For a moment I am lost, hot, nauseated, and unsure where I am or who is calling me. Then I open my eyes to see a palace. An enormous building, wedding cake white and trimmed with frosting-like curls and flowers, is in front of me, surrounded by fountains and lush flowering plants. Off to the right, turquoise pool water is glistening.
“What…?” I ask. “What happened to the—” I wave my hand to encompass everything: the noise, the dirt, the honking “—the cows?”
“This is the Hotel Shanker,” Finjo says, smiling. “You’re home. For now, anyway.”
“This place is seriously swank. And we look like something the cat dragged in,” Tate says, staring around. He turns to me and scrubs at his dark, shaggy hair, making it stand up like crazy. “Well, you look like something the cat dragged in. I look like something the cat dragged in, ate, then puked back up.”
“Nice,” I say, shooting him the finger and trying to smooth down my own hair, which has totally escaped its braids and is a mass of frizz and curl.
“It was a compliment. Kind of,” he says, leaning over to mess up my hair.
Jordan sighs.
The hotel guy starts talking about our rooms, and Jordan is asking about timing for our first team briefing, while Tate is interrupting to ask if he can go crash, but I tune them all out. Beyond the lush green of the hotel gardens are smoggy sky and decrepit buildings. But beyond that, in the distance, are mountains. Dimmed by smog and barely there, but snowcapped and enormous against the sky. The Himalayas.
It’s all starting. I try to imagine what it’s like up there, two weeks’ walking distance into the mountains, so far from home. Unbidden, my thoughts fly to Mami. She would love this. Love the roads with their chickens and cows and shrines, love the hotel with its wedding cake balconies, love the start of this adventure. My excitement dims, and the Dread shows up, strong enough that I must have made a noise because Tate glances over.
“You okay?” he asks, and I know he catches a whiff of it on my skin, fear so deep it feels bottomless.
I nod, take a deep breath, and reach for the excitement, fan it, coax it back into flames. I will love it enough for both of us. I will soak it all in and bring it home to her.
* * *
—
Noise and light and color. Kathmandu has a serious overabundance of all of them. And traffic. In addition to the cows. Walking through Thamel, the main tourist district, is like being in a developing country made up of mostly white hippies and climbers. Every storefront promises Everest View Trekking—Best Price or Mountain Panorama Helicopter Rides—Safety First or sells fake North Face down jackets for five dollars. People follow us down the block, holding out trekking poles, water bottles, Mountain Hardwear gloves.
Tate realizes he forgot his water bottle on the plane and asks if we can stop for one, which has Jordan huffing in annoyance about the amount of gear Tate loses. But Paul makes a joke about Tate and leaving a trail of water bottle bread crumbs to follow home, and we all laugh. I’m reminded again that I’m glad to have him here. We’ve known Paul for years, when some friend-of-a-friend introduced him to Jordan before a climbing trip. He’s younger than our parents and older than us, a peacemaker who always offers a welcome voice when we’re getting on each other’s nerves. But now, without Mami, I’m even more grateful he’s with us. He’s another grown-up for Jordan when Tate and I want to be by ourselves, another non-Russo for me when Tate and Jordan are squaring off. Maybe it’s because he’s a pediatric and adolescent psychiatrist, but he’s able to calm the Russo men down better than most. Listening to Tate and Jordan fight is not my favorite part of climbing.
Paul slows to wait for me.
“Can you believe this is really happening? Just being in Kathmandu is a dream come true, and we haven’t even gotten close to the mountains yet!” He grins. “If only I could go back and tell my sad, bullied fourth-grade self that I’d be heading off to climb Mount Everest someday. Though maybe I should thank the jerks who made me so miserable. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t have run into the mountains every chance I got.”
I put an arm around him. “I hate that anyone was mean to you. If you want, I’ll fly back to Salt Lake City and beat them up. Or beat up their kids. Whatever.”
He laughs. “Rose the Avenger. Thanks for the offer, but I think sending the article headlined ‘Acclaimed Psychiatrist Aims for the Summit, Dedicates his Climb to LGBTQ Youth’ to my alumni newsletter will allow enough gloating. Besides, that’s all in the past. I need to—”
“If you sing ‘Let It Go,’ I swear…” I side-eye him. “Please. No.”
“It’s a great song!” His smile deepens. “I’m just really, really happy to be here.” He looks around. “Hard to believe we’re only a few minutes from the hotel. This is a different world.”
“The real different world is when you get outside the tourist area,” Finjo says. “But today we’ll stay in Thamel and get our shopping done.”
We nod obediently because that’s our only option whenever Finjo tells us what to do. The bossiness continues unabated. Still, as he shepherds us forward, barking in Nepali to the map sellers who are encroaching, I can’t help slowing to stare. The streets are choked with cars and mopeds and the occasional cow, and the sidewalks have even less room, with tables of Buddha statues, prayer bowls, incense burners, and—oddly—old American DVDs for sale. Dust, thick and lung-punishing, hangs over the streets in a cloud, dimming the sun as though smoke from a fire were blowing. Adding to the dust is real smoke from storefronts that aren’t stores but, instead, tiny makeshift restaurants with smoky grills that smell of delicious meat. No tourists stop; only crouching Nepali men grabbing a quick lunch. I can’t help staring wistfully.
Finjo catches my eye. “No street food, ever. Okay? It will make you sick, and no getting sick before we climb.” He looks fierce.
I nod, filming the street scene as I walk and nearly knocking over a rack of mountaineering maps. I’m taller than a lot of the men here, and the women only come up to my chest. I feel like a giantess laying waste to a village as I try not to trash the careful displays.
“Oops! Here, I wanted to get a few maps,” Paul says. He has already stopped to buy an ornate Gurkha knife, a hand-hammered brass bowl, and some carved figurines. We’ve only gone around three blocks from the hotel—I can’t imagine how he’s going to get this stuff home. Now along with the maps he grabs more post cards, some to mail back to the kids he sees in the hospital, some for Drew, his husband, who will meet us here in Kathmandu when we return, along with Tate’s and my families. I think about being back here in close to three months, having stood on the summit of Mount Everest. I try to imagine Mami’s arms around me, her face when I display the photo proving that I held a picture of her at the top.