The Runaway Wife (11 page)

“Anzère,” she said. She stood and dusted off her pants. “Over those mountains, but first we'll visit the hermitess. It's on our way. Please come with us.”

“Anzère is too far,” Valasian said in English. “The snows come tomorrow. Early snow. Bad at the pass to the south. Audannes is better, half-day walk.”

Calliope responded in French, and Jim guessed she was explaining to the old man who cared so much for her what she had told him earlier—that his worries were unfounded, early snows were rarely dangerous, and Anzère was farther south. She suppressed a cough and sneezed.

“Madame,” he said. “You are very sick.”

She handed Jim the owlet wrapped in her sweater. “Will you excuse me?” she said.

They watched her pick her way to the edge of the copse and disappear inside.

“No Anzère,” said Valasian in broken English. “It is too far, and you will have difficult and cold mountain. With snow, impossible. You are not prepared.”

Valasian quickly and gruffly conveyed to Jim that he
would give Calliope and Jim other directions that were unfamiliar to Calliope, and tell them that it was a shortcut to Anzère. The path would start in the direction of Anzère but would eventually cut east, toward the Cabane. If they did not stop often, they could arrive at the Cabane later that afternoon. He would have accompanied them, but he was already delayed in sweeping the mountain of livestock before the snow arrived.

“The hermitess?” Jim asked.

“No!” Valasian shook his head. “Go to the Cabane now. Her cough,” he said, pointing at his throat and looking in her direction. “She is very sick.”

Valasian removed a scrap of paper and a pencil from his jacket, placed them on the large, flat rock in front of him, and sketched the hike east and south across the pass to arrive at the back entrance of the Cabane. He showed Jim the route as Calliope walked up slowly from the forest.

“Valasian is showing us a shortcut,” Jim said when Calliope approached.

“To Anzère?” she asked.

“Valasian says we'll see only one sign along the way, the one toward Col des Eaux Froides”

Valasian spoke to her quickly in French, pointing to the lightly trodden trail ahead of them. Jim understood that he was emphasizing that they should take the fork to the east—he looked meaningfully at Jim—to arrive in “Anzère.”

“I don't have a compass,” Jim said.

She laughed in a way that made Jim nervous. “
I
am your compass, Olsen!”

She had never called him by his surname. Her voice sounded strange; she was elongating her words.

“I realize that this is hard to imagine,” said Jim, “but what if even you cannot see the sun through the clouds?”

“Allez,
assez
! Go!” Valasian ordered them.

Valasian's eyes bore a hole into Jim's.

She coughed. “Such fuss over a little cold.”

From the bag he carried, Valasian lifted a loaf of brown bread, two apples, and a wedge of cheese. He handed them to Jim who added them to Calliope's supply in his knapsack.

“Before I, or we, go anywhere,” Calliope said, “I'm going to visit the hermitess. Valasian, you have told me she lives up there.” She pointed to the right, where the skies had been muzzled by gray clouds.

The old man shook his head. “No. It will snow there tomorrow.”

“But this is today!” she said.

Calliope lifted her elbows and untied the maroon velvet ribbon from her long neck.

“Valasian,” she said in English, “when you visit Gabriel and his family, will you please give him this?” She held out the ribbon. Thalia had learned the trick from her mother. Valasian bowed.

“Do not stay long,” Valasian addressed Jim, his face stern. “If the helicopter finds you, that will be better than the snow.”

“Valasian!” she scolded, visibly wincing. “Jim, don't listen to him.”

“
Vite
,” he said. “Go quickly.”

The old man hesitated, and Jim guessed that he was waiting for his own gift from Calliope. He fixed his eyes on a patch of green moss growing on a nearby rock.

“This is not a good-bye, Valasian,” she said to the old man. “I will return next summer. You have been my godsend. Thank you for keeping my fires always burning, for the local news, for the food, for your protection.”

She hugged him. She opened her knapsack and lifted out a gold chain with what looked like two lockets dangling from it.

“No, madame,” he said, backing up, shaking his head, and blushing.

“Valasian.” Calliope's voice grew serious. “This is for you. My grandparents' faces. See?” She opened each of the back-to-back lockets on the chain to show Valasian the miniature photographs inside.

“It is fitting that you have this, so my grandparents will now be as much a part of the Wildhorn as you are. It will make me happy to know that you have it.”

She held the gold pendant out in front of her. Valasian dropped onto one knee and bowed his head. He was a knight receiving a dubbing. She coughed into her handkerchief, then laughed, lowered the chain around his wrinkled, brown neck, and secured the clasp. He kissed her hand, then stood.

“Merci,” he said.

“He,” said Valasian, lifting his chin toward Jim as he retreated, “knows the way. Go before the snows.”

“See you next year, Valasian!” she said.

“Go!” he yelled, staring stone-faced at the ground. “Go!”

T
HE GREEN PASTURES AND WILDFLOWERS HAD
given way to a gradual ascent up a sea of broken gray shale. The mountain was a dragon that had shed its scales. Sharp pieces of Wildhorn detritus lay scattered randomly, layer upon layer.

