My October

by Claire Holden Rothman

  Lanctôt was a man of dreams, in fathering children as in all else. Even now, after all the years, all the failures, he clung to his ideals. Luc admired him for it. So, paradoxically, did Hannah. It took faith and stubbornness after all that had happened. The novel was set in 1995, during the second referendum on Quebec independence, when the province had failed, yet again, to reach nationhood. That autumn, in the bitter wake of that defeat, Luc had lapsed into depression. His sleep had turned fitful. He had spent mornings in bed, unable to get up. He probably should have seen a doctor, but he’d chosen not to. Instead, he spent an apathetic year doing nothing. And when the year was up, he began writing Dreamer.

  The phone rang. Hannah stood up, startled. She ran back to the kitchen and located her mother’s cordless phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Hannah?” It took her a moment to recognize Luc’s voice. “Hannah?”

  “Oh,” she said, “it’s you.” She saw herself reflected in the dark panes of her father’s liquor cabinet. A thin little person, thin and tired.

  “Something’s happened.”

  There was a pause, the pause of a man steeling himself to deliver bad news. And then it came spilling out: the gun, the meeting in Principal Bonnaire’s office, the suspension.

  She closed her eyes.

  “Hannah?”

  A gun.

  “Are you there?”

  The thin little person in the panes of the liquor cabinet had a hand cupped over her mouth.

  “You have nothing to say?” His voice was low, clipped. A dangerous sign. She pictured his forehead, the line between his eyebrows deepening till it turned black, the same way her father’s did.

  “No one was hurt?”

  “No. The thing was in his knapsack, in bubble wrap. He says he bought it this morning before school. In a pawnshop on Sainte-Catherine Street. The school is checking the story. Why would a pawnshop be open at eight in the morning?” He sighed. “There weren’t any bullets.”

  Hannah exhaled.

  “Hannah?”

  “That’s good.”

  “Good?”

  “No bullets.”

  There was another pause. Hannah wasn’t sure what Luc was doing on the other end. She couldn’t even hear his breath. Was his hand over the receiver?

  “Christ, Hannah!” The shout was so sudden she almost dropped the phone. “He brought a gun to school! A gun! They had to call in the police. If he’d been anyone’s son but mine, he’d be in jail right now. The detective couldn’t have been clearer. It’s a crime. There is nothing good about this, Hannah. Are we clear on that? Nothing good at all.”

  “Luc—”

  “Don’t make excuses for him.”

  She wasn’t making excuses, not that she would say so now. The little person in the glass had her mouth closed in a flat, determined line.

  “There is no good here, Hannah. Not even a drop.”

  She wasn’t about to argue. There was a long silence before Luc started talking again, his voice a little calmer.

  He told her Hugo was home for the week. There was a ban on video games. And television. Hugo could do homework, play music, read. He was allowed outside for two hours a day. And if he did go out, Luc had to know where he was going and with whom. Evenings were to be spent in his room. Meanwhile, Monsieur Bonnaire was making arrangements at the school for a disciplinary hearing.

  “You will be there,” he said.

  “Of course I will.” Did he honestly think she might decide to miss it?

  “When are you coming home?” He sounded suddenly like a child. The anger was spent and now need was calling out. The need for her.

  “It’s awful, Hannah. I moved my computer upstairs this afternoon so I could watch him. I feel like a prison guard.”

  “I’ll do my best,” she said, thinking of what lie she could tell her mother. Hugo had broken a bone. He had mononucleosis. Something serious but not life-threatening.

  “It was a Luger,” Luc said, interrupting her thoughts.

  The little person in the glass looked back at her, startled.

  Luc cleared his throat. “You didn’t tell him, did you?”

  “No,” said Hannah, although this was not strictly true. In Hugo’s last year of elementary school, he had asked her about it, and she had set out the facts as clearly and simply as she could to a person who was eleven years old. She had mentioned the gun, certainly, but not what kind it was. At least, not that she recalled.

