Page 10

10

KIT

DAY 6: KARANGA TO KOSOVO

13,600 feet to 16,000 feet

“G ood morning,” says Joseph, tapping on our tent in the darkness.

“Good morning,” replies Miller politely.

“Fuck,” I whisper, surly as ever.

I slept incredibly poorly last night. My heart was hammering—I’m not sure if it was the altitude or just sheer nerves because today is basically the day . We’ll spend the morning climbing—passing Barufu Camp, where the bulk of the people on this route stay—and continuing on to Kosovo, ninety minutes closer to the summit.

We’re supposed to sleep for a few hours after dinner at Kosovo—I’ll undoubtedly be too nervous—and then begin the summit at midnight. Which means I’ll be climbing for roughly twelve hours up and several hours down before I get a decent night’s rest again.

Miller turns on the lamp. “You okay?” he asks, surveying my face, that pretty mouth of his in a worried pout, a furrow between his brows.

“Just great,” I reply with a forced smile.

He sighs. “I didn’t sleep either.”

I press my face to my hands. “How the fuck are we going to climb all day, then climb for another six or seven hours at midnight?”

He elbows me. “Because Gerald will run his mouth if we don’t.”

I lift my head with the start of a smile. “What happens to all the people who don’t have a Gerald on their trip, I wonder?”

He grins. “Gerald would say they all go down in stretchers.”

I laugh and push out of my sleeping bag. “You’re a much better tentmate than I am,” I admit, pulling on my fleece. “You’ve got a better attitude.”

He begins sliding his pants on. “That’s the first flattering thing you’ve ever said in all the years we’ve known each other.”

“I’m not sure it was flattering,” I reply. “I bitch a lot. I’ve set the bar pretty low.”

He tugs on a lock of my hair. “I sort of enjoy your bitching, Kitten.”

I narrow my eyes. “You know how I feel about that nickname.”

“You’ve earned it. You claw, claw, claw, but it’s more cute than it is irritating.”

I’m fighting a smile as I walk out of the tent, and God, I really shouldn’t be. The affection I feel for him isn’t nearly as sisterly as it’s supposed to be.

* * *

“Today is going to be so much harder than you realize,” Gerald says over breakfast. “The hardest day we’ll have.”

Adam’s eyes roll. “You’ve said that the past two days.”

“Every trip there’s someone coming down in a stretcher,” he says, with a pointed look at me. “I guarantee one of you won’t make it.”

“Gerald,” says Miller, stabbing his meat with his fork, “direct just one more comment like that at Kit and you’ll be the one going down on a stretcher.”

The tent goes absolutely silent, eyes wide. Alex quietly laughs, and his mother gives him a stern look. I guess most people would say Miller shouldn’t be resorting to threats, that we should be operating like a team.

Blake would have ignored it, but I like Miller’s way better.

“If you knew who I was, you wouldn’t be making threats like that,” Gerald says, picking up his fork.

“You don’t know who I am either,” Miller says with an amused smile. “Or who Kit is. If you did, you’d realize you should have kept your fucking mouth shut.”

Gerald doesn’t say another word. He storms out of the tent right after breakfast, announcing he’s walking ahead because we’re all too fucking slow.

“Good riddance,” mutters Adam.

“Don’t let the door hit you on the way out,” adds Alex.

We are united in our hatred of Gerald, which makes me love these people even more than I already did. It’s so weird that in two days we’ll be saying goodbye and I likely won’t see them again.

Even Miller—we’re in the same place once a year at most. I swallow a lump in my throat at the thought. The next time I see him after Tanzania, we won’t be the way we are here. I’ll be engaged or possibly married. He’ll be with someone else, most likely. It will be awkward at best, or incredibly sad.

I think it’s probably going to be incredibly sad.

Our journey to Kosovo begins with a long, flat walk, and then we are climbing up and up and up. It takes a few hours before Barafu Camp comes into sight below us. We’ll be having lunch there, but I’m getting emotional about that too.

“Are you okay?” asks Miller.

It’s funny, the way he senses when my emotional temperature changes. Maren and my mother never had a clue. They’d talk about how stoic I was, but I think it’s that I had to seem okay with them because they never were. They’re both fragile. My distress would distress them, so I kept it to myself.

I force a smile. “It’s just hitting me how close we are to being done.”

