Sure does, said I. One of the grim ones, in which you froze to death in a bewitched forest. Didn’t say that.
She asked if I was doing okay. Whether I’d managed to get my bearings in Switzerland and had been able to come to terms with everything we had to go through. Only after all of that did she ask about Nick. That’s how she is, Louise Grevers. We all want a little voice in our head telling us we can do it. In my case, that voice was flesh and blood and drank algae shakes.
“Harald and I are worried,” Louise said. Nick hadn’t responded to any of their messages and calls for a while. “I have a feeling he’s going through a difficult phase at the moment. Do you happen to know if that’s true?”
What can I say, he’s going through a deep depression. He still has a big mountain to climb. Nothing we couldn’t work on, I said.
Me, the perfect son-in-law, honest to the core.
Okay, tiny asterisk: don’t tell a mom that her son had probably done too much damage already. That maybe it was too late for his exorcism.
“Really,” I said, “he’ll be overjoyed to hear that you’re thinking about him.”
Nick, who I assumed was downstairs. Taking a rest. Or the Maudit was phasing him out again. Something like that—you couldn’t be sure.
Homecoming had been totally awkward. He’d been lying on the couch, sleeping off his oxazepams, the radio still on WYDL. Hadn’t even noticed I’d been gone all night. He fluttered open a woozy, beauty-sleep-filled eye, saw Julia, and said, “Julia?” More absently than usual. Julia’s coming at least a big enough distraction to keep him from noticing my aloofness.
Or so I hoped.
I could deal with all the rest of this shit, but not with Nick.
Not without a definitive answer.
Louise’s voice, on the other side of all those stories you didn’t tell: “Okay, well, let him have his rest. Do you know if Nick is still planning to have his scar surgery?” He’d talked about it with Harald, she said. “It’s scheduled for next week or the week after, I think, but we haven’t heard anything about it for a while.”
Looking out at the snowplowed road to the valley, I knew that, for Nick right now, surgery would be the number one all-time worst idea ever.
I said that he was still thinking about it.
“Well, we’ll ask him about it later.” Louise said, “Will you please tell him I called?”
Oh, and yes, she’d gone over to water the plants and pick up the mail. There was an urgent summons for Nick to file his quarterly tax statement. A letter to me from UvA . . . did I want her to open it for me?
And a funeral card. That was such a sad story.
Here we go.
Rosalie Timbergen, she said. A child that had lived a couple of doors down. Only three years old. Asked did we know the Timbergens well?
And I heard myself say, Not well, no. Heard myself say, I would see her passing by on her tricycle from time to time. Heard my heart thumping, pa-WHUMP, pa-WHUMP, pa-WHUMP.
Loes Timbergen’s face in the doorway flashed before me, snarling, He scared the living daylights out of her with that mask of his! The sincerely fearful expression in the mother’s eyes when she said, She’s all out of sorts, it’s made her sick.
“I bumped into Adelheid on the sidewalk,” Louise said. ’Course. Our next-door neighbor, gossip queen of Amsterdam-Zuid. “She’d been to the funeral at Zorgvlied cemetery. It must have been awful. I could see she was still shaken when she told me about it. Still so young, poor child. And the parents, inconsolable . . .”
And my own words, before I had slammed the door in Loes’s face: It’s not Nick’s fault she’s sick, got it?
It’s not Nick’s fault.
It had looked like it was the flu, Adelheid said. Nausea, dizziness, throwing up. No painkillers had given her any relief. The family doctor hadn’t been able to find any direct cause but wasn’t too worried. Just a case of diminished resistance. There was a lot of it around, after all. Tucked in bed, freshly squeezed OJ, ginger tea, and Grandma’s chicken soup. Then her lungs filled up and she drowned in her own bodily fluids.
“It was pulmonary edema,” Louise said. “They were too late; the paramedics couldn’t do anything for her anymore. If she’d been correctly diagnosed, maybe they could have helped her in time . . .”
With my vision starting to dim, I heard myself say, It’s not Nick’s fault she’s sick, got it?
My vision narrowing into a tunnel, I heard Louise say, “According to Adelheid, the doctors were baffled.”
Pulmonary edema.
I’d read about it only recently. Cuz pulmonary edema was what you died from when you had acute altitude sickness. Your lungs started leaking. In the end, your brain.
Which didn’t cross the doctors’ minds, because Amsterdam’s elevation was exactly minus seven feet.
“Losing a child, I cannot bear to think what that would be like,” Louise said. “In that regard, we should be grateful that we still have Nick, wouldn’t you say?”
Yeah, I said.
So grateful.
3
So there we were. Julia and me, back in the mountains. Back in a cabin. As if we’d never fully descended the Panther Mile.
“What would you do,” I said, “if you suspected the person you loved had done something terrible? Something really terrible.” Thinking out loud as I spoke, I said, “Maybe he wasn’t altogether himself when he did it—diminished capacity, let’s say. Temporary insanity. And you also think that he won’t do it again, cuz he has much better control over the impulses that made him do it. But still. It happened, and you have a strong suspicion that he’s responsible. What would you do?”
Julia hesitated for about a quarter of a nanosecond. “First thing, I’d want to know for sure if it’s really true. I would never want to risk falsely accusing anyone.”
“So, gather evidence.”
Yes.
“And then?”
“Then I’d confront him. If that’s possible, at least. Ask why he did it. I’d wanna know. And after that, it depends on the circumstances. What exactly happened, is there a chance he’d do it again, who are the victims? But I’d still somehow let justice prevail. Especially if other people are involved.” She looked at me. “And even if it’s at my expense. Of my love for him.”
I suddenly felt like crying. Julia picked up on it and took my hands in hers, causing Ramses to jump off her lap. Julia, suddenly real close, said, “Bro, whatever it is, you can deal with it. You’re strong.”
But I wasn’t.
“Yes you are. And I should know.” Julia, real close, “We went through hell together, remember? You rescued me from a burning house.”
Was that how she remembered it?
Julia said, “You’ve always been my hero, Sam.”