Cécile was here to help, I’d said to Nick. Said I’d asked her to come cuz she was the one who knew there were holes the size of glacial lakes in the official account.
You need an infiltrator, I said. Someone who knows the ’hood. That’s her: Cécile Métrailler, secret agent. We had to confide in her.
And Cécile on the couch in our chalet, legs crossed, hands fidgeting with the throw pillow. Wary eyes. Pupils pulsating every time she looked at Nick, like someone was shining Morse code in them with a penlight. Dot dash dot dash, open shut open shut.
While Nick talked—me throwing in French when Cécile didn’t understand his English—I kept my eye fixed on her expression. I’d picked up on the way people reacted around Nick before. How they could feel the mountain in him. I’d seen it with Harald and Louise Grevers, with Claire the shrink. Even today, with Maria. It was subtle but unmistakable. The subconscious aversion to being around him for long. The instinctive disgust causing them to turn away. How they licked their lips the entire time. How they suddenly staggered or clung on to something. And they didn’t even have to see him.
For obvious reasons, Nick avoided having friends come over when we were in Amsterdam, but one Saturday morning Fazila came by to pick me up for a shopping spree and we were having lunch in the kitchen. Nick was upstairs in bed. After half an hour, Fazila said she felt dizzy. Said she needed some fresh air, wondered maybe her period was too early.
Yesterday it suddenly hit me.
Dry mouth. Nausea. Dizziness and headache. All symptoms of altitude sickness.
I googled it: hypobaropathy. Exposed to it too long you get pulmonary edema and cerebral edema and then you croak.
All of them symptoms I didn’t have . . . cuz I was acclimatized to Nick. What I had was fear of heights. Can’t acclimatize to that.
But what if someone was exposed to Nick for too long?
This all zipped through my head as I stared at Cécile. Nick talking and Cécile’s fingers digging like claws into that pillow. Her eyes, they looked away from him, practically popped out, and her pupils pulsated their SOS to the world like it was her last cry for help.
What was wrong with her? Was this altitude sickness?
When Nick was through talking, Cécile’s face was ashen. Was it okay if she lay down for a bit? Said she’d had the early shift that morning at the CHUV and was tired from the drive up. I showed her the bedroom Maria’d prepped for her in the attic. Clean sheets, aired mattress—only disadvantage, there’s no en suite bathroom. Doesn’t matter, she said, her body language screaming Get out now! Voice hoarse, lip quivering as she shooed me down the stairwell and shut the trapdoor behind me. I called up did she need anything, herbal tea or something, and she replied no, all she really needed was rest.
Once I was back downstairs, Nick, looking at me miserably, said, “It’s me, isn’t it.” Outside, twilight had conquered the valley, and Nick said, “Something’s wrong. It didn’t look like she came here for fun. Or for us.”
And me suddenly thinking, the way she kicked me out of the attic, it had looked like she was in a hurry. Like she was late for sundown and would change into an ogre or something.
Now, at our table in H?tel du Barrage, I grabbed her hands and asked, “What happened to you?” Those eyes big and brown; now it was my turn to hold her in an eye lock. “You ran out of the hospital in the middle of cleaning Nick’s wounds and you left them all exposed. You texted that he was a monster. What did you see when you were changing the dressings?”
“What did I see? I . . . An ugly wound. Bloody.”
I told her the nurse in charge said she ran outside screaming. That couldn’t be from seeing a little blood. What’s so bad it could make her scream and run?
“It was nothing,” Cécile said. “I was under a lot of pressure at work. It just got over my head.” Plucking at her hair, she said, “Juste une dépression nerveuse.”
I thought, Pull the other one. You wanna tell. That’s why you’re here. But you can’t get up the nerve.
“Okay,” I said. “Fine. Full disclosure here. I looked too. Under the bandages.”
“That was unavoidable.” Another sip of beer. “I remember you said you were afraid to do it. Could you bear it?”
“Birds came out of his face.”
Cécile blinked.
I pointed past her to the thing shifting around in the semidark above the bar. “Same kind as the birds in all those cages everywhere.” Lucky birds, per Maria. Ancestors with claws and beaks. “I was prepared for a lot, but that was overdoing it. Your turn. What did you see?”
“I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying, Sam.”
I asked, “Do you believe in ghosts? In spirits?”
“Yes,” Cécile said bluntly. By the look of her, she wasn’t bullshitting.
“I don’t,” I said. Pause. “But there was something else.”
“What?”
“I thought I saw Augustin. Nick’s climbing buddy, the one who froze to death in the glacier. When I looked under the bandages, his hand came out. Gore-Tex jacket sleeve, fingers all stiff and blue from the ice . . .”
What came looking back at me, over the beer glass, were those big, brown eyes, which, now that I was so far into the story, sucked the rest of it out of me. The mise-en-scène hadn’t changed. The customers’ laughing, the crackling of the fire. The chef’s singing. The outside world a moonless black, the escape route to the valley a single narrow lane in the October rain. All of it was there, but the only thing that mattered was the story I told Cécile in order to pry hers out of her.
The dizziness, the vertigo, the whole shebang. I laid my cards on the table.
“I know,” I said, when I was done. “I musta imagined it. But it seemed so real, ya know? It seemed so real.”
On Cécile’s arms, all the hairs stood on end. Sweltering, oppressing heat in the inn, but all Cécile could feel was the cold mountain wind.
“You felt something too,” I said. “I saw it on you when Nick was telling his story today. I saw it in your eyes; something was up. What was it?” I dropped another silence and, as if on cue—bang!—a gnarl exploded in the fire. Cécile jumped. The only thing you could see in that semidarkness was the customers’ hollow faces. The dark shadow in the birdcage. My mouth, forming words she didn’t want to hear: “Something happened to you when you looked under the bandages. You saw something. Did he hurt you?” I asked, “Why are you here, Cécile?”
And Cécile said, “I’m here to help.” A heartbeat later: “And I’m here because I can help.”
5
So here we go.