  They said goodbye, and for a moment Hannah stood staring at her reflection. She looked so unhappy. Had she somehow been the cause of this? Her eyes ached. Her skull ached. She pulled a phone book from the drawer where her parents kept it. “Metropolitan Toronto,” it said on the cover, with a helpful picture of the CN Tower. She was searching for the Via Rail listing when she heard the front door open. Connie.

  Hannah had no idea what to say. The pain in her skull was intensifying. She wished she had insisted on speaking to Hugo. She’d gotten so caught up with Luc and his fearful temper that she hadn’t even asked. And now it was too late. Her mother appeared in the doorway.

  “I saw him,” she said, grim but satisfied. Her face was grey with fatigue. “The doctor,” she said in answer to Hannah’s blank look. She dropped her purse on the floor and took off her coat. “He finally came.”

  Hannah made an effort to focus. She closed the phone book and put it back in the drawer. “Which doctor?”

  “Ufitsky. You know. The neurologist.”

  “Oh. Right,” said Hannah. “Ufitsky.” The phantom brain specialist who was said to stalk the halls of M-Wing, although few people ever had the luck to meet him. “What did he say?”

  “Nothing. Next to nothing. He’s practically aphasic himself.” Connie walked over to the stove and lifted the pot lid, sniffing.

  “Squash and ginger,” said Hannah. “I made it for you.”

  Connie put the lid back. “You’d think in all those years of medical training he might have picked up some people skills,” she said. “But no. He wouldn’t even look at me, though I’d been waiting all day. From seven thirty till … what time is it, anyway? God. Thirteen hours. For what? To be insulted.” She leaned against the stove, shoulders slumping.

  Hannah wanted to reach out to her. But she kept her hands to herself. “Did he say anything about Father?”

  “He didn’t say anything about anything. He spent thirty seconds with us.” She turned as if in imitation of the phantom Ufitsky and left the room, carrying her coat and purse.

  There was a jangling of hangers in the vestibule, followed by a groan. Hannah found her mother groping through the contents of her green leather handbag.

  “Mum?”

  There was a faint smell of mothballs. Hannah gathered her courage and put a hand on her mother’s shoulder.

  “Goddammit,” said Connie, moving beyond her daughter’s reach. “I left my wallet at the hospital. Under your father’s mattress.”

  Hannah looked at her with surprise.

  Connie caught the look. “Don’t patronize me. I hid it. I was tired and needed a nap.”

  Hannah wished her mother would permit herself to be held, just this once. But that wasn’t Connie. “How did you manage to get home,” Hannah asked, “without your wallet?”

  “Taxi chit,” her mother said, as if it were obvious. She waved a little booklet under her nose. “I keep them in my coat.”

  “I wouldn’t worry,” Hannah said, and felt herself start to worry. There probably wasn’t much cash in the wallet, but there were credit cards, bank cards, her mother’s health insurance card. It would mean cancellation calls and replacement forms to be filled out, hours to be wasted over a lost leather pocketbook and its content of plastic.

  “It’ll be fine overnight. I mean, it’s hidden,” Hannah said, for her own benefit.

  Connie shook her head. There were tears in her eyes. She looked diminished and fragile. Hannah took a step forward, but Connie stepped away. “Y
ou don’t understand. Anyone could wander in there.” She looked at Hannah imploringly.

  Hannah felt the old helplessness—wanting to give support but not quite knowing how. “Okay,” she said, surrendering. “I’ll go.”

  Connie walked into the living room and sat down in an armchair.

  “Is that okay?” said Hannah, following her.

  Connie’s eyes were closed. Tears glistened in the corners. She nodded.

  “Okay,” said Hannah. “Sounds like a plan.” She smiled cheerily at her unseeing mother and went to get her jacket.

  THAT NIGHT, after the wallet had been retrieved from under her father’s mattress, after Connie had bathed and drunk valerian tea and been tucked into her bed, Hannah lay in her parents’ guest room, watching red numbers blink on the digital clock. They were the only things visible in the darkness. Hannah had said nothing about the phone call from Montreal, about having to leave the next day. Her mother was in no state for more bad news. Hannah would announce it in the morning. Hugo had caught something, she would say. Something that required care; something he wouldn’t die of. Something Connie would understand but not fear. Catching the early train wouldn’t be a problem. If Connie heard her moving around in the pre-dawn silence and got up, Hannah would be ready with a plausible explanation. Her mother was more exhausted than she had ever seen her. This was how it happened, Hannah thought: illness leading to more illness. Connie was blessed with a steel constitution, but even steel had a breaking point.

