It had Been a good day’s work.
In the space of less than a hundred kilometers, Christophe had managed to visit three farmers, including two new prospects who had been happy to sign an exclusivity agreement. This was far from a sure thing, given the crappy freebies he had to offer them: a CaniGood jacket and two plastic food bowls. Another two like that and he would meet his quality target for the year. But his problem remained the same: the quantity target for cat food. A fifteen percent increase…were the guys at HQ off their heads? All the salespeople agreed it was crazy. Some even suspected the figure was a trick, designed to prevent them landing the bonus that, in the best-case scenario, represented an extra quarter’s salary. The staff representatives on the works council had stirred up discontent among the troops. But the only result had been a memo reaffirming the target, assuring employees that it was perfectly attainable, and announcing a new targeted advertising campaign to be launched in the coming weeks. They had two months to meet the expected figures and the sales manager, Serge Pelekian, was confident.
“Bullshit. They’re going to screw us over like they did last year.”
“Yeah, half the guys came up short. They don’t give a fuck about us.”
“And you, what do you think?”
“Well, yeah,” Christophe said, more out of politeness than anything else.
Beside the coffee machine, in the warehouses, by text, the discontent grew. Some even talked about organizing blockades, work slowdowns, stirring up trouble for management. Christophe just followed the general drift, his mind elsewhere. In the end, whatever happened, he always managed to hit his targets.
CaniGood had two manufacturing plants on French territory, plus a sales force of almost two hundred people and a dozen distribution centers. It was in those centers that the traveling salesmen met, with their white station wagons, their cheerful dispositions, their bellies bulging from too many restaurant meals. Very few women worked this job—there was only one of them at CaniGood—and nobody over fifty. The men bumped into each other while working, went to the offices to say a quick hello and pick up the products and goodies they needed, then exchanged a few words in a corner, near the loading zone, smoking and vaping in a circle, hand in pocket, looking relaxed and confident, in shirt and jeans, sometimes in a suit but that was unusual. They used these chance encounters to catch up, talking about their families, the vacations they had planned, sharing recommendations—for a roadside restaurant where the salt pork was excellent—and, above all, to complain: about working conditions, clients, targets, management, logistical problems, strategic screwups, and all those shareholders in Miami who didn’t lift a finger while there they were racking up two hundred fifty kilometers a day easy.
Not only that but, since the regional merger, HQ had decided to reorganize their sphere of operation. Instead of covering two departments, a salesman would soon be stuck with four. Behind all these euphemistic expressions—“reorganizing spheres of operation,” “pooling resources,” “resizing areas of expertise”—CaniGood was only ever seeking to generate additional margins, since the business was barely growing. The employees moaned about it quietly, interminably, mingling the vocabulary of the hierarchy with ideas aimed at causing it harm. This was how they defended themselves, with their powerless, schizophrenic language, unable to comprehend that in a mature market they were now the only margin that could still be compressed, the only raw material whose price could go down, a cost doomed to erosion. So they kept driving ever greater distances, struggling constantly to meet ever less realistic targets, seeing their slender benefits stolen from them one by one in the name of justice and equality, progressing ever farther in that curious mechanism where every step forward was translated into a step back, where every innovation gave rise to more archaic relations, where future profits could be secured only by drastic belt-tightening.
But things weren’t really all that bad, and Christophe had had a good day. After seeing his three farmers, he’d still had time to call on Gamm Vert in Corcieux to launch the final-quarter special operation. The woman at the store was nice: she’d bought him a coffee and given him a hand putting his signs in place. At four, he’d paid a flying visit to Dr. Désirant, a vet from Vittel to whom he had promised some hockey tickets. Veterinarians were still his best promotional outlet, since they were in a position to pass off any old dog or cat biscuits as a form of treatment. It was thanks to them that Christophe was starting to develop the CaniHealth range, an assemblage of vitamins, vegetables, and “best quality” chicken supposed to keep the animals in perfect health and to solve their kidney problems. This segment had seen a fifteen percent rise in sales over the last eighteen months, even though the price had gone up twenty percent. Proof that you could always hope to extract some unexpected profit as long as customers didn’t read the small print. One day, he thought, they would eke out the last percentiles by selling the promise of degrowth.
But, whatever, it was with a feeling of having done his duty for the day that Christophe went to Épinal for his first date with Hélène.
