Friendship Makes the Heart Grow Fonder (9781455517763) Page 14

  Monique dropped her gaze and found interest in the flecked particleboard edge of the little table, running a fingernail along the seam between the shiny veneer and the scratched wood. She disagreed with Judy. Loss was always delivered in agonizing, unpredictable little shocks. Grief always visited unexpectedly, revitalizing the pain just when you thought you might be ready to lay it aside.

  Monique’s gaze drifted to her phone, now dark on the bedside table.

  Just then Becky, dressed in a faded pair of cotton pajama bottoms and a crinkled Creed concert T-shirt, swung the bathroom door open. She tossed her cosmetics bag in the direction of her suitcase and loosened the towel around her head.

  “Hey.” Her blond hair, darkened by moisture, fell over her shoulders. She rubbed it briskly with the towel. “Any news about flights to New York?”

  Monique exchanged a glance with Judy, who with her back to Becky unloaded a wedge of brie and a wax-wrapped rectangle of country pâté, and then, without another word, picked up the wine and filled Monique’s glass.

  “Actually, Beck,” Monie said, “I need to talk to you about the flights.”

  Becky’s brisk rubbing slowed. “Is there a problem?”

  “It’s just getting so late.” Monique took a sip of the wine. She felt the liquid on her tongue but didn’t register taste at all. “I’m not even sure we can buy a ticket online or over the phone from here on such short notice. To do this right, we’d have to get you to Orly and then hope you get on a flight stand-by. But we couldn’t go to the gate with you. We’d have to leave you there not knowing whether you’d gotten on or not—”

  “It’s not pitch-dark in an airport.” Her voice was as flat as a nail head. “I can manage just fine.”

  “You’d end up in the States at some ungodly hour of the morning. With Marco not even knowing you’re coming home.”

  At the sound of her husband’s name, Becky sank with a bounce to the edge of the bed, giving up all pretext of drying her hair. Monique knew that Becky hadn’t been able to get through to Marco. Her calls dropped before the first ring. Both she and Judy were having trouble with their international calling and texting. Monie suspected this hotel was in some sort of triangulated dead zone for their service.

  With a grimace Judy disappeared into the bathroom for a moment to wash a cluster of purple grapes.

  Monique forged ahead. “I’m just trying to reason this out, Beck.”

  “I’m being a pain in the ass.”

  “You’re not a pain in the ass.”

  “I don’t want to drag you two to Orly. Besides,” Becky added, forestalling her, “you guys can’t nanny me tonight. You both have a flight to Zurich in the morning.”

  “Eight-in-the-freaking-morning,” Judy grumbled, emerging with the wet grapes sagging in a facecloth.

  “That’s just my point,” Monique said. “Zurich is one of the busiest airports in Europe, a major hub. Wouldn’t it be better for you to get a good night’s sleep tonight and do at least one more leg of the trip? Once we’re in Switzerland, if you still feel the same way, we can take the time to make a reservation home from Zurich and contact Marco so he knows you’re coming.”

  Judy arranged the grapes on the table and cast an aggrieved look at Monie. “Were you hitting the whiskey when you dreamed up this itinerary?”

  Monique ignored her. She focused on Becky, now curling her bare feet underneath her, looking more like a teenager than her own Kiera.

  “If you left tonight, you might get lucky,” Monique conceded. “You might catch the last red-eye out, and you’d be home by tomorrow. But if you miss that flight, or if all the flights are full, you’ll have to spend the whole night sleeping in a molded plastic chair. And you’ll spend all of tomorrow trying to talk your way onto a flight. You’ll be home in two days.” Monique raised her glass. “But if you sleep here and come with us to Zurich tomorrow, you can still be home in two days if you want.”

  “I need to go home, Monie.” Becky hugged her arms. “I want to see their faces. I need to see them.”

  “You’ll have plenty of time for that. You reminded me yourself at the catacombs. It’s only a five percent loss a year—”

  “I don’t give a damn about me.”

