I never told her I was the one who burned down Huckleberry Wall.
Now, Julia, six hours earlier in NY: “That makes it even worse, dumbass! Whatever you think you saw there, what good will it do to rake up things that should stay buried?”
My point exactly.
Pacing up and down in front of the window, AirPods in, Julia in my hand, I told her about the doorbell ringing that morning. Us just up, last thing we expect after last night is visitors, so I say to Nick to keep still.
At the door, this whole delegation. Three strong, from Grimentz, led by some guy with one of those collars, a white jabot-type thing, some church rep. I’d come up with the name if I was born two generations earlier or three states to the south. They looked simultaneously intimidating and ill at ease, staring at me in the doorway. The one dude with Nick’s hat pressed against his jabot.
They’d come to apologize for le petit incident yesterday evening by the church, they said. Les enfants had owned up to it all and had gotten a good whupping by their folks. They’d been taken aback—did one of us maybe wear a masque de bandages?—but that was no excuse for their disgraceful behavior. And now they wanted to set things straight. To bienvenue us to Grimentz.
“It was like the most awkward conversation ever,” I said to Julia. “No way were they here to say sorry; they came here to check us out. Seriously, it was totally weird. And who were those dudes, anyway? This is a fucking Airbnb. How the hell did they know we’re staying here? And question after question. Who we are, where we come from, what we’re doing here. And this dude keeps looking past me into the hall, like maybe there’s someone else he can talk to. When it was clear to them they’d have to deal with me, they said they wanted to apologize directly to my copain and would I peut-être go get him?”
“Ew, that really is creepy. Then what?”
“I pulled the hat out of his hands and slammed the door.”
“Wow,” Julia said. “Subtle, bro.”
“What else could I do?” Ramses, who was nervously licking his forepaw in the window, flinched. I lowered my voice and hissed, “The whole situation is fucked up. Those creeps didn’t leave the door, cuz I heard muffled voices. And even when I thought they were gone, I wasn’t sure, cuz I thought I heard something outside the window on the other side of the house, and now I’m scared to go check and I’m going totally crazy here in this fucking house and this fucking country where all those fucking mountains keep coming at you and—”
“Sam.” Julia’s blueberry eyes bored into mine through my iPhone screen. She said, “What you need”—poking her finger right through six time zones—“what you need is a team.”
I fell silent.
She said, “An ally. Eyes on the ground.”
Julia was right. I needed reinforcements.
Six hours earlier, New York, but for always hand in hand in front of that burning house. “I can be your home base. Your hotline. Your long-distance consultant. But who do you know over there, Sam? Who do you trust enough to call?”
I swiped to my second screen.
“Bro? Hello? The picture just froze.”
I opened WhatsApp, scrolled like crazy through my chats.
“Hello?”
“Justaminute!”
There. End of August. That +41 number. I opened the chat and read my last text:
Cécile, WTF?
And hers:
Sorry. He was right, he’s a monster.
3
Fast-forward to two days later, Friday afternoon, the kitchen. The thick leather instruction folder we got from the owners couple in Sion said the cleaning lady comes on Friday afternoons. The cleaning lady in question, Maria Zufferey-Silva de Souza, Portuguese but married to some Swiss guy from Grimentz. The resulting gene mix was MoMA material, I said, when she showed me a pic of her son. The son, Men’s Health cover boy potential, now quartering in a barracks in Andermatt. Maria, beaming in her apron, she and her thundering laughter, didn’t stop talking about her offspring, all in French, with a delectable Swiss-Portuguese accent, of course. She was a walking thesis in linguistics.
Don’t lecture me on South European moms. Want something from them, just ask about their sons.
“He must be happy to have left the valley,” I said. “I mean, it’s really beautiful and all, but I can imagine life here can be pretty cramped for someone his age.”
“Not at all,” Maria said. This was a woman who could fervently bewail her lot while scrubbing the kitchen tiles with the furious routine of someone who does nothing else, not missing a single spot. “Anton grew up here; he feels at home in the valley. Every time he has furlough, he comes back. I always say go to Bern, son, go to Geneva, or farther, over the border. I prayed to God for war, that they’d dispatch him to Syria or Iraq or Yemen, because that’s the only way he’ll see something of the world. But he’d rather go skiing all winter with his friends. Home, where he grew up. Can you imagine?”
She stopped to take a sip of the ristretto I’d brewed for her. Sweat on her big boobs, she winked at me confidentially and said, “I can’t. I’ve been living here for twenty-three years now, and the only thing that keeps me going is visiting my sister in Lisbon every January for a month. Being snowed in the whole winter . . . what a disaster.”
“It can’t be all that bad.”
“Yes, it is. The cold seeps into your bones. And it’s not only the cold. It’s the storms from the mountains that drive you crazy. My husband didn’t understand it the first time, but I said, ‘Pascal, if you don’t let me go, I’ll never set foot in this village again.’ ”
“Good for you, girl,” I called, and fisted the air.
“Ah, querido.” She blew me a kiss.
Maria, I liked her right off the bat. Her purity. Sleeves rolled up to the elbows to show the whole world her age spots. An immigrant in Grimentz’s insular community, she’d always remain an outsider in their eyes. Maybe that’s why she was so candid with me. That and the caffeine jolt I dealt her, the perfect setup to grill her.
“What’s the deal with all those birds, by the way?” This behind the chalet, where I’d just brought her a self-brewed Black Insomnia, Maria sweeping the needles off the patio. “All those birdcages hanging under the roofs in the village.”
“So you saw them,” she said.
“Not only saw.” I told her what had happened when we visited the village. The birds going berserk, those asshole kiddies with the stones, that Godzilla dog with its small, grinding teeth.
And Maria said, over the swishing of her broom, “Don’t take it personally. Those rascals aren’t used to strangers in the off-season. It’s all pretty small-town here.” Leaning toward me over her broom, theatrical sotto voce hand: “Some are a bit slow, if you ask me.”
“But what’s the idea behind the birds?”
Ils sont des something-or-other. Dialect word, not French or Portuguese anyway.
“Lucky birds,” she then said. The only English words I heard Maria utter. Those dark brown eyes, a sparkle in there.