The Runaway Wife (5 page)

“Whose?”

“Some say Italian is the most beautiful language, but I would argue that it's French. There's an intimacy in the way the French say things, like
chez moi
,
chaleur
,
amour
,
Bonheur
. . .”

Thalia's voice was like the rolling hills of the lowland Alps. Helene's was like a gust of wind in a sail, held there only briefly. Sally's voice was high in tone and had a scratchy quality that was sexy: he missed it.

“I thought I would hear Sally's voice for the rest of my life.”

“This is your journey to forget Sally.”

“Five years of loving her. And then you tell your heart, ‘Sorry, wrong recipient! Delete!'”

Sheets of heavy rain—or was it sleet?—began to drop
suddenly from the edge of the cave roof, and the men quickly rose and pulled their tarps deeper inside.

Jim knew that he and Ambrose shared the same concern: how they would find their way tomorrow if the sleet turned into snow and the mountain path was covered.

Between yawns, Ambrose began to tell the story of his standoff with a ten-foot elk while on a fishing trip in Wyoming: he and the elk glared at each other for half an hour . . .

“Then?” Jim asked.

Ambrose whistled in his sleep, and Jim found himself counting the seconds between each exhalation. He readjusted his position on the cold, rocky, uncomfortable surface. Every night, he thought, transformed a person in a small way, with the dreams and the tossing and turning of thoughts in the rolling water mill of the mind. Sleep was not a break from life's continual sweep. In it, you were still living life, seeing things you would never see come morning, and it could age you as quickly as daytime.

“M
AYBE THEY KNOW SOMETHING WE DON'T,”
said Ambrose. “They must have closed down yesterday or the day before.” They were standing before the boarded-up rustic chalet at the summit of Col du Brochet. Unlike the tin Cabane des Audannes, this chalet was adorned with classic Swiss wooden balconies and some of the summer's leftover pink flowers at the windows. Wooden planks covered the two front windows.

After hiking under clouds that now stretched like a white sheet of ice over the sky, Jim had expected to find this chalet, which he'd heard was a charming Alpine gem with a commanding position over the glaciers, with its doors open and fellow hikers spilling over benches and picnic tables outside.

“These chalets don't usually close until mid-September,” said Ambrose.

They ate their midmorning snack at one of the picnic tables that no doubt provided an awe-inspiring scenic overlook on a clear day. Now they saw only layers of gray upon gray. Jim had never imagined so many combinations of grayness.

“We'll take Monsieur Acolas's shortcut,” said Ambrose, squinting at the familiar yellow signs and pointing in the direction of Gstaad, eight hours.

“I've decided to take this route”—Jim pointed—“to Geltenhütte, southwest. On my way I'll look for the mysterious Calliope.”

“You know that the Swiss Air Ambulance actually
trains
people to rescue stranded hikers or skiers in the Alps—” began Ambrose.

“Ambrose, we've been through this.”

“Jim Olsen. I've never known you to be this obstinate. Take a man off his job, set him down in the Alps, and you never know what could happen. I'm guessing that you want to prove something to the ladies in the hutte.”

“Maybe.” Jim honestly didn't know, himself.

“You're aware of those clouds? White, powdered fortune cookies with strips of paper inside that all say ‘snow'?”

“They've been following us.”

“Come back with me, Jim. It's not sensible or smart to hike alone in these conditions.”

“I promised—”

“Jim—”

“The path is clearly marked, Ambrose. Ten-dollar bet that I beat you down!” Jim patted his friend on the back. “Really, I'll be fine. Give my best to Stephanie and the kids.”

“Text me as soon as you arrive in Gstaad. I will be waiting,” Ambrose said.

After a good-bye hug, Ambrose disappeared around the bend of the shale path. “Safe travels and bon voyage!” His voice trailed off.

“You too!” Jim yelled back, though he realized that his reply was probably lost in the thickening mist.

NOW THAT HE WAS ALONE, JIM FOUND HIMSELF
walking faster. He would not call it panic, but it was something close, an alertness that he imagined he shared with the mountain mammals seeking shelter from the coming storm. Based on his summers working in the paint department at Manny's Hardware and Paints, he would categorize panic in the same color family as anxiety: red, but possibly a deeper hue. He recalled the metallic taste of anxiety before giving presentations to a room of thirty or more executives. This hike along the open-jawed terrain of the Alps could never be as threatening as those thirty-odd steel-edged minds sharpening their grist on his every word.

