She checked her watch, which she’d placed beside her on the floor. Two in the afternoon. She should get up. She really should.
Every day, she had these arguments with herself. One part of her wanted to lie here on the living room couch and never get up again. Another part observed the first part with mounting horror. She hadn’t eaten breakfast yet. She hadn’t even looked at the chores written out in white chalk on the slate hanging on the kitchen wall. Hannah tried to recall what day it was. Monday? No, that couldn’t be right. She got up from the couch and went to the window.
The sudden movement left her momentarily dizzy, and she had to lean on the wall until her vision unclouded. She looked out the window. Empty garbage cans stared from every doorway all the way down Laporte Street. Same thing for Agnes Street, on the other side of the park. She had missed the Tuesday pickup— something she’d never done before. And the worst part was, she didn’t care.
She was probably depressed. But how could it be depression if all she felt was … nothing? She had no appetite. No interest in washing herself or in keeping even a pretense of order in the house. Her sloth was boundless. Reading seemed to be the only activity left to her. Each night, she read so late and long that the next day she could barely get out of bed. For Hugo’s sake she did rise, but the minute the door shut behind him, she sank onto the couch, where she lay until his return nine hours later. The book she was currently reading was on mass killers.
It was a recent publication, a bestseller in the States. Since Columbine, the subject was a hot one. Mass murderers characteristically suffered from personality disorders. There was some speculation that Eric Harris, the instigator of the killings in Colorado, had been anti-social. He had died before anyone could diagnose him, but that didn’t stop a deluge of post-mortem hypotheses. He was very bright, the book said. Good in math, a whiz with computers. He’d been in trouble with the law, but he lied with great facility so they kept letting him off.
Marc Lepine, who’d killed fourteen women at the École Polytechnique in 1989, had been another anti-social kid. Like Harris in Colorado, he also had loved video games. And had a thing for guns, just like her own son.
Dylan Klebold had been different. He’d had a conscience, the book said. He wasn’t anti-social so much as depressed. For him, the shootings were as much about putting a bullet in his own head as about hurting other people.
Hannah shivered. The assessment results for Hugo had come in, not that they clarified anything. Many of Hugo’s responses had been puzzling, Manny Mandelbaum had said, defying categorization.
“He’s a complicated kid,” he’d told Hannah the week before, when she had still been answering the phone. “More complicated than the average, I mean. No discernible portrait has emerged.”
Hannah had tried to read hope into this utterance. “You mean he’s not anti-social?”
“Not definitively, but like I said, a number of the answers are puzzling.”
“What will you tell the school?” This was the question, of course. The ostensible reason Hugo had been subjected to the test in the first place.
There was a long pause during which Hannah had held her breath, listening to the sound of papers being shuffled on the other end of the line.
Manny Mandelbaum sighed. “I really can’t say one way or another. Some of the answers definitely point to insensitivity. Or anger, or something. Some kind of reactivity. But why wouldn’t he be reactive, writing a test like this?
“I hate this kind of thing, Hannah,” he said. “I really do. Human beings resist categorization. Who knows? Maybe he just ticked the boxes arbitrarily, and here we are, trying to read meaning into them. People are way too complex to fit into neat little squares. Adolescents even more so than the rest of us. So much is happening in adolescence, on so many levels, that an assessment like this is beside the point.
“There have been studies recently showing that the brain is still growing well into one’s twenties. That’s pretty outrageous, when you stop and think about it. It takes over two decades for the frontal lobe to operate at full capacity. Hugo is still unformed, Hannah. Not everything is in its place, and yet we expect him to be as rational as an adult. His brain might not be ready for that quite yet. And apparently it’s perfectly natural.”
Hannah had wanted to believe this. But surely what Hugo had done wasn’t natural. Buying a gun and carrying it around with you at school—that went beyond immature frontal lobes, didn’t it? The principal had said it was the first time anyone had done such a thing at the Collège Saint-Jean-Baptiste. Mandelbaum was probably trying to protect her, trying to cushion the blow. Hugo was fragile in some possibly unfixable and permanent way. The gun might have been a cry for help. But while Mandelbaum was sympathetic, the school certainly wasn’t. It wanted judgment.
