by Alex Dahl
41
Elisa
We still do Friday nights like we used to, but the new normal is Fredrik, me and Lyder. We have tacos like every other family in Norway, then we settle in front of a movie with a big bowl of popcorn and sometimes candy, too. Tonight, the movie is about some animated chipmunks on a cruise ship, and Lyder has fallen asleep. Fredrik and I keep pretending to watch the film, because what else would we do? The silences between us are louder than the conversations we have at this point. Every time we talk, it seems to lead to disquiet, blame, and an even wider space between us.
I become aware of a change in the atmosphere and glance at Fredrik. He has paused the chipmunk movie and is looking at me intently. ‘What?’ I say.
‘What’s the matter, baby?’
‘Nothing.’ Everything. Obviously.
‘You’re crying.’
He’s right, my face is wet with tears. ‘Oh.’
He reaches across to stroke my arm, but Lyder is awkwardly slumped between us.
‘Talk to me, Elisa.’
‘Well,’ I begin, letting my mind run free with all the possible things I could say to my husband. I decide on something that’s been bothering me for a very long time now. ‘Sometimes I can’t help but think that this is what I deserve, you know?’ I look at the familiar room around me, at the TV screen, at the empty space next to Lyder where Lucia should be, little mouth chomping popcorn.
‘This?’
‘You know. This situation. Lucia being gone.’
‘Why on earth would you deserve such a thing?’
‘I just can’t help but feel that it’s some kind of punishment.’
‘Punishment for what?’ I can tell by Fredrik’s tone that he’s getting impatient with me.
‘For sinning, or—’
‘Sinning?’
‘God punishes sinners.’ My words swell in the air between us, and Fredrik seems to struggle for something to say. We never speak of God or religious belief in our house; our upbringings have made that impossible.
‘We don’t believe in that kind of God, Elisa,’ he says softly. ‘And besides, even if we did, how could we possibly deserve… this. Okay?’
‘But what if I’ve done something in the past that’s brought this down on us, like karma, or—’
‘Honey, please. We’ve come too far for this. Way too far. Please.’ He turns back to the TV screen and presses ‘Play’, bringing the chipmunks back to life.
Lyder stirs and suddenly sits upright, blinking comically, then continues watching the movie as though he hasn’t just slept for half an hour. Fredrik and I disappear back into our distant, separate worlds.
42
Jacqueline
They’ve started to go on frequent excursions. Jacqueline knows, now, that she can trust Lulu-Rose when they go places, that the child won’t suddenly cry or scream, alerting strangers and begging for help in a foreign language. Lulu-Rose speaks French, and while she’s not yet quite at native level, neither is Josiane, having spent most of her early years in Norway. Both girls occasionally stumble, but Lulu-Rose is now at the level where she can pass for a French girl most of the time. Sometimes Jacqueline will be scrubbing the kitchen surfaces or stirring something on the stove and will overhear her speaking unselfconsciously to Kimmi in French. It makes her stop and smile, and when Lulu-Rose realizes she’s being watched and looks up, she too smiles – a wry, self-conscious smile – and Jacqueline’s heart aches in her chest.
Jacqueline glances in the rearview at the girls, both of them sitting up very straight, staring out of the window at the vibrant green pastures and the sweep of blue sky. They’re grinning widely, and occasionally they look at each other and burst out laughing. Jacqueline grins too at the memory of their stunned expressions when she sat down opposite them at breakfast earlier and said, ‘So, what do you say we get a puppy?’
She drives slowly down the narrow winding lanes to the hamlet, then left towards Rivèrenert. The road is bumpy and crisscrossed with muddy tractor tracks. The girls giggle in the back seat. Jacqueline feels light and happy.
‘You’re going to need to come up with a name,’ she says, and they immediately start to shout out their ideas.
‘Toffee!’ says Josiane.
‘Willy,’ says Lulu-Rose.
At the last sharp turn before the main district road to Saint-Girons, Jacqueline looks up at the lush, rolling foothills that hide Le Tachoué from view. When her mother was a child, this road had not yet been constructed and everyone had to use mules to reach the valley and transport goods. She pictures her mother as a young girl in her grandfather’s wooden cart, being pulled slowly by mules up to the ancient farm.
