My October

by Claire Holden Rothman

  She deleted the message. The idea of working right now seemed absurd. Allison March was in her mid-thirties, single, childless, still young and sheltered enough to know nothing of ailing, mortal parents, brooding husbands, and rebel sons. What she did know about was Hannah’s translation. The work that should have been done by now—but wasn’t. It wasn’t even close to being done.

  If Hannah shut herself in her office all weekend, she could finish the third section of the book and send it off. After that, she would have a hundred and twenty-three pages left to translate.

  Luc’s most recent novel was longer than the other books he’d written: one hundred and thirty thousand words. Although she’d kept the thought to herself, she felt it could have been shorter. But Luc had reached the point in his career when people no longer questioned him. His French publisher treated him like a demigod. His fans were numerous and loyal. Critics’ praise was almost reflexive.

  Hannah could see Hugo’s closed bedroom door. A crack ran down the middle, the result of too many slams. And there was the cobra, its hood open like a fan. She was calm enough now to see him. She walked to the door and knocked.

  There was no answer. She could see light in the space below the door. She knocked again, harder.

  “Hugo?”

  “What.”

  An English word, spoken without inflexion. Neither question nor answer.

  “May I come in?”

  When he didn’t respond, she pushed the door open. He was at his desk, his back to her, his hand covering a piece of paper he had just flipped over.

  He looked terribly thin. A bony little boy in oversized striped pyjamas: not quite a living version of the liberators’ photographs of Auschwitz, but not far from it, with the shaved head revealing every ridge and contour of the fragile skull. And the Jewishness. Yes, this boy was undeniably Jewish, with dark, quiet eyes that seemed to reach right inside you. “Honey,” she said, and kissed his bristling head, “I missed you.”

  He had turned slightly and was looking out the window at the neighbour’s brick wall.

  “How are you?” she asked.

  She waited. She had read the books on adolescence, the ones that violated all her instincts with their solemn advice: Leave space, and words will emerge. She waited. Hugo stared at the brick wall.

  “Dad told me what happened,” she said.

  His skin was bad. Tiny red pimples covered his forehead. But his profile was beautiful. Regal, almost, under the angry teenage skin.

  His hands were small. She had never seen a Luger. She pictured a dainty pocket pistol, a derringer—was that the name? The kind of gun women used to hide in their bodices in cowboy movies. The kind that might fit in the hands of her child.

  “You don’t want to talk?” she said, shifting her weight.

  More wasted words. Luc would have made a sarcastic comment. She had eyes, didn’t she? Ears?

  She wanted to take him by the shoulders and turn him around. Silence could be protective, but this felt hostile, smouldering with aggression.

  “Hugo?”

  He would not turn. “I’m not asking for a hug,” she said. “Or even a hello. But I would appreciate it if you had the decency to look at me.”

  The stopper was out now, and her own anger began to flow. She knew, even as it was coming out, that it wasn’t strictly about him, but this did not stop her. Out it came. “Your grandfather is sick, Hugo. Life-and-death sick. He’s hooked up to tubes. He can’t walk. He can’t feed himself or take a shit. He can’t utter a word. I was beside him yesterday, and now I’m here. Because of you.”

  Hugo continued staring out the window, but his body had gone rigid.

  “So thanks for that. Thanks a lot.” She was trembling. On her way out, she slammed the door.

  It was only in the kitchen that she allowed herself the luxury of tears. It was stupid even to have tried to speak to him. As a baby, he’d been as clear as water. Long before he could speak, Hannah had known what he was thinking. Or so it had seemed. Luc’s mother, Lyse, who lived right below them, nicknamed Hugo “the baby who never cried.” She’d said this partly to reassure Hannah and Luc that they weren’t waking her up with the night feedings, but also because it was true. Hugo had not cried. He had managed to convey every impulse, every feeling, with a clarity that had stunned her.

