Léo looked slapped. He didn’t say another word. He rinsed off the suds with a hose as she stood watching. “Besides, how could all of you have killed him together?” she said, feeling suddenly emboldened. She’d always wanted to know, but had never had the courage to ask. “It doesn’t make sense.”
He set the hose down and stared at her meaningfully. “A man has nothing if not his word,” he said, silencing her.
That was the last he spoke of it. If Lisette knew the truth, she was equally tight-lipped. She clearly accepted and loved him no matter what. It didn’t seem to matter to her, the depth of his involvement in ending another man’s life. Véronique was not quite so blasé about it. One time she actually went to the library and looked up Pierre Laporte in the encyclopedia. She also read about the October Crisis on microfiche for hours. Reading about Laporte’s family—his son, Jean; his daughter, Claire; his wife, Françoise—gave her a sick feeling deep in the pit of her stomach. She couldn’t reconcile the man she loved—her father—with the man who had taken away someone else’s father and husband. She’s never stopped grappling with it, but she has mastered the strategy of compartmentalizing.
Over time, as her hormones began to settle, so did their relationship. They eventually arrived at something fairly normal, much less contentious and volatile. Léo’s charm and charisma, which he could turn on and off as he pleased, won her heart. One day she realized she loved him.
It helped that her friends thought he was cool. She was still vulnerable, impressionable; their opinions mattered. And she could do no wrong in Léo’s eyes. His only disappointment in Véronique was that she could speak English. He felt her bilingualism was a betrayal. It meant she’d “caved to the elite,” which was absurd since she was only four years old at the time.
She learned English when her mother was cleaning houses in Westmount. Lisette never had childcare, so she used to drag Véronique along with her to work. One of the families had a nanny for their three kids, and Véronique spent three mornings a week with them—playing, watching English TV, reading their books, absorbing the language without even realizing it. By the time she started kindergarten, she was fluently bilingual, a skill that has served her well in her current profession, about which her father knows nothing.
“Turn the volume up, will you?” he says. “The batteries in my remote are dead.”
She finds her mother in the kitchen, pulling a chicken out of the oven. Lisette is still pretty, in a slightly fatigued way. Her dark hair is cut short with filaments of silver woven throughout, and she wears glasses now, but her skin is smooth and she’s long-legged and slim. Véronique kisses her cheek and hoists herself up onto the counter, long legs dangling. A cigarette is burning in the ashtray, an open Labatt 50 beside it. “The house reeks of smoke,” she says. “When are you guys going to quit?”
“When we’re in the ground.”
Véronique sighs. “What’s new?”
“I got the new Roch Voisine CD,” Lisette says. “It’s the greatest hits from his European concerts.”
“Did you vote?”
“Of course. You?”
“Obviously.”
Lisette turns on the mixer and starts whipping the potatoes into a creamy mash. She adds a half stick of butter, heavy cream, and a generous amount of salt. “Put this on the table,” she says. Véronique slides off the counter and places the bowl of potatoes in the center. The small round table is already set for three. “Léo!” her mother shouts.
Moments later, Léo shuffles in and they all sit. Lisette transfers the roast chicken from the stove to the table, followed by the peas and carrots, gravy, and a plate of white bread and butter.
“Go put on my new Roch Voisine CD,” she tells Léo, and he gets up obediently and disappears for a few minutes, and then they can hear Roch’s deep voice from the living room.
“Have you found a job yet?” Lisette asks her as Léo returns to the table. He pinches his wife’s ass before sitting back down, and she playfully slaps his arm.
“Not yet,” Véronique responds, not looking at her mother. She still hasn’t told them she’s been smuggling cigarettes, has no plans to. They would object not to the illegality, but to the danger. “I will, though.”
“Ginette’s daughter works at that big record store downtown,” Lisette says. “I could speak to her. She gets a good discount on CDs.”
“Sure.”
