She pulled a spoon out of the cutlery drawer, and something— a mouse? — skittered in the wall behind the counter. Matt Johansen had told her a story of a man he knew, a teacher accused by a female high school student of sexual abuse. The man denied the accusation and had no prior record of misdemeanour, yet he’d lost his job, and his wife had left him. The girl accusing him was young and seemed vulnerable and why would she lie about so terrible a thing? The man lost access to his own children, Matt said, and was forced to move, and when, later, he won his case in court, the vindication hardly mattered for it was impossible for him to reconstruct his life.
Soup bowl in hand, Sara paced back and forth between kitchen table and stove. She did not want to be shielding herself from the truth, but for the moment something outweighed the reasons for mentioning the allegations against Raymond Renaud. A gnawing discomfort held her back.
Saturday, a week later: through the dark came the tock of a newspaper hitting the wood of the porch. A car engine throbbed its way in slow, accelerated bursts up the street, and half asleep, Sara imagined a dark-skinned man, Tamil, resident of one of the towers on Jameson Avenue down by the lake or, more likely, a house to the east in Scarborough or to the north in Brampton filled with recent arrivals like him, reaching into the back seat of an old sedan for another newspaper from the stacked piles and hurling it houseward through the open car window. Her own words rolled in an elastic band made their way out into the world. She curled in on herself, pushing the pillow under her head, wanting praise or reassurance, which was ridiculous. She was a professional: why this time did she want someone to call her up and tell her she’d done a good job?
The ringing of the telephone roused her. Full daylight, almost eleven, my God. By the time she made it down the hall and into her office, whoever was calling had hung up. And left no message. David? Usually left a message. She was woozy in the way that happens when you are yanked from deepest sleep, the collapsing of two weeks of late nights, writing, editing, the hashing out of the shape of the article’s two parts with Alan Marker, and Sheila Gottlieb, back from a conference, and Paula Brown, the features editor. The house was cold, the temperature outside must have dropped overnight. As Sara stumbled down to the first floor, barefoot, having pulled on a sweater and jeans, the phone, phones, both the one in her office upstairs and the portable one on its stand in the front hall, rang again.
Oh you’re there, said Gerard Loftus, loud. I was calling back to leave a message. I saw your piece. It takes up a lot of space. That’s good. And it’s good there are photographs. The photo of Abiye. And most of what you say is good. That you found Templeton and the thing about Reseltier. Amazing. This morning I thought, I’m glad of all the people I could have met, I met you. But I have a few issues. Like what you say about what happened when Templeton left the Village. If you think I should have told the boys to keep on going to his house until someone in New Jersey decided to do something or the police did something, think again. Oh, and it says there’s a second part, so is that when you’re going to mention Raymond Renaud, because there’s nothing here so I’m checking.
How she wished she had never given him her home number. It was only nine in the morning where he was. Determined had been Ed Levoix’s word for him, hadn’t it? Or adamant. Outrage was not going to be the best response. If he could hear the sleep in her voice, he was not going to acknowledge it. The sun was bright in her eyes through the living-room window. In his eyes, she was nothing but his mouthpiece.
Gerard, Sara said, sinking into the sofa, losing her body heat, aware of the coiled paper out on the cold porch, the headline that she hadn’t seen but could guess at, something to do with Abuse and Expats, the photo that she’d taken of Abiye looking angrier than she remembered, glowering in his striped shirt. I appreciate all your help and I understand all you have invested in this story, but it’s not up to you what I say. She’d made a few more stabs at finding Raymond Renaud, had even called Sem Le in Sydney, but he knew nothing and so far she’d come up with nothing.
Because if you don’t say anything, I’ll have to let your editors know.
Let them know what?
We wouldn’t want it looking like you’re protecting him.
We, Gerard?
Well, I mean you.
