Page 74 of When We Had Forever
Something clinks—ice in a glass, I think, which makes me wonder whether he’s drinking water or something stronger.
“I’ve never told this story before,” he says. “And it’s about as personal as it gets. So if you’re not up for that, say so now.”
I smile into the receiver. “Personal is kind of the point.”
“Okay. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
I wiggle deeper into my pillows. The intensity of my brush with the bear slips away. There’s only me here, soft and warm and bathed in firelight while the wine expands on my tongue and Grayson’s smoky tenor purrs in my ear.
“This all happened in the Himalaya,” he says. “A few years back.”
“The Himalayas, you mean?”
“No,” he says. “That’s just a bastardized American way of saying it. People here get it wrong all the time, but in the local language,Himalayais already pluralized. SayingHimalayasis kind of like sayingsheeps. Ormooses.”
I turn that tidbit over. Grayson might be a drinker and a self-proclaimed mess, but I forget that he’s also an adventurer. That every stunningNational Geographicphoto represents a journey he’s taken which I’ve only dreamed about. He’s climbed mountains, dived oceans, watched the sun set over a thousand different horizons.
Amazing.
“Anyway,” he says, “at the time, I was in a...dark place, in my life. One of the darkest I’ve ever been in. And I got sent to Nepal, on assignment. My job was to shoot these caves there that had only just been discovered. They were carved out of the cliff face a thousand years ago, but had lain untouched for centuries because they’re so hard to get to. A ledge runs underneath, but there’s no way to get to it without ropes.”
I picture Grayson in climbing gear, scanning the rock face from beneath that scarred eyebrow while mountains jostle for space in a majestic sky. “Okay. Go on.”
“It was just a normal day. A normal assignment. I climbed up while my partner waited below, and when I got onto the ledge, I unclipped so he could follow. But then I turned to look at the valley we’d hiked up from, and something happened. I had this...moment. Thisepisode. It was like the whole world poured into me, all at once. The sky was so blue it hurt to look at, and those mountains... Christ, those mountains. There’s something that happens, sometimes, in those high places, when the breeze rises on a clear day. The wind sweeps snow up off the summits, just shoots these fountains of sparks right into the sky. It’s called spindrift.”
A murmur catches in my throat. I’ve heard the word, but never knew what it meant.
“So there I was,” he continues, “standing on this precipice in the middle of nowhere, and the whole world was laid out below me. The spindrift made it seem like the peaks were exhaling into the sky, and it all just looked so...weightless, you know? Like the mountains were about to let go of the earth and float up into the blue. The whole scene hit me right in the heart, and it felt like life was reminding me that no matter how fucked-up things get, there’s always something beautiful somewhere, balancing it out.”
“Wow.” A delicate shiver dances through me. “You definitely understood the assignment.”
He gives a soft laugh.
“Then what?” I say.
“Then I stood there and thought to myself, well, maybe that’s all there is to it. Maybe I just need to let go, like these mountains. Maybe I need to stop hanging on to this thing that’s slowly killing me. It was almost like I could hear something inside me, chanting it, over and over.Let go, let go, let go.”
I take a sip, but I’m too caught up to taste the wine. “And...that saved your life?”
“In the end, yeah.”
“But how, exactly?”
Rustling fills the line, as if he’s rearranging himself. “Because on that same trip, I climbed Everest, and what happened there had everything to do with those two words.”
“Everest.” Air rushes in through my teeth. “Where you were in that avalanche? Where you took that picture of yourself?”
“You’ve seen it?”
“Of course. I told you so already, in my email.”
“Right,” he says, momentarily gruff. “That’s right. Then you probably know the story, or part of it. Except there’s another part I never told anyone. And it’s that right before the avalanche, I was still reliving that moment on the ledge. Just trudging along, hearinglet go, let go, let gowith every step. Because it felt like if I could just get to the top of that damn mountain, maybe I really could. Maybe I could finally let go of this thing that had been rotting inside me for years. Finally be free of it.”
A pang twists in my chest. I know whatitis without having to ask. Or rather, who. Lily. The woman whose death broke him in ways time has never reconciled.
“The point is,” Grayson says, “when I heard the crack and saw all that snow, I did exactly what I was shouting at myself to do. I let go.Physically. I knew I couldn’t outrun what was coming, so I threw down my axe. Ripped off my pack. Everything I could possibly let go of in those ten seconds went. And then the snow took me and I did my damnedest to swim upward, and when it was all over, I only ended up buried four feet down.”
I make a horrified sound. I know the basics—he spent eleven minutes entombed in snow before his climbing partner dug him out. Eleven minutes in the dark, starving for air, not knowing whether he would live or die.
