The Returned

by Seth Patrick

  He wished he’d given himself time for a cigarette. The view was one he liked after nightfall—the town never looked more alive, and life was something he missed. He was already a little late, though, so he went inside. There were the usual number, twenty or so. Most of the parents took turns with their partner. He noted that Sandrine and her husband were both present, but they were the exception—Sandrine volunteered much of her spare time to help out at the shelter, and she never missed the support group meetings.

  Jérôme grabbed a chair from the side and brought it over to the gap next to Sandrine, trying not to clench his fist when he realized Pierre was talking. He’d never punched anyone in his life, but with Pierre it would be a pleasure.

  Pierre ran the Helping Hand, and he led most of the support groups himself. Alcohol, depression, drugs, divorce (God, the irony)—whatever your problem, Pierre was there to grant sanctimonious advice that might leave you no better off but would, guaranteed, allow him to feel self-satisfied. Pierre was a religious man, born again, with the zealotry that came with it. He was also surely the biggest prick Jérôme had ever met.

  Claire had brought the topic of divorce up more than once in the eighteen months since Jérôme had moved out, and she’d probably done so at Pierre’s suggestion. Jérôme had no idea if they’d even slept together yet. Given Pierre’s religious commitment, he suspected not, and Jérôme certainly wasn’t going to agree to a divorce. He knew Claire still felt something for him—not as much as he felt for her, but it was a spark he believed could save their marriage. Time was running out, though. It wouldn’t be long before his desire to have his wife back counted for nothing in the courts, and then the way would be open for her to marry Pierre.

  Even so, Jérôme kept coming to the support group. It helped him. Why it helped, he wasn’t sure, but it did. Perhaps it was because he liked imagining his fist shutting that mouth; perhaps it was just that, with Pierre in the same room, Jérôme knew the man wasn’t with Claire. With his wife.

  “…and you can all have your say in a few minutes,” Pierre was droning. Jérôme felt his hands ball up into fists and had to concentrate hard to relax them again. “But first,” Pierre said, “I believe Sandrine has something to tell us?”

  Sandrine smiled, not something Jérôme saw much of in this group, except for Pierre’s patronizing leer. Everyone else, after all, had had the same kind of immunization against smiling as Jérôme. “Yes,” she said. “Yan and I wanted to let you all know that we’re having a baby.”

  More smiles broke out across the group. Jérôme tried, but nothing happened.

  Sandrine went on, hesitant, sounding almost apologetic. “It wasn’t easy, but still, we wanted to tell you…and to thank you all. Especially Pierre. These meetings really helped us after the accident. Because of you, we’ve been able to carry on, move forward. And now we have this. Life prevails. It’s such a beautiful gift.”

  “That’s your gift to us, Sandrine,” gushed Pierre. “You too, Yan.”

  The group started to clap. Jérôme kept his hands by his side.

  “Now,” said Pierre, “you all remember Charlotte, the mayor’s assistant?” He gestured to the woman sitting to his left. She smiled and nodded, and the group did likewise.

  Not Jérôme, of course. He knew she was there to talk about the commemorative monument again, and he remembered the last time too clearly. He would try to keep his cynicism reined in, but God…people made that hard sometimes.

  Soon after Charlotte began, the overhead lights stuttered and failed, and darkness took over. A ripple of groans and uneasy laughter passed around the circle before phones were brought out to give some light.

  Jérôme stood and went to a window. “Looks like the whole town is out,” he said.

  “It should be back soon enough,” said Pierre from his seat. Jérôme found a bitter smile creep onto his face. Pierre’s tone had been almost scolding. There was simply no room for pessimism with the man.

  Small talk ensued, bathed in the pale phone light. Jérôme stayed by the window to avoid the empty chatter. After a few minutes, the lights in town came back on. He returned to his seat as the strip lights above him flickered to life.

  “Good.” Pierre smiled. He looked to Charlotte. “Let’s continue.”