Listen — outside, the reddening leaves on the Norway maple trembled like little souls and beneath the floorboards Kumiko sang as she vacuumed — you don’t need to threaten me. I’ve decided to try to find Renaud before repeating the allegations against him. He should have the chance to respond to them.
You need to say there’s a ring of them.
And how, she wondered, on her feet with the phone dead in her hand, had she managed to get herself in a position where Gerard Loftus had this kind of menacing power over her?
After the first surges of anger and self-justification, as Sara stepped out of the shower and wrenched a towel from the rack to wrap around her head, another thought came to her, What if Gerard found out that she had driven Raymond Renaud to Montreal? It seemed far-fetched to the point of paranoia to think that he would ever learn of it. She had told no one other than Juliet Levin and David. She had no idea to whom Raymond might have mentioned the trip, or her name. He might have said enough to someone that Gerard, learning of the journey, could figure out the truth. She barely knew Gerard Loftus or who he was or who he knew or what he was capable of. No, she had some sense what he was capable of. She wiped another towel across her face and wrapped it around her body, not frightened but unnerved. And if by some rare chance, Gerard did find out that she had driven Raymond to Montreal, she had no doubt that he would use the knowledge against her to dismantle what semblance of objectivity she had.
She didn’t want to hurt the circus. The circus, as far as she could see, meant nothing to Gerard. There was all the joy and hope that seemed to have sprung from it, the good that seemed to have its own life. Surely there was good there. She wanted no hand in destroying it.
Do you have a partner, Gerard? She didn’t think he had, perhaps he’d never had anything but fleeting sexual encounters. With men, with women? Why was she wondering about this now: she was trying to parse the source of his insistence. Was he thinking only of the boys, of helping the boys. There was an urge to punish in him. How had he been betrayed? Had he possibly been abused himself, and this was a hidden source of his fire. His father was a minister, she thought he’d said at one point. He was an outsider, with an outsider’s needs and grievances.
She had the rest of the weekend to rework her copy. It had been edited, even copy-edited, but she could call Alan or Sheila and say she’d discovered something else. Such things happened all the time. Still wrapped in the towel, Sara dashed upstairs. By car, she could be at the office in less than half an hour. Monday’s paper would not go to bed until Sunday night.
Tuesday morning by phone, Juliet said, I thought you should know, their Canadian tour’s been cancelled. Remember the circus was supposed to come here in the spring, here and Montreal, and the US? I got a note from their presenter this morning saying they were told the embassy in Nairobi wouldn’t issue them visas. The message from Foreign Affairs said they were worried about defections and they didn’t necessarily believe the performers were coming here for the reasons stated in their applications. Maybe they read in your piece yesterday about what happened with the performers in Australia and that had something to do with the decision.
Just back from a story meeting, Sara had reached across the expanse of loose pages, faxes, empty packets of dissoluble vitamin C, balled-up tissues, pens, the copies of Saturday’s and Monday’s papers containing the two parts of her article, to grab the receiver from the ringing phone on her desk. There were reprint requests, Alan had announced at the meeting, from as far away as the UK and Australia, and because this had happened on his watch, he was going to take what credit he could, how pleased, even salaciously pleased he was. On one of the TV monitors overhead, American President Bill Clinton smiled a
nd mouthed a truth or a lie, and the pixellated numbers on the clocks of the world on the far wall switched over from one minute to the next: 11:52 in Beijing became one step closer to midnight.
They don’t want defectors, Sara said to Juliet, and swept some of the detritus on her desk into the wastebasket. It has to do with the fact that the performers fled and less to do with why. And it doesn’t have to do with him. He wouldn’t even be with the circus when it came here.
They’ve been tainted, Juliet said. By all of this. The whole circus has. It’s so sad.
That’s not necessarily his fault. You can’t hang all that on him, or you can’t do it yet.
Whatever, Juliet said. Really, it’s your story now, not mine. You’ve taken it over, and I wish you luck with it.