The path he hiked was composed of slippery, shattered
scree—layers and layers of shredded slate. With no Ambrose or mountain views to distract him, Jim hiked forward, but found himself looking back.

He was seventeen years old, arriving for the first time at Princeton University. He'd never visited the college—the trip east was too expensive, and who needed to see it? Princeton was his father's boss's alma mater, and it was the college Jim's parents had chosen for him as soon as he'd entered the sixth grade. When Jim had dropped his only duffel bag on the shiny wooden floor of his freshman dorm room, his hometown friend, Tommy Murphy, a junior on the lacrosse team, had rushed in to welcome him. Thankfully, Tommy had showed the naive Midwesterner the ropes and invited him to team parties at Cottage, an eating club.

But Jim was quiet by nature. Among his convivial new friends, Jim considered his self-restraint and reticence a personality flaw. He'd never learned the art of talking, as his competitive sister had (everything she undertook was motivated by the desire to outshine her younger brother) from their fussy, loquacious mother. Rather, he'd intuited from his father that talk was idle and worth little. It could even cost you your integrity. The dialogue of the men of the family was interior, like these barely whispering mountains.

Jim stopped to remove his fleece from his knapsack. Had nature decided to hold its breath? It was so quiet. Or was this break in the howling wind the pregnant pause before the snows? The clouds were regrouping and gathering above.

Where were the hikers, the yodelers, the sheep and cow
herds? Jim would welcome even the relentless chop of the helicopter. What if the sought-after Calliope had been located? What if it snowed? What if the barely perceptible path upon which he walked disappeared into miles of endless slate scree?

Enough with the what-ifs
, he told himself, pulling on his fleece and returning to his fast pace. This mountain, the Wildhorn, was about
whatness
. The sheer verticality took his breath away. Jim Olsen from the flat prairie lands couldn't stop looking up and up and up and up. Even if nothing else was moving, surely this
mountain
was alive, yearning, incessantly heaving upward to touch the clouds. It inspired awe, fear, and humility. This sensation of being literally in the clouds, in a land of vertical suspension, made him feel more alive than, yes, come to think of it, he ever had in his life.

He was walking so quickly now that he almost missed the signpost to the Refuge de Geltenhütte: elevation 2759 meters, four hours southwest; The Wildhorn 3247, four hours north, the direction he'd come; Le Sex Rouge 2893, six hours east; and The Arpelistock 3035, five hours south.

Four more hours? His watch had stopped long ago. Had his walking slowed? Was that the smell of . . . snow? Well acquainted as he was with frigid Midwestern winters, Jim had never known snow to smell. It was as if these mountains hungered for it, impatient for its release. As Jim continued in the direction of the Refuge, everything he saw along the way suggested snow: the white sky, the white patches on faraway peaks, the sparkle ingrained in the granite mountainside,
the deafening quiet. Why hadn't Ambrose, king of preparation, thought of packing an ice pick? Jim's legs devoured the mountainscape in huge, lunging bites.

At a pass between two sharp-edged ridges, Jim stopped to drink and eat. The traverse he'd been treading looked so faint in the distance that he wondered for a panicked moment whether he'd been following a trail made by steinbock. How could a trail taper off and disappear? The Swiss were a reliably predictable people.

He threw on the next layer, his Windbreaker, and donned the gloves that he'd told Ambrose he'd never use. His fingers were almost numb. All around him, the mountain inclined into peaks of jagged rock. He crouched down. One of his heels was bleeding again, despite the Band-Aid he'd stuck on that morning. A trace of a trail, then nothing but gray-black scree in the distance. Ambrose and Clio had been right. Who did he think he was to tackle this black-eyed mountain solo? Should he turn back, retrace his steps? He felt for his flashlight in the knapsack, his only weapon. He'd been hiking five hours since he'd stopped for lunch. He would need to find a place to sleep.

The evening darkness encroached from all sides. He would live with uncertainty that night, and in the morning, with the sunrise as his compass, he would recover his bearings.

