The Runaway Wife (7 page)

Back at the fire, she slid her hands into thick red oven mitts, removed the cast-iron pot from the hook over the fire, and, arms wilting under its weight, placed it on the small table. Her face—how quickly its expression changed—grew serious as she lifted the lid under his nose. He closed his eyes;
the steaming scent was of fish and the unidentified sweet herb, perhaps licorice or anise. When he opened his eyes, she was ladling brown fish, carrots, tomatoes, and thinly scalloped potatoes onto his pewter plate.

“What kind of—”

“Brown trout. The lake is full of them. I shoot them, and Dalí plucks them from the water.”

Alpine Disney. Before he could tell her that he knew she was joking, he noticed his hostess bowing her head. When she looked up, her eyes were glistening. The glow of candlelight rippled around her face.

She lifted her fork and brought a piece of fish to his lips.

“It was a beautiful fish, shiny and full of zest,” she said sadly.

The fish melted in Jim's mouth; the potatoes tasted of sage—and anise, he decided, was the herb. Everything smelled so fresh, as of wildflowers.

Jim tasted the wine. It was heavy with resin, very acidic and faintly sweet.

“Dense, isn't it? Hmm,” she said. “It tastes faintly like blood.”

The same thought had crossed his mind.

The flames from the candles wavered, and Jim felt a cold draft on the back of his neck. He touched the velvet ribbon in his pocket.

“Three beautiful women asked me to convince their mother to leave the mountains before the snows,” he said.

A gust of wind from the direction of the door extinguished the candles and left them in semidarkness. He rose
to take the tapers to the fire to light them, but she placed her hand on his arm and shook her head.

“Our last candles. We don't need them when we have this fire.”

He heard the bell tinkling outside and felt more cool air funnel into the room.

“Anyway, I find candlelight a little sad,” she said.

A melancholic
whooooo whooooo, hooooot, hooooot
from the wall behind the fireplace punctuated her words.

Sally loved candlelight, but only with the lights on. He was always turning off the lights, and she would turn them back on. “Why do people not want to see everything they can?” she would ask.

He strained to see Calliope's expression.

“The owls sense you,” she said. “They're louder tonight than normal; they'll leave soon.”

“For the night or for the season or forever?” Jim was not certain he spoke the words aloud. After the day's hike, the frigid swim, the perilous rock climbing, the filling trout stew, the Benedictine brew, and the dim light, he'd begun to feel groggy. What if Calliope had drugged him?

“Which wars were raging the last time someone sipped this wine?” he asked so he would stay awake. He swirled and peered at the viscous black liquid in his cup.

“Everyone thinks the Alps are peaceful, but for centuries these mountain peaks have echoed with gunshot exchanges between the Oberland beer-drinking northerners and the southern vineyard owners.”

“In peaceful Switzerland?”

“In your tranquil Switzerland, haven't you heard the life-choking sounds of a helicopter penetrating our hours of light?”

He moved quickly to change the subject.

“I was lucky to have met Valasian.”

“How
fonny
!” she said, suddenly laughing.

“What's so
fonny
?” he said, feeling himself the subject of derision. He remembered how Thalia had pronounced
funny
as
finny
.

“You believe in luck!” she said, a smile on her lips as she dipped her fork into the stew.

“Excuse me?” he said.

“Luck,” she said. “
La chance. La fortune.
A primitive concept,
non
? But one moment—where is Dalí?” she called out. She jumped up from the table, opened the door, and peered outside. The cold air startled Jim awake.

“I can't see anything: no sun, no moon, no Dalí. My fierce and noble hunter has left today: I feel it in my bones. Au revoir,
mon
Dalí,” she called into the blackness.

“Luck,” she said, returning to her stool and leaning across the table as if she were confiding a secret, “is the religion of a man without imagination.”

Could there be anything worse?

“For example,” she said, standing and retrieving something from the darkness. She bent over the table. “Did luck bring you this?”

In the dim light, he could make out a small basket con
taining what looked like half a baguette and three rounds of cheese.

“Your daughters think you're starving,” he said.