In the end, Hugo had been allowed to stay. This was good news, Hannah had to acknowledge, although she felt as confused about her son as ever. He was a black hole, singular and unknowable, into which she was pouring her darkest, most inarticulate fears.
She returned to the couch and slipped the book on mass killers under the cushions so Hugo wouldn’t see it when he got home from school. She had thought she might go to the kitchen to see about making some food, but a wave of fatigue hit her, forcing her to shut her eyes.
An hour or so later, the two-toned ring of the doorbell woke her. She jumped up to answer it and became dizzy again. But she kept walking, unsteadily, toward the door. By the time she opened it, her vision had tunnelled. She staggered forward and would have pitched right down the staircase if a pair of arms hadn’t caught her.
A muffled, distant voice said her name. Moments later, she looked up into the skewed, frightened eyes of Serge Vien. He seemed so alarmed that she wanted to reach out and reassure him, but her arms were pinned. He was down on one knee, clasping her to his chest like an operatic lover.
“Are you all right?”
Hannah nodded.
“I’m sorry,” he said quickly, looking down at their bodies.
She wasn’t. She lay perfectly still. Her right ear was pressed against his chest in such a way that she could hear his heartbeat. She lay there, listening to the sound and gazing up into his face. She had no idea how long they spent on the front hall rug. Time stopped, or at least stretched so elastically that it lost its meaning. The sea-swell of nausea receded. Her vision brightened and cleared. She yawned.
“Thank you,” she said.
He shrugged. “I couldn’t very well let you fall down the stairs.”
“No,” said Hannah, still gazing up into his face like a child. She shifted, and it occurred to her that she wasn’t looking her best. Her hair smelled; her eyes felt dry and gritty. She was wearing her nightgown over an old pair of sweatpants. “I must look awful,” she said, struggling to get up.
He released his hold. “Au contraire. I was just thinking how lucky I was to have this beautiful woman faint in my arms.” The skewed eye surveyed her appreciatively. “You don’t look one bit like your father, you know.”
Hannah’s smile froze.
“We had the pleasure of meeting once. Years ago,” he continued, too engrossed in his story to notice her reaction. “The circumstances weren’t all that pleasant, unfortunately.”
Hannah steeled herself for what was coming. It wasn’t the first time a friend of Luc’s had made the connection between her and Alfred Stern. Luc hung out with artists—writers like him, painters and singers. Exactly the type that the RCMP would have rounded up back in the fall of 1970. In most instances, they laughed it off. But she knew of at least one acquaintance who had stopped speaking to Luc.
“You were arrested?”
Vien’s chest puffed out ever so slightly. He nodded. “I did four days at the Hôtel Parthenais.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, as if she herself were responsible. Not that “sorry” was enough. Not by half. But what else could she say? She’d dragged this thing around all her life, and she still had no
clue how to handle it. The name change helped, but inevitably someone learned whose daughter she was and the whole cycle of questions and guilt began again. The sins of the fathers.
Vien, who was still sitting on the floor, noticed her discomfiture. “I was actually looking for Luc,” he said, scrambling to his feet. “He’s not downstairs.”
“No,” Hannah said. She must try to keep her voice normal. “He’s got a new office.”
Vien looked surprised.
“He didn’t tell you?”
He shook his head.
“It’s been a while now.” She paused, trying and failing to count the days. “He hasn’t installed a telephone yet,” she added. “He’s not a big fan of those things. I can give you the address, if you want.”
“Would he be there?”
Hannah shrugged. He was watching her, trying to gauge what was up. He sensed something, that was for sure. She knew she looked like hell. She rearranged her face into what she hoped was a neutral expression.
“I have papers from the school,” he said, reaching for his briefcase. “Both parents have to sign.” He pulled out several sheets covered in print. “Protocol.”