  To calm herself down, Hannah went to the bathroom and took a shower. She stayed under the spray for a long time, letting the water beat down on her and the room fill with billowing steam. When she was clean, she dropped Luc from her considerations, dropped even her son, and concentrated on what needed doing. She should get to the bank. She had to pick up some food for dinner. It would be good to move her limbs. She couldn’t stay here a moment longer. She gathered her tote bags, put a note for Hugo on the kitchen table in the unlikely event that he ventured out of his room, and left the apartment. As she reached the second-floor landing, the door opened and her mother-in-law’s face poked out.

  “I thought I heard your step!” she said, coming out and taking Hannah in her arms. “Welcome home, my dear one.”

  Hannah was considerably taller than her mother-in-law. Her chin brushed the top of Lyse’s head, but even so, Lyse’s small body felt like a haven. “Poor little chicken,” Lyse said, holding her close. “You were missed by us!” Hannah stood in her arms, savouring the words.

  She allowed herself to be pulled into Lyse’s flat, which smelled deliciously of apples. A bowl of them sat on the chest of drawers in the vestibule, red and shiny, their skins only just starting to wrinkle from the heat. Apart from the apples, everything in Lyse Lévesque’s flat was white—walls and ceilings, drapes and rugs. Much of her furniture. She had a variety of antiques picked up in pawnshops, or at the Salvation Army on Notre-Dame Street, or from the sidewalks of Saint-Henri.

  The floor creaked behind her and a thin, wispy-haired man entered the vestibule. Graeme White, Lyse’s good friend. He smiled shyly at Hannah and reached for a jacket on the coat rack.

  “Oh,” said Hannah, switching to English, “I didn’t mean to interrupt anything.” She felt herself blush. Why had she said that, of all things?

  Graeme White busied himself with his jacket. There probably was something going on between them, not that it was any business of Hannah’s. He spent a lot of time on Laporte Street. But he never seemed to stay the night. Lyse called him her “garage-sale friend,” because that was their shared passion: meeting every Sunday morning in the spring and fall to pick through the neighbourhood yard sales.

  “Well,” he said, “I guess I should be off.” He bent over Lyse, who chastely kissed him on both cheeks, as she might kiss Hannah herself, or Hugo, or Luc. She certainly wasn’t giving anything away. But to protect whom, Hannah had to wonder. Luc? Rémi? They were no longer children.

  From the top of a chest of drawers in Lyse’s vestibule, the bust of Luc’s dead father looked on. The ghost of Roland Lévesque still haunted this house. Lyse had never really let go of him. Nor had Luc. For him, his father was still larger than life, a working-class hero who appeared, again and again, with little alteration or nuance in his books.

  “How’s your papa?” Lyse asked, in French now that Graeme White had gone.

  Hannah tried to smile. “Not bad. He’s eating again.”

  “He can swallow? That’s good news.”

  Hannah nodded. So Lyse knew about strokes. She knew about so many things.

  “He’s still not talking,” she admitted. “Or walking.”

  “After what? Ten days? It will come, Hannah. Don’t you worry. All in good time.” Lyse reached out and squeezed Hannah’s arm. Human touch. She had been without it for far too long. In Toronto, she’d massaged her father’s crippled hand. For the entire visit, that had been the extent of her physical contact with other human beings.

  “Do you have time for a tea?”

  Hannah shook her head. Who knew what would come out if she sat down with Lyse? “I can’t right now,” she said, pul
ling toward the door. She held up her tote bags. “I’m on grocery duty. You should see the fridge. No milk. No eggs. God knows what they survived on.”

  Lyse’s face looked alarmed. “I tried,” she said, as though she were responsible. “The night you left, I went upstairs with a pâté chinois, but Luc chased me away. Wouldn’t take it. I ended up giving it to the woman next door, the one with all the kids. Hugo hasn’t gone hungry, has he?”

  Hannah shook her head and forced out a smile. She wanted to say something funny and reassuring, but her throat constricted. She tried to clear it, and all that came out was a choking sound.

  Lyse reached an arm around her and patted her back. “Are you all right? Here, Hannah, come and sit down.”

  And that was how she ended up on Lyse’s white couch, cradling a cup of camomile tea.

  “Now tell me,” said Lyse. “What’s wrong?”

