“Where were you?”
He was standing in the doorway to Hugo’s bedroom, his hand on the cobra’s head.
She held up the chicken. “I left a note.”
He rolled his eyes. “You just got home and already you’re out the door to shop? You might have said something to me.” He turned his back on her, presumably to face their son. “Meanwhile, guess what your only child was doing in your absence?”
She put the bags and the chicken down on the floor and stepped forward. She would not mention the garbage, or the empty fridge. Luc was pacing angrily. In his hand was the empty plastic case for Red Alert, Hugo’s favourite computer game. The game he had played continuously through the eighth grade, to the exclusion of homework and family life, while his parents tried without success to limit his access, to wean him off his addiction. Every day, he would come home from school with the same hunger in his eyes, shut himself in his room, and play.
Hugo was sitting on his bed, his back against the wall. For some reason, he had no shirt on. Hannah hadn’t seen him without one for years. Springy black hairs encircled his nipples, which looked vulnerable and pink. She fought the impulse to stare. Black wisps curled from his armpits too. He must have felt her eyes, because he folded his arms over his chest.
“I caught him,” said Luc. “Red Alert. After all we’ve been through. Can you believe it?”
Hugo looked up at her then. They both looked at her, waiting to see whose side she would choose. She felt the power of her position, momentary though it was. She felt their attention and their need. She wished it could go on forever, this moment immediately before choice.
“Guns!” Luc said desperately, waving the plastic case. “It sounded like World War Three when I walked in, I swear to you.” When Hannah still didn’t respond, he turned away from her and threw the case on the bed. It bounced off the mattress, striking Hugo’s bare stomach.
“Enough is enough,” he said, reaching for Hugo’s arm. “Tell your mother what happened.” He pulled Hugo roughly to his feet, breathing heavily. She had rarely seen him so upset. “Tell her how you brought a gun to school. Go on,” he said, shaking him. “Explain to her. A Luger, for the love of Christ.”
Hannah, who was standing in the doorway, tried to intervene, but Luc pushed her aside. The situation felt out of control. He’d never touched her like that before. And he’d certainly never lifted a hand against Hugo.
“What were you going to do, Hugo?” he kept asking. “What was the plan?”
Hannah moved in again, and for a moment the talk stopped and they wrestled with each other. Luc was trying to hang on to Hugo, who was squirming and trying to wrench free, while Hannah tried, unsuccessfully, to wedge herself between them.
“Stop!” she shouted, pushing Luc off with all her strength. But they couldn’t stop. Father and son were locked in a strange slow-motion dance, trapped in a panting embrace that only ended when Hannah began to sob.
Four bright finger marks decorated one of Hugo’s shoulders. On his neck was the darkened beginning of a bruise. The sight was so shocking that she stopped crying. Stopped even taking in air. He looked like a battered child.
In an instant, he was back on the bed, clasping his arms over his naked chest.
Luc retrieved Hugo’s T-shirt from the floor and threw it at him. “Cover yourself.”
Hugo didn’t move. His back was against the wall. His arms were mottled.
“Put your shirt on,” Luc ordered. He stepped forward, but Hannah took his arm.
“Leave him alone!” There it was. She had chosen. From the corner of her eye, she saw Hugo’s lower lip start to quiver.
Luc pulled free of her grasp. “All I’ve ever done is leave him alone. At your urging.”
“Luc. This isn’t helping.”
He held up his hands as if suddenly aware of how he looked. Shame clouded his features. Then he backed away from them, shaking his head, and left the room. A few moments later, they heard the front door slam.
Hannah glanced at her son. He was on his feet now, bending to retrieve the shirt his father had thrown at him. He didn’t return her look. As he straightened, she caught sight of his shoulder blades poking out of his back like pitiful broken wings. She felt sick about what Luc had done. Sicker still that she’d participated in the drama and been unable to stop it. She tried to apologize to Hugo, but the words came out false and awkward. He kept his back to her, refusing to move until she left.