His shoulders sag as if that bothers him too. “Yeah, I?—”

At that exact moment, a cry echoes from the other side of the ridge. We glance at each other and start hustling toward the top. A wide-eyed porter runs to meet us and says something urgent in Swahili to Gideon, who winces and then turns to us. “Gerald has fallen. They think the leg is broken. I must go check on him. The other porters will stay with you.”

“Kit went to medical school,” Miller announces. “Take her with you. She should look at it.”

My jaw falls. “How did you?—"

My father . I suspected my father had told him. This confirms it.

“I only got through two years,” I reply. “That in no way makes me trained for this.”

“Kit,” Miller says, his jaw set hard, “that may be true, but it still leaves you better equipped than the rest of us to deal with it. Give me your daypack, pull your head out of your ass, and go take a look at the injury.”

Narrowing my eyes, I hand him the bag and jog down the hill after Joseph. Gerald is flat on his back off the side of the trail and moaning.

His leg is clearly broken, and it’s a compound fracture at that. There’s absolutely no way he is walking up the mountain or back down it, and I am not equipped for this. At all. These guys probably have medic training and have dealt with more of this shit than I have by far.

I glance up, hoping one of them will take charge, but they all look worried and slightly queasy.

“Send someone on to the next camp,” I tell Gideon. “I bet there’s a doctor there.”

He nods. “They ran there first to ask. Can you help him, though?”

I sigh. No. Not really . I can at least stabilize it until they get him out of here, I suppose, but nothing more.

“See if you can find me a board, or a stick, but as straight a stick as you can get. And something to wrap it with.” I return to Gerald. As much as I’ve loathed him from start to finish on this trip, I pity him now. “They’re running to the camp to see if there’s a doctor there, and they might have some pain meds for you.”

“How the hell am I gonna get back down?” he demands, his face screwed up in agony.

“They must be prepared for things like this. I’m sure they have some kind of stretcher, and they’ll carry you back. You’re gonna be fine.”

“I assume it’s broken?” Miller asks behind me.

I nod, rising. I have the most inexplicable urge to rest my head against his chest. Why would I want him to comfort me when he’s the one who put me in this position in the first place? His arm reaches out, as if he wants the same thing, before it falls loosely to his side instead.

I work on making Gerald comfortable until the porters return with a flat board and gauze. I wrap the leg as tight as possible without cutting off the circulation. There’s not much else to be done.

Leah is biting her lip and looking from Gerald to the summit. We’re eight hours away. She wants to keep going.

“What should I do, babe?” she asks. “They’ve already carried all of our stuff up.”

“We paid them to carry it up, and they’re paid to carry it down too,” he says. Selfish prick .

She hesitates and then shrugs. “I’m gonna go ahead and finish. I’ll see you in two days.”

Gerald’s jaw falls open. “Are you serious? I paid for you to come on this trip.”

“Right, and we’re nearly to the top,” she replies with a blithe shrug, “so I want to finish.”

I stand up, planning to remove myself from this argument, just as two people reach us with a medical kit in hand.

“We’re both doctors,” says the woman. “What’s going on?”

“His leg is broken,” I tell them. “It looks like a compound fracture. I did my best to set it and then wrap it, but take a look to make sure it’s okay.”

I expect Gerald to mouth off about how I probably fucked it up, but he says nothing as the woman kneels down beside me, undoing a little bit of the gauze to look for herself.

“Are you a doctor?” she asks. “Or a nurse?”

I shake my head. “I got through two years of medical school. That’s it.”

Her head tilts. “You made it through the rough part and left?”

I give a small shrug and look away. “It wasn’t for me.” I wonder if that sounds as false to her ears as it does to mine. There’s pity in her eyes, so...probably.

“Could we stop discussing Kit and focus on my fucking leg?” shouts Gerald.

The woman ignores him. “You did a good job,” she says to me. “I don’t think I could’ve wrapped it that well.”

I’m already backing away. I want no part of this conversation. “Anyone could have done it.”

“No,” she says behind me. “Not anyone.”

* * *

The porters have set up a dining tent at Barafu Camp. Stacy wants to know why I never brought up medical school before. I send an accusatory glance in Miller’s direction before I answer, since he’s the one who told them. “It just wasn’t for me.”

“But you’re so good at it!” she cries while I struggle to force down a peanut butter and banana sandwich. “And you’ve been talking about medical stuff through the whole trip. Are you sure you don’t want to go back?”

