These chocolate puffs, I’ll be saying to Julia later that night, they’re a culinary conundrum. Whatever you do it ends up in a pig’s breakfast. No matter how hard you try, each bite makes it look more like a bomb fell on a dairy farm.
They tried, really. Louise asked Nick how his recovery was going. If he was taking good care of himself. Harald asked what the logistics were for the coming weeks and if Nick was keeping his appointments with the shrink and speech doctor. They tried stuffing the distance between them with questions. But Nick didn’t wanna talk. In his face, his old man turned into an old man, his old lady started crying, and Nick, if you ask me, getting a kick out of their desperation. God-awful thought, but true. That desperation was love, and it was all Nick had left.
Fingers trembling, Louise removed an envelope from her purse. It had clearly already been opened and was taped shut again. She wiped her eyes and said, “Augustin’s parents wrote us.” She said, “Uwe and Bettine Laber. Did you know them?”
Nick shook his head sluggishly. Louise spoke slowly and cautiously, wanted to make sure she didn’t say anything wrong, cuz Augustin’s photo, the pic she’d found when she was putting away the clean laundry, was the elephant in the room. “They’re deeply mourning their son. They wish you a speedy recovery. They’re aware you can’t talk yet but would really like to talk to you about what happened when you can.”
Here it comes. Now she’s gonna say they asked if you took any pics of him. And then we all know what happened to the Augustin bivouac photo. We all know, but you don’t know I know.
But she didn’t. Louise put the letter on the coffee table next to Nick and said, as calmly as she possibly could, “Read it when you’re up to it.”
And that’s when it happened, I would later say to Julia. It struck me like lightning. I thought, Small, fragile Sam. And I could see Nick on the glacier, his arms around Augustin, so tight his ribs cracked and blood shot out of his eyes. When he let go and Augustin’s lifeless body fell into a crevasse, Nick took his Swiss Army knife, shoved the blade into his mouth, and slashed open his cheeks from ear to ear.
It was like someone’d smashed me in the face. Me sitting up straight, a forkful of whipped cream on its way to my mouth. And Harald asking, would it be helpful if I joined him at therapy? Louise asking, when do they expect him to be able to take solids?
And my hands, I’d say to Julia, my hands all covered in chocolate fondant and cream. The silence, I’d say to her, made it impossible to surreptitiously wipe them on the throw pillow.
And all of a sudden Harald lost control. Jumped up, knocking the tray with chocolate balls to the floor, shouting, “Dammit, Nick! You’re going to have to start talking at some point! You’re going to have to take off the bandages and confront your new face!”
Everyone shut up. Everyone froze, a Mannequin Challenge for people looking at ruptured chocolate choux. One with a faceful of cream.
And Nick started typing:
Sam, by the looks of it you need to be drip-fed too. I can put them in the blender for you, but I don’t think ma would approve . . .
And that changed everything. I remember I looked at him sheepishly, then burst out laughing. Louise and Harald laughed, too, Louise right through her tears. Nick was startled, then gazed at me again with big, clear eyes through those strips of bandage, and I coulda sworn those eyes belonged to the old Nick, the pre-mountain Nick, and how could I think all that about him, Julia? How could I have thought all those terrible things about him? The scar had not only his parents under its power but me, too. I was so wrapped up in my own fears and doubts that I didn’t give a moment’s thought to what it was like for Nick. Instead of standing by my man with his PT-fucking-SS, I’d turned him into a monster.
“And he was trying, sis. To be sweet. He squeezed my thigh, tried putting his arm around my shoulder, and the whole time I’m thinking he murdered Augustin.”
“Come on. Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Julia said. “What else? Tell me everything.”
6
I was up and down all evening. At least after Harald and Louise’d split and Nick had withdrawn to the cellar with Ramses, my dizziness went down a coupla notches, but I couldn’t erase that image in my noggin. The image of Nick clenching his arms and blood spouting from Augustin’s eyes.
It was after ten before I could muster up the courage to go down to the cellar. You probably have a good idea of what a cellar smells like, but this was like going into a drugstore after an explosion. Each inhalation sucking in enough antibiotics for a lifelong immunity to pneumonia. Every breath consuming enough wound malodor and stench of human degradation to make you barf. It was the same miasma emanating out of Nick this morning when he hugged me, but stronger. More cellary.
The stairs dipped down into the dark. No, not pitch; way at the end there was a glimmer. The cellar looked bigger than it shoulda been. Too big. Optical illusion big. And the glimmer, it was obscured by something in front of it. A black, amorphous mass. Down by the ground. Extricating itself from the gloom. Something horrific, something that crawled, its limbs moving all wrong and stuck all wrong to the body. Seeing it made my scalp crawl, too. Every hair on my head at attention, hurting like it was being pulled out by the roots, because I suddenly knew for sure that the thing there in the dark would crawl over to me if it noticed me.
Then the darkness collapsed, its shape became human. To my shock, I recognized it as Nick. It was my imagination that had blown him up to the stuff of nightmares. But accepting that it was Nick who was crawling around on all fours at the far end of the cellar was equally weird, and for a minute I was scared he’d still crawl toward me.
“Nick?” I said, flicking on the light switch.
Nick shot up so abruptly I almost jumped out of my skin, even on the other side of the cellar. And he was moaning. It was the first sound I’d heard him make in more than a month. Goose bumps galore.
Ramses scurried between his legs, giving me his unfathomable poker face, vigilant tail aloft. Enough light to see Nick had dragged half the household down here. Desk, Arezzo rug from his study, studio couch from the attic: check, check, check. He was crouched over an open map of the Alps, haloed by a desk lamp. Next to it, between toolboxes, crates of food, and tins of paint, books about mountains. Photos of mountains. And man-made mountains of empty beer bottles with straws.
Made me nauseous. Nick in the basement, absorbed in his obsession, the gothic novel cliché incarnate. Only thing missing was Augustin’s ghost floating around doing the revenge thing cuz he got tossed into the glacier.