They had been messaging each other a lot lately, swapping memories, sharing the image they’d had of each other when they were young. The past was their opportunity. She had stroked his ego. And then they had talked about their current lives, first in an overly positive and optimistic way, before confessing some less idyllic details. At their age—close to forty—it was hard to admit, but the truth was that the future no longer belonged to them in quite the same way, and that the passing years had left their mark. Without going into too much detail, they had surreptitiously shown each other their scars, the simple bruises and blows of fate that were a feature of almost everyone’s life. Work, parents, kids, love, all the intimate crap that never goes well for anyone. And then, since Christophe could not make up his mind, Hélène had taken the initiative of organizing a meeting. It was obviously not a good idea to meet in Nancy, and she insisted that they find somewhere quiet and discreet where there was no risk of bumping into someone they knew.
Hélène’s marital situation had never come up during their conversations, but her Instagram account did not leave much doubt on that score. There were numerous photographs showing her on vacation—in Dordogne, in Vietnam—with a man, always the same one. He was well-built, curly dark hair, not bad-looking, although there was a sort of mocking glint in his eye. You could also see two little girls whose growth could be monitored over time. Other images showed Hélène’s favorite architectural styles, gourmet meals, some street art, big mirrors in gilt frames, several interchangeable friends, and a few brief indignant comments. In all honesty, though, Christophe had spent the most time looking at a photo of her in a swimsuit. Hélène seemed to have nice legs and a great ass. He was starting to really like her.
So Christophe went to Le Casque d’Or, a cheap restaurant located in the shadow of the basilica in Épinal, where the air smelled faintly of grease but where you could still buy a beer for less than two euros. It wasn’t exactly chic, but it met all Hélène’s criteria and Christophe went there pretty often. He had a satisfied feeling as he walked into that familiar decor, the mosaic floor and Formica tables, the industrial-sized percolator and the upside-down bottles of spirits. Not to mention, in front of the enormous mirror, the row of classic Monin syrups like a rainbow-colored pipe organ.
He chose a table at the back. He usually came here to fill out his expenses claims and client reports. Joss, a tall, stringy woman whose voice sometimes reminded him of Claudia Cardinale’s, called out her usual “What will it be?” and Christophe ordered a coffee and a glass of water.
It was Joss who kept the heart of this half-dead dive bar beating, with her tireless zeal, her constant hygiene obsession (which explained the faint odor of bleach and the relentless wiping of surfaces), and her dictatorial authority over the regulars—mostly old men whose drinking habits and medications she kept a close eye on, a few lawyers from the nearby courthouse who came here for a quiet drink, some street peddlers on market days, a thirsty mailman or two, and, of course, a handful of genuine drunkards, anxious wrecks who knew they could take refuge there on their thirstiest days. Sitting at the bar, or at a table in a dark corner, these men would order golden-colored drinks, glasses of wine or something stronger, quickly knocking back two or three, in their crumpled jackets and their shining skin. She watched over them like those spectral, touching creatures that you see in aquariums. From time to time, one of the stools would remain empty for a few days. A regular was no longer with us.
Christophe had been coming to Le Casque d’Or for years, always alone. He had discovered this haven just before Gabriel’s birth, and it had become his womb while Charlie’s expanded. Many was the time she had asked to come with him, but he had always refused.
It was funny, thinking back to that now. He had been crazy for that girl as soon as he met her, infatuated like a kid, his love for her drowning out everything else and making him do the stupidest things. God, he had worked so hard to get her. Charlie was older than him, and at the time she had seemed to belong to a completely different world. At fifteen, she was already going to gigs, hanging out with a whole tribe of weirdos that included skinheads and punks, all of them lefties in leather jackets or bomber jackets who listened to the same grunge rock. She had been smoking since seventh grade and in the playground she would read books by dropout American writers like London and Kerouac. And while most kids her age had to fight for the right to be allowed out until midnight, she was already in the habit of going to clubs and sleeping at friends’ houses whenever she felt like it.
Between fourteen and twenty-five their relationship had been on-again off-again, but, through it all, everyone considered them a couple. She lived in one of those little houses in Saut-le-Cerf, with her grandparents, who were easygoing and spent their time playing French tarot at a neighbor’s house. There had been afternoons in her attic room, the first unbridled sex sessions, that stunned amazement at all the stuff they could do, the other’s body as new as a PlayStation under the Christmas tree, licking each other from lips to legs, the sweat, the fluids, the twisted sheets, take me, bite me, don’t let me go. And then after two wild, obscene hours, during which he never lost his hard-on, they found themselves in surprise, soaked with sweat, staring at the ceiling, with her smoking a cigarette and asking: “How are you feeling?” And of course he was feeling horny so they went at it again until they heard the front door opening downstairs and they just had time to get dressed, the clothes sticking to their salt-scented skin, and to turn the TV on as if all they’d done was watch it. “Haven’t you even been out in this lovely weather?” the grandmother would ask. And: “Are you hungry?” Yes, they were starving, and in the kitchen they would stuff themselves with supermarket-brand pains au chocolat and look at each other with sparkling eyes.