Before I can answer, the doctor who assisted Gerald pops her head into the tent and gestures me out.

“You did really well up there,” she says. “Why did you actually leave medical school after you made it through the worst part? And don’t try to tell me it wasn’t for you. I saw the look on your face when you said it.”

“I made a mistake,” I admit. “I didn’t catch something I should have.”

She frowns at me, but it’s a gentle frown, a sad frown.

“We all make mistakes,” she says, zipping her jacket up higher against the icy breeze. “You realize that, right? Every doctor who has ever existed has made a terrible, tragic mistake. We just have to tell ourselves that on the balance, we’ve helped more people than we’ve harmed.”

“I hurt someone I loved, though,” I reply, my voice nearly a whisper. “It kind of fucked me up. It’s just…too much responsibility.”

She traces a line through the dust with the toe of her boot. “The responsibility is the hard part, but it doesn’t mean you just walk away from it. Every gift comes with a price, and that’s the price of yours. Just think about it. And if you want to talk it through, give me a call.” She slips a piece of paper in my hand with her name and number and walks away.

I re-enter the tent, where everyone has clearly been listening but pretends to be consumed with their food. I won’t be able to eat with the ugly past now churned up inside me, and I don’t want to sit here faking it. I turn on my heel and walk to the outskirts of camp, where I slide behind a rock as I start to cry.

The last time I ever spoke to Rob I was just leaving the library. It was incredibly late in France, and he was so drunk that he was slurring. I was amused but also slightly annoyed because I could still hear girls there, and I was about to take one of the most important tests of my life—which he seemed to have forgotten about entirely.

I laughed and told him to sleep it off. He argued that he hadn’t had that much to drink. I assumed he was tired or hadn’t kept count—I’d seen him with his friends before and he reverted to Frat Boy Rob when they were around, keeping up with them shot for shot.

“Go to bed, babe,” I said. “Take some ibuprofen and call me tomorrow.”

“I love you so much,” he slurred. I told him I loved him too, but I said it the way a parent would to a hysterical toddler, as if I was humoring him.

God, I hate that I said it that way.

The call from his mother came in the middle of the night. When she told me he’d died, I thought it was a mistake.

“I just spoke to him,” I argued, but already I was picturing him: reckless on a dangerous slope, unable to stop as he careened toward a tree.

“They think he had—” she began, but she was crying so hard she couldn’t continue. Rob’s dad took the phone from her.

“Kit,” he said, his voice rough and broken, “they think he had a cerebral hemorrhage. It’s an altitude thing.”

And that’s when all his symptoms hit me, the symptoms I’d dismissed: his fatigue, his headache, the slurring. If I’d just thought for one fucking second, if I’d actually listened to him instead of laughing about the slurring, I’d have told him to get to a hospital, and he’d have been fine.

Miller takes a seat beside me on the freezing ground and wraps an arm around me. I lean into his chest willingly, though I don’t deserve to be comforted.

“What happened when you were in medical school?” he asks.

I’ve never admitted aloud that it was my fault. Rob’s parents heard from his friends about his symptoms. I’m sure it occurred to them that I should have put it together, but I never admitted it and they never brought it up.

“The guy who died?” I whisper. “The one I mentioned yesterday? His name was Rob. He was skiing at Chamonix and had a cerebral hemorrhage. He was slurring, so I assumed he was drunk. I could have saved him if I’d given it a moment’s thought.”

“Oh Kit,” he says, his voice low and pained. “Anyone could have made that mistake.”

My shoulders shake, and he pulls me closer. “No, a good doctor wouldn’t have. I knew enough. I should have thought of it.”

“You were only two years into your training,” he says. “Experienced doctors miss stuff. You heard the woman today.”

I take a shaky breath, trying to get ahold of myself. “He had so much ahead of him and because of me, he didn’t get it.”

Miller presses his lips to my head. “No, not because of you. Because you both had a really bad break.”

“He missed out on so much, though,” I whisper. “He was going to climb all seven summits. He didn’t get to a single one.”

Miller tugs me closer. “He got to leave the world knowing he was loved by you. I promise that meant more to him than any summit ever could.”

It doesn’t remove my guilt, but he isn’t entirely wrong...I think what we had did mean more to Rob than those summits he wanted to conquer, in the same way that he meant more to me than med school...and we were lucky to find it. Not everyone does.

