I said, “All right, if it makes you feel better.”
I pressed another one out and crushed the six pills into powder with the bottom of a glass. Poured the powder into the glass, topped it with H2O, sloshed it around. Result: troubled water. Result: not exactly how any self-respecting Putin poodle would slip you your daily dose of polonium.
“I’ma add some grape juice to it. Maybe he’ll think it’s Mountain Dew or something.”
Upstairs, I did as I said I would and then put the glass on the end table next to the couch. When Nick turned around, it’d be the first thing he’d see.
“Now what?” Cécile asked, when I was back in the kitchen.
“Now we wait.”
7
Just before two, we heard footsteps shuffling down the stairs. Scuff-whump, scuff-whump. Downstairs, in the direction of the bedroom. Up to this point we’d been keeping ourselves busy making coffee and conversation. My mix an epic fail of coffee grounds/Tabasco/shot of cognac. I called it the Intestinal Hemorrhage. The convo not much better—it all felt so forced. I had the impression Cécile was keeping back all kinds of stuff. If only I knew what it was.
And the whole time, that static energy crackling on your skin. Sometimes, out of the blue, it would make your hair literally stand up.
Now, hearing Nick go down the stairs, Cécile and I looked at each other. Waited for what seemed like an eternity, not moving, barely breathing. Then I couldn’t take it anymore. I slunk toward the door. Silently pushed the handle down.
The living room was still.
The glass was empty. Our bait had worked.
I motioned to Cécile, gave her a nervous double thumbs-up. I walked through to the hall to listen in the stairwell for what was happening downstairs. Nada. No sounds coming from the bathroom, no backwards-spoken incantations, no playlist Nick would occasionally put on to help him fall asleep. Total zip.
“What do you think?” Cécile whispered right behind me, me jumping out of my skin. “Oops, sorry.”
“Jesus fucking Christ. I hate fake jump scares.”
“Give him another fifteen minutes to fall deeper in sleep.”
So we waited. Silently listening to the wind. Outside, the snowy slopes curving toward the reservoir at the end of the valley were now indistinguishable, the leaden sky an increasingly heavy, dense mass that had already choked the highest ridges.
After a quarter of an hour we snuck down the stairs.
Nick was lying in bed in the same clothes he had on that morning. Gray sweatpants and white T-shirt. His customary crib wear.
My boyfriend, his chest rising and falling with the rumbling breathing of the mountain parasite, his face shining scar tissue and the illusion of a raw, exposed landscape, otherwise stunning.
“Nick,” I said softly. “Nick, are you asleep?”
I ran my tongue over my lips, touched his shoulder. “Nick?”
He was cold.
When I touched him, I felt a distant dizziness, but not like before. It was more the impression of dizziness. As if my mind had registered it but my body didn’t feel it.
“Okay, he’s out,” I said to Cécile. “Let’s go. Impulse control.”
I drew the dusty curtains. Walked to the bathroom, shook Nick’s whole depressing supply of cellophaned bandage rolls into the sink, a grab bag of shiny marshmallows. Back in the master bedroom, I tore a pack open with my teeth. Cécile, in the twilight of the doorway, was holding on to the post as if she was afraid she’d be blown away.
“Come. I need you here.”
“What are you going to do?”
“What does it look like?” I hissed. “I’m gonna hold his head away from the pillow so you can wrap it like a baguette in cling wrap.”
Cécile, showing no signs of going anywhere, she said, “I’m not touching him. You can’t ask me to do that.”
“Nurse. He’s sleeping. He won’t bite ya.”
“Please. Don’t make me, Sam. I really don’t want to.”
“But what’s the matter?”
Cécile gripped her bottom lip and started to tug and twist it. Blood shot out, filled her lips and dripped down her chin.
“What the hell? Stop that!”
Her eyes strained, welled up with tears of pain.
I leaped forward and grabbed her by her shoulders. Cécile let go, crying, covering her face, the sling arm across her heaving bosom. For the second time that day I took her in my arms, this time looking over my own shoulder, eyes bulging, making sure Nick wasn’t suddenly sitting up or coming at us or something. Lay on some Psycho shower strings and you get a pretty good sense of how I felt.
“Did he make you do that?” I stammered. “Cécile, did Nick make you do that?”
And she’s just shaking her head, cuz she couldn’t utter a single word. She tapped my arm, tried to tell me to give her a minute. Cupping her nose and mouth, trying to regulate her breathing. Giving me the time to run to the bathroom to get her a wad of paper.
Nick was sleeping through it all.
It hadn’t been Nick, Cécile said, dabbing her lip, as dark blood blossomed on the paper tissue. It was her. She’d felt a panic attack coming on. This had been her last-minute tactic to smack herself back to the yin and yang. Cécile’s version of the ultimate reality check.
I asked if self-mutilation was really the solution to her problems.
“You don’t get it,” she said. “You don’t get it at all. I’m shattered, Sam, and that’s because of him. You’ve been living with him all these weeks, but you have no idea what he’s doing, do you?” She laughed and cried at the same time, hoarse, high-pitched, as if she’d only just understood it herself for the first time. “You really don’t see it.”
“See what, Cécile?” Not getting an answer, I said, “Let me get this straight, you hurt yourself to prevent yourself from getting a panic attack? So what happens if you do get a panic attack?”
Adding, she didn’t really fall off a stepladder, did she?
Her face seemed to clear up a bit. Looked like a flush of embarrassment was flooding her cheeks. “Look at me,” she said, smearing running concealer all over her face. “I came here to help you and now I’m the one who’s a wet rag. I’m so sorry, Sam.”
I thought, You know absolutely nothing about her. You let a stranger into the cabin. At the end of the world. With the Storm of the Century a-brewing.
Yep, and based on what, in fact? A shared desire to cure Nick?
Not that I was presuming to be Freud or whatever, but you didn’t need psychoanalysis to figure out that self-mutilation wasn’t exactly a sign of mental stability.
That familiar, sickly sizzling in my guts again. What was she actually doing here?
Cécile showed a faint smile and said, “Really, I’m so sorry. This has all been too much. And I obviously haven’t been coping well with it. I’ve been having nightmares for weeks. Anxiety attacks. It was a defense mechanism to . . . you know . . .”