  “Then you know their vision is not going dark in a day or two, Beck.” Monique paused, balanced on the fulcrum, trying to decide what to say. She was no expert, and she knew better than to give false hope. But this, at least, seemed clear. “Your version of RP arrived late in life, relatively speaking. And your night vision was the first thing affected. It might be decades before they show any signs of vision loss. If ever.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” Suddenly Becky rolled up the towel and tossed it into a corner of the room. “Tell me how complicated this is.”

  Monique realized that the time for silence and patience and stillness had finally ended. Still, she hesitated. She thought about everything she’d gleaned from the geneticist at the hospital, from the medical websites, from the case histories she’d studied. The genetics of retinitis pigmentosa were complicated and still being researched. It involved up to thirty-odd genes or locations on genes, but there were three generally dominant patterns of inheritance. Autosomal dominant, autosomal recessive, or X-linked. Monique had already ruled out X-linked for Becky’s RP.

  Researching all of this had reminded her of how she’d once considered going to medical school. Then she’d spent a couple of summers volunteering in a hospital. She’d watched the doctors juggle blood tests and lab printouts, CAT scans and MRIs, consultations with other physicians about diagnoses, prognosis, drug treatment regimens, surgical intervention. Then she’d watched the nurses talking with the patients, double-checking meds, taking vitals, often harried, but once in a while holding those brittle hands and listening to stories.

  Times like these she wished she had become a doctor.

  “I’m an armchair geneticist,” Monique warned. “You’d be better off getting real hard information from an expert. Someone who’ll know what questions to ask about your family history—”

  “There’s not a soul in my family who’s blind.” Becky picked at a thread on her pajama bottoms “The doctor told me to call every relative to find that out. He said it would help in determining…probabilities.”

  Probabilities. What a terrible, terrible word.

  “I’ve grilled everyone,” Becky continued. “Even a great-aunt living in Taos that nobody had spoken to in thirty years. No blindness, not a suspicion of it, for at least two generations. On either side.”

  Monique felt relief like a soft tumbling down a flight of stairs. She hoped it didn’t show on her face. “That’s…promising.”

  Becky’s sudden stillness held a fragile hope.

  “It suggests,” Monique continued, “that the method of transition isn’t dominant.”

  “Isn’t dominant?”

  “If it were dominant, you’d probably see blindness in every generation. You don’t. So that suggests that your version of RP is most likely recessive.”

  “For God’s sake, Monie,” Judy said, “English.”

  “If it’s recessive, it can skip generations.”

  With a sharp inhale, Becky’s face suffused with color.

  “That doesn’t mean that they won’t carry a copy of the gene, Beck. Carry it, but not manifest it.” Monique hesitated, wondering how much Becky could handle. “And when it comes time for them to have their own kids, they’ll have to look into genetic counseling.”

  Monique watched her friend, trying to gauge her mood as Becky hauled herself back up to a sitting position. Her friend’s face was a mask of blank hope and shock and something else, something Monique couldn’t identify.

  Judy poured a new glass of wine. “That sounds like good news.”

  Monique felt vaguely nauseous. “I could be wrong.”

  “It doesn’t sound wrong.” Judy stretched across the space between table and bed in order to hand the wine to Becky. “It sounds like it mak
es perfect sense. It sounds like it’s worth believing.”

  Becky lifted the glass to her lips. She sat there with the glass raised, her lips parted, but she made no effort to actually take a sip. Monique wondered if Becky knew how much Monique owed her. Monique wasn’t sure she would ever have done this trip if Becky’s diagnosis hadn’t provided the push she needed. And Monique knew, looking at her old friend, that Becky still needed the distraction of travel. Maybe much, much more than herself.

  Monique toed the third chair away from the table. “Come have something to eat, Beck. It’s hard to think straight on an empty stomach.”

  Becky didn’t come over right away. She sat for a few minutes, made a halfhearted attempt to drink her wine, and then she unfolded herself from the bed and joined them at the table. She stared at the array—the bread, the brie, the hard sausage, the soft rectangle of pâté, the glistening grapes—but didn’t reach for any of it. Not even for the slice of bread smeared with pâté that Judy slipped on a little square of wax paper in front of her.

  “This trip,” Becky began softly, “has been great, Monie. I mean, really, really wonderful.” Becky braced her hands on either side of the seat, locking her elbows as she rounded her back. “I can’t thank you enough for inviting me.”