I know I need to dry my eyes and pull my shit together. But I like being exactly where I am right now—sitting in the dirt, freezing cold, pressed up against the only person I’ve ever told this to.

Somehow, I knew he’d make it better, and I was right.

* * *

We reach our final camp before the summit a little while later. Like Barafu, it’s a barren desert where the wind blows hard, and you don’t really want to be anywhere but inside a warm sleeping bag.

We’re fed an early dinner, everyone gets their oxygen checked, and then they brief us about what will happen next. “Sleep,” says Gideon. “We will wake you at eleven to get ready, eat a small meal, and leave by midnight.”

I swallow. Around me, the faces are serious. Thousands of people manage this each year, but…that doesn’t mean it will be easy. We’re going to be climbing in absolute darkness for six or more hours, on little sleep, in freezing weather. And then we’ll still have to climb back down.

What if I just can’t do it? I know I’ve got Miller there, and the porters, but I also don’t want to be the person who fucks up someone else’s trip.

“See you in a few hours,” I say, squeezing Maddie’s hand. She’s okay so far. I really hope it stays that way.

“She’ll be fine,” Miller says as we walk back to the tent.

“You don’t know that,” I whisper.

“You’re right,” he says as we climb inside. “But if the altitude hasn’t gotten to her so far, I’d say the odds are good that tonight will be no different. I also spoke to Gideon. He’s got oxygen canisters if it’s an issue. We’ll keep an eye on her.”

I reach for my brush, swallowing hard so he won’t see how touched I am. “Thank you.”

I start trying to work the day’s knots out of my hair and he holds out his hand.

“Here,” he says. “It’ll be easier for me.”

I raise a brow. No man has ever brushed my hair in my life, aside from hairdressers.

“I have sisters, remember?” he asks.

I hand him the brush and turn away. “Charlie has never brushed my hair once.”

“Well, obviously,” he says, working out a knot with his fingers. “Brushing your own sisters’ hair would be gross.”

I laugh and then quiet. It’s surprisingly soothing, having his hands in my hair. I wonder if this is how dogs feel about being petted. If he kept brushing my hair the way he is, I could fall asleep sitting up.

“The Rob thing,” he says. “Is that why your dad actually wanted you to do this? Was it some push to help you get over it?”

I shake my head the little I can with the brush pulling my hair. “No, not exactly. I think it’s about the ashes.”

He stops brushing. “Ashes?”

I glance over my shoulder at him and take the brush away as I turn his direction. “Rob’s mother gave me a little cup full of his ashes. She said I should leave them in a place that he loved or a place that he would’ve loved. It’s almost as if she was asking me not to fuck it up this time.”

“Kit,” he groans. “I’m sure that’s not what she meant. So I guess you must still have them, then?”

I run my fingers through a tangled section of hair. “I’ve brought them everywhere. I’ve carried them with me since he died.”

His eyes widen. “Jesus. You’re saying that you’ve carried that little cup with you everywhere for four years?”

“Well, you make it sound weird when you say it like that.”

He looks so incredibly sad, and worried. “Kit…”

I laugh miserably, pulling my hair back as I slide into my sleeping bag. “Yes, I know. It is weird. And my dad thinks it’s not fair to Blake to be carrying them with me still when I’m considering marrying someone else. Not that he cares at all about Blake, but he probably has a point.”

“So you’re going to place them at the summit?” he asks, shucking off his coat before zipping the sleeping bag up around him.

I stiffen. “I don’t know.”

He rolls toward me. There’s a slight clench in his jaw, one I don’t entirely understand. I’d think he’d prefer to not be in the vicinity while I dump human remains.

“You’re still not ready? After all this time?”

The breeze outside rocks the tent. “I don’t think that I am.”

“Will you ever be?”

It’s strange...I’ve thought about Rob a lot less than I normally do on this trip, perhaps because there’s been so much else to think about. But that doesn’t mean it will last once I get home. “I don’t know,” I reply. “There are times when it seems like it’s getting better, and times when it isn’t.”

“What’s going on when things are better?” he asks.

You’re there.

I blink, surprised at the thought. A thought I shouldn’t have had.

“I don’t know,” I say again.

My inability to provide a clear answer bugs the shit out of my dad.

I’ve got no idea why it seems to bother Miller even more.