When Nick awoke, his parents had returned. He was upbeat and even made jokes. Careful conclusion: he was happy to see me, not upset that I split. He complained about a painful pressure to the back of his face, but the nurse said there was still an hour before the next hit of morphine. Last thing she wanted was a junkie on her hands.
I said, “I’ll take a dose. I sure could use it.”
But instead, there was Louise and Harald and a call from the AMC. The doctor they had talked to, like them, saw no reason to keep Nick in an overpriced Swiss clinic any longer. Under certain circumstances, it was even possible to overrule the local quack’s decision. Since Nick’s mountaineering insurance covered medevac, Dr. Genet was in for an unpleasant lunchtime surprise. Your patient X, your experiment, your faceless Frankenstein, well, he flew the Intensive Coop. Wild guess, but if you ask us, it was merely falling rocks.
We sat by the bed, all four of us feeling relieved, till early in the evening, when Nick’s next morphine shot kicked in and he had trouble keeping his eyes open. Louise and Harald said good-bye and went to the nurses’ station to bring the night shift up to speed about their son’s imminent repatriation.
Gave me the chance to finally try to say it.
“Nick . . . I’m sorry I left this morning.” I bowed over him, so close I could smell the antibiotic ointment under his bandages . . . and under them, unmistakable and sinister, the wound odor. I laid my hand on his shoulder. “I’m here for you, okay? Don’t be afraid. Whatever happened, you got my support, you hear? Whatever happened.”
Nick fixed his open eyes on mine. The morphine made it hard to tell which emotion they were harboring, but he squeezed my hand softly.
“And when we get home, I want you to tell me everything, okay?”
Another squeeze. I wanted to stay, but Nick took the notepad lying on his chest and wrote,
Go get something to eat with those two. Cécile will be here soon, but I don’t think I can stay awake till then.
So I did, and I wish I hadn’t.
Next to the hotel, we ate the best cheese fondue ever: Gruyère/Vacherin/tons of garlic/white wine. In the southeast, in the direction of Wallis, sky heavy and dark, faraway rumbling echoing against the mountains. Halfway through dinner, Harald got a call confirming the medevac the next day. Louise clapped her hands in delight.
“Oh, I’m so happy,” she said. She laughed, eyes glittering, leaned toward me. “Want to know something, Sam? That man, the dental surgeon, that Jeanette or whatever his name is, I’m sure he’s good at what he does, but like I told Harald yesterday, I think he’s an awful man.”
I smiled. “So I wasn’t the only one.”
And that’s why, for the second time that day, I ran through the CHUV’s corridors and stormed into Nick’s room. Not in shock this time but excited about sharing the good news.
“Cécile, he can go home!” I yelped—but then I saw that the woman bowing over Nick wasn’t Cécile at all. It was a nurse who was much older, heavyset, and when she looked up with a start, I saw dark rings under her eyes.
And something else.
It was just a flash before the nurse blocked what she was doing with her body, a flash before she fastened the bandages with those metal clips. But in that flash I saw something, and I could still see it the next day, when I was jolted out of a nightmare somewhere above the Atlantic, halfway to New York.
It’s the things you leave out that are the worst.
My knees buckled, I sank against the doorpost, only just managed not to fall to the floor. Sat there, sprawled, slumped, till the nurse was done and turned to me. Blood gone from my face.
“Where’s Cécile?” I managed to get out.
I stared at her latex gloves, at the metal tray in her hand. Stared at the strips of used gauze and wads of bloodied cotton, yellow-brown, disinfectant-sticky. When I spoke, I could barely recognize my own voice.
“Don’t ask me where she is. Fifteen minutes ago she ran out of the ward, screaming. The concierge saw her leave the building. Kid was absolutely terrified, he said.”
“What happened?”
“She was with that friend of yours. Something must have scared her witless. She was changing the bandages and left everything all exposed. Exposed! And he slept through it all, can you believe it?”
She nodded at Nick, but I noticed she didn’t look at him. She was actually already halfway to the door, as if she couldn’t bear another second in this room with her patient.
“I called her at least ten times, but she won’t pick up. She needs to come back. We’re understaffed as it is, and everything’s going haywire.”
“But . . . what could have happened?” I tried again.
“No idea, but if the staff find out, and they will, it won’t happen again. She’ll get fired.”
It hurt to hear it. “Can I go to Nick?”
She gazed at me, hesitated, then held up her hand. “I don’t want to have anything to do with this. If anyone asks, I never saw you here, got it? I’m assuming you’ll confirm it.”
“You’re an angel,” I said.
But the angel had walked away, one latex hand in the air, grumbling to herself about Cécile, God, and the world.
I closed the door softly. It was true: all the commotion had gone unnoticed by Nick. He lay there under the sheet, still as a stiff, face buried under all those new bandages. Behind him, the large window, looking out on purple-black thunderclouds and the foothills in the dying light. That window, it shook lightly in its grooves every time the lightning made the contours of the peaks appear in the distance. Maybe it was my imagination. What I didn’t imagine was my fingers, trembling so hard when I texted Cécile that I had to start over three times.
Cécile, WTF?
No reason to assume she’d contact me if the hospital couldn’t reach her, but surprise surprise. I got one text; and that was the last I heard from her.
Sorry. He was right, he’s a monster.
9
The UvA gym, the workout bench where Nick lay glistening with sweat, the soaked tank top—it wasn’t only where we first met, it’s where we first smooched. In the locker room. Yeah, okay, after showering.
Don’t know how we got there, don’t care, but he pushes me against the tiled wall, tongue in my mouth, six foot four of macho-boy twinkdom, Dior Fahrenheit and body wash bouquet, one hand on my neck, the other guiding mine under his shirt. Nick, perfect-pec babe magnet, likely will have a girlfriend next week, but I’ll take my chances.
Wrong about the girlfriend; three years of exemplary fidelity instead. But when he pulls back and smiles at me, the corners of his mouth are split open to the ears and I see a row of bared, bloody teeth all the way to the back of his mouth. I touch my own lips and it’s like we just made out with a mouthful of raw mincemeat.
“It wasn’t an accident, Sam,” Nick says, and I can see his tongue, I mean the whole thing, and I start screaming. “Augustin is dead, and it wasn’t an accident . . .”
10