Okay, maybe the last thing was a bit of a gamble, a pretty wacky gamble maybe, but it paid off. And it was a calculated gamble. No one ever pioneered by playing it safe.
Pioneering didn’t mean you fell back into your body with a smack. You didn’t plop down into the snow on your back the way it would happen in the movies. No shock, no gasping for breath. I simply became aware of the weight of my body and the cold that was eating it away. The flapping of my Gore-Tex coat’s collar.
And a vague aroma of liver.
What I saw when I opened my eyes was one of those choughs, head tilted, beak yellow. Looking at me the way a Frenchman looks at a plate of escargots. Alarm clock from hell—see that and you’re wide-awake in no time flat. You forget about the cold, too.
Screaming and flailing my arms, I jerked upright. The bird flew up. All the birds flew up. The whole flock that had gathered around me. Me and Julia.
Julia, she was lying not far from me in the snow, next to the sled. All around us, raked footprints. Shivering from the cold and moaning from the pain in my limbs, I plowed my way to my sister and fell to my knees. Eyes: check. Pulse: check. Breathing: check.
Julia: check.
But where was Nick?
I looked around and no one saw that I was being stared at by a gaping void. No one felt that I was engulfed by an unbearable sense of loneliness. The dawn’s light show was over and the last of the vivid colors had disappeared off the summit. The light had shifted; the Maudit was trembling far away in the hazy sky. I wanted to touch it. I needed to be consoled by the illusion that it would be close, but it was just drifting there, far off in the distance, out of reach above the mist on the glacier, which had now climbed further up its flanks.
The scene was unfathomable. It swelled up in my chest and overwhelmed me. Crushed me. Exposed an ugly, deep wound. I felt that I was sinking and could only think, No. Please no. Please, I don’t want this. Could only think, I can’t deal with this. I don’t want to be alone. Not without Nick.
I collapsed onto the snow, pulled Julia against me, and wrapped the blanket that had saved our lives fifteen years ago on the Panther Mile around us. I started to rub her warm. Blow her warm. Julia’s hair fluttered over her forehead in the calm breeze coming down from the glacier. I tried to think a hoodie into existence but couldn’t. We had to make do with what we had.
We sat like that on the col, who knows for how long, till I felt a wrinkle in time. Till I heard Julia say, with a shaky voice, “Oh my god.” Julia, she stammered, “Sam, it’s so beautiful here . . .”
And me rub, rub, rubbing. I couldn’t stop, know what I mean? I couldn’t stop. Whatever resided here in the silence, I had to cling to it. Had to keep it close, before it would slip away from me forever. You had to put up your mask, cuz you were terribly afraid of the idea that the world could see your weakness, despite your attempts at faking confidence. Sam Avery, always in control. Maybe there’s a heart in there somewhere, but all we get to see is granite.
It didn’t work, and I started to cry.
Startled, Julia turned around, but I couldn’t see her anymore. I hid my face in the inside of my elbow and felt only hot tears.
“Hey, bro . . .” She wriggled up against me and squeezed our bodies till she was the one hugging me instead of the other way around. “Is Nick up there now?”
I could only nod. That’s what it had all come down to. Nick was up there now. I was down here.
I cried aloud and Julia tried to console me.
“Sam,” she hushed, “bro,” she hushed, “he belongs here, can’t you see that? Nick came home here, he is this place. You gotta know that, right? Just look! Look at the mountains and try not seeing Nick in them. That’s impossible!”
I looked, and all these things were true, and that’s why I cried. I couldn’t stop anymore. I had no restraint. I had lost my anchor.
“I really tried,” I said between sobs, searching for the right words to say the things I wanted to say. “If there’d been another way to exorcise him, to make him stop doing all those things . . .”
Julia wiped the tears off my eyes with her thumbs and looked into me the way only Julia could. Hands on my shoulder, she said, “I know.” Said, “There was no other way.”
“It was too strong, Julia. The thing inside him. How can you fight against something as big as . . . as—”
“You fought it. And you never stopped loving him. That’s why you were able to set him free.”
“I want him to come back so much, Julia . . .”
“Sam.”
“I just want . . .”
“Bro . . .”
“I love him so much! He’s done such terrible things, but really, that wasn’t him. It wasn’t really him who did it, Julia. He was sweet, he really was—”
“Sam.” Stern. Her fingers squeezing my Gore-Tex shoulders. Flat on my cheeks, pinching, shaking, like she was squeezing out an orange. “Listen, all of that is true. It hurts a lot and it’s going to hurt a lot more. That’s why I came here. You once took care of me, and now I’m going to take care of you, you understand?” She rocked my face up and down with her hands, nodding my head for me, which made me laugh through my tears. “But now you have to say good-bye to this place, because we still have a very long way down ahead of us, and I don’t think you’ll ever be coming back here.”
New tears came; I couldn’t hold them back. Julia took the thermos and screwed the top off. Poured steaming tea into the lid and let me drink. No, uh-uh, another sip. The thermos had kept the concoction nice and warm, and whatever kind of sugar coating was in there made my throat burn.
“Whoa, someone sure has spiced up that tea, huh?” my sister said, when she’d taken a sip herself. Not that she could care. Julia’s got the liver of a sperm whale.
When I was feeling a bit better, I said, “I started the fire in Huckleberry Wall.”
“I know,” Julia said.
My eyes hot and wet and searing, I looked at her in shock. Took a while, but eventually I came up with, “Since when?”
“I’ve always known. And now you told me, so it doesn’t have to be a thing for you anymore.”
I was stunned. “But . . . how?”
“It added up.” She said, “It wasn’t that hard to see. With all you had to carry with you through all those years. I don’t think Mom and Dad ever knew, but I’m your sister, huh? I can see right through you. Here, wait.”
She walked to the sled and came back with Ramses’s travel carrier. Of course! The cat! I totally forgot to check on him. But when she opened the flap, it wasn’t Ramses she took out but Dr. Jingles.
I didn’t get it at all anymore.
Julia handed me my old teddy bear with his singed little ass, his snout just a wee bit askew, the bald patches on his forepaws. Just like a coupla days ago, I pressed my nose into his fur and sniffed the aromas of my childhood.
I asked, “But where’s Ramses then?”