THE SECOND SOLO DAY WAS SIMILAR TO THE FIRST.
He failed to find a marked trail and feared he was walking in circles. The snow had still not arrived, but Jim sensed it
in his every bone, in the bloated clouds, and the pregnant silence.

Someone please speak. A steinbock, a bird, a breeze, a helicopter. Someone remind me of life!
Would he get out of here alive? What about his job? Maybe Calliope's helicopter-heavy-handed husband would rescue him
and
her. What if he had hiked out of helicopter range? He cursed himself for every act of foolishness that had led up to this moment.

That night the temperature dropped dramatically, and the slight breeze that had developed late in the afternoon grew into a howling wind. Jim would have liked to light a fire for warmth, but how could you build a fire with rock?

When he woke in the night he thought he heard water splashing, and he wondered if he had accidentally wandered near the waterfall of the legendary Grotte aux Fées. One of the hikers at the Cabane had told him about this miracle of a waterfall inside a mountain—more than 250 feet long.

He would locate the trail to Gstaad the following day. When he was hiking with Ambrose, time had seemed limitless, but now it was closing in on him. He needed to get back to New York in time to start his new job. He could not risk being one day late. But risk what? Would they fire him if he was one day late?
Yes
, he heard. It was Sally's voice. “Go away,” he told it.

But the words surfacing from the distant splashes were French, the voice in tune with the falling water. So much breath in a voice. Something about it soothed him. He called out the names of the Castellane sisters as if they were his
family: “Thalia, what man are you pursuing? Clio, are you happy to be among your children? Helene, are you sleeping well tonight?” He remembered how childlike her face had looked in the moonlight that night in the Cabane. “Calliope, mother, mirage, meanderer, did you realize when you lost yourself that you would lose me as well?” He doubled up the blanket and pulled it to his chin.

With dawn nowhere in sight, Jim decided to drain his valuable flashlight battery to light a page of the book of poetry Thalia had given him. Although he didn't understand most of the words, he repeated one line aloud in the glow of the flashlight as the snow began to tumble like white down from a comforter above, as the wetness began to seep into his clothing, as the world he did not know changed into another world he would not recognize. Appropriately, the poem was titled “La blanche neige”—“The White Snow”—and the line that Jim repeated was “Les anges, les anges dans le ciel”—“the angels, the angels in the sky.”

He thought he heard a faint echo of footsteps, someone walking along the once-dry riverbeds that were now drinking in the snow. Perhaps it was another lost hiker, he mused to himself as he drifted off to sleep. Perhaps it was Madame Castellane.

W
AS THAT THE SOUND OF A FIRE CRACKLING? HE
was dreaming. He could feel its warmth. But no! His clothes were cold and clammy. He remembered the snow, appearing like a prowler in the night. He opened his eyes slowly. The dimly lit sky hovered so low that Jim felt he could touch it. The snow had stopped. Thank God. And yes, that was a fire! Not far from where Jim lay, a man hunched over flickering flames. The man's face was creased and marked like the bark of a tree. His hair was thinning, gray and white. He wore a brown jacket that was too short for his long torso; it rose up from his waist as he bent. His pants were a darker shade of brown, stained in many places and ripped at the knees. The skin on the back of his neck was stretched so
thin that Jim thought he could see through it. Was he in the presence of a ghost?

Jim scrambled to his feet and rubbed his sore back. “Bonjour,” he said.

The man stared stonily at him, shook his head, grunted, and returned his gaze to the fire, prodding it with a crooked twig. He dug his hand into his pocket and, without looking up at Jim, held out a wedge of cheese and a small sausage.

“Thank you,” Jim said, taking the proffered food and sitting down on a boulder near the busy little fire. Monsieur Acolas's soggy brown bag of food had lost its appeal the previous night.

Speaking felt strange. “Jim Olsen,” Jim said.

The man stirred the fire.

“Valasian,” he said in a deep voice.

“Valasian,” Jim repeated. Last name or first name? Maybe both.

Valasian looked like an extension of the mountain: his face was the same shade of gray. Tattered long underwear peeked out from his dark-brown trousers.

“I'm looking for the trail to Gstaad,” Jim began hopefully.

Valasian kept his gaze focused on the fire. He did not speak.

“I need to get to Gstaad today to catch a plane tomorrow from Geneva to New York City.”