“Her cave should be just on the other side of this, on the north face.” Calliope was breathless. “What a barren place she chose.”

“This is too far off our path,” Jim protested, but she continued to march resolutely ahead of him, coughing into her handkerchief every few strides.

The sky was now a milky white, the temperature had dropped, and floating mist shrouded the rocks to either side.
Jim imagined that this was what it must be like for fish, gazing flat-eyed upward through the water's surface.

The hike up the north side required full concentration, as the slivers of scree and slate were slippery and the ground uneven. After an hour, Jim stopped.

“This is too long a detour. Your cough is getting worse, and it's getting colder. We need to get back to the trail—”

“I see it.” She pointed to a small cave halfway up the mountain wall. “Just up there.”

From where they stood, the dark chamber looked like a lopsided eye in the mountainside.

“Hold Hamlet, will you?” she asked when they'd reached the vertical granite wall. He had almost forgotten about the bird. She placed the owlet on top of Jim's knapsack, then took hold of a rope that dangled nearby. Jim traced its origins to a hook protruding from the top of the ledge.

“Valasian must have attached this rope to carry supplies and food to her,” she said, her voice wavering as she shimmied up the rope with a strength that he would not have imagined in her slight figure.

Jim held the knotted rope still. Once at the top, she swung her legs over the upper ledge. Jim followed, the owlet in his knapsack, wedging his boots against the glistening rock face, listening to Calliope's cough above him. He disliked this detour as much as Valasian did.

“How did the hermitess get up here without this rope?” Jim asked once he'd cleared the ledge.

“She came as a young woman,” Calliope said, taking Hamlet into her hands, “and she'll leave through the back door that is paradise, and become a young woman again.” She coughed into her handkerchief.

At their new height, he could see a foreboding white shroud of mist pierced by a crown of mountain peaks. He should never have acquiesced to Calliope's request to visit the hermitess. Why had he let this sick woman determine their fate? He would take the lead on the next leg of the journey.

“You're skeptical about our hermitess,” she said as they neared the entrance to the cave.

“I'm skeptical about your health,” he said.

They covered their noses immediately and simultaneously. She removed a candle and matchbook from her pocket and lit the candle. The owlet hissed.

“
Shhhhh
, 'Amlet,” she said, stopping quickly, holding Jim back.

“The smell of death,” she whispered.

The odor was not as rank as that of the bat-infested cave, but it was sour.

They found the old woman propped up against one side of the cave, her head of long white hair collapsed onto her chest. One of her dull-gray eyes was open, the other shut.
As you go to death
, Jim thought,
perhaps there is always one eye turning back toward life.

Had she resisted Death, fighting tooth and nail as it
sucked the air from her lungs? As she was swallowed into nothingness, was her mind reaching for the wildflowers of her youth, the white giggles of edelweiss?

“By the looks of her, she must've died more than a week ago.” Calliope handed Jim the candle. “We can't leave her like this.”

The dead woman wore a sack of gray fabric; her bare ankles and feet were swollen. A wooden bowl and spoon lay next to her fingers, along with an empty metal cup and an untouched loaf of bread that looked as hard as the rocks outside. No rodent or insect had found it appetizing. Fear in the form of adrenaline rushed through him.

Calliope sank to the body and pulled the long-white-haired head into her lap. With her delicate fingers, she closed the woman's open eye.

Jim worried that they were losing daylight outside the cave and that the temperature was dropping. Aiming the candle at the cave walls, he noticed that they were scalloped like the inside of a shell. As in the sea, as on land. There were markings on the wall: simple stick figures came into view.
Not possible.

Wherever Calliope was, there were miracles. Had the hermitess painted them? He walked closer and deciphered waving lines: a river; stick figures with objects in their hands; animals in motion, some resembling reindeer. The shape of a flame—or was that a fish in the sky?—and the contours of the mountains. Hadn't Calliope told him that her grandfa
ther thought the mountain caves dated back to the Pliocene or Miocene Age?

Calliope gestured to him, and Jim placed the candle on the cave floor and took the dead woman's ankles. It repulsed him to feel how loose the skin was. Together, they moved the hermitess's body so that it lay flat. The body was light, as if the person within had left her skin behind. Calliope arranged the woman's bloated arms, then found a blanket in a dark corner. She shook it out and spread it over it—over her. Calliope placed her hands together in prayer and pressed her lips to the bone-white forehead.

“Valasian will bury her,” she said. Her cough echoed throughout the cave.

OUTSIDE, IT FELT AS IF THE SUN WERE WEARING OUT.
Clouds blurred the outlines of the mountains. They descended the rope quickly and began hiking in the direction that Valasian had indicated. Despite the challenge of hiking this trail of slippery and loose slate, it was a relief to gain distance from the cave.