  6

  H annah had walked to Laporte Street from the metro station at Place-Saint-Henri. She surveyed the park, which was shimmering in sunlight across from the house. Everything was golden and soft today. The only dark spot was Jacques Cartier, pointing northward at the mountain he was about to claim from the Iroquois for his king.

  The air tasted sour. A hazy mix of industrial and traffic fumes hung low over Saint-Henri. It was still unseasonably mild; there wasn’t a whisper of wind. When the air was this bad, it took a storm to clear it.

  Hannah straightened her knapsack so the weight fell more evenly on both shoulders. It was almost noon. Luc would be pleasantly surprised, she thought. He certainly couldn’t accuse her of neglect. She’d left her parents’ place at five o’clock that morning and managed to get a seat on the first train to Montreal.

  Connie had not yet been awake when Hannah crept out into the streets of Toronto. She had left a note: “Hugo has mononucleosis. I should be with him.” At least the second part was true. She hoped her mother wouldn’t worry, wouldn’t feel abandoned. The triplex stood in front of her, reassuring and familiar. At this hour, Luc would be at his desk. Or maybe not. Maybe this drama had turned him upside down too; drained him, at least temporarily, of his creative juices. She took a deep breath. The air tasted like yeast.

  She went to the downstairs door first. Usually, he wrote all morning, phone unplugged, door locked against intruders, although no one ever disturbed him. Sometimes he even wore earplugs—bright orange foam bullets, visible through his thick hair. She raised a hand, hesitated, and knocked.

  A form loomed up behind the frosted glass window. He was down here, after all. A good sign, perhaps, if he felt he could leave Hugo alone upstairs. Her blood quickened as the door swung open.

  She smiled broadly, reaching out both arms. How she had missed him. Her mind could forget, but not her body. It always turned to him, like a plant to the sun. Remarkable how instinctive it was, how rooted in the cells. His smell too, especially around the mouth, never failed to arouse her.

  He didn’t smile. Didn’t even meet her gaze.

  “I’m back,” she said, and instantly regretted it. Luc had a special scorn, as her father did, for people who stated the obvious.

  “I managed to catch the early train.” Another useless statement. She should stop. What did she want from him? Praise? Thanks? He was probably irritated even before he saw who was at the door. She must have interrupted his work. He was wearing long johns and gym shorts: his uniform. And the lovely soft pullover she’d bought for him last Christmas. His chest hair poked out at the neck. If he hadn’t looked so forbidding, she would have stepped into his arms.

  “Hugo is upstairs,” he said.

  “I’ll go up, then,” she said, as brightly as she could, but she was hurt. After a sleepless night, she had hurried to catch the train, in which she had fretted, dry-mouthed and dry-eyed, lapsing repeatedly into a doze and just as repeatedly being shaken awake. She had left her stricken father and her exhausted, lonely mother because her husband’s suffering meant more to her than theirs. He was everything to her. “You okay?” she asked, not daring to touch him.

  He looked at her. Finally. His eyes were ringed with blue. It had seeped like ink into the hollows on either side of his nose and up into the lids. His hair looked greyer. Could that happen in the space of six days? Or had their separation, short as it was, opened her eyes and made her look at him a little more closely? His hair was still thick, still beautiful—inviting touch, inviting her to rake her fingers through it—but the colour was definitely fading.

  “No,” he said. “No. In fact, I’m not.”

  She took a step toward him, but he moved backward. She could barely see him. It was always so dark down here. As usual, all the curtains were drawn. As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she saw that he hadn’t been working after all. Or at least, not writing. Boxes were strewn behind him on the floor. A couple were filled with books and manuscripts. And he seemed to have dismantled the pine IKEA table on which he wrote. The top of it was leaning against the hallway wall.

  Luc saw her confusion. “I found an office,” he explained.