Did this old man not understand him, or did he refuse to respond?

Jim asked if the man had seen a woman in the area? Aha—a reaction from the stone! The man frowned, shifted his position, and then returned his curtained eyes to the fire.

In broken French, Jim explained that the woman's three daughters had sent him to find their mother. To illustrate his story, Jim removed the now crushed and damp maroon velvet ribbon from his pocket and held it out.

The old man's slits of eyes opened wide. He grimaced, rose, and gestured for Jim to follow him. They walked around a small hillock, and Jim stumbled when he saw the orange-pink shimmer of dawn reflected on the white cover of the formerly gray-locked mountain. The morning had been ignited.

Was it 6 a.m.? How inadequate a measure hours and minutes were to mark the passage of time in the Alps. You couldn't swallow 6 a.m. as Jim now drank in the pink lure of sky; you couldn't inhale 6 a.m. and feel it become a part of you, as he did with the yellows, pinks, and oranges that swelled into him from the rocky, shimmering backbone of the mountain. The colors on such a palette had texture, even sound.

Extending his bony fingers—the joints reminded Jim of potatoes left too long in a cupboard—the old man pointed downward, into the valley.

“Aha,” said Jim. “Will you please show me how to get there?”

Valasian limped back to his fire, his head angled toward the mountain. Everything about him, Jim noticed, tilted to
one side, giving the impression that he was on a ship listing portside.

Valasian stamped out the fire and, with his crooked forefinger, gestured for Jim to collect his things. He walked briskly ahead, treading unevenly on the loose shale rocks.

“The trail?” Jim yelled ahead as he followed Valasian over the slippery snowfield. Despite the views of the green valley patchwork below, it was cold away from the fire, and Jim shivered in his wet clothes. Not a person nor an animal nor a signpost did they pass, nor a word did the two men speak as Jim followed Valasian through the midday hours—not even when they both stopped to gaze up at the sound of the helicopter. Jim guessed that the search had been renewed now that the clouds and snow had passed. He felt relieved.

Valasian squinted up at the buzzing insect in the sky, shook his head—a persistent habit—and turned to walk in the opposite direction. Jim followed. Was the old man avoiding the chopper, too?

Valasian stopped to peer over a cliff overhang. Without a word of warning, he disappeared. Drilled into the rock ledge at Jim's feet was a thick rope secured to a rusty metal ring. Looking down, Jim caught sight of Valasian's crooked body rappelling to the bottom of a deep ravine. He tugged on the metal ring. Why should he trust this old guy? This was no ladder in the sky, it was just a rope. Abandoning his trekking pole, Jim grabbed the frayed cord, and grateful for his gloves, slid down. Landing in the ravine, he was
surprised to see that the valley around him was untouched by snow.

NEXT, VALASIAN POINTED TO A SPLIT IN THE SIDE OF
the mountain, a hole about four feet wide. With surprising agility, the old man lifted himself up into the wide fissure. He looked like a man in a circus stuffing himself headfirst into a cannon.

“You've got to be kidding,” Jim said.

With a deep breath, Jim followed his guide
into
the mountain wall. With Valasian's boots in his face, Jim slithered along inside the dark, damp tunnel, wondering once again whether he or this newfound companion had lost his mind.

It was frigid inside the mountain, and it smelled of mold. After some time, the tunnel began to slope. Jim heard water rushing, and then felt the tug of gravity. He dug the toes of his boots into the wet rock but failed to get traction. Before he knew it, he'd been dumped like a waterfall out of the guts of the mountain, plunged into a body of glacial water. When he popped up, breathless, he saw a waterfall streaming beside him. He was swept along in the turbulent current, his extremities numb in the freezing water, his knapsack wet through. He whipped his head around in search of Valasian and caught a glimpse of the old man climbing onto the riverbank behind him. Using all his strength, Jim swam across
the current and pulled himself up onto the sharp, rocky shore about thirty feet downriver from Valasian.

“Thanks for the warning, old man,” Jim said as he joined Valasian on a rock slab. Valasian resembled a nearly drowned rat: the little hair he had was matted down along his ears, and water dripped from every part of him.

Jim detected a ray of mirth in his guide's blue slivers of eyes.