Lisette grabs two more beers from the fridge, opens both, and hands one to Léo. She doesn’t offer one to Véronique. Véronique knows it’s not on principle; it’s because her mother doesn’t want to share. She’s probably counted out exactly how many she’ll need for tonight. Lisette is a heavy drinker. When can you call a person an alcoholic? Véronique has no idea. She knows her mother occasionally has a beer in the morning; knows she drinks every single day, though that doesn’t necessarily mean much. Most people she knows do. She wishes she’d known them before he went to jail, that she hadn’t been born on the cusp of the end of their best selves.
“The chicken’s good,” Véronique says.
“You don’t think it’s dry? It was juicier last week.”
“I think it’s juicy.”
“Next week I’m going to start my holiday baking,” Lisette announces. “How many tourtières do you want?”
“I don’t know,” Véronique says. “One is fine, I guess.”
“You can freeze them and keep them until spring.”
“Who wants tourtière in the spring?” Léo says.
“It’s just a meat pie,” Lisette points out. “Why the hell can’t she eat a meat pie in the spring? There’s no law that says tourtière can only be eaten at Christmas.”
“What did you think of the referendum?” Véronique asks her father, desperate to change the subject.
“It was a good outcome,” he says, drowning his plate in gravy. “Not surprising, but positive. Now that the goddamn accord is dead, we can move on.”
“To what?”
“What do you think?” he says. “Separation. Now we know what the rest of the country thinks of us. We don’t have to be polite anymore.”
“Were we ever polite?”
“The Liberals are too polite,” Lisette says.
“Two more years,” Léo states. “And then the PQ will get back in and we’ll have our own country. We’ve all had enough of being second-class citizens when we’re the goddamn majority. We need a place to call our own, like Palestine.”
Lisette is smiling, her faith in him unwavering. She can’t hide her delight at this rare glimpse of the old, determined Léo. This is when she loves him best—even Véronique can see that.
After supper, Léo offers to drive Véronique home so he can try out his new car starter. He points the little gizmo at the window, aiming it down at his ’89 Tempo, and presses the button until the exhaust puffs to life and the car starts. “A miracle of technology!” he cries. “No more freezing my ass off in the morning!”
They wait ten minutes for the car to warm up, and then they dash out and jump in, and it really is a miracle. Inside, the heater is blowing on high and it’s toasty warm. “Revolutionary,” she says.
As soon as they pull onto De l’Église, Léo lowers the volume on the radio and says, “I know you’re smuggling cigarettes, Véro. Your uncle told me.”
“So?”
“It’s dangerous.”
“Coming from the man who threw bombs into buildings and kidnapped an innocent man at gunpoint.”
“I’m still a parent.”
“You were then, too.”
“This is different,” he says. “It’s you who’s in danger now.”
“I’m making good money,” she tells him. “And I’m really careful.”
He doesn’t say anything for a while. The roads are deserted, typical for a Sunday night in the middle of winter. As they wind through the streets of Verdun and then into St. Henri, past the row houses and duplexes and apartment buildings, Véronique imagines other families insid
e them, huddled in their kitchens, eating roasts and buttery mashed potatoes, discussing the aftermath of the referendum and what will come next; bickering over tourtière. She imagines them all like her family, with one glaring difference: their fathers and husbands are probably not notorious FLQ members from the October Crisis, ex-cons who lived more than a decade in prison. But then the people in those row houses, enduring the daily grind like sheep, will never know the freedom of living life on one’s own terms. She will never settle for such a mediocre existence.
“You saving your money?” Léo asks. She detects a tinge of pride in his voice.
“Of course.”
“Good,” he says. “The government deserves to get fucked. They’re a bunch of greedy pigs, taxing the shit out of our cigarettes. It’s us, the working class, who smoke. They know that. You know how much I paid for this pack?” He points to the Player’s on his dashboard. “Eight goddamn bucks. The motherfuckers.”
Véronique is pleased to have his endorsement. It’s exactly the way she feels.
“Just don’t get caught,” Léo says, winking. “I won’t tell your mother.”