She didn’t go downstairs to seek out Luc immediately, but went instead to their bedroom and lay down on the bed. When she came out again half an hour later, she happened to look out the living room window, and there he was on the sidewalk, in the bright afternoon sun, loading things into his Peugeot. Beside him were the three cardboard boxes she’d seen earlier in his office, plus his laptop computer and a futon rolled up and tied with a strip of purple cloth. He kept this mattress in his office for power naps. Hannah could see only his backside and legs. The rest of him was hidden inside the car.
8
T he Green Spot was empty when Luc arrived. It was Sunday, three o’clock in the afternoon; the brunch crowd had left. Everyone was outside, soaking in the last rays of sunshine. A green banner emblazoned with the restaurant’s name hung over the short-order window. The name was a joke, considering that the neighbourhood around here was bereft of greenery. Not a bush or tree in sight. Luc scanned the sea of empty booths and tables. Not a lot had changed.
He hadn’t been here in years. When he was small, his father had brought him and Rémi almost every Sunday. It had been their little weekend ritual. Luc had eaten his first poutine here. And his first Pogo. His parents hadn’t been churchgoers. Lyse had never prepared a Sunday dinner in her life, unlike most mothers in Saint-Henri. In the Lévesque household, Sundays were Lyse’s day off, the day her menfolk dined at the local casse-croûte.
It was fun. Luc’s father would greet the men he knew from the Imperial Tobacco plant. At the sight of him, they would get up from their tables. Luc’s father had been a great talker. A lover of politics, much like Azarius Lacasse in Bonheur d’occasion. Not world politics. Local matters, workers’ matters. He had been a security guard at Imperial, and before that he’d worked the assembly line. He knew the cigarette business inside out. He lived and breathed it, he used to joke. He knew everybody at the plant, and everybody liked him. He was regarded as a hub in the communal wheel. A union man, through and through.
Dinners at the Green Spot stopped abruptly when he lost his job after nineteen years of service to the company. Luc was twelve years old. They’d steered clear of the restaurant after that. It was only at the end of high school that Luc began to frequent it again. By then, his father was dead, and years had passed since those Sundays of his childhood. Few people recognized him. He went with Serge Vien. They were taking the same classes, both lovers of Charles Baudelaire, both convinced that they belonged to his exclusive club of poetically damaged souls. They came after school and sat right here in the booth at the far back of the restaurant next to the washrooms and gum machines, strategically out of sight of the guy at the cash. They ordered fries in little paper bags that darkened as the grease soaked through. They pushed quarters into the jukebox. “Crimson and Clover.” The first time Luc encountered that song, he’d heard it as “Christmas Is Over.” Part of it was his English, which hadn’t been particularly strong, but part of it was the lead singer swallowing his words. This was what, in his innocence, he had sung for years, until one day Hannah heard him and set him straight.
He flipped through the little jukebox at his table. The Beatles, Bon Jovi, the Backstreet Boys. A bird’s-eye view of rock ’n’ roll through the ages, and that was just the B’s. He found what he was looking for under the T ’s. Tommy James and the Shondells.
Vien walked in just as Tommy James began to croon. Luc watched his face light up. “Lord,” Vien said. “They still have that?”
Luc bobbed his head to the beat, inhaling the co
mforting smell of refried grease, his own variant of Proust’s madeleines.
Vien’s head was bobbing to the music now too. He resembled a bird. A beaky, stork-like bird with a jowly wattle under his chin and a silly misaligned eye. “Nothing’s changed,” Vien remarked, grinning.
“Maybe a bit,” Luc answered, his eye on the wattle. “But not a whole lot.”
“The waitresses are younger.”
Luc burst out laughing. It felt good to be here. Seeing Vien again was the silver lining to all this. He took two menus from beside the jukebox and slid one toward Vien.
As if on cue, a woman with a mop of dyed black hair came over to take their orders. Her arms glowed a strange coppery colour that, Luc supposed, was the product of regular visits to the tanning salon. “What can I get you two gentlemen?”