He walked to the rhythm of Calliope's stride and her cough, and neither of them spoke. The hermitess's death had left a stamp of gloom. The landscape was colorless, and the mountain under the gray sky looked hard-eyed and deserted.

Even if they kept up their brisk pace, they would not
reach the Cabane des Audannes by nightfall. The visit to the hermitess had cost them two hours of daylight.

At dusk, Calliope began to drag her feet. Jim wished he hadn't abandoned his trekking pole. When they stopped to rest, she fell into his arms, holding out the owlet for him to take.

“Bacon in my knapsack,” she said, her voice hoarse.

He lowered her gently onto a slab of rock and found a small container of bacon in her knapsack. He placed the bacon near the agitated, blinking owlet, and it pecked greedily.

“Can you make it a little farther, Calliope?”

“Yes,” she said, smiling as she unwound her shoelaces.

“Just a little farther.”

“Yes,” she said as she lay down on the rocky plateau.

There would be no more hiking that day, he thought.

“Were you ever here in the snow?” he asked her as he spread the tarp. Saying the word
snow
felt forbidden, as if in saying it he would give it permission. Over the last hour, it had been at the edge of Jim's every thought.

“Only once, with Grand-père.” She opened her eyes and smiled up at him. “It was a rainbow snow, but I still think my grand-père made it come especially for me.” She was a little girl again. “We were usually back in school before the snows arrived.”

Jim dug into his knapsack and offered her some bread and cheese. She waved it away.

“You want to hunt, eh, mon 'Amlet?” She lifted the vig
orously flapping Hamlet above her head. “Nature is finally calling you hers.

“Fly away!” she commanded. The owlet's eyes were orange lanterns in the gathering dark. It stared at her motionless as if it were a sulking teenager.

Jim was hungry, even if she was not. He ate slowly and tried to entice Calliope with small bites, but her interest was elsewhere, her energy fading.

As she curled up under the blanket next to him, Jim considered how the managing directors at Wolfe, Taylor would greet his failure to appear on the first day of his new job.

“Too many words,” Calliope was murmuring in her drowsiness. “You mustn't trust them. Poison hides in words.

“‘I love you,' says my husband to his mistresseses,” she continued, slurring her words in her fatigue. “He says it to this one and that one, and also to me and also to you.

“Too many loves in the world,” she said. “A plague of loves: sexual love, romantic love, married love, adulterous love, family love, friend love, love
platonique
, love lost, love found, young love— No, no more words. Please! No more loves!”

She coughed. He placed his cold hand on her burning forehead.

“Do you still love him?” he asked.

She answered as if she were completely lucid. “How can you love someone who is able or likely to cause physical, mental, or emotional injury? How can you love someone who doesn't cherish anyone or anything?”

He thought of himself, of his work, and of Sally's look of sadness when, so often, he said he was too busy to make plans for the weekend. He'd kept her waiting at a restaurant for an hour on her last birthday. He couldn't help it; he was under a work deadline. Now, reflecting back, he wondered, could he have helped it? Could he have told his colleagues, “My fiancée is more important”?

“How can you love someone,” she said, her voice groggy again, “who gives his body and takes others' with no thought of the spirit within them? How can you love someone whose integrity is corruptible by his own unsatisfying excuses, someone who has never attached any consequences to his actions? Can love exist without trust?”

“You're planning to leave the marriage.”

“Enough about me! Jim Olsen, you, whose true north is your heart, must find someone whose compass is as fixed as yours. That I can see now very clearly. Yes, that I can see.”

Would Sally have said that Jim's magnetic north was his heart? More likely she thought that his compass needle pointed to his version of success: getting to Princeton, getting to Harvard Business School, getting the first job, getting Sally. As his peers were getting, so was he. He would not be left behind.

“Helene.” Was Calliope speaking in her sleep, or was she awake with her eyes closed?

“The electricity went out in Paris the night Helene was born. My hospital room overlooked the Tour d'Eiffel, and voilà, the moment she was born, all the lights on the tower
went on:
ping, ping ping, ping
. That is Helene,
la lumière
, the light. Lives are short, with a few moments of epiphany. That was one—the moment when Helene was born and the lights returned to Paris—and now the lights are on again, with us, even in this blacked-out city of rock.”

No stars, no moon, no light tonight, and Calliope was shivering. He placed his jacket around her shoulders, but that did not stop her shaking. Every inhalation required strength.

When she was fully asleep, he placed his ear to her chest. He doubled up the blanket to cover her and tried to warm her with his body, negotiating the sharp contours of the mountain floor. What if he took a wrong turn tomorrow, if they got lost, if she could no longer walk and he had to carry her? What if it started snowing before they arrived at the sign for the Col des Eaux Froides and they found it impassable? The image of the dead hermitess filled the gaps in his thoughts.

Calliope's eyelids fluttered, and he wondered if she was dreaming of the burning barn or of the dreaded helicopter, of Anzère or her daughters or her life in Paris. He felt for Thalia's ribbon in his pocket. It was no longer there. He felt a strange panic, as if a part of him had been lost.