  Charlotte stood, holding up a folder with drawings of the planned monument for the group to see. “So, as I was saying…the monument is in the form of a circle. It comes out of the foundry on Monday, and it’ll be installed by the end of the month, ready for the ceremony. There are thirty-eight holes, one for each student.” She handed out two copies of the drawing for people to take a closer look.

  Wonderful, Jérôme thought. Another empty space for Camille. And he would have to look at the damn thing every day.

  “Does anyone have any questions?” asked Pierre.

  Jérôme’s hand went up.

  “Jérôme?”

  “Was that thing expensive?” Beside him, Sandrine and Yan looked up from the drawing they were holding, wary. “Because it’s quite ugly, to be honest with you.” Silent, the group exchanged uneasy looks. “You think it’s nice? You like it?” He was doing it again, he knew—being honest when silence was the right option. “OK,” he said. “If everyone else likes it, I’ll keep quiet.”

  Pierre shook his head, dismayed. “You made your thoughts clear when we first discussed this. We listened to you; we voted. Can’t we move on now?”

  “No,” said Jérôme. “Back then, I said it was pointless. Now I’m saying it’s ugly. There’s a difference.”

  Pierre sighed, looking away. “OK.”

  “Jérôme,” said Sandrine, “I think we’ve all had enough of your sarcasm. If these meetings seem so ridiculous, then don’t come.”

  “Sarcasm? It’s not…” He stopped, feeling tears at the edges of his eyes—he absolutely was not going to give Pierre that satisfaction. He took a breath. “I come because it does me good. Believe it or not, it does me a world of good, just like you. Without this, all I would have is despair. Maybe life will bring me beautiful gifts one day.”

  Sandrine’s eyes showed a mixture of pity and hostility. Jérôme looked to the floor, silent as the meeting progressed and the arrangements for the ceremony were discussed. He heard a phone vibrate nearby and saw the awkward look on Pierre’s face as the man reached into his pocket to reject the call. A few seconds later, his own phone rang. “Claire,” the screen said. He stood and went to the door, stepping outside to take the call from his wife.

  “Jérôme?” said Claire. “I need you to come over.”

  “What’s wrong? Is it Léna?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s Camille.”

  “What about her?”

  “Please.”

  There was a desperation in her voice that scared him. She sounded lost.

  “I’m coming,” he said.

  4

  Claire had been in the shrine when the power had cut out across the town.

  Shrine. Jérôme had called it that whenever his patience had worn thin. Camille’s bedroom, kept almost exactly as it had been the day she died.

  Before the age of ten, Léna and Camille had shared a room. Then, the approach of adolescence had given them a need for their own space, marked by increasing squabbles over the smallest of things. As soon as they each had their own bedroom, the fighting had stopped. It had fascinated Claire to see how the girls were careful to keep their rooms distinct; marking out their differences allowed them to remain as inseparable as ever.

  Claire had been in the process of cleaning Camille’s room when the news of the accident had first come through. When she’d started cleaning, she’d known what reaction to expect from Camille and had almost been able to hear the girl’s outraged voice in her head: Mum, why did you touch my stuff?

  Then Jérôme had rushed into the room, distressed, unable to
speak at first, Claire becoming more and more anxious until at last he’d managed just one trembling word: Camille.

  And she’d known. In that second, the fear that nests in the heart of every parent had become a horrifying reality.

  She’d been living with that fear in the background for fifteen years, living with the realization of what parental love really meant: a need to protect that was so overwhelming, it was almost debilitating. Every time one of them was ill or still out even a few minutes longer than agreed, the worst-case scenarios had played out in her mind. Every news story about children in peril had left her feeling a terrible guilty relief that it hadn’t been her daughters—that it had happened to someone else. But now it had happened to her. Camille was gone.

  Being a parent was not easy. Losing a child was impossible.