He laid them out on the chest of drawers in the hall while Hannah went to the kitchen to write down Luc’s address for him. When she returned, he was looking around. The apartment was bathed in afternoon light. The floors and oak door frames that she and Luc had scraped down with such hope and patience at the start of their marriage were a rich, burnished gold. The walls were clean and white with clusters of prints for colour. On the dividing wall between the dining room and kitchen, a collection of emerald bottles gleamed in the sun. Luc had a thing for green glass.
“Lovely place,” he said, looking wistful. Luc had mentioned that Serge Vien’s wife had left him. Poor man. Did he envy this?
She signed the sheets he’d laid out and then handed him the slip of paper with Luc’s address. “Luc’s new place.”
“Saint-Augustin Street.”
“It’s not far.”
“Thanks,” said Serge, folding the papers into his briefcase. At the door, he paused. “Are you all right?”
An odd sound came from somewhere in the back of her throat. She covered her mouth and pretended to cough. “I’m fine,” she said, and turned her back until he was gone.
16
Luc was on his back on a grimy blue yoga mat he’d appropriated from Laporte Street about a week ago. He’d gone there looking for Hugo the day after their chance meeting in the metro, but Hugo hadn’t been home. Neither had Hannah, so he’d unlocked the door and wandered through the empty rooms, feeling like a home invader. He’d taken none of his things, not even a pair of boxer shorts, which he happened to need, but the yoga mat had been rolled up and propped beside the front door as if waiting for him. He couldn’t resist.
He hadn’t returned since, hadn’t even telephoned, though the startled face of his son on the escalator still haunted him.
Luc turned his attention back to the task at hand. He was still damp from his run. At the moment, he was recovering from the first of two daily sets of sit-ups. The floor of his new house was more crooked than he’d thought. He pressed the small of his back into it, resisting the urge to roll. The tilt was almost comically pronounced, as if half the house had sunk into a bog. Standing up, you could miss it, but not lying down. It really was like living on a boat. He lifted his socked feet in the air and crossed them at the ankles. Time for the second set. Each day, he tried to do a total of fifty.
His body was warm, despite the chill. Over the past couple of days, the temperature had fallen quite dramatically, and his new place, for all its charms, wasn’t insulated very well. The drywall was cold to the touch, and from under the baseboards Luc swore he could feel a flow of frigid air. If the little house was cold now, he shuddered to think what it would be like in February. For the moment, noontime jogs were doing the trick.
He’d forgotten what a pleasure it was to get out of the house in daylight hours, and to feel endorphins pinging inside his skull. His usual route was along the Lachine Canal to Ville Saint-Pierre and back. Today, he had gone farther, most of the way to the lakeshore. It had felt great at the time, but now his knee was sore.
He did five last sit-ups and abandoned himself to the floor. His body was finally cooling off. He was wearing the new black silk jersey that Marie-Soleil had bought for him. He loved the feel of it against his skin. He closed his eyes, conjuring her. She always came to him lips open, laughing, exposing her pink cat’s tongue. Her teeth were like little pearls. He felt the beginnings of an erection. He was young again himself, absolutely shameless.
Last night, he’d slept with Marie-Soleil. Up to the last minute, he’d sworn he wouldn’t, but a dinner of grilled sirloin steaks and a smooth Merlot had washed away his defences. He had thought that infidelity might jolt him to his senses, fill him with remorse, or, worse, force him to acknowledge that he was no longer physically up to it. After so many years with Hannah, he’d had no idea whether it would work with another woman. For months, he had fantasized about Marie-Soleil, of course. She’d filled his waking hours. His sleeping ones too: he’d even had a wet dream about her. He closed his eyes, sniffing his fingers where traces of her smell still lingered, and had no idea why he’d ever hesitated.
He rolled onto his stomach and placed both palms on the floor by his armpits. Twenty-five push-ups, he told himself sternly. Then, and only then, could he shower. He lowered his head, brushing the tip of his nose against the mat’s surface. Little bits of blue had flaked off and scattered across the floor. The smell of rubber made him think of condoms, which last night he had neglected to use.