  “An office?”

  He looked at her impatiently, waiting for her to remember what he was talking about. Yes. Rémi was moving back.

  “I thought that was for December.”

  “It is.”

  “December’s in two months.”

  Luc made an exasperated face, a face that said he’d tried his best.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” she began, but he held up his hands, stopping her mid-sentence. He wasn’t looking at her. Wouldn’t meet her eye. He was angry, that much was obvious. But so angry that he felt compelled to move out the instant she got home? His face wasn’t giving her any clues, so she screwed up her courage. “What’s this about, Luc?”

  “Peace,” he said tersely, still not looking at her, picking up a dictionary from the floor—his dog-eared Larousse—and holding it against his chest. “And quiet. Two things I’ve never been able to find here.”

  It was as if he had reached out and pushed her. His laptop was folded up too, she noticed, right beside the dismantled desk, ready to go. Hannah retreated onto the front step, out of the building that for years they’d both called home. Her head felt empty, almost weightless, as if it might rise at any moment and fly off like a balloon snatched by a current of air. There was something going on, something that had nothing to do with offices or writing and that somehow she hadn’t seen coming. He was telling her now with his movements, with the defensive curve of his body as he crouched over his books.

  “I’ll go up and see Hugo,” she said quickly. Her chest was aching, physically aching, as though she’d received a blow. Sun flashed in her eyes as she turned away.

  She ran up the outer staircase to the second floor, and then the inner stairs to their flat. Her head still felt strange and wobbly on the thread of her neck. She’d known she was returning to a crisis, but she’d had no idea it was affecting Luc like this. Could the fact that it involved a gun have shaken him more than he was ready to admit?

  Hugo’s school shoes lay on the top stair. She slipped off her own shoes and unlocked the door. Simple gestures. Reassuringly familiar. Inside, the apartment was perfectly still. Another surprise. No gunfire.

  The place smelled of rotting citrus and coffee grounds. She went into the kitchen to investigate before facing the more daunting prospect of her son. Luc had forgotten to put t
he garbage out. Twice. And then he’d just left it there, presumably for her to deal with. Resentment surged. The bin was overflowing. She could barely pull out the bag. She cursed him silently as she tried to create a neck of plastic for the knot, but the ends were too short and slippery with grease. The bag got away from her, disgorging its slimy contents across the kitchen floor.

  “Shit!” she said. She always swore in English. Swore and counted. “Shit, shit, shit!” she said to her absent husband and his present mess.

  She had to scoop it all up. Hardened grains of white rice from the Chinese takeout place, sawed-off pork ribs that had been gnawed clean, the damp and pungent remains of several grapefruit halves. She closed the bag with a twist-tie this time, and washed her hands in near-scalding water. What a thing to come home to. The smell was appalling.

  After putting the garbage out in the shed, where it would rot in peace until the Friday pickup, she mopped the floor and opened the windows, waving her arms to move the stagnant air. Then she opened the refrigerator. The rock-hard remains of a baguette and two cardboard containers of Chinese takeout sat on the bottom shelf. No eggs. Not a vegetable to be seen. Not even a carton of milk.

  He wasn’t a domestic man. He’d told her so way back when she first knew him. But this was more than disdain for housework. He was fastidious in his habits. This was not like him.

  Her office was orderly and clean, as she’d left it. It was located in a little space beside the kitchen. Before she had claimed it, it had been the pantry. There were two entrances—one from the kitchen, the other from the hallway. It had no actual door, but it was a room. Luc liked to listen to the radio while he ate, which sometimes disturbed her. And Hugo had an annoying habit of materializing when he was hungry and staring at her back until she turned around and noticed him. Still, she’d done plenty of work here over the years. Unlike Luc, she could cook, translate, tend to Hugo, and do a load of laundry all in the space of a morning.

  The red light on her telephone was blinking. She walked to the desk and pressed a button. The voice of Allison March filled the room, asking after her father and wondering how Hannah herself was. And where. A wave of guilt surged inside her. She’d told Allison she was going to Toronto, but had neither phoned while she was there nor specified a date of return.