“They should know their maman by now,” she said. “Try this one.” She pointed to one of the cheeses.

It melted in his mouth like butter yet had a sharp, tangy bite.

“Chèvre from the farm in the adjacent valley, and, of course, the ever-present Emmentaler, and an Alpkäse. Gabriel brings it from his mother's pantry once a week.”

“Gabriel?” He knew it: her Alpine lover . . .

“My friend, a fifteen-year-old goatherd.”

“And in the winter, your friend returns to the valley? Are you aware that there are warnings of an early snow—”

“Up there, yes.” The flame from the fire sparked, and in that moment he noticed her dainty chin pointing upward. “At the Col des Sybelles and the Col du Brochet. Instead of hollyhocks budding for the last time, as they are in my garden now, at those passes the crystals are compounding—large and lustrous crystals, more faceted than any diamond. At certain times of year, crystals fall from the clouds—and in different colors.”

She leaned her elbow on the table, rested her knuckles against her chin. “I witnessed it once with my
grand-père
. We called it
rainbow snow
, a snowstorm caught in a rainbow. I don't think I've ever seen anything more beautiful: red, blue, green, yellow jewels dropping from the sky, some as big as a pea”—she made a small oval with her forefinger and
thumb—“some as small as a fleck of gold.” She pinched her finger and thumb together. “It was as if nature was having hallucinations. On second thought, it was like witnessing nature while she's dreaming.”

“Sounds like the first sign of hypothermia.”

“Did
you
grow up in the Alps, monsieur the expert?”

Without waiting for a reply, she rose from the table. Did she ever sit still?

“I have something very special for you that you must tell my daughters about, something I've been conjuring all afternoon. Please don't move, not an inch. I wonder if you'll also consider
this
to be luck!”

It was too dark in the chalet to see where she'd gone. If he completed his mission tomorrow, she, not he, would be describing this night to Thalia, Clio, and Helene. He would be on a flight back to New York. But even if they left early and hiked to Gstaad by the end of the day, even then it would be pushing it to catch a flight out of Geneva by tomorrow night. He would have to pay full fare for another flight on Thursday.

The last embers of fire illuminated what looked like a glaze of frost in the far corner of the chalet. He threw another log from the small pile in the corner onto the dying flames and listened to the residents hooting. This little chalet would be an icebox before long.

Ice house. His grandfather Ocean Olsen had once been locked in one back in Norway, the Old Country—or at least that was the story he'd told his impressionable
six-year-old grandson. He was found blue and frozen, all but his eyeballs. They were able to save him, hot-blooded Viking that he was, but the picture in Jim's mind of moist blue eyeballs in a frozen blue body had remained with him all these years. Grandfather Ocean's family had hauled in a good income exporting ice to England, but his grandfather left that and the fjords behind when he immigrated to the New Country. What he had kept and passed on to Jim were his descriptions of the vast Norwegian mountain cliffs, valleys and fjords.

This, Jim decided,
this
was his heritage: craggy mountain peaks, lakes that floated on the top of the world—not the flat plains of Illinois. No wonder he felt more alive here. On the perilous cliffs of his trek earlier that day, he'd felt as if the sky had held him up by the back of his shirt and suspended him in the blue light.

Where had Diana the Huntress gone?

“
Et voilà
,” he heard as she glided back into earshot. She'd been away so long that the room had lost its luster. She placed before Jim a pewter plate bearing what looked like a white model of an archipelago.

“
Île flottante
,” she announced as she took her seat and pushed the islands around with her fork.

“How did you—” he began.

“Don't inquire,” she said, and the
q
seemed stuck on her tongue. “It's also called
oeufs à la neige
. Eggs in the snow, which might be more appropos,” she added as she hopped up and stoked the fire.

He closed his eyes as he tasted the soft custard with the stiff, honeyed meringue crust. He had never tasted anything like this soft, sweet melting on his tongue. Like snow.

She laughed when she returned to the table. “You have a dollop on the tip of your nose!” She tapped his nose gently, and he joined in her laughter.

They ate the remainder of the melting islands without speaking. He listened to the bass notes from the owls, the occasional clanging of the bell in the tower, and the high-pitched whisperings of the wind outside.