  Monique reached for the loaf of bread and pulled the end off, the crust leaving crumbs on the table. “What do you think, Judy? Did you hear a ‘but’ in there?”

  “Sure sounded like a ‘but’ to me.”

  “I don’t want to cause any trouble,” Becky said. “I won’t try to catch a flight out of Orly tonight.” She shrugged and the stretched-out neckline of her T-shirt fell down over one shoulder. “I’ll go with you tomorrow to Switzerland. If it’s all right with you, I’ll do what you suggested and catch a flight home straight from Zurich.”

  Monique smiled and tried very hard to mask her disappointment. She’d managed to get Becky to concede to Zurich, yes, but what Monique really wanted was for Becky to stay in Europe and finish the vacation. Becky needed time—probably more time than Monique could give—to come to terms with so many things.

  So with a pointed glance at Judy, Monique decided to resort to guilt: A timeless and ruthlessly effective tactic. “So, Judy, I guess it’s just you and me abseiling in Interlaken tomorrow.”

  Judy folded a cheese knife out of her Swiss Army knife and reached for the brie. “If by that fancy European word, you’re asking if I’m going to rappel backward down some rocky alpine peak, then the answer is—hmm, let me think—no.”

  Monique shook her head. “Sooooo predictable.”

  “The twenty-two-year-old backpacker in me is all in, but my fifty-one-year-old knees aren’t complying. Besides you need someone to take video.”

  Becky toyed with a piece of bread. “Abseiling? What’s that?”

  “Come on, Beck, didn’t you read ahead in Monique’s backbreaking itinerary? ‘Abseiling’ is the next thing on Lenny’s list.” Judy peeled the paper off the brie and chopped a hunk off with her knife, which she then pointed at Monique. “Amazon woman here won’t admit it, but she is terrified.”

  “Slightly concerned,” Monique corrected, slipping two fingers on her wrist. “And showing some physical signs of increased stress.”

  “It’s really physical.” Judy took a healthy bite of the bread and cheese and spoke around the wad in her mouth. “You’ve got to get all geared up, take a lesson, and then just blithely walk over the side of a cliff.”

  Monique muttered, “All by myself, apparently.”

  “Have fun with that, kiddo,” Judy said. “I’ll wave from the top. I’ve always preferred sitting on the sidelines anyway.”

  Monique sidled a glance at Becky to see if their little exchange had had any effect. But Becky was just staring at the food in front of her. Clearly Becky’s mind was already halfway home.

  Monique smeared some spicy pâté across the warmth of a baguette, trying not to feel too grim. She wasn’t looking forward to being suspended on the side of a cliff all alone, with the wind cutting through her. But she supposed she shouldn’t be surprised that this was just the way it was going to be. Becky had a husband and two children waiting for her at home. Judy still had Bob. Kiera was drifting away long before she actually moved away.

  As for Monique Franke-Reed…she’d always be alone.

  “Interlaken, huh?” Becky poked at her untouched bread. “Now I remember. That’s the hardest thing on the list.”

  “Lenny and I read a long article about it in National Geographic. There were lots of pretty summertime pictures of the Alps.” Monique shrugged. “I think he had an urge to be someplace high so he could yodel.”

  Monique looked up into Becky’s blue eyes. The girl was so pale. The long shower hadn’t washed away the dark circles, or the fear.

  Suddenly, Becky reached across the table and laid her hand on Monique’s forearm. “What’s a day or two, right? I just can’t leave you hanging, Monie. Especially off a cliff.”

  *

  “No way did it look this steep on the website.”

  Monique stood at the top of a sheer precipice, frozen not from the wind cutting over the edge but by the distance between where she stood a few yards from the brink, and the alpine valley far, far below.

  “Cameras can’t always pick up depth perception.” Becky planted her hands on her hips and dared to lean forward a bit. “But, man, my depth perception is working today. Those are some big pines down there, and we’re way above the top of them.”

  “I specifically told them that we’re beginners.”