Overall, though, they probably spent more time fighting than fucking. He had his practice sessions; she had the friends she didn’t want him to meet. They were grown men who drove crappy cars and took her to gigs in remote villages in the Vosges or Haute-Saône, to weird parties in warehouses or under bridges. He’d even found Ecstasy tabs in the pocket of her jeans. Once, while he was on a hockey trip to Prague, Christophe had gone to a whorehouse with some other players and of course Charlie had found out. In retaliation, she had headbutted him and given him the silent treatment for two months.
But what distinguished Charlie above all back then were her depressions. There was something dark inside that girl that blotted out all the light around her.
“What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know, what about you?”
“Nothing.”
And then, after ten minutes of silence and sighing, while she pretended to tidy up her room, she would tell him to fuck off. He would take his scooter and ride home, sulking, knowing full well what was going to happen next. She would call her friend at the café, Natacha, to arrange something with those other sons of bitches—Keuss, Karim, little Thierry—those unemployed guys who were permanently drunk or stoned and who spent all day spouting their stupid losers’ wisdom. Christophe imagined them in a Renault 5 by the side of a road, smoking weed, laughing, squeezed close together, the windows steamed up. Maybe they were even making out. Or worse.
Back then, Christophe was also involved with little Charlotte Brassard, so cute and clean in comparison. She worshipped him, and her constant availability compensated him for Charlie’s ever-changing moods. With hindsight, it seemed to him that he’d had a strange youth, like the view from the window of a train, one of those landscapes blurred by speed where you can’t really focus on anything. Hockey always came first, anyway.
After taking her baccalaureate, and passing it at the first attempt, Charlie had gone to Dijon, where her father lived, to study sociology in college. He’d had to retake his year and they hadn’t seen each other except by chance, often during the holidays, when she came back to visit her grandparents. The two of them would stop then, on the sidewalk or in an aisle at Monoprix, and look all embarrassed. How’s it going? Great. What are you up to?
Those haphazard reunions always left Christophe vaguely troubled. He felt only irritated by what remained of the teenage girl she had been: her eyes like little stones on a riverbed, her perfect skin, almost yellow, the ebullient, mischievous part of her personality, her small breasts under her T-shirt, hardly ever confined inside a bra. But what had changed hurt him even more: the high-heeled shoes that had replaced her Converse sneakers, the jewelry, the polite friendliness that had smoothed over that deep furrow between her eyebrows, the way she seemed like a woman now, an adult mostly reconciled to the way things were. Each time, he learned a little more about her life. She had gone to college, dropped out, worked here and there, then gone back to school to become a graphic designer, like everyone else. When they went their separate ways, it took all the willpower Christophe had not to turn around in the street and check out her ass.
And then one day she came back to Cornécourt for good, to be closer to her grandmother, who was not getting any younger. After that, things moved forward easily. They were not yet thirty, just starting out in their careers, had a bit of money, each with their own car and apartment, a life that seemed free. They went out to restaurants and movies, they made love and found, in each other’s presence, a sort of peaceful comfort that needed no words, where one moment smoothly gave way to another. They would simply make a quick phone call at the end of the day to decide whether to spend the evening together or not. Often they would just eat lasagna or a salad in front of the TV. They would watch American cop shows or travel documentaries. When her car broke down, he started driving her around. In winter they went snowshoeing in the Vosges, ate hearty potato dishes in mountain restaurants, before emerging hours later, red-faced and half-drunk. The balcony of Charlie’s apartment overlooked the Moselle and they would invite friends there, eating plum tarts in fall, spending the winter playing Crash Bandicoot on an old games console that Christophe had found at his dad’s house. Charlie listened as he told her about his working days at the Renault garage near the exhibition center, then his problems with the staff at the Hotel Campanile, where he briefly worked as a manager. She was there to support him when he bought the old café in the Galerie Saint-Joseph, which had of course failed, since nothing lasted long in that tunnel of doomed businesses. In fact, all the stores in the city center appeared as if they were caught in a heat haze; you expected to see them vanish at any moment, leaving a gap, an empty storefront, while customers rushed to the signs proliferating on the periphery, with their shitty products and their infinite parking lots. During that period, Christophe went through job after job, almost one per year, until he decided he’d had enough. He then used his unemployment benefit to support him while he did some thinking, taking the time to consider his future.
Money worries soon arose, however, and Charlie solved the problem by finding them a two-bedroom apartment in Cornécourt, where they moved in together in May. The night of their housewarming