  Luc hadn’t confided in her, evidently. He was secretive by nature, particularly with his mother. Hannah knew she should ask him before talking to Lyse, especially about the gun. But surely Lyse had a right to know. She was part of the family, an intimate part, and she was one of Hannah’s closest friends.

  “Hugo’s been suspended from Saint-Jean.”

  Lyse nodded slowly. “I knew something was up. He didn’t go to school today.”

  Hannah’s throat was closing again. She swallowed hard and spoke without looking at Lyse. When she came to the part about the gun, Lyse raised her hands to her mouth.

  “It wasn’t loaded,” Hannah said.

  “Thank God,” said Lyse. “Oh, thank God.”

  It took Hannah a second to realize it, but Lyse was crying. She was holding her face in her hands. Her shoulders were shaking.

  “It’s okay,” said Hannah, reaching out to her. She was beginning to regret this. She was exhausted, emptied of her normal reserves. “No one was hurt, Lyse. He didn’t have any ammunition. He didn’t even have the thing out. It was in his knapsack, in bubble wrap.”

  But Lyse was no longer listening. Hannah went into the bathroom to get tissues.

  “He’s all right, though?” Lyse said, once the crying had finally abated.

  Hannah nodded.

  “But why on earth …?” Her makeup was running. She looked up pleadingly at her daughter-in-law, unable to finish the question, her face streaked with black lines.

  She was probably thinking of Roland. Maybe of Columbine as well. The boys shooting up their school. How could she not? “No one knows.”

  “Did you ask him?”

  They sat there in silence. Luc and his mother had the same half-moon eyes, the same vulnerable brown gaze. At least, it had once been vulnerable.

  “There’s one more thing,” said Hannah. She hesitated, unsure again whether to divulge it. “It was a Luger.”

  The half-moon eyes grew round. “Does Hugo know?”

  Hannah shook her head, feigning more certainty than she felt. She still couldn’t remember. If she had mentioned it to him, the guilt would be beyond words.

  “No,” said Lyse, shaking her head. “No, of course not. How could he?” Her head went on shaking, as though trying to shake off the memories. “Oh, God,” she said. “How odd it is. Why didn’t Luc tell me? Why didn’t he say anything?”

  “It happened yesterday.”

  “Still,” said Lyse. “I was here. I always am, you know, for each of you.” She shook her head again. “Luc is so … contained. Rémi is the one who talks about himself. He’s the one who tells me stories. Luc keeps all of his for his books.” She paused. “He’s unhappy, isn’t he?”

  Hannah averted her eyes. This was the danger of talking with Lyse. She picked up on things. Even when you hid them. She was sensitive, like her artist son. Hannah could picture Luc’s face, full of anger, when he discovered that she’d had this conversation with his mother.

  “I’m making things awkward for you,” Lyse said quietly. “I apologize. But I worry. Luc says so little, and I’m left alone to wrestle with my imagination.” She made an effort to smile and dabbed her eyes with a streaked tissue.

  She would have been around Hannah’s age when it happened. Hannah and Lyse had spoken of it only once, early in Hannah’s marriage, when she was still trying to fill in the blanks in Luc’s childhood. The experience had marked her forever, Lyse said. Before it happened, she had believed in herself. She had believed in the myth of her own agency. She had believed that if she thought hard enough and put in enough effort and energy, she could make things right, truly right, at least in her own little corner of Saint-Henri. Roland’s death had swept that illusion away.

  She’d seen it long before it happened. That had been the worst thing, she said. Knowing it was coming. Not when, or how, precisely. Only seeing the image, and knowing it would one day become real. Visions had come to her before, so she wasn’t frightened, exactly. Within the family, they joked about her psychic abilities. But her visions had never before been of death.

  When the police officers came to the door over three and a half decades ago on that October morning, she’d known why they were there. They had made her sit down before they announced it. She did as she was told, even though it wasn’t necessary. She had seen it already, twice in dreams, and a third time when she was awake. A thought, an image of her husband’s blue Chevrolet parked at the top of a hill, with Roland sitting perfectly still at the wheel. That was all. No blood. No hint of impending violence. The second time, she watched him from the side; the third, from behind. He was sitting up straight in the driver’s seat with the motor idling and the windows rolled up. Each time the vision came, her skin had crawled. For six months, she had been afraid to shut her eyes and sleep.