She sounded cool but not cruel. At least she hadn’t used the word steal, Sara thought, yet the word hung in the air. If you still want to make a film about the circus, I’m happy to give you access to any of my interviews, help with the research, help in any way I can.
She couldn’t believe that she was making this offer: where did the urge come from other than a need to reconfirm Juliet’s trust.
As once, long ago, as her trial had approached, then at the trial, she’d lived with the sense that she hadn’t been canny enough or given enough forethought to the potential after-effects of some of the anecdotes she’d shared with Juliet during her first weeks in the Esplanade apartment. Nights they’d sat up late in Juliet’s bedroom or at the kitchen table, drinking from a bottle of cheap red wine and she’d comforted Juliet in her pining after a student actor and raged about Graham and regaled Juliet with stories from her youth, like the time, during the months she’d spent hitchhiking through Europe two years after high school, when a trucker had fleeced her out of what cash she had as she was making her way south through France so that she’d had to beg a woman in a village pension to give her a free room for the weekend. Or stealing toilet paper from restaurants and sleeping on the beach with a boy at Narbonne Plage. Or about the dwarf trucker who’d ferried her into Spain, along with a girl whom he insisted was his sister, although his hand on the girl’s thigh and the way they disappeared together into a tent at night made this unlikely, the girl looking no more than fifteen. How, while they’d slept, she’d eaten food they’d left in the truck cab: baguette, apples, a hunk of salami.
Thanks, Juliet said over the phone. I appreciate the offer, but it’s unlikely I’ll go back to the film.
Why not?
Because the whole thing’s turned so morally icky and that’s really not the kind of story I want to tell.
Juliet gone, Sara pulled Monday’s paper toward her and opened the front section to World News, her eye roving again to what she’d written.
Another visitor to the Village was Raymond Renaud, aged 42, the Canadian founder of Cirkus Mirak, a famous, world-travelling troupe of child acrobats from Addis Ababa. According to Loftus, Renaud had plans to start up a circus program at the orphanage, as he had done in towns such as Jimma and Dire Dawa. Loftus claims Renaud previously met Templeton in Sri Lanka. Renaud himself is currently facing allegations of physical and sexual abuse from nine of his performers. They fled the circus last month in Australia, where they have filed an asylum claim. Renaud has withdrawn from his position with the circus pending an investigation. Circus spokesman, Tamrat Asfaw, says he denies the allegations. Children who remain with the circus in Ethiopia have not substantiated them.
She’d heard nothing from Gerard Loftus since his call on the Saturday morning. There’d been no peep from him when these words had appeared in print the day before. And her words were helping to spread news of the allegations far and wide, and now other journalists would be searching for Raymond too, for him and the other men to whom she’d linked his name, Templeton, Reseltier, journalists potentially more ruthless than she was. She’d emailed Ed Levoix to ask if he knew anyone in Addis who might be in touch with Raymond Renaud, and Ed had responded that other than the circus guy Tamrat and the children he had no idea. She’d sent out queries to schools in south India and Thailand that were hiring or had made recent hires since, that night in the car, Renaud had mentioned travelling to both these places. It was like reaching for a needle in the dark.
David’s voice: Sara encountered his jubilation from the instant she picked up the phone; it sprang from the air around him, from his hello, as an email from a school in Kottayam, in Kerala, popped into her inbox. David said, We got the results this morning. All clear. I am breathing a sigh of relief like you cannot believe, I am whooping like a wild dog. I wanted to tell you as soon as I could. I know you’ve been wondering, and it makes such a difference, all your good care.
Dear Mrs, We are apologetic to be of no service in this matter.
Such good news, Sara said. Your good care. I’m so thrilled. For you and for Greta.
I won’t be able to see you tomorrow night, David said, his voice tumbling on. Is that okay? I just can’t. We may be going out. But next week. I do want to see you. I want you to know that too.
This was the song of his happiness, the swoop of him.