  She didn’t remember much of the immediate aftermath. It was like drowning in dark water—muted sounds filtering through, Jérôme desperately trying to hold her. She had pushed him away and stared at the pristine floor of her daughter’s bedroom, feeling as though she’d been caught in an act of sacrilege, that maybe if she hadn’t touched anything, Camille would still be here.

  So Camille’s room had remained untouched since and became a shrine—candles lit, photographs on the chest of drawers. Claire would sit on the bed and watch the candles reflected on the glass frame with her dead daughter’s face and convince herself that the sharp pain might one day start to dull. At first, she’d restricted her time in there to whenever she was alone in the house. She’d wanted to spare her husband and Léna. Spare them from the extent of her grief.

  But they’d known. Jérôme’s initial careful remarks had grown increasingly concerned and then angry, especially as she’d been drawn more and more to Pierre and to what Pierre told her.

  God answers prayers. God has the power to heal.

  “I want her back,” she’d told Pierre. “Can God do that?”

  Pierre had given her a typically elusive answer: “Through God, you will find Camille again,” he’d said. “She will come back to you.”

  But it wasn’t enough. She wanted Camille home; she wanted their life back. She wanted to wake and find that the last four years had somehow been an error, a bad dream, and in the shrine, she prayed every day for God to make things right again.

  When the power outage came, it took her a moment to realize it wasn’t just a blown bulb in the lamp in the corner of Camille’s room, the only electric light that she had on. In the glow from the candles, she went to the window and saw that the streetlights were also off.

  She waited for the power to return. She thought of Léna, out with her friends, probably at the Lake Pub, if the girl’s word still counted for anything. And back when? “When I’m back” was all the assurance Claire had managed to extract before Léna had gone. Still, any kind of assurance was better than none, better than her sneaking out of her bedroom and climbing down the trellis at the front of the house with no hint of what her plans were.

  She checked the time. She didn’t expect Léna back for a while yet, unless she’d had another argument with Frédéric.

  Claire went into Léna’s bedroom, a riot of mess. The bedroom of a nineteen-year-old girl, who Claire would still think of as a girl when, God willing, Léna hit her thirties and beyond, even when Léna had children of her own and discovered how such a gift from God carries a crippling price.

  She bent to the floor, grabbing clothes she would throw in the wash, just the smallest concession to cleaning—exposing enough floor to actually walk on.

  But nothing that Léna would notice. Never that. Never again.

  Claire heard the front door shut. “Léna?” Had to be a problem with Frédéric, Claire thought, readying herself for a long night of comforting. The irony of motherhood—that you feel least useful when your child is happy and most useful when she’s in turmoil.

  She went down the stairs and stopped. The fridge door was open, a girl’s hand on it. Claire’s view was obscured as the girl raided the fridge’s contents, plastic tubs of leftovers being taken out and put on the breakfast bar, flashes of tied-back red hair.

  “Léna?” said Claire.

  The fridge door swung closed. A young girl stood there. Long red hair and a face Claire knew better than her own.

  Claire stared. She was dreaming. She had to be.

  There, opening the tubs and taking what she wanted, acting as though everything was completely normal, was Camille.

  The girl saw her. “I know it’s late. You must have been worried. But it’s not my fault. Something really weird happened.”

  Claire stood there in breathless silence, not daring to speak. Saying something would break it, she thought, make the moment fracture and crash down around her. Reveal it for the hallucination it was. All she could do was stare.

  “Don’t look at me like that!” said Camille, making herself a sandwich. “It sounds funny, but I woke up in the mountains, above the dam. It took me ages to get home. Honest. I’m not making it up.” She topped her sandwich and started to eat. “I’m so hungry.”

  Claire managed to take a step toward her, silent. She had to keep everything slow or risk panic.

  “Are you OK, Mum?”

  “Yes,” Claire said on autopilot. “I’m OK.” And the terrible fear in her heart was joined by something else: a terrible hope, just as sharp. She wanted to reach out and touch whatever it was that stood before her. Reach out, grab hold, and never let go.

