And there’s more. He’d pierced the corners of photo-Augustin’s mouth with scissors and cut open his cheeks all the way to the ears.
Nick found out his mom’d seen the snapshot. She didn’t know how, didn’t have any evidence of it, but didn’t doubt it for a second. “He was downstairs with us that evening, and the way he was looking at me, Sam. I didn’t recognize him. It was like I was sitting next to a stranger. And . . . he wrote a note. I was so taken aback by it that I threw it away and didn’t even show it to Harald.”
What it said? She wouldn’t say.
She’d called Nick’s psychotherapist behind his back. The shrink said you couldn’t rule out Nick bearing grudges, if he blamed Augustin or anyone else around him for his mutilation. And aggressiveness. Delusions. OCD. Best thing that she could do was re-create normality as well as she could.
That’s what she was trying to do. By calling me home.
“I think he needs you, Sam. And you want to know something else?”
“What?”
“By the sound of your voice, you need him too.”
Louise was right, of course, but I still thought of what Cécile Métrailler had said: If there was violence, it had to have been between them.
2
Nick wasn’t in bed. Didn’t know where he was. The bed looked untouched, curtains drawn, gently swaying in front of the open window. I had a vision of them billowing like a drifting specter in the empty room when I came in the front door. The odor of antiseptic was much more pungent up here.
So I go back to the landing, call out his name. Nothing. Surprised, but not yet worried. My homecoming was unannounced, and maybe, despite everything, Nick had stayed the night with the folks or gone to the AMC for a checkup. But I kept my ears open, psyched out by the silence. Even no Ramses pit-a-patting from one of his hideouts, which probably meant he was nestled on the bed at Adelheid’s, in number 47—a statement no doubt. I decided to call Louise at a godly hour and take advantage of the time in between to smooth out my jet lag.
Showered. Loved the awesome water pressure, splattered my face for at least twenty minutes, eyes shut, Spotify bouncing against the walls. Muffled sounds. Almost dropping off to the rhythm of my daily mix and the streaming water.
Towel skirt on, I went into the dark bedroom. Halfway there, all of a sudden, wham!
Nick was there, sitting on the edge of the bed.
I tottered, felt like I was falling face-first into the Grand Canyon or something. Still, I somehow managed to compensate. Don’t let him notice. It was a matter of life or death, I knew. Something told me I shouldn’t let on how much he shook me up. After a short, involuntary shoulder spasm, I came to a halt and just stood there, halfway between the bathroom door and the bed, while my face almost popped off my skull and my brain worked overtime to find solid ground under my feet. I’d stopped breathing. Good thing, or else I woulda screamed.
Nick was a specter. Could just as easily have been a pile of discarded clothes dumped on a chair in an accidentally humanlike form. I couldn’t see his face.
“Surprise,” I said shakily. He musta been in the cellar when I came home. Heard the boiler kick in.
Yeah, right. Seven a.m. and he’s in the cellar. Doing what, exactly?
“I didn’t know you were home,” I said. “I wanted to surprise you, that’s why I didn’t say anything.”
I just stood there in the middle of the bedroom. Both feet on the ground but the whole room reeling. Jesus, why did I become so unglued? Nick hadn’t budged. Looked like he was staring at me in the semidarkness but without recognizing me. Something moved next to him. Well, blow me down! Ramses, curled up on the covers. Purring too, dammit. Nick’s inert hand on his neck. That unglued me even more. I was sure Ramses wasn’t there when I’d looked into the bedroom before. Or had he been? Suddenly, I wasn’t sure about anything, except that I was feeling really vulnerable and naked.
“Damn, don’t be so creepy,” I said. I strode to the headboard and switched on the bedside lamp.
Shock. Nick raised his arm to block the light, concealing his face in shadows, but in that second, I saw it was still all bandaged up. Less elaborate than those first days in Lausanne, but enough to rattle me. The whole bottom half of his mug was swaddled. One band across the bridge of his nose and his cheekbones, another on his forehead to keep everything from falling off. But around his eyes was a sunglasses-shaped patch of bare skin, the tip of his nose was poking out, and tufts of messy hair popped out on top of it—dimly visible behind the bandages was Nick, all the way.
I twisted the lamp away to put him out of the spotlight and he slowly lowered his arm. Ramses jumped off the bed and stole out of the room, cold-shouldering me.
I tried to smile. “Weird, seeing you up. After lying in the hospital for so long, I mean. Makes sense, though. Duh. Still hurting?”
Blabber, blabber. “I thought they could come off,” I said. “That everything’s all . . . closed up and stuff.”
Nick reached for the notepad and started writing. For so long it got me all jittery. At one point, his pen hovered above the pad, trembling, and he jerked his head from left to right like he was listening to sounds only he could hear.
When he was done, he ripped the sheet out and handed it to me.
I knew you’d come back. I knew you would from the moment you walked out of the CHUV because I saw it in my head. They say people who go blind can suddenly smell and hear better. It’s like that. Only I don’t smell or hear more, I see more. Much more. Sometimes I see so much I think my head will explode.
O-kay.
Freak talk. Psychobabble. I wasn’t sure I was up to this. When I looked up from the note, Nick was staring at me again.
I walked to the closet, grabbed a T-shirt, and pulled it on. Made me feel stronger, but then I thought, There are holes in the ice. They look just like eyes.
Right, so now I had a T-shirt on, but I was back in the exact same spot in the middle of the bedroom. Didn’t know what to say. Nick on the edge of the bed, his eyes big and cloudy under all those bandages—they looked like they were Nick’s, but how could you know for sure when you couldn’t see his face? How could I be sure it really was Nick sitting there and not some other being impersonating him, some thing that looked like Nick, had the same hands, wore the same sweatpants, but was actually something totally alien? It didn’t use words Nick would use. Didn’t smell like Nick. And when the mask came off, it wouldn’t even have Nick’s face.
“I wish I’d stayed,” I blurted out. “That I didn’t split. But I was shit-scared. I didn’t know what to do.”
Nick gave me a long look. Those dull eyes under the dressing practically clinging on to me.
“I just hope we can somehow get through this together. You’ve been through something terrible. And to top it off, that business in the AMC. I want to be there for you, okay?”
He nodded slowly.
“I love you.”
He started writing again: