Scored a Red Bull.
WhatsApped Julia to ask if everything was all right over there and she texted back, Everything A-OK, drive carefully, bro!
Then Emily, that my ETA had now shifted to eight, barring more delays. A single gray check. Followed it up with a regular SMS.
Reached the border at eleven thirty. Heil, Deutschland, land of unlimited speed limits. Pretty much horizontal horizons. The weather and the jams had cleared up and I gunned it, cruise control set to a smooth 100 mph.
Two hours later, just past Karlsruhe, the jitters set in.
Maybe Emily was at work. Maybe her phone was off.
From the phone mount, that single gray check kept staring back at me.
I called her but it went straight to voicemail. Called Julia. Had she seen Nick? Yes, he’d come upstairs in the morning. They’d eaten breakfast together.
“Oh, really?” I asked, “How’s he doing?” Asked, “What did you say?”
“That you had to search something out. About this thing you guys are working on—that I didn’t know the ins and outs. That you’ll call to let him know when you’ll be back.” She said, “He seemed to accept it.”
There was something strange about her voice.
“Anything else?”
“We didn’t talk about it. About what’s going on.”
“Really?”
She didn’t want to make him feel uncomfortable. About Cécile. About his face. So no.
Maybe I was chasing ghosts.
Outside the Focus, the A6 and the A5 and the A67, and inside your own universe Julia spent the next half hour telling you about NYU and Mom and Dad and about her Tinder dates with Abercrombie-clad frat boys. Outside the Focus, Germany and overcast skies, and inside your own universe you did everything to kill time. To reinstate normalcy.
Nothing felt normal. Everything felt wrong.
“Are you sure nothing happened?” I suddenly asked, and Julia, she said no, nothing happened.
We said good-bye and I drove on.
Stretched my legs. More Red Bull. Yawned. Before Frankfurt was a ton of roadwork, so you could only do fifty. We did thirty-five. Stopped. I called Emily a couple more times and checked my email just to be sure. Then we were moving again. I gobbled up a whole bag of wine gums. A pack of M&M’s.
“It doesn’t mean shit,” I said out loud, but the sound of my voice in the empty car made me shiver.
What if she changed her mind?
Something was wrong. I could feel it all over.
Dr. Jingles stared glassy-eyed at the glove compartment. We’d been inseparable when I was a boy, but his presence, which was effectively impossible, didn’t do anything to ease my mind. There was a lot we had to talk out, Bear and me.
Outside the Focus, the Ruhr. It got dark and the weather got worse. By then I was really tired. Outside the Focus, big trucks slugging ahead in endless rain. Even before K?ln we were gridlocked into a standstill, and the voice in my subconscious had swollen to an ominous and downright menacing chorus. It reminded me of the Morose’s wailing.
My phone rang, startling me. Julia. I put on the Beats and swiped her on.
“Sis!”
“Hey. Where are you?”
“Near K?ln. Cologne. Ugh, this road really sucks, sis. Jammed as far as the eye can see. Like, the whole fucking drive.”
“How long do you still have to go?”
“Three and a half hours. If nothing new happens, that is.” I held on to the wheel with both hands and said, “Everything okay, sis? You sound . . . not okay.”
“I’m not.”
“What’s wrong?”
Silence on the other end of the line.
I said, “Hey, what’s up?” Then I heard a sob. Julia was crying. “Hey! Li’l sis, what—”
“I’m so sorry, Sam . . .”
“What is it?”
“Nick is gone.”
“Say what?”
Since this morning, she said. “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to worry you. And there wasn’t any reason to be worried, I thought he’d come back any minute. But it’s gotten dark now and he hasn’t come back yet and now I am worried . . .”
“Well, he’s wandered off before when the Maudit takes over, but if they see him in the village . . .”
“It’s not that, Sam. He took the car. He took my rental, when I went out to that little grocery store.”
And me, yup, tongue-tied. Nick, he hadn’t touched the car in weeks.
The look in his eyes last night. His despair. He had something up his sleeve. It had been written all over his face.
Don’t go away, Sam, he’d said. Please don’t go away. Don’t leave me all alone . . .
He’d been up to something and wanted me to see through it. To prevent it from happening . . . because he’d been afraid.
But of what?
Fear tearing through my body. Thin and sharp like shards of glass. I squeezed my eyes shut, and when I opened them again it was just in time to avoid rear-ending a Volvo V90. Focus, you doofus!
I cursed. “Did he say anything? Something that might tell you where he was headed?”
“No,” she said. She sniffed. “But there’s something else, Sam.”
“What?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it.
“It got ahold of me too. That thing you’ve been talking about for so long, it’s gotten me too.” She said, “He looked so tall this morning, Sam. I couldn’t help it. I told myself not to act like an idiot, but I was afraid of him. And . . .” A gasp for breath. “And I got dizzy.”
“Did he have his bandages on?”
And Julia said, “Yes. But that’s exactly what was so wrong. The shape of his face underneath them, it was all wrong.”
The V90 in front of me suddenly braked and I honked. Spit expletives.
I said, “Listen.” Said, “Keep an eye out for him, okay? If he comes back, let me know right away. But be careful. If he’s himself, there’s nothing to worry about. But if you notice even the slightest oddity about him, just avoid him. Leave him be, but lock the doors, keep the keys with you, and stay away from him.”
“I’m so sorry, Sam.” Her voice still soft in my Beats, her voice trapped in a chalet four hundred miles south, she said, “I feel so guilty.”
“This is not your fault, Julia.”
I said I’d call back and hung up. Called Nick. The phone rang. Kept ringing. Went to voicemail.
“Fuck!” I shouted, and slammed the wheel with my fist. The Focus swerved.
Called three more times and then I had the brain wave. Fierce and hard, like steel biting into my bones. A claw hammer smashing into my skull. Was Nick contemplating suicide? Was that why he’d begged me not to leave him alone? Had he thrown in the towel because, let’s face it, after all those weeks in Switzerland, we hadn’t gotten an iota closer to anything resembling a solution?
But why did he need the car, then?
I texted,
Nick, please call, worried sick here!!!
Two gray checks. Received, not viewed. So his phone was on. I called again. In my mind’s eye, a phone was ringing in the wreck of a rental hanging in a larch, in a narrow ravine halfway up the Val d’Anniviers. Nick with his head on the steering wheel, bleeding out of all of its holes.
There are holes in the ice. They look just like eyes.
I was driving myself crazy. Nick would never—