  “Lost in translation?” Becky scuffed her feet against the rock, like a runner itchy to get onto the track. “Or maybe they just didn’t want to scare the heck out of you before you got here.”

  Becky grinned. A somewhat crazed, maniacal grin, Monique thought. Becky wore her usual amber sunglasses beneath the climbing helmet strapped onto her head. A harness sagged on her lean hips. The girl should look exhausted, not just from yesterday’s drama in the catacombs, but also because the three of them had hauled themselves out of their Parisian hotel before five a.m. to make a flight to Zurich, where they switched to a train that chugged them into Interlaken Ouest only so they could load onto a bus that took them to the Hotel Sonne, where, after checking in, they raced to catch the Swiss alpine guide van waiting to pick them up just outside the hotel.

  Trains, planes, and buses for six hours straight…and Becky looked wired, and twitchy, and very much awake.

  A whir of a camera caught Monique’s attention. Judy, wrapped up to her ears in a scarf, aimed the lens of the camera at her. “They’re calling you, ladies.” Judy poked her head around the viewfinder and tilted her head toward the step-off point. “You’re next.”

  Monique glanced to where the über-fit, ex-Olympic athlete was waving them over. She waved back though she couldn’t really hear him over the roar of the motorcycles pulling off the road into the scrubby clearing. There must have been a dozen bikes kicking up alpine dust as the riders parked their hogs. One rider pulled his helmet off and an iron-gray ponytail dropped out, brushing the back of his belt.

  With Judy and Becky trailing, Monique headed toward Hans or Henrick or whatever his name was—the guy who’d given them, like, a ten-minute lesson on how to rappel. “Sure you don’t want to come, Judy? I hear it takes a half hour for the van to bring you down to the landing point. You could rappel in less than that.”

  “Oh, you’re funny.”

  “It’d be a hell of a photo to show Bob and the kids when you got home.”

  “They’d say it’s Photoshopped.”

  “You don’t know how to Photoshop.”

  “You do your midlife crisis your way. I’ll do mine my way.” Judy gestured toward a couple of stone benches under a little copse of trees. “I’m taking a nap on one of those.”

  Hans greeted them and urged them toward the ropes. He turned Monique so that she was facing him and the flank of motorcycles. If she glanced
to the right she could see the distant white-capped tips of the Alps. Hans forced her attention back to him, chattering in his clipped English, his indescribable accent somewhere between Oslo and London. Monique had to keep shaking herself to pay attention to what he had to say.

  “Remember what I taught you, yes? Left hand is guide, right hand is brake hand.”

  He kept repeating the frighteningly simple instructions. He pulled at the rope in the carabineer, a metal loop that she now knew was the piece that attached the rope to the harness now digging into her butt. He tugged on the edges and the straps, checking everything, pulling the rope so it was taut. Then he casually leaned over and glanced down the great sweep to the bottom of the valley, jerking on the free end of the rope so it swayed unimpeded.

  “Now, MO-nique,” he said, pronouncing it distinctly French, “take three steps back, and then step over the edge.”

  Her hands gripped so tight that prickles of the fiberglass rope poked through the fabric of the gloves. Her tongue swelled. She couldn’t look behind her. She stared into Hans or Henrick’s clear and somewhat crazy green eyes.

  “You are afraid,” he stated.

  “Sh-sh-shitless.” Her voice, a croak in her throat.

  “Of course you are afraid. It is not natural to step off a cliff.”

  “Definitely not natural.”

  “You must look at this fear.” He pointed two fingers at his own eyes and then turned them to point those fingers at hers. “Look at it in the eye. Then you do what you must to finish what you set out to do. This is how to live.”

  Monique stared frozen at the insane athlete who’d strapped her into a harness and was urging her to walk backward over a cliff, the Swiss adrenaline junkie probably pumped with steroids as he gave her life lessons.

  Becky shouted, “Stop stalling, Monie. Get down here before I have to catch my train back to the airport.”

  Becky was already leaning back at a forty-five-degree angle with the rope in one hand and her feet braced flat on the cliff face, staring at Monique like she was impatient with her kids for dawdling at the swing set in the park.

  Monique flexed her palm, sweaty in the glove. “Do you see what you’re doing?”