Headlights(85)

“Lone Pine, California,” she says. “I was hoping to hike and just, I guess, get a break from the world. It was meant to be a pass-through. It’s where Tumanguya is, Mount Whitney most people call it, even though that’s not its name. It’s a small town, there’s really not much. Manzanar, an old western film museum. Couple bars, hiker resupply, some motels. The Alabama Hills, these rock formations at the base of the mountain.

“My first night there, I stopped in one of those bars, just to get a drink. I’d entered the lottery to see if I could get a permit to summit the mountain from the portal side, and I was waiting to hear. And that’s when I met Eden. She was … everything I wasn’t, I guess. She was there collecting stories, trying to piece together a huge book on this country and the people in it, interviewing locals and getting to know everyone she could. She was … fearless.”

The look on her face, pain. That type of deep unrelenting grief.

“We hit it off,” she says. “And I mean, the kind of hit-it-off that only happens once, maybe twice in a lifetime with someone. Soulmates come in any type of relationship, and you never know when you’re gonna meet one, or if. If it’s even possible. But we knew. It was … bliss.” She shrugs.

I start to dab the alcohol closer to the part of my pinky that’s hanging off. I exhale through my teeth.

“I didn’t get the permit, that first night, to summit. We tried a few times, throughout the summer, got matching tattoos of the mountain to sort of will it into existence. And it worked. Finally, we got it. We hiked up, were up at Trail Camp, which is like the last stop just before the top, just us and a couple other hikers and a bunch of marmots. We could’ve summited in one day, come back down. We were strong. That kind of young and dumb that makes you invincible, almost. But we decided to stretch it out, swim in each lake as we went up, take a couple days. Camp and experience the camaraderie of pre-summit base camp.”

She braces herself, takes a deep breath, fidgeting with the tooth. “At the campsite, while we were sleeping, a storm came in. A big one. The kind that gets hikers put on the evening news as the one death for the year. One of the others had told us weather might come, that he was reconsidering his summit and thinking of just hiking back down in the night. We shrugged it off and went to sleep. We were having fun. When we woke up, all the other hikers were gone, and the snow was everywhere.

“We couldn’t get down. Could hardly even see. And Eden, it turns out, had a heart condition, and hadn’t brought enough medication with her up the mountain since it was just supposed to be one overnight. She hadn’t told me about it. I thought we’d told each other everything, but…” One tear falls, and she swipes at it with the back of her hand.

“We couldn’t get down. The blizzard. We couldn’t even find the trails at all at this point, the snow was feet high. So we found this kind of makeshift cave in between some big rocks, and the snow kept coming. We couldn’t see, other than just white. Like now,” she says, glancing out the window at the flurries that haven’t stopped. “We’d only brought food for a day and a half.” She swallows. “Eden made it four days before her heart … The snow never let up. It got worse. Once-in-a-lifetime record storm.”

“I—” She wipes her face again, the tears there, and says, “I was up there for thirty-two more. After she died. Thirty-six days, total.”

I’ve stopped what I’m doing with the bandage. Watching her, listening.

Realization settles over me at her words. Why she is telling me this. What this story has to do with everything.

A young girl trapped and cold and starving, with her best friend’s body.

“You survived,” I say.

She nods. Takes a long minute, just turns the tooth over and over in her hand, that look of pain on her face. Tears falling. “I had no idea how much a person could hate themselves. I … I was really lost, for months. I drifted in and out of towns, but … I realized I couldn’t be near people, anymore. The smell of them. I stopped eating meat, couldn’t look at it. And when I met James, the guy who owns the house in Aspen, I needed a place to land, get my life together. He was lonely, just wanted company. He gave me space and never questioned the nose plugs or the capsaicin or any of it. I think he just liked knowing there was someone around. Every day, I’d drive down the mountain and to that trail you and I ran, and I’d run or walk, and I’d think maybe today I just end it all. If I didn’t exist, the memories wouldn’t either. What I’d done would cease to exist with me. Maybe today I just … stop. Have you ever…?”

She raises her eyes to me, vulnerable. Raw. And I know exactly what she’s asking. I know the answer I would honestly give, and it’s the one she needs. The one she’s begging for.

I don’t say anything.

Her shoulders slump, and she drops her gaze again. “When it became clear that James wanted more and I couldn’t give it … I mean, I couldn’t even get near anyone. There was no way … I left. And I walked, mostly. At night. Maybe kind of daring the night to take me, some bad man or big animal. Statistically it’d be the man, I guess. I hiked trails and walked highways. Drove, sometimes. Just … drifting. I almost felt like I was between worlds, somewhere not quite here. Nothing between the memories and me. But something about the dark of night, something about no longer existing in the daylight, made me feel as though I … No one wants to be the darkest thing in the day. But I was at home at night. I don’t know. I was in a hell of my own making, but it was better than trying to live in the daylight world again. Being the darkest thing there and knowing it.”