So not tomorrow but what about another night this week? It wasn’t even that she wanted to see him exactly, as much as she wanted to know how he’d respond.
Sure, maybe. Let me see.
His wife was in remission. He hadn’t been punished, none of them had been, the way she thought David had feared irrationally, with the appearance of the second tumour. She had never wanted to love a man the way her mother loved her father, with such fervid exclusivity, the refusal to be like her mother felt even more strongly after the end of her relationship with Graham, but this also seemed clear: she couldn’t or wouldn’t love David in an arrangement like this anymore.
I’ll call you soon, David said. Did he sense some shift in her? Take good care of yourself.
Take good care. Could he not hear the desolation in her? While over her shoulder, in the dark of her car, Raymond Renaud shifted in his seat and said, My father had to choose between the Désir sisters.
Thursday morning, not long after ten, Monsieur le directeur of La Maison des Enfants de Beau Soleil, an orphanage in Jacmel on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, having switched, at the sound of Sara’s voice, from Creole to more neutral French, said, Monsieur Raymond Renaud, yes, we do have. And the straightforwardness with which this man offered up Raymond’s name was stunning.
In French, Sara said, He’s new. He hasn’t been with you very long.
Yes, Dieufort Alexis said, since September.
Is it possible to speak to him? I’m calling from Canada.
But he’s in the classroom. Classes have already commenced for the day.
Is it possible to ask him to come to the phone? It’s very important I reach him as soon as possible.
Who I should say is calling?
Please just tell him it’s a call from Canada.
Now she sensed the man’s caution. Wait, please, he said.
A great fluidity took hold of her. Her free hand waved among the papers on her desk until it located her clip-on microphone, which she attached to the edge of the phone receiver. She pulled a new tape from her top drawer, checked that there were others, in case she needed them, and inserted the tape into her recorder, whose red power light glowed brightly, yes. To one side of her, the wheels of Paul’s chair cackled on their piece of hard plastic matting as Paul cleared his throat and said something to someone that sounded like, There’s a monster in all of us.
There would be no more privacy than this. No dark car, no hurtling alone together through the night. And if Sara had, instead, simply thanked the director of the House for Children of the Good Sun for that information, hung up, and begun a whirlwind of preparations to take her down to Haiti in order to waylay Raymond Renaud in person? It would have taken days, at least a couple of days, and there was the risk, if Raymond guessed someone had stumbled upon his whereabouts, that he might vanish again. She had a pad of paper and
a pen in hand and a back-up pen. By now, presumably, the orphanage director had spoken to Raymond. He could choose not to come to the phone. Who would he imagine was calling him? He was walking toward her, tall, with the supple and muscular gait that she remembered, away from a room full of children along a corridor of painted cinder blocks latticed with petal-shaped holes through which came an uproar of horns and bright fists of light.
A mutter of voices, mesi, mesi, a murmur of footsteps, and then someone lifted the phone and his voice spoke into it, Oui, allo?
In English, Sara said, Raymond, it’s Sara Wheeler from Toronto. Do you remember me —
How ridiculous to feel caught out as much as that she was catching him out. She was doing him a favour, giving him a chance to speak, she had done everything she could to find him. She was cleaving his present from itself and violently realigning it with his past.
Yes, I remember you. She would have been a fool to expect friendliness from him. Thanks again for the lift. How did you get this number?
The lift, she thought, the lift? I spoke to a cousin of yours in Montreal. I was looking for your aunt.
My aunt? My aunt’s dead.
Yes, I know that now. And that both his parents were also dead.
Which cousin. Oh, forget that, it doesn’t matter. What do you want?
Okay then, she thought, I’ll return bluntness with bluntness. And said, I want to talk to you about what happened with the circus, about the performers who fled in Australia.
Listen, I am sorry, but that is all over. That was another life. Okay? I understand you want to speak but no. No. This is my place now and these are my people and I have a class of children waiting for me.
Accusation Page 20
