straps that had no doubt secured it to Dad’s boot on part of that last climb and on countless others before. Running his finger over one of the spikes, my brother took a deep breath. “He made it to the summit.” With a quiet laugh, he shook his head and put the crampon down beside the other one. “No one’s surprised by that.”
I couldn’t laugh, but I managed a small smile. Dad had always said he’d climb Mount Everest, and he’d deeply resented the storm that had driven him back down the first time he’d attempted ten or eleven years ago. No way in hell, he’d declared ever since, was he turning back again.
“I guess the peak was seriously overcrowded,” Daniel went on. “A lot of people who shouldn’t have been up there, slow-moving lines…” He sighed. “One of the guys who was with Dad said if they’d all been able to move faster—just get to the peak and start back down instead of lingering at those extreme altitudes—things probably would have played out differently.”
“Really?”
He nodded, moistening his lips. “They were up there way longer than they should’ve been. Because they couldn’t move. Not with that many people. He said someone died with the peak in sight, and everyone just stepped over her and kept going.”
I grimaced. I’d heard the horror stories for years, especially from Dad’s climber buddies who’d done Everest before. And the news had said something about April and May being exceptionally—and dangerously—crowded. Even before I’d gotten the call about Dad, I’d heard about climbers being left for dead because the people with them barely had enough strength to get themselves back down the mountain. Stepping over a fresh corpse to get a selfie on a mountain peak sounded beyond morbid to me, but it seemed to be one of those things that came with climbing to altitudes that high. They didn’t call it the Death Zone for nothing.
And now I had visions of people stepping over my dad’s body. Maybe while he was still alive. Had people seen him dying and just had to keep moving so they didn’t join him? We’d been told his body couldn’t be safely retrieved, and I’d thought at the time that it was kind of poetic that his final resting place was the mountain he’d set out to conquer. But now…fuck.
Acid burned the back of my throat, but I managed to ask, “Where did Dad, um… Where did he…”
My brother swallowed. “Parker said he got snow blindness and wandered off the path. He fell, and…” Daniel cleared his throat. “They couldn’t get to him safely. So he’s, um…”
“Right. Got it.” It wasn’t a pretty place to die or for his body to remain, but there was cold comfort in knowing he wasn’t in a place where people would be stepping over him. “How did they get his stuff, though?”
“I guess he took off his climbing helmet when he wandered off the path, and he managed to drop his crampons.” Daniel gestured at his head. “He kept his passport inside his helmet, so…”
I nodded mutely. So Dad had probably been delirious in addition to snow blind. With any luck, he’d been delirious enough to not realize he was in danger, or blind, or lost, or dying. One could hope.
“Well,” I said. “He died doing what he loved. We should all be so lucky.”
“Yeah. I’m just glad it happened on the way down, not on the way up.”
I nodded. Trust my father to be someone who always said he’d summit Mount Everest or die trying, and manage to hold on until just after he’d succeeded. Which…now that I thought about it, might be why he’d ended up dying up there. I’d heard about climbers who should have turned back, didn’t, and died on the way back down. There was no way to know for sure if that was what had happened this time, but I had to wonder.
“Anyway.” Daniel cleared his throat. “We should keep working.”
“Yeah. Yeah, we should.” I sighed. “Even if it sometimes feels like we’re not making a dent.”
“Well, whatever we don’t finish this weekend, you can work on when Maryann and Lisa get here.” His lips twisted slightly. “And after that, I mean, you’ve got nothing but time on your hands, so I’m sure you can wrap it all up.”
I refused to visibly wince. “There’s a lot more here than I expected. It’s going to take some work.”
He seemed to think about it, then sighed heavily. “You know