  “Is Léna home?”

  “No,” said Claire. The shock of seeing Camille was overpowering. Every word she spoke took considerable effort. “She’s…at a friend’s house.”

  “Is she better then?” asked Camille.

  Claire had no idea what she meant. “Better?”

  “She was sick, wasn’t she?”

  “Yes,” said Claire. As if it’s the same day, she thought. “Yes, she was. She’s better now.”

  Camille reached over the tubs and picked up a frosted glass Claire had bought the year before. She considered it. “Wow, this is ugly,” said Camille, before setting it down and heading for the stairs. “I’ll clean up later.”

  Claire stood where she was as Camille went out of sight. In the silence, she could hear her rapid pulse loud in her own ears. Surely she was alone in the house. None of that happened, she thought. None of it is real. No matter how much I want it to be.

  And then she heard water running in the bathroom and bounded up the stairs, down the corridor, her hand moving toward the handle on the bathroom door.

  The door opened wide, startling her. Camille stood there, a towel wrapped around her, the bathwater running. “Can you get me my dressing gown, please?” she asked.

  Claire nodded. Camille closed the door again.

  Claire turned, hardly able to breathe, then rushed to Camille’s room. She blew out the candles and took them and the photographs—everything that didn’t belong there—and bundled it all into the top of a wardrobe. In the chest of drawers were the things that had been there before, the day of the accident. Claire put them all back in their original places.

  Everything had to go back. She thought of Camille’s dislike of the frosted glass, and she mentally tallied the changes that had happened in the house over the last four years. Everything had to go back to how it had been.

  She gathered Camille’s dressing gown, then composed herself. She knocked on the bathroom door, holding it out.

  “Thanks,” Camille said carelessly, taking the dressing gown and shutting the door again.

  Claire walked down the stairs, every movement slow and considered, as if she were walking on glass. She paused, then took her phone and dialed the number of the man who would know what to do. It rang through to voice mail.

  “Hello, this is Pierre. Please leave a message.”

  “Pierre, it’s Claire. Could y
ou come over please?”

  She hung up.

  She thought for a moment, then called Jérôme.

  5

  The rain was coming down hard by the time Jérôme got home—and “home” was still how he thought of it. The house where he and Claire had brought up the girls, where they’d experienced so much joy and sorrow—not the bare apartment in town he slept in now.

  Claire opened the door, dazed and red-eyed, and Jérôme braced himself for some kind of impact. She looked just as lost as she’d sounded on the phone.

  “Come in,” said Claire. The words came out as if they were escaping from her.

  In the year after Camille’s death, he’d watched Claire come apart piece by piece as he’d withdrawn into the solace of alcohol. He’d ignored every sign, perfecting his denial until Léna had stepped in and brought him to some kind of sense, and he had truly seen the look in Claire’s eyes. A look that had been growing in plain view but that he’d managed not to notice.

  The same look was there again—raw, fragile, close to breaking. Oh Jesus, he thought and felt an almost physical pain at the sight. He loved her, and she was suffering.

  “Why did you ask me here?” He was almost scared to find out.

  “You should come inside,” she said. Jérôme hesitated. Claire dropped her voice, secretive and fierce. “Camille is here.”

  “Claire…” he said, despairing. This was how it had been on the worst days. Claire would see Camille in town, walking around a corner; she would see Camille in the shot of a crowd on television. And on the worst days of all, Claire would call Léna by her dead sister’s name and insist Léna was playing games with her if she denied it. It wouldn’t last. Disoriented, panicked, Claire would finally go to sleep, and when she woke, she would have recovered her bearings and sob.

  The passing of four years had brought just enough change in Léna’s face, altered it from precise match to close resemblance, enough for that confusion to subside. It was a relief to Jérôme too not to see the face of Camille every day on her living sister, because he’d suffered from the same kind of momentary error more than once, certain, just for an instant, that it was the other twin standing there.