Yoon Su looks up from her phone. “All the shrines along the road are for the people who die in car accidents,” she states calmly, before starting to text again.
I stare at her. She flashes a fast smile, and I decide not to ask if she was kidding or not.
Soon we are at the gate of Boudhanath, one of the largest Buddhist temples in the world. It sits huge and white and domed against the deep-blue sky. Rising from the dome is a dull golden pyramid, brightly painted eyes gleaming over the edge. Strung down from the tip, thousands and thousands of colorful prayer flags flutter in the wind. It is massive, endless, timeless, beautiful.
“This was definitely worth the ride, since we survived,” I say, standing still. It is quiet within the gates of the stupa, quieter than anywhere else I’ve been in Kathmandu. It’s almost its own small city in here, with a few guest houses, restaurants, and shops tucked among the religious statues. Pilgrims and Buddhist monks walk clockwise around the massive structure, rolling the cylindrical brass prayer wheels that line the edge. All around us are buildings with pots of orange flowers and statues of Buddha.
“We start the tour?” our guide, Ram, asks, joining us. He is an official city guide, unlike Finjo, who can only guide in the mountains. Ram meets us at all the tourist sites, wearing a rakish purple scarf and smoking constantly.
Before we can answer him, he starts speaking. “I can tell you all about it. This is the largest stupa in Nepal, sacred to Tibetans and Buddhists. There are over five hundred prayer wheels, all engraved with the mantra om mani padme hum, which means ‘the jewel in the heart of the lotus.’ It is also one of the most ancient—”
Yoon Su makes a dismissive sound and interrupts his monologue. “First we will look around by ourselves. Then you can tell us everything when Finjo and the rest arrive.” She doesn’t look at me or Tate for approval, but I can’t help being relieved. I want to soak it in.
Tate leans over. “Holy shit,” he whispers. “She’s even bossier than Finjo.”
I give him the big eyes to tell him to shut up. I’m liking Yoon Su more and more. “Want to walk a bit?” I ask her. “Before the others get here?”
She nods. “Definitely. We will wander and meet back here. Can you please tell Finjo?” she tells Ram, then starts walking before he can answer.
Ram looks a little disgruntled, but he agrees.
Silently Yoon Su, Tate, and I start to circle the enormous building. There’s less dust and smog here, and the noise of the city is hidden behind the walls. Mostly it is the quiet murmur of prayers and the slow footsteps of pilgrims.
I jump a little when Yoon Su speaks. “How are you feeling about the expedition?” she asks. “Are you ready?”
Tate glances at me, shrugging, but I nod. “Definitely! We’ve been planning this since we were in fourth grade. In fact…” I pause, pulling out my phone. “Time to capture this for posterity!” I take a photo of the stupa, then a selfie with prayer wheels behind me.
“How did you decide to summit Everest?” Yoon Su asks. “It is an unusual goal, even today, when so many are crowding the mountain.”
I tense a little. The full truth about this trip is more complicated than I want to get into. I settle for the easy version. “We had been climbing for a while, with my mom and Tate’s dad. First in California, where we’re from, but then in Europe and South America. We were still pretty young when we decided to train for Mount Everest. And here we are.”
I leave out all the stuff in between. The endless fund-raising and the ongoing, grueling training. I leave out Dad’s worries and Mami’s reassurance that we would be fine. I leave out Mami and our arguments over whether I was training hard enough. I leave out her pointed silences when I struggled on a climb, which felt louder than an I-told-you-so, and my grudging return to the training schedule.
I glance at Tate, wondering if he’ll have more to add to my abbreviated version. He catches my eye.
“We’ve been dreaming about this for a long time,” he says. “It’s Mount Everest! Is there any climber in the world who doesn’t want to bag this one?” He smiles but it looks forced, and I wonder if he too is thinking about Mami and her plans. “What about you?”
Yoon Su flashes her quick grin again. “I read about this mountain when I was a little girl, in boarding school in Switzerland, and decided that someday I would be one of the few who climb it. In Switzerland it was easy to train because climbing was so common. At home hiking is very popular, but climbing Mount Everest? That’s harder for people to understand. And a woman climbing? That can be even more difficult to explain.”
She and I share a look. I’ve spent enough time on high peaks where bro dudes act like I’m there to hand them their beers and laugh at their jokes to guess at what she’s not saying. And that’s not even getting into the everyday harassment and sexism on the streets in towns where we travel. I’m white-passing, but Mami, who’s Puerto Rican, would get additional attitude: in places where the lodge workers were Latinx or even just dark-skinned, other climbers would often assume she worked there. She never complained about it, but I always felt a weird kind of guilt, like I was getting away with something I didn’t deserve.
I wonder about Yoon Su. As an Asian woman, she probably has another level of crap to deal with. I wonder what it will be like for her, and me, on the trail up to Everest. So far though, Nepal has been refreshingly uninterested in me as female. If anything, people are excited that another woman wants to summit, since so far only around five hundred of the total five thousand people who have made it up Everest have been women. We have some catching up to do. As though reading my mind, Yoon Su says, “I have heard good things about climbing in Nepal. At least here I hope not to be called ‘China doll’ or told I can’t possibly know how to use the gear I’m carrying.” She sighs, then changes the subject. “Jordan is Tate’s father, yes? So where is your mother?”
I swallow, trying to make the story easy to tell, easy to hear. Tell it like it was history, over and done, not something that still roils, digs, hurts.
“She has some health issues and couldn’t come.” I leave it at that.
Yoon Su looks at me. “Ah. I am sorry to hear that.”
No need to talk about the bad days. No need to talk about the pain. No need to talk about the end of Everest. But not for me. Not for the rest of us, because Mami would never ever be the one who took it away from us. No matter if I used to complain about the training, I definitely want it now, want to succeed twice as much, for Mami, for me. The Dread bites at me, and I push it back, think about the summit, think about what it will mean to be there, to share it with her. Yoon Su is still looking at me, her face pitying, and I need to stop talking about this. Pulling out my phone, I start filming, moving slowly in a circle and narrating some of the facts Ram told us about the site.