She saw the notice about the puppies taped to a lamppost in the parking lot of Josiane and Lulu-Rose’s school and thought: why not? In spite of everything that’s happened in Jacqueline’s life in the past few years, her objectives have always been to be the best mother and to keep the girls happy. A puppy will make them even happier. It will also be a reward of sorts for Lulu-Rose, whose behavior continues to get better by the day. She isn’t running away or hiding in the woods as often, or wetting the bed, or crying uncontrollably for hours, like she did a year and a half ago. She seems settled and happy, like she’s never been anyone else.
Occasionally Jacqueline leaves the girls at Le Tachoué for a few hours in the afternoon and drives to Saint-Gaudens or Lannemezan or Foix – places where she is known to no one. She always parks on a residential street on the outskirts and walks until she finds an internet café. There, she orders a black coffee and spends an hour scrolling through everything she can find about the most recent developments in the Lucia Blix case. She studies the desperate, baffled faces of the police and the Blix family. Her plan has worked even beyond her wildest dreams – the police believe Silwia Truja took Lucia, and she is dead. There’s no reason to believe they will ever come looking for Jacqueline Thibault. Eighteen months later and they still have nothing: nothing at all to link her to Lucia Blix. Eventually, the media will stop talking about the Blix case altogether, because that’s how these things work. And Lucia Blix will never be found, because she no longer exists.
The girls sing loudly in the back seat on the road from Saint-Girons to Salies-du-Salat, and she can’t help but laugh at the sound of them. It really is a beautiful day, and she keeps glancing in the rearview mirror at the still white peaks of the Pyrenees receding behind them. These are the mountains they look across at from Le Tachoué and to Jacqueline the sight of them is as much a sight of home as the farmhouse itself. She slows down as they approach the sweet little town of Salies-du-Salat, known for its impressive spa. She’s brought the girls here a couple of times before, including last month for the annual tarot festival, for which Lulu-Rose and Josiane dressed as witches. It turned out the festival was for adults, so they bought some baguettes and trekked up to the haunting ruins of Notre-Dame-de-la-Pitié, where the children had hours of fun riding broomsticks made from branches torn from the trees in the recent storms, their gleeful cackles echoing into the valley.
She pulls off the D117 and onto a smaller road and the girls fall silent, staring at the houses, trying to guess which one is the puppies’ home. It turns out to be a charming modern house built in the old style with a huge terrace facing the Pyrenees. When they get out of the car, the sound of barking starts up from inside and a man opens the door, holding a chunky, squirming puppy underneath his arm. He sets it down on the ground and it ambles towards Lulu-Rose and Josiane, who have dropped to their knees on the muddy ground and are cooing hysterically. It is white and impossibly fluffy, like a live stuffed bear. Jacqueline laughs and so does the man, and she finds herself unable to take her eyes off him. He holds out his hand and she presses it limply instead of shaking it the way she usually would, taken aback by the powerful current that passes between them.
‘Hello, I’m Antoine,’ he says, still holding her hand and laughing as though Jacqueline has said something amu
sing, even though she hasn’t even spoken yet. ‘Thank you for coming. The puppies are excited to meet you.’
Inside the house are another two puppies, and their mother Safina, who watches carefully as Lulu-Rose and Josiane play with her little ones.
‘This one!’ says Josiane, holding one up, letting it lick her entire face.
‘No, this one,’ says Lulu-Rose, tickling the belly of another puppy.
‘Coffee?’ says Antoine, raising an eyebrow and smiling.
‘Sure. Looks like we’ll be here a while.’
She watches him as he prepares the coffee with a fancy espresso machine. What is it about this man that she is so drawn to? From behind, his long, muscular back resembles Nicolai’s, and there is also something about the way he moves – slowly and deliberately, as though he’s never known stress or hurry, and perhaps he hasn’t. It is possible to lead a very calm life here, in this part of France, if that is what one is after. Maybe he is childless and works from home, spending his breaks sipping macchiatos and looking across rolling fields to the Massif du Mont Noir. She imagines he might have views of Marimanha, the distinctly pyramid-shaped peak across the Spanish border. She glances around his kitchen for clues as to who lives here or signs of a wife and children.
