Coming Home by Stuart Watson

When Alyss brought Bret the opportunity to fly halfway around the world in a child’s car seat to trek Nepal with, as he put it, “the Dolly’s Llamas,” he curled his lip, peered over his readers, and sneered. Then, he returned to his reading as if any verbal engagement would concede the least interest. Alyss huffed from the room, the word “impossible” hanging on the steam in her wake.

Did she honestly think he would change? When their post-adolescent planets collided, heat consumed them. Sex. Sweaty. Then, a puffing break. Sex. Break. They eventually found time to talk about her moving in. Later, weekends at the coast and short drives to visit their parents. Global travel never came up. Until it did, when she expressed a dreamy hunger to see it all, and he had to admit his total lack of interest in stepping aboard a conveyance designed to plunge its passengers into the sea.

Was it his problem if he chose never again to see anything he hadn’t seen before? To him, going somewhere new was always the same: Different. Some people preferred pagodas. He opted for Sunday night football.

So he knew better than to raise opposition when Alyss, now in her mid-50s, came to him with the news that she would be going anyway, with Claire Glisby, “because Claire —”

“Does the downward-facing dog?” he interjected.

“—cares about other cultures.”

She ignored his poke; he ignored hers. Thinking through how this conversation might go and how it should go, he smiled.

“Sounds like a wonderful trekking companion,” he said. And he meant it. Why should couples do everything together if everything doesn’t interest one or the other? Besides, Claire certainly dressed the part in vests constructed of pockets and baggy khaki expedition pants decorated with velcro closures and snap-down straps for attaching…expeditionary accouterment.

On a future occasion, he would be sure to remind Alyss that he was the one who cooked exotic fare from the indigenous cuisines of Oaxaca, Sri Lanka, and Morocco and how much she enjoyed his brand of armchair travel. Culture extracted from books, without the motorbike exhaust, zippered pockets, and doubts about giardia from the tap.

He was the one—not her—who brought the world home.

During the weeks of planning that led to the date of her departure, Alyss would share with him what Claire had shared with her: details of their route, where they would stay, and the start, passage, and finish of their trek. Claire had done this three other times. She arranged it all and emailed Alyss with a day-by-day itinerary in response to her relayed requests for details that might dial down Bret’s growing anxiety. It became the focus of the dinner conversation.

“What if something happens? I keep thinking about horrid things.”

“Stop thinking about them.”

“Easy for you. I read about this stuff all the time. Hikers kidnapped by commandos. That sort of stuff.”

“Horrid things happen here, too. Shut your brain off.”

“How can I help you if I’m here and you’re there?”

“Not your job. I’m not helpless, you know?”

He chewed slower as if to process her words.

“Besides,” Alyss continued, “Claire is quite experienced. She’s so calm. Fearless.”

“How is she with commandos? I’m sure she’s capable. But she’s not superwoman. Nobody is invincible.”

“Even you? It’s not as if I’m incapable, dear boy.”

“I know. But I want to help. I can’t help if I’m here and you’re there. If I can’t see you, my mind runs wild with the possibilities.”

“Focus on good possibilities. Smiles open doors. And arms. Trust me. Trust Claire. I do.”

“Why should I? How can I? I barely know her.”

“You don’t know her like I do. She’s a rock.”

Early-onset Alzheimer’s had taken Claire’s husband a decade earlier. She met Alyss at a girls’ night organized by a mutual realtor. Alyss always brought home tales of Claire’s adventures, her mind drifting off as she spoke to imagine herself in whatever destination from which Claire had most recently returned. At first, he felt irritation as Alyss muttered in the background about Montevideo and the Atacama and the floating torii gate of Miyajima and more, much more, all exotic and frankly strange to his ear. Why go where you could understand not a word, didn’t know the currency, and had to sleep on thin, hard mattresses?

He realized he had come to think of Claire, lacking any other balancing information, as something of a Svengali to Alyss. In her limited company, he detected nothing to support such a view. She was vivacious, lean, tan, and handsome with a cascade of prematurely graying hair and a shapely figure that Bret tried, not always with much success, to avoid admiring when she visited them for dinner. As they chatted, he allowed himself the luxury of “what if—” thoughts. Yes, if Alyss were gone, I might ask her out. Definitely attractive. But no way in hell would I consider a pairing. She’s the antithesis of what I want. She would always be gone. Always going. I want a putterer. Calm. Quiet. Life is too short to embrace absence.

He offered to drop them at the airport. The trees still wore their leaves a month before Halloween when he drove them in. He helped unload their bags, making a show of manly vigor despite Claire’s mild irritation. If he had crawled inside her thoughts, he would have heard her. I wonder how he’d do carrying this thing for ten miles?

He kissed Alyss, thought of kissing Claire, and waved weakly as they strode toward security.

Alyss had done this before, solo travel or adventures with friends to places he had heard of but had no desire to visit. As then, he ended his day with a cocktail, the dog at his feet, his laptop open to Google Maps, searching for and staring blankly through digital Nepal for the name of that day’s destination for Alyss and Claire.

He got two emails from Alyss recounting their efforts. It was a low-elevation, self-guided wander. Lots of terrain. No snow. No ice. Gallons of meltwater from the high country.

When his smartphone buzzed five days later, jerking him from the sleepless debate about whether to rise or persist in his futility, Claire’s voice careened into his ear. She was blubbering and crying and apologizing. He knew, in that instant, that future conversation with Alyss about his worldly cuisine would never come.

Nothing Claire said made a bit of sense. She jumped from one thing to another, forward then back, so that Bret could extract no linear narrative. Except that Alyss was dead.

He craved an understanding of where they had started, where they were when the accident happened. After repeated prodding and requests to slow down, he deduced that Alyss had insisted they climb through the underbrush to the top of the Tindhare waterfall. Claire reluctantly followed, and they edged out along a flat boulder overlooking the braided tumble of the current.

Claire said she was looking upstream. She hadn’t noticed Alyss positioned behind her, closer to the lip of a rock shelf, taking a photo. A stream of photos, more likely. Claire said she spun to her left to invite Alyss to look where she had been looking, and that’s when she bumped Alyss. Alyss tipped into the sky and became airborne, looking backward toward Claire, her phone still elevated in front of her face, then soaring off as she hit an outcropping and went all loose and rubbery, and rolled backward in midair, her feet coming up and over as she disappeared below the rocks and into the current.

Other tourists saw the accident and rushed to Claire’s side. There was no sign of Alyss. The current surged briefly across rocky steps, plunging again and again. Anything thrust into it would be carried hundreds of meters downhill toward a river at the bottom of the slope.

Other visitors comforted Claire. One helped her to his car and drove her back to Kathmandu. They reported the accident to the police and, later, to the U.S. Consul, with instructions for the return of the body and any personal effects, should they ever be recovered.

Claire asked if he could pick her up. She was flying home alone the next day.

She was at the curb. He got out and went around back to open the hatch. When he turned toward her, she was there, throwing her arms around his head and thrusting her face against his shoulder. He held her. She said nothing at first, then, “I’m all cried out.”

She pulled back so their eyes could meet. Then she kissed him hard and hungry. It shocked him, but only briefly, before he felt himself kissing back.

Driving Claire home, he sat with a flood of questions. What were they to do about all this? It was all such a tumble, confusing. Hunger and hurt. Loss and longing. Desire and despair.

As affairs often do, theirs had started in a moment of shared grief, in fatigue, extreme stress, at a moment of wanting what no longer can be, in an embrace meant to comfort, not to seduce, but at a moment in which one style of embrace can often be confused, or evolve into another.

Both admitted to some shock at the rapidity of its reveal. In moments after lovemaking, they spoke of how they had found themselves, long before the accident, tilting toward each other, the way a safe tilts out of an upstairs window and begins to plunge toward a pedestrian walking by on the sidewalk below.

Reeling as they were, Bret felt an even greater shock when the email arrived from Alyss. She had plunged several levels downstream from the point of her fall, impact buffered by her backpack, slowed by pools at each level, then pushed by the current toward the next until she slid to the edge of one pool. She was stunned but conscious. She pulled herself to a mossy mound of earth beneath an overhang. And passed out. It was dark when she awoke. It took her two days to find a path back to the trail. Bruised and scraped, she could walk. Barely. She hitched a ride with a tour group.

Claire, of course, was gone by then. She had given Alyss’s luggage to consular officials. They were happy to help reunite Alyss with her clothing, toiletries, and laptop computer. She used the consulate wifi to write.

After reading the note—it expressed no blame, just gratitude—he noticed that his wife had also sent an attachment. A photo, magically uploaded, shortly after its capture, to a cloud storage folder. Bret opened the file.

It showed Claire standing on the shelf from which Alyss had fallen and was falling at the moment the image was captured. Claire was leaning forward a bit, a look not of panic or fright on her face but more one of resolve, her right arm extended fully, perhaps to catch or restrain her friend. Which, of course, had been a futile gesture.

Bret couldn’t sleep. As he lay in the dark, listening to Claire’s gentle breathing, he thought again about the photo. Something about it troubled him: Claire’s posture. She was reaching, yes? As if to grab Alyss and arrest her fatal fall. Yes?

Or was she? Again, the image floated to his inner eye. Claire, leaning, but her arm was all wrong. If she had been trying to catch Alyss, her fingers would have been extended. As it was, he could see the palm of her hand tilted upright. Lifted up, fingers flared, not as if she were reaching to grab someone falling away from her or restrain something coming toward her. Her hand looked more as if she were concluding a forceful and successful push.

In the background, Claire’s face, not one of fright or surprise, panic or concern, just a stern and intent resolve to complete the task at hand.