Friendship Makes the Heart Grow Fonder (14 page)

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 makes 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?”

Becky wrinkled her nose as she stared up at the sky. “The light’s good. My feet are flat. It’s a fine day.”

“You’re hanging off the edge of a cliff.”

“Yeah, and it’s pretty awesome. Unless we get dive-bombed by falcons, it’s not likely anything is going to come up behind
or beside me. All in all this is a good place for an almost-blind woman. It’s exactly what I should be doing the day after
I find out my kids might just be okay.”

Becky lifted her left hand and slid down so that Monique could only see the top of her helmet. Monique forced herself to swallow
the lump rising in her throat. Becky’s attitude had switched back to casual flippancy, which was probably a hundred times
better than yesterday’s panic attack. Monique wished she could summon the same levity.

“Grip the rope now, yah,” Henrick said, forcing her fingers around the rope. “Hold it tight in your left hand. This is the
guide rope.”

She flexed her fingers. She should just pretend that she was stepping over the deck in her backyard. In a windstorm, maybe.

One step. Two.

Then came the shock of nothing under her heels anymore. She curled her toes as if she could dig them into the rock. Monique
mentally measured the diameter of the rope. Less than two inches held up her one hundred and forty-three pounds over an abyss.
Mustn’t think of that.
A breeze eddied up the sheer face to give her a chill where it shouldn’t.