  Lyse got the location right: the lookout in upper Westmount, the quiet green place where lovers went to fondle each other, where Lyse herself had sat with Roland during their courtship, driving up from Saint-Henri in his father’s car, navigating streets lined with houses that looked like castles in a fairy tale, one of which Hannah’s father would eventually own. Roland had kissed Lyse in that green place, held her tight against him. She had been sixteen, far too young to know anything about love. The lights in Saint-Henri had blinked like fallen stars. She had thought, mistakenly, that she was in heaven.

  Hannah’s mother-in-law was looking at her, now dry-eyed and serene. Hannah stood up. “I’ve got to go.” She gave Lyse’s arm a tender squeeze and reached for the tote bags stashed at her feet.

  They said their goodbyes in front of the bronze bust. Lyse had commissioned it at the last possible moment. It had cost her more than the entire funeral. The artist had been forced to go to the funeral parlour to make the mould. There was no back to it, just Roland Lévesque’s proud, stern face, and the mouth into which he’d stuck the barrel of his gun.

  His Luger.

  Once, when Luc was nineteen, he had taken the bust down from its altar in his mother’s vestibule and pushed his own face inside. He’d been drunk, he told Hannah years later. It had been late at night. He’d replaced the bust afterward so Lyse wouldn’t suspect anything, but although the altar looked the same, Luc himself had been changed by this curious nocturnal act.

  “Call on me,” Lyse said, pulling Hannah to her for a last embrace.

  Hannah tried to smile, but the bronze likeness of Luc’s father was staring so fiercely she couldn’t manage it.

  7

  T he staircase to the second floor seemed steeper than usual when Hannah got back from the grocery store. She’d bought more than she’d planned, probably because she was so tired. She had a chicken tucked under her arm like a football.

  Chickens were on special at the Super C. Five dollars a bird. So, without giving it much thought, in addition to the milk and the bread and the eggs, she had bought a chicken. And a carton of plain yogurt, Balkan style, which she knew she would want the next morning. And cereal for Hugo. Froot Loops, which he still loved. An indulgence. What was wrong with that?

  Plenty, she told herse
lf, willing her feet to move faster. She regretted the way she had spoken to him, the assault on his conscience.

  She kept thinking about the gun. The Luger. The lugubrious Luger. Heavy, dark, morose. Luc’s father, whom Hannah had never met, had been lugubrious. At least, that was how she imagined him from Lyse’s accounts. Luc didn’t describe him this way. To Luc, he was a hero. But then, he had died before his son outgrew the need for heroes.

  Lugubrious. Was it in the genes? Luc and his brother didn’t seem afflicted. Oh, they had their moods. No one was spared that. The period immediately prior to Dreamer had been a trial for Luc. But his response had been art, not depression. What if it skipped a generation? She pictured her son’s affectless face, his strange, empty eyes. She made a mental note to read up on drugs.

  Would she notice if Hugo were stoned? She knew what marijuana did to him. His face went chalky and his eyes got dry and red. Besides, she could smell it on his clothes. But he only smoked sporadically, so far as she knew. Weekends mainly, with his friends. She and Luc had spoken to him about it a couple of times, voiced their concerns. The books she had read said it was futile to try to ban it outright. What you had to do was talk.

  But what if it wasn’t drugs after all? What if it was something else, something internal, something harder to give a name to? What if it was a hidden grandparental legacy, sparing the father the more savagely to strike at the son? An image of the awful bronze in Lyse’s front hall returned to her.

  She was on the inner staircase now, huffing upward. I think I can. I think I can. I think I can. At the top of the stairs, she spotted Luc’s shoes. Good, he was here. Maybe the clouds had lifted and they could sit down as a family for once and talk. As she opened the door, however, that thought was dispelled. Luc’s voice rang out in the hallway.