‘Are you from here?’ she asks, taking the coffee he hands her and savoring the strong, bitter smell that fills her nostrils as she leans against the wooden worktop that runs down one entire wall of the kitchen.
‘Born and bred,’ he says, his eyes resting on her longer than necessary.
She smiles and nods.
‘What about you?’
‘My mother was born here. Over near Rivèrenert, on an old farm in the hills. My father was Norwegian.’
‘Ah. Unusual. Explains the Scandinavian blonde hair. So where did you grow up?’
She laughs – the hair is hardly natural – over the past eighteen months, she has been progressively lightening it.
‘We lived here until I was seven, when my grandfather died, then we moved to Norway. My mother lives in Paris now.’
‘And you’ve moved back here permanently?’
Jacqueline nods and takes another sip of the coffee. ‘My husband passed away a few years ago,’ she says, dropping her voice and glancing in the direction of the girls, who are busy and oblivious with the puppies in the adjoining room. She is surprised at herself, for saying the words out loud. But she wants Antoine to know that she is on her own and that he can look at her like that. Like she is something wonderful. ‘I realized that I wanted the girls to grow up here.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. I understand you wanting to come home after something like that. Especially with the children.’
‘Yes.’ She doesn’t embellish; she learned long ago that with men it’s a good idea to let them drive the conversation and come to her, rather than show any kind of obvious interest.
They stand a while watching the girls play with the dogs, smiling at each other occasionally, not in the polite way strangers might, but warmly, like friends.
‘Yeah, I left this place for several years myself,’ continues Antoine after a while, like she knew he would. ‘I traveled around a lot. Lived in Toulouse for six years. Los Angeles for one. Then my father died and all I wanted was to come home. I’ve been here ever since, except for occasional work trips. If I had children, I couldn’t imagine them growing up anywhere else either.’
He gazes out through the floor-to-ceiling windows that open onto the terrace and give an uninterrupted view of the unblemished countryside and the Pyrenees beyond.
She has the impression that he said ‘if I had children’ to let her know that he does not.
‘What do you do for work?’
‘I’m a writer. Or rather, I wanted to be. I do content stuff, mostly from home.’
She smiles again, and this time she makes sure to narrow her eyes a little and turn her body slightly towards him. Ninety per cent of communication is non-verbal – she knows this, too.
‘What about yourself?’ he asks.
‘I’m a make-up artist. I’m not working at the moment. I decided to take some time out to be there for the girls after… after my husband passed away. Insurance meant that I could do that.’
Antoine nods thoughtfully. ‘It must be hard, to be by yourself with them.’
‘It’s okay now,’ she says. ‘It’s been a long time.’
He smiles at her, a wide, genuine smile, and she feels naked when he looks at her, in spite of her smart clothes and perfect make-up.
‘We’d better get going soon,’ she says, breaking the electric moment. ‘I’m sure the girls will have decided on a favorite little fluffball by now.’ She’s pleased by the flash of disappointment in Antoine’s eyes. She turns away, and in the next room she squats down on the floor in between the girls.
‘We want the girl,’ says Josiane, pointing to one of the puppies. ‘That one.’
Jacqueline reaches out to run her hand across the dog’s back, but the puppy flips over and holds her front paws tight against her chest, waiting for a belly tickle. Jacqueline laughs and obliges.
‘Good choice,’ says Antoine. ‘Don’t tell the others,’ he says, mock-whispering, ‘but she’s my favorite too. What do you want to call her?’
‘Boulette!’ shouts Lulu-Rose and both girls collapse in fits of giggles. Of course they want to name the puppy ‘Meatball’.
‘Your daughters are hilarious,’ he says and winks at her.
Another charged moment passes between them and Jacqueline finds herself looking at his hands as he strokes Boulette, picturing those hands caressing her own skin. ‘Aren’t they!’
‘So, Boulette will need another jab and an anti-worming treatment. She’ll be ready to go home with you early next week. If you want, I can drop her round. Over near Rivèrenert, did you say?’
