulder gently. “Don’t mention it,” he said, nodding toward the door. “Let’s not leave dinner too long or we won’t get a plate.”

That evening, Sophie set the flash drive on the bed beside her laptop. Another ten minutes passed before she worked up the courage to insert the small device. It was neatly organized: four folders, labeled Evelyn, Levi, Sophie, Pictures. Out of context, it could have been a family reunion.

It’s not often you’re given the choice between hearing two ghosts. Sophie’s mouse lingered over the Evelyn folder for a long minute before she clicked. A dozen audio files, each labeled with Evelyn’s name, the date, and the time. Twelve pieces of information about her sister’s life in the weeks before she died. It was almost too much to bear.

There was a photograph, too, misplaced from the Pictures file. Evelyn, at Base Camp, her brown hair caught in a gust of wind. Her mouth was open in a smile, her cheeks ruddy to match her maroon suit and her eyes bright. She was bent forward a little, in laughter, and despite what Lowell had just said about her emotional state, she looked happy. Sophie studied the photograph for as long as she could bear, trying to sear this version of Evelyn into her brain. She closed the picture.

Sophie opened the first audio file, dated April 2, 6:15 p.m. It played automatically, a moment of rustling before Lowell’s voice rumbled through her laptop speakers, asking Evelyn to introduce herself. And then Evelyn’s voice. Clear and bright, and alive, and Sophie wished to crawl through the screen and into the file itself and back onto the snow-covered mountain. If only she had marched up to Evelyn that first day, turned her around so that they faced each other, and told Evelyn that it didn’t matter. That she was forgiven, and that Sophie couldn’t summit without her, not really. That she couldn’t go through life without Evelyn, that a piece of herself would always be missing.

When Sophie’s name left Evelyn’s lips, Sophie knew, in some intrinsic way, that it had been the same way for Evelyn. In those last few weeks, perhaps even as she died, Sophie had been the person on Evelyn’s mind. It gave Sophie little comfort to think that with more words and more time, perhaps they could have both lived to grow old together, as sisters, as friends. She knew it wasn’t a rational thought—the storm hadn’t been a manifestation of their inability to reconcile. It was simply nature, acting in response to a thousand unseen variables of atmospheric and environmental cues. A storm, a falling rock, a coyote moving through a darkened field—it all meant nothing. But still.

Sophie paused the recording before it ended, shut her laptop, and turned off the light.

The thing about mountains is that they never change. On a geologic timescale, of course, snow falls and melts away. Rivers overflow and change course, forests burn in fires, but the physical structure of a mountain is largely unchanging in the scale of a human life. So, when Sophie set foot on the rocky tumble of Base Camp the next day, her heart caught in her throat. It looked the same as it had ten years ago, minus the dotting of bright tents. Prayer flags were still affixed to poles, crisscrossing overhead, nothing more than little tatters of colored fabric after enduring years of harsh conditions. They approached the undecorated Chorten in silence, listening to the wind ripple through the prayer flags.

Finally, Haruki slung off his pack, pulled out the plaque for Yakumo, and stepped forward to place it at the base of the Chorten. He bowed his head and said something quietly in Japanese, before stepping back.

The others who had been given plaques repeated the process, setting the plaques down to encircle the base of the Chorten and saying a quick word to pay their respects. Sophie stood frozen, unable to move, until she felt someone’s hand on her shoulder and realized that she was the last one left. She glanced over; the hand belonged to Penelope, who studied her with a faint smile and sadness in her eyes.

“I will help you,” Penelope said, and Sophie had never been more grateful.

Together, they carried the plaques to the Chorten, Sophie with Levi’s and Penelope with Evelyn’s. Sophie knelt on the rocks and laid Levi’s plaque amid the others. “I love you,” she whispered. “I’ll never stop loving you and I’ll never, ever forget you.”

She reached up to wipe away a tear, smearing dirt across her face, and reached up to take Evelyn’s plaque from Penelope, avoiding her gaze. She shifted across the rocks, nestling Evelyn’s marker between Eddie’s and Levi’s.

She drew a breath, the familiar feeling from Evelyn’s funeral returning. She could think of nothing to say. “All my life I’ve wanted to be just like you. I’m glad I’m not, because I could never fill your footsteps. I love you. I’ll see you again soon.”

Sophie rose and stepped back; her face flushed. She had whispered but didn’t know if Penelope had heard her private communion. She’d had more trouble believing in anything spiritual since Levi’s and Evelyn’s deaths; she had looked for signs of them everywhere and seen nothing. She gave Penelope a tight smile and mouthed thank you before walking back to the others. At James’s suggestion, they bowed their heads in a moment of silence.

Sophie tried to keep her eyes closed, but something told her to open them. She looked up, blinking against the brilliant midday sun, to the peak of Yama Parvat. A dark blur of movement caught her attention. Far overhead, against the dramatic backdrop of the white mountain, a pair of black birds soared. Goraks, they were called. In tumbling flight, the birds dipped and rose, riding the wind. She watched as they turned to specks and then disappeared, finding someplace safe to land on the mountainside.

“What are you looking at?”

Penelope’s question made Sophie flinch. She realized that everyone had opened their eyes and were moving, discussing the hike back to the teahouse.

“Just the mountain,” Sophie said. Penelope squeezed her hand, a kind gesture, and stepped away to shoulder her backpack. Sophie picked up her own, much lighter now, and felt the comforting weight settle against her back.

As the group began to trickle out of Base Camp, beginning the long journey home, Sophie paused to look over her shoulder, shielding her eyes against the sun. She saw no birds, no signs of life, only Yama Parvat, solid and imposing against the blue sky. She listened for a moment but heard only the wind. It was over. The mountain had nothing left to say.