“Before you sleep,” she said finally, rising from the table and taking his plate, “I'll introduce you to your bedfellows.”

“I thought we were alone,” he said.

She threw back her head to laugh once more, and her eyes shone in the darkness. Helene, yes, Helene had the same laugh.

“You are
fonny
, Jim Olsen! One is
never
entirely alone,” she said. “Follow me.” She bent over the small, crackling fire and lit the candle stub.

He stood and could hardly lift his legs to walk. Calliope of the Wildhorn
had
drugged him, with her wine dregs and perfumed eggs in snow.

All the better
, he thought as he followed her into the barn that was attached to the chalet.

AT FIRST GLANCE, IN THE LIGHT OF THE CANDLE, HE
counted twelve of them: twelve sets of blinking yellow-orange eyes; twelve gray-and-beige feathered bodies with
heart-shaped white faces. Most were perched on a beam near the ceiling of the barn, and some were in the rafters.

As they entered, a large owl flew silently out the open door at the end of the room.
Whoosh
. Its wingspan must have been five or six feet. Another fluttered its feathered wings as if it were compressing and expanding the bellows of an accordion. Rotating its head, it blinked down at them. Jim could make out a few smaller owls in the corner, roosting on thick nests of hay. This room was warmer than the firelit room in which they had eaten dinner; Jim noticed that the gaps in the logs that formed the walls had been stuffed with hay.

What a sound! An orchestra of low, muted exhalations—soft, rounded, sweet, muffled, measured, and tinged with indescribable melancholy.

“They own this place,” she whispered. “They allow me to take up residence here.”

“How about in the winter?”

“They'll leave soon. Can't you feel it? I worry about the little ones.”

“Unlike you,” he said, “they don't believe that summer will last forever.”

She disregarded his words and stepped farther into the barn.

“I thought owls were solitary birds,” he whispered, stepping beside her.

“I did, too,” she said in a low voice close to his ear. “In my time here, I've learned that they're monogamous crea
tures. If their mate dies, they'll die faster than they would from starvation or dehydration. Like us, they also communicate with facial expressions. Look over there.”

She lifted her candle to the corner. Four smaller owlets ruffled their feathers; their round blinking eyes looked accusingly at the intruders.

“A late brood. I'm guessing that's why this group has stayed here so late in the season. I've named the owlets: Hildegarde, Catherine of Siena, and Teresa of Ávila. Oh, yes, and then there is Hamlet, the smallest of all. Stop staring, Jim: you've made Teresa freeze and compress her feathers so she looks like a tree branch. Yes, Teresa, a man is in our midst, sent by my daughters to take me away.”

She raised the candle and met his eyes as if to challenge him. He did his best to match her look: defiant and deeply knowing. She returned her gaze to the owlets.

“I hope they forgive me for naming them. They have such different personalities. I've recorded their behavior in a journal . . .” How he loved the way she pronounced that word,
j-our-nal
, the
o
and the
u
intimately touching, grazing each other.

“Just as my
grand-père
taught me,” she continued. “Like a good ornithologist, I record their habits, their flight patterns, their relationships.”

Another of the larger owls flew out the open barn door. Its flight was noiseless and weightless, like snow falling in late spring.

“Called to the night hunt,” she murmured.

They heard a sharp shriek and lifted their heads to the owl on the beam above them.

“That is Hrotsvitha,” she whispered. “The name in Saxon means ‘strong voice.' Hrotsvitha was a tenth-century dramatist who wrote plays about powerful women. Yes, Hrotsvitha, this is our guest for the night. Most of the owls will be gone all night and will return only at dawn. Hrotsvitha, why are you still here? The big men are gone. The rest usually wait for her to go, and then they follow.”

Hrotsvitha raised her feathers, snapped her bill, and shrieked again. One by one—whether because of the human disturbance or the direction of the tenth-century-dramatist owl, or because the perfect moment of velvet darkness had arrived outside—they departed, ten owls swooping above them out the large barn door into the night. All except the four smaller owls in their straw nest.