5
DECEMBER 1992
Elodie’s father, Gabriel Phénix, is buried in the East-Dunham Cemetery in the town where he grew up, the same town where he fell in love with Elodie’s mother, Maggie. He rests next to his parents and two of his siblings, all of whom had died in a car crash when he was young. On the other side of the cemetery, Maggie’s parents—Elodie’s grandparents—are buried side by side.
Gabriel had been in Elodie’s life exactly ten years when he died, not nearly enough time to get to know him. Today would have been his sixtieth birthday. They’re all here today at her mother’s request. Later, they will go back to Maggie’s house in Cowansville for what she is calling a celebration of his life.
Stephanie crouches down on all fours and lays a bouquet of winterberry at the foot of his headstone. Maggie brought copies of the Brome County News and the Quebec Farmers’ Advocate, which she sets down in the snow next to Stephanie’s berries. Elodie doesn’t understand why she brings these sorts of things. He’s dead. He can’t read the papers.
She looks over at her brother, James, who is stone-faced and stoic. He hasn’t brought anything either. He’s wearing sunglasses and a tuque, as though trying to go unnoticed. The only ones missing are Clémentine and Nancy. Clémentine moved to Rimouski with her husband and daughter, Georgette, about a year after Gabriel’s death. Gabriel was more like a son to her than a little brother, and she couldn’t bear to be in Dunham after he was gone. The cornfield, the farm, the cottage where they’d always lived, all were saturated with her memories of him. Everywhere she looked, she’d complain mournfully, she could feel him, smell him, see him. Her daily life was so fraught with grief, her husband put the cottage up for sale and moved them to his hometown of Rimouski for a fresh start.
She still writes to them. She’s found her footing again. She’s a grandmother now and works part-time at a local bakery. She’s never returned to the Townships.
Nancy is also gone. Moved away to start a new life. She lives in Bouctouche, New Brunswick, of all places. She never gave a proper reason for leaving other than to say she liked the beach and wanted to explore “different places.”
Elodie is the one who always encouraged Nancy to be independent and self-confident, so she can only blame herself for Nancy leaving. She wanted her child to live a life free of fear and insecurity. She wanted her child to grow up and be in the world, not cowering on the sidelines of it. In spite of her own inadequacies, Elodie somehow managed to foster a healthy self-reliance in Nancy. It’s been her greatest gift to her daughter: freedom. Nancy lives her life with gusto; she doesn’t even know to know to be afraid of the world.
Elodie’s been a good mother. She can say that with certainty. She never raised a hand to Nancy, never screamed, never intimidated her. She was affectionate—no small feat given where she came from. She had to teach herself how to hold another human being, how to be tender and gentle and loving. It never came easy, and it certainly wasn’t natural, but she tried until it became natural. My God, she tried. Besides that, there was always food on the table, heat and hot water, even some extras so that Nancy never felt different from any of her peers—a VCR, a Sony Walkman, whatever running shoes all the kids were wearing at the time.
You can hide a lot from a young child, and that’s exactly what she did. She kept her secrets to herself, concealed the horrors of her childhood, and pretended to know what she was doing, even when she didn’t. Nancy knows her mother grew up in an “orphanage” and only reunited with her parents at twenty-four, but that’s about the extent of what she knows.
There was only one time when Elodie was made aware of just how perceptive Nancy was and how careful she had to be. They were watching a documentary about the deadly London fogs of the nineteenth century, those dense, foul-smelling blankets of soot that smothered the city, obscuring it in murk. “That’s what happens to you, M’ma,” Nancy said, precocious beyond her years. “You get the dark fog sometimes.”
After that, Elodie doubled her efforts to shield Nancy from her “dark fog.” And it’s paid off. She’s created a stable life for them, a life she would even go as far as to call normal.
In spite of the late-afternoon sun flooding the cemetery, the mid-December air is frigid. Elodie is grateful when Maggie and Stephanie step away from Gabriel’s headstone and look at everyone as though to say, I guess that’s it.
