Not ghosts, I thought. Echoes.
This was exactly the reason I hadn’t told Julia about the Morose. Maybe you’ve figured out by this point that I have a tendency to avoid tricky conversations if they aren’t absolutely, incontrovertibly necessary. And this one wasn’t. The forecast for the coming days was stable weather. Thaw, even. That strengthened my confidence it would be safe for her to stay.
“Thing is, there’s someone in Amsterdam who claims the exact same thing. Someone who has also come into contact with Nick. A neurosurgeon, of all people.” I said, “If there’s anyone who knows about brain trouble, she’s it. This woman is my last hope.”
That wasn’t the full story, but—fuck it, period that sentence.
“So go,” Julia said. “Go ahead and I’ll keep an eye on Nick.”
“Seriously?” I bear-hugged her. “You’re my hero, I mean it . . .”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. I’m only doing it because I think it’ll do you good to go away for a while. And if this doesn’t get you anywhere, we do it my way. Promise? Then we take Nick to Holland, make sure he gets the help he needs, and you’ll come home with me for a while.”
“Promise.”
But that wasn’t gonna happen. The truth was simple: after I had my talk with Emily Wan, the road forked in two. Go left and there’d be no reason to assume Nick was responsible for the catastrophe in the AMC. If that was the case, I was willing to accept that Rosalie’s death, Cécile’s disappearance, and Dr. Genet’s suicide—if it really did happen and wasn’t a figment of Cécile’s imagination—were all coincidences. Then maybe Nick still had a problem with the Maudit, but he wasn’t the monster my imagination had blown him up to be. That was still possible.
Go right, though, and there was blood on my hands, too.
And whichever way it turned out, I had ten hours of solo time in a car to mull over my next steps.
Julia pushed me gently away and looked at me. “You guys are going to all ends to avoid each other, huh?”
What was she talking about?
“Nick hasn’t shown his face all afternoon and you haven’t so much as looked at him today.” Julia’s blueberry-blue eyes looking right into me, “And now you’ve got this guilty look on your face.”
I held Dr. Jingles in front of my face, shook his noggin and rumbled with my best bear voice, “Bear don’t like busybodies.”
But her last comment had hit a nerve all right, and my evening started with a big rock in my stomach. A big rock and a premonition of impending doom I just couldn’t shake.
What I did was focus on the practical. Texted Emily I was coming—my plan was to hit the road tomorrow at seven, so, including the pit stops, I could be in Amsterdam by six p.m. and—ping! Emily’s text already in: Thank you. And a home address.
What I stuffed into my backpack was just the essentials. Passport, laptop, card. Started pumping volts into Nick’s Beats. Anything to keep busy. Distracted. Halt my train of thought, cuz it was rocketing straight toward the double tunnel entrance into the darkness of my conscience.
I’m avoiding him, but he’s avoiding me too. Triggered by what Julia had said, it came to me in a flash.
He’s up to something.
File it, floodgates: check. No room for this. Had my hands full with myself.
If only I’d paid more attention to it.
When I went downstairs late in the evening, he was in bed. When he saw me, Nick immediately stretched out his arms, and it looked like he was calling to me from behind the bandages, even with no sound coming from his lips.
I saw something was wrong right away. Something about his eyes. A white, milky haze came and went over his pupils, came and went. Not the white of a cataract, but the white of a glacier, the white of a snowstorm. And each time it happened, a wave of dizziness flowed through me.
I sat beside him and took him in my arms.
“Shush, boy,” I soothed him, enduring my dizziness. “I’m with you. It’s all right. It’s over, it’s okay, you’re in control. Look, Nick, you’re in control.”
And he was. The storm in his eyes died down. I don’t know how long I held him, but Nick didn’t utter a word.
He was dropping off, but just before he fell asleep his eyes opened one more time and clung on to me, full of fear and loneliness. “Don’t go away, Sam,” he pleaded. “Please don’t go away. Don’t leave me alone . . .”
It gave me a shock. A heat behind my cheeks.
Even though his words could be about anything, even though he most probably meant here and now, I couldn’t hear anything in them but a prophecy.
A warning.
And I couldn’t comply.
I kept holding him for a long, long time, while Nick’s breathing slowed down, me fully unaware of the many things that were simultaneously going down with the tragic precision of fate. Nick’s life quieted in my arms to languidly flowing liquids in a timeless perseverance, and me fully unaware of the tragedy unfolding in Amsterdam at the very same time. But in this particular, untouched moment, all the things I suspected his involvement in didn’t matter, because only Nick and I existed, and I loved him as I had loved him ever since that improbable, one-in-a-zillion chance occurrence when our paths had crossed.
7
Outside the Focus, it wasn’t just one long road. Outside the Focus, it was all the roads. All the hairpin turns and tunnels and gas stations and overpasses. All the place names and license plates and flashing taillights that brought you home. Inside a car, you brought your own universe, but outside everything always changed.
It was a strange sensation to drive out of the winter and back into fall. Below the snow line, the Rh?ne valley was a palette of browns. After a while, it was like the snow had never existed. In your rearview mirror, in a few switchbacks, you could still see the distant, white sawteeth of the highest peaks, but one flick of the wrist and the mirror stopped hassling me. I felt strangely upbeat. Beats covering my ears, this time my own playlist, and not in life support mode but in the knowledge that I was taking action. Singing along with “Tongue Tied,” singing along with “Get Out,” drumming on the wheel, and when you reached the highway by Sion you swung to the left lane and put your foot to the floor.
Next to me, riding shotgun, seatbelt on: Dr. Jingles.
Outside the Focus, the E62 and the E27 and the E25. Outside the Focus, the roads curving through ever-changing mountains, ever the same. Outside the Focus, the only diff was they got lower and lower. Less threatening.
The first gridlock was between Bern and Basel. Rain. The northbound lane, a miles-long chain of red taillights. The southbound lane, a miles-long string of white headlights. Drivers were silhouettes behind swishing wipers. The GPS showed red dots all the way to the German border. Seriously, you’d think fate would be on my side for a change.
Outside the Focus, the world crawled by you stop-and-go, till x klicks before Basel you cut off the highway into a sardined Rastst?tte. Filled ’er up. Took a leak in a putrid pissoir.