*
It’s late when she gets the girls to sleep. They insisted on a sleepover, building a makeshift bed with blankets and pillows in the tent in Josiane’s room, and they eventually fall asleep in there after hours of excited chatter about Boulette, their newly long legs poking out from the tent flap. Jacqueline checks on them on her way to bed and stands a moment looking at their protruding bare feet, white and impossibly fragile in the cool light of the moon. Four little feet, just the way it was meant to be.
She remembers the first ultrasound of her pregnancy, when four little feet appeared beneath the sonographer’s wand, wriggling the smallest of toes, treading water, kicking. ‘How will we manage?’ she whispered, turning to Nico, who was staring at the grainy screen, transfixed. Then he laughed and squeezed her hand.
She falls asleep quickly for once, jostled into unconsciousness by swirling thoughts dragging her one way and then another, like small but strong waves. Her last conscious thoughts are of the moments she spent in the kitchen with Antoine, how there was something so intensely familiar about him and at the same time so seductively new, like a house you just know is meant to be your home. He is there tonight, in her dreams, looking at her as though she is something wonderful.
43
Lucia
Boulette is coming home today! Me and Josie sang all the way to school because we are so excited. Maman says Boulette has to sleep in her crate in the kitchen so she doesn’t get too spoiled, but me and Josie have a plan. We’re going to wake up in the night and take Boulette upstairs to the tent in Josie’s room and let her sleep between us like a real teddy.
The teacher says, ‘Écoute, Lulu-Rose,’ but I can’t focus because I’m so excited. I look over at Josie, but she is bending over her book, writing carefully. I want her to look at me so we can laugh. The teacher, Maîtresse Millau, had to move Josie to over by the door and me over to the window in the front, because otherwise we whisper too much. Now I have to sit next to Gabin Chameau, who fidgets all the time. Even Gabin is writing in his exercise book, so I keep trying to write what Maîtresse has asked us to – seven sentences about what I think libe
rté, égalité and fraternité mean.
I look around again and this time Josie is looking around too and when we look at each other we giggle quietly. I hold both my hands up against my chest like paws and she sticks her tongue out and pants, and this is so funny I laugh loudly and Gabin notices and laughs too, but then Maîtresse slams her fat hand down hard on her desk and puts her finger to her lips. Her eyes are bulgy and big behind her round glasses and sometimes at home me and Josie make fun of her, walking around slowly in circles and tut-tutting.
When Maman first found me and brought me home to Le Tachoué, I wasn’t allowed in school. Every morning after we’d finished feeding the chickens, Maman drove Josie to school. Le Tachoué is far from the school, which is in Saint-Girons, because we are far from everything and it used to take one hundred minutes before Maman came back, sometimes more. I timed it on the little egg that counts time like Maman taught me because she knew I got worried to be there alone even though Le Tachoué is the safest place in the world.
‘Can I come with you?’ I’d ask every time, but Maman always shook her head sadly. ‘No, my darling,’ she’d say. ‘Not yet.’
I’d try to read a story in my room, but I couldn’t make out all the words then, even though Maman was teaching me every day. Instead, I’d look at the pictures and I’d look at the timer. Sometimes I’d get up and stand by the window again. The mountains, which were grey with a bit of white when I first came here, turned all white, and then the snow began to melt again and it was summer and that was when I started to understand more. Josiane and I played every day in the forests and the fields and Maman would leave us a basket with baguettes, boiled eggs and ham on the big rock where the forest comes up to our river, and we didn’t go back home until it was nearly dark, laughing all the way. I loved it then, but sometimes in the night I cried because I was so sad, too.
Now the mountains are black and white and grey. The white patches glow pink in the sun and I have to shield my eyes when I open the curtains in the morning. It’s spring again and the fields are bright green, and we can play in the forest again. The forest, which I thought was scary when I came here, actually isn’t scary at all, and most days Josie and I play there before it gets dark. We find treasures there and we bring them back so Maman can help us make them into crafts. One wall in my room is completely full of things we’ve made from the forest. My favorite is a picture made from twigs that we glued together then spray-painted gold in the courtyard behind the barn.