He hadn’t brought one to her flat. Pure foolishness, and a measure of the strength of his denial. Marie-Soleil wasn’t in danger of getting pregnant. He wasn’t totally crazy, and, more to the point, neither was she. She was on the pill, something Hannah had avoided all the years he’d known her. No messing with Hannah’s hormones, non, monsieur, not even if it meant a mess of spermicides and diaphragms every time he wanted her. Marie-Soleil made it easy. Too easy. She hadn’t even raised the condom issue with him, which, in retrospect, Luc found worrisome. She was a gorgeous, liberated young thing in her sexual prime, quite obviously not the type to deprive herself. How many men had preceded him—without condoms? Luc took a deep breath and pushed his body off the floor. He refused to let his mind go there.
On push-up number three, there was a knock at the door—a double knock, somewhat tentative. Luc leapt to his feet. It was her. It had to be. She had dropped by twice before in the early afternoon on her way back to the office after lunch meetings.
He dashed down the stairs, his whole body singing. He was wearing the black jersey. He would enfold her in it, let her feel the softness for herself. A vision of him carrying her, laughing, over the threshold rose up in his mind. He would do it. He would literally sweep that girl off her feet.
When the door opened, Serge Vien stood before him, gazing at him with his unnerving eyes. Luc’s expression must have been weird, because Vien stepped backward in alarm. “Is it not a good time? I can come back, you know. It’s no problem.”
Luc shook his head and made reassuring sounds even as his heart folded up like a piece of origami. What was Vien doing here? How did he even know the address? No one besides Marie-Soleil had it.
“I was just at Laporte Street,” Vien said, as if reading his thoughts. “Hannah told me where to find you.”
Hannah. He’d forgotten about her. He looked at Vien sharply. How casually he’d said her name, as if he considered her a friend.
Vien was squatting now, the flesh of his flabby thighs straining the seams of his flannels. “I’ve got something for you,” he said, rifling through his briefcase. Papers were jammed in haphazardly, some of them creased and torn, with faded pencil scribblings, obviously years old. He found what he was looking for. “It’s a contract,” he said, handing over a plain brown envelope. “S
chool protocol. Both you and Hannah have to sign it.”
There it was again—Hannah. Luc took the envelope but didn’t open it.
Vien’s attention shifted. “So this is the new space,” he said, smiling politely. Dead leaves and the pages of an abandoned newspaper swirled behind him in the street. A sudden gust blew up, sending dust into Luc’s face. Vien shivered in his thin suit jacket.
Luc pushed the door open and waved expansively inside. As they walked through the dim and narrow ground-floor rooms, he became aware in a way he hadn’t been before that there was no furniture. Not a rug or single ornament. And the colour Monsieur Gagnon had picked for the walls looked atrocious in this light.
Luc had walked through these rooms plenty of times already, but with Vien by his side, he was seeing them with fresh eyes. And smelling them with a fresh nose. He had been habituated to it, but now, coming in from the street, he was assaulted by the close, musty odour. It grew stronger as they passed the kitchen. The strip of counter behind the kitchen sink was black with some kind of growth. The air was probably teeming with noxious spores.
He led Vien up the stairs. There was a chair upstairs—the only one in the house. As soon as they entered Luc’s workspace, he regretted bringing Vien in. The yoga mat was still on the floor, but this wasn’t the problem. It was hardly a crime to work out in one’s office. Luc had forgotten all about the bed, however. It wasn’t a real bed, just his futon in the corner, and it was obvious that it had been slept in. The sheets were in a tangle with his soiled laundry heaped on top. It looked like the room of a student.
Luc pulled his chair out from the desk and gestured for Vien to sit down. Another error. The desk was piled high as well. Clearly, not a whole lot of work was going on here. There were two boxes of light bulbs and some plastic hangers Marie-Soleil had brought over when she realized he didn’t have any.
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