What else is one to do at the cemetery? Elodie has always found these visits to be awkward. Sometimes Maggie kisses his stone. Other times, she kisses her fingers and then touches the stone. She’s been known to converse with the stone, or simply to sit there in front of it in meditation, as though it helps her to conjure Gabriel back into the world. Elodie understands; he was the love of her life.
Maggie lives in an old farmhouse on the edge of the lake, the same one where Elodie first met her birth parents eighteen years ago. Elodie will never forget arriving at their front door in 1974. At that time, thanks to Sister Ignatia’s monstrous lie, Elodie still believed her real mother was dead. She remembers thinking how beautiful Maggie was, standing there in the living room with her thick black hair and lovely cream skin. As a couple, Maggie and Gabriel were perfect; the life they had created was a fairy tale, with their good looks and their two well-adjusted kids and their warm, welcoming farmhouse.
The reunion was charged with emotion. After the initial shock of discovering that her mother wasn’t dead and that she was actually face-to-face with her real parents, they got down to the business of explaining how she’d wound up in an orphanage. In some ways, it was everything Elodie had always wanted to hear. Maggie had been fifteen when she’d gotten pregnant; her parents had made the decision for her. It was like that back then, in the fifties. Good Catholic girls did not get to keep their illegitimate babies. Maggie hadn’t had a choice.
It buoyed Elodie to know that they had at least come looking for her. They told her they’d tried to find her numerous times over the years, even getting as close as the mental ward of St. Nazarius Hospital, where Elodie had been locked on the other side of the metal doors.
That night, Maggie asked her if she could ever forgive her. Elodie remembers wanting to, desperately. She said, “What else could you have done back then? Everyone knows it’s a sin to have a baby out of wedlock.”
She said those things to let Maggie off the hook. But the sincerity behind the words took much longer to catch up. It would be years before she truly felt any peace with Maggie’s choices.
She slept in her parents’ guest room that night. She remembers her mind swirling with angry, vindictive thoughts; her chest clenched with hatred for little Stephanie—Maggie’s other daughter, the one who was born after her—and rage at God. And then Maggie was there, standing over her, asking if she could stay. Elodie said yes, and Maggie lay down beside her. She sang her a song, or told her a poem—Elod
ie can’t quite remember. Something about seeds. She held Elodie all night.
Maggie wanted Elodie to move in with them right away back in ’74, but Elodie felt it was too much. She needed space and she was scared. She didn’t want to fall headfirst into a relationship that could just as easily be taken from her. So she visited them on weekends, and they got to know each other slowly, on her terms. Maggie frequently came to see her in the city, and they would spend hours in the diner on Wellington, interviewing each other about their lives and working on the manuscript of her memoir. Elodie recounted a story about St. Nazarius while Maggie sobbed and swore, overcome with guilt. She blamed herself. Elodie felt this was reasonable and did not try to talk her out of it.
About two years after they’d found each other, something happened that very nearly severed their embryonic relationship. Maggie and Gabriel decided to take the family to Old Orchard Beach for the construction holiday, but they did not invite Elodie. When Maggie told her about their plans, Elodie burst into tears.
“I didn’t think you’d want to go!” Maggie said, her face collapsing.
“You could have asked.”
They were at Paul Patates in Pointe St. Charles, having coffee and sharing a plate of French fries.
“I know you work weekends, Elo.”
“You still could have asked,” Elodie said. “Nancy would love the beach. We’ve never been.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just—”
“What?”
Maggie reached for her hands and clasped them in her own. Elodie would never get tired of Maggie’s gestures of affection. Over the two years, she had become reliant on them, needy. That’s what made her exclusion from their vacation so painful. She almost felt entitled to be included, as though they owed her. And didn’t they?
“It’s just the kids . . .” Maggie fumbled. “We haven’t really done anything with them, just the four of us, in so long.”
Oh, how that cut deep. Just the four of us. Elodie could feel the rejection coagulating into rage. She retracted her hands and stood up.
The Forgotten Daughter Page 5