“I suppose this was the faster route, if we don't die of hypothermia,” Jim continued. He rubbed his hands together. “If I'd known we were going swimming, I would have protected my knapsack.”

A drop of lake water hung from the tip of Valasian's nose. Jim pulled off his gloves, T-shirt, fleece, and Windbreaker and squeezed the cold water from them. Valasian glared at Jim's bare chest with a look of disdain.

“For God's sake, it's just us up here,” said Jim, laughing. He imagined his mother's face screwed up into the same knotted scowl.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the shock of the plunge, Jim found himself shivering and laughing at the same time. Had he ever appreciated the presence of another human being as much as he did this older man? Had he ever felt so refreshed? Every cell in his body vibrated with new life.

Jim drank in the green that carpeted the sloping mountain. Valasian pointed to something in the distance. It looked like a chalet with a bell tower. Beside it was a dark wooden
barn and an oval-shaped lake. In the late-afternoon sun, the lake looked spangled with gold and silver.

Valasian nodded to the chalet, his face unyielding. No cues, no clues, no information. A hermitess could live in such a place, as could Madame Castellane.

Valasian pulled his jaw up square to Jim's and gestured for Jim to don his wet shirt. Jim obeyed. Valasian took a seat on a nearby rock and closed his eyes, clearly waiting for Jim to depart—Jim had grown fairly fluent in the old man's silent language.

“Thank you,” said Jim, wondering whether he should dip into his pocket for a tip.

“
Allez
, go!”

A handshake seemed too casual for this dignified man of the mountains. Jim bowed his head. Valasian nodded back.

Keeping the bell tower in view, Jim picked his way through a small copse and slid down a cliff face to find a lightly worn path that wound in the direction of the lake. As he descended, he caught glimpses of the bell tower behind this rounded hill, that grouping of cedar trees, this mountain boulder. It was as if the chalet were beckoning him closer. Listening for the tinkle of a bell, instead Jim heard the distant strobe of the helicopter, blasphemy in the peaceful setting.

Landing a chopper would be a challenge in this area. The chalet rested at the very top of a peak, among many other narrow mountain aiguilles. The only unbroken plane
was the lake, which had now lost favor with the sun. In the silver shadow, the shining lake resembled a mirror.

As he attempted to mentally reconstruct Calliope's face from the faded photograph, Jim slipped and cut the fleshy part of his thumb on a sharp ridge. Cursing, he tore off a strip of his T-shirt and tied it around his finger.

Despite the more challenging terrain, the chalet continued to draw him like a magnet. A narrow trail bridged a crevasse easily two hundred feet deep on either side. A tightrope across a chasm. Jim felt dizzy. Was it the altitude? But this peak lay far below the Geltenhorn and the Cabane des Audannes. Blood loss? The T-shirt tourniquet crisscrossing his thumb was soaked. He slipped, caught himself, and watched the displaced slate crumble as it hit the canyon below. He dropped his head to his chest until the dizziness passed.

Once he'd crossed the canyon, he threaded a slope of brambles, scratching his arms and legs, and then heard—was that finally the bell? A tinkling bell! What a welcome sound. He clambered up a steep hill and glimpsed the bell tower of the little chalet higher up on another peak. A flock of small white birds burst into the sky, balloons heralding his arrival.

He was immediately overcome by the smell of wild roses, a sweetness that he could almost taste. Roses in the Alps? He thought of the sprig of heather in the book of poetry, of Thalia's flirtatious advances, of Sally's beleaguered disavowals, and he climbed faster. Enough of Sally.

Relying on the tips of his fingers and boots, he hoisted himself up the precipitous rocky crag in front of him until he ran out of cracks in the mountain face. He paused, his heart pumping madly as he lifted his head to examine the ten-foot vertical sheet of granite above him and the bell tower above that. After inspecting the rockface, he finally spied a small notch to his left. He glanced down at the exposed drop and across at the ice drapes of the Wildhorn Massif in the distance. He took a deep breath. With his left hand, he reached as far as he could, got a finger-grip on the notch, and with a loud shout “Ahhh,” threw himself in one bold motion, one leg after the other onto the top of the cliff. When he lifted his head, he saw the chalet with the bell tower and the brown wooden barn beside it. The bell tinkled in the light breeze.

Not far from the chalet, he spotted the silhouette of a woman.