The Last Ridge, Part 3: Five Months After
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Part 3 of 5. A snowstorm traps a woman guide in her fifties and her nineteen-year-old client in the mountain hut where she last saw her climbing partner, and the young man finally explains why he came.
Hardly had they reached Camp Three when the wind changed direction.
Elsa felt it before she heard it: a pressure in the ears, a sudden cold on the left side of her face. By the time they had forced the hut door shut behind them, snow was hitting the walls sideways and the small window had turned white.
It was the same hut. New roof, new stove, but the same wooden bunks, the same nail by the door where Paul had hung his gloves to dry. Not once in twenty years had she allowed herself to picture this room, and now she was standing in it, unable to stop seeing it.
Tomas lit the stove without asking. Not until the pot was boiling did either of them speak, and even then it was only about the forecast. Around nine, a gust struck so hard that a pan fell off its hook, and Tomas laughed, a short surprised sound, and for the first time he looked his age.
'You climb like someone I used to know,' Elsa said.
He stopped laughing. For a long time he watched the blue flame. Then he took the black notebook out of his jacket and laid it on the table between them.
'They found it with the axe,' he said. 'In the same block of ice. My mother didn't want to open it. I've read it maybe a hundred times.'
Only then did Elsa understand: the formal letter, the strong shoulders that slowed down for her on the steep ground, the way he tilted his head when he listened. Paul had never mentioned a child. Paul had never known.
'I was born in February,' Tomas said. 'Five months after.'
Never had the wind sounded the way it did then, low and endless, like something breathing against the walls.
'My whole life, people told me the same story,' he said. 'Two climbers. An argument. One went up, one came down. Everyone was very kind about it. Everyone said you couldn't have done anything.'
He opened the notebook at the last page and pushed it towards her.
'He doesn't say that. Read it. Then tell me what really happened up there.'