She was chewing gum. She could still carry off a pair of tight pants, but her cleavage, revealed by a low-buttoned white blouse, was fissured like soil gone too long without rain. The tanning salon had done its work well. She thrust out a hip while she jotted down their orders on a dollar-store notepad.
Luc watched her retreat to the kitchen and sighed. “Not yet forty.”
“A child,” Vien agreed.
At the kitchen window, she rose up on her toes and gave the cook their order. From the back, she looked a decade younger. The skin was what gave her away.
The last strains of Tommy James’s voice echoed as Luc turned back to face Vien. “I suppose you know about the suspension. You’ve spoken with Bonnaire?”
Vien brought his hands up from his lap and interlaced his fingers, exposing knobby knuckles that looked a little arthritic. “Not just with Bonnaire,” he admitted. “The school’s had two emergency staff meetings on the subject of your son.”
Luc tried to hold Vien’s gaze, but it was too much. On the sound system, a new song selection started up: “Come Together,” by John Lennon.
Vien unlaced and relaced his fingers, as if he didn’t trust them. “What can I tell you, Luc? Everyone’s taking this pretty seriously.”
A crash came from the kitchen. Silence followed, and then someone swore. Luc and Vien turned, but there was nothing to see. Their waitress was standing by the cash, cracking her chewing gum and staring out at them with unconcerned eyes.
Luc turned back to Vien. “Will charges be laid?” That was the question. The one over which he had agonized all weekend: his son in youth court; the media getting wind of the story and broadcasting every aspect of it but Hugo’s name, thus respecting the letter of the law if not its spirit. All of Quebec would figure out who the celebrity father was. He had already warned Frédéric Axe. And Marie-Soleil. This could degenerate into a circus.
The waitress disappeared into the kitchen, leaving Luc and Vien to themselves in the vast dining room.
“Oh, I don’t think that’s much of an issue,” Vien said, raking his fingers through his grey hair.
“You don’t?” Luc said sharply. “Why not? A crime was committed. He was caught red-handed.”
“You should watch more TV,” Vien said, gazing at Luc with his misaligned eyes. “You’d learn that not every crime gets prosecuted.”
Lennon’s voice was still coming through the tinny jukebox speakers, explaining the eternal mystery of jokers doing just as they pleased.
Luc looked away in frustration.
The waitress had emerged from the kitchen. Whatever drama had occurred seemed to have sorted itself out. The guy who stood by the cash had also resumed his station. Behind him was an old-fashioned glass display case full of pie slices: lemon meringue, apple, and something green. Key lime, most probably. They weren’t edible, Luc knew. As a boy, he had liked to get up close to the case and see the layers of dust on the painted plaster. Next to the pieces of pie sat five or six glass goblets filled with green Jell-O cubes. Fake as well. Glowing eerily and topped with grimy plaster cream, the delight of his youth.
Lennon stopped singing. The anthem of a generation was over. Luc turned back to Vien. “The detective said they might prosecute.”
“Might,” Vien repeated. “Possible, but not probable. I’m pretty sure this thing will stay internal.”
“But the police are already involved.”
“Bonnaire will disinvolve them.”
A couple of kids who had just come in put on a new song. American rap. Angry words spat out to a brainless rhythm.
“Trust me,” Vien said, leaning back against the red banquette. “There’ll be no formal charge.”
Luc reached across the table and took hold of Vien’s wrist. “Thank you,” he said, his voice cracking. Until that moment, he hadn’t known how much he’d needed to hear those words. He withdrew his hand quickly. Wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his shirt.
Vien watched him, surprised. “It’s going to be okay, Luc. Really. I have a good feeling here.”
Luc suddenly regretted his histrionics. He regretted calling Vien today, regretted laying himself open to another man’s pity.
“This is tales out of school,” Vien said, leaning in conspiratorially. “But we’re anciens, right? We’re entitled, to some degree. I obviously can’t tell you all the details of my talks with Bonnaire. I don’t want to play double agent, but the least I can do is reassure a friend.”
“Friend” was a bit of an exaggeration. But Vien was at least an ally, something Luc desperately needed right now.
“Bonnaire will do just about anything to avoid the press getting mixed up in this,” Vien said. He glanced around the room and dipped his tone confidentially. “Numbers are down at Saint-Jean this year. They’ve been falling for a couple of years, actually. People in Quebec aren’t having kids anymore. Or at least not the kind of people who used to send their kids to schools like Saint-Jean-Baptiste. We’re in the red, Luc. It’s serious. The last thing Bonnaire needs right now is a scandal.”
The waitress picked that moment to arrive with their order: two bags of fries and two large, ice-filled glasses of Coca-Cola.
“You sure you don’t want plates?” she asked, depositing the snacks on their placemats.
“No, no,” Vien assured her. He smiled sweetly. “We’re on a trip down memory lane.” He took one of the ketchup packets that accompanied the fries, tore it open with his teeth, and squeezed its contents onto his potatoes.
“We used to come here a long time ago,” Luc said to the waitress.
“A very long time ago,” said Vien, taking a greasy fry between his long, pre-arthritic fingers and examining it. A filament of steam rose into the air. “Now that is a patate frite,” he said, and popped it into his mouth.
Luc and the orange-skinned waitress laughed.
“Are they as good as you remember?” she teased.
“Better,” said Vien.
Luc dug into his own paper bag. He hadn’t tasted a Green Spot frite in decades. Vien was right. They were delicious.
The woman left and they ate in silence.
Luc finished first. “What do you think will happen?” he asked, folding his bag. The fries had improved his spirits.
“Well,” said Vien, still chewing, “there is sure to be a disciplinary hearing. This coming week, I would guess. I’ve sat on these things before, Luc. I can help you prepare.”
“Prepare?”
Vien was now digging fragments of potato from between his teeth with a toothpick. Luc averted his eyes.
“The parents have to attend,” explained Vien. “The student too, obviously. It’s your chance to say your piece.”
The bell on the Green Spot door jangled and a big family group entered the restaurant—grandparents, parents, and a clutch of children. You rarely saw families like this in Saint-Henri anymore. They looked like something out of the fifties or sixties. The waitress led them to a large table at the front of the dining room and went to get a high chair for the smallest child in the group, a little girl of two or three in a frilly party dress. Luc watched the mother settle everyone. They weren’t speaking French. O
ver the traffic sounds coming in from Notre-Dame Street, his ear caught Slavic syllables. Of course. These people were too united to be from here.
“His chances can’t be good,” Luc said wearily. He and Hannah would have to find another school for him, the kind of school where troublemakers and misfits got dumped.
“Chances?” said Vien.
“Of staying at Saint-Jean. After all this.”
Vien surprised him by smiling. “All this isn’t terribly serious, Luc. Really. Not that I’m exonerating Hugo. But I’ve seen far worse. He didn’t hurt anybody. There was no damage done. His motives don’t make much sense to me, but it doesn’t look like there was an intent to harm.”
A commotion made them turn. The little girl at the front table wanted to sit with her older siblings on the red banquette. She was twisting in her high chair, reaching out to them and whimpering. The mother tried to reason with her, standing up and hovering over her chair, but that only made things worse. The whimpers escalated into shrieks. Finally, the father stood up. He was a short man, solid, probably not yet out of his thirties. He scooped the little girl out of her seat in a single deft movement and carried her, writhing and shrieking, to the back of the room where Luc and Vien were sitting, veering just before he reached their table and disappearing with the child into the men’s room.
The shrieking stopped. Vien raised his eyebrows in mock alarm.
Luc ignored him. The man was a good father. When had discipline become cause for alarm? Still, there was something that made Luc listen for sounds from the men’s room, something less certain and harder to name than his own tacit approval.
A moment later, the door to the washroom swung open and the man stepped out, leading the girl by the hand. She had stopped crying, although she looked pale and subdued. She held her father’s hand and walked with dignity back to her family’s table, where the man made her kiss her mother and apologize. Then she climbed uncomplainingly into the high chair.
Luc’s approval was complete. He wished Hannah had seen this: the rebuttal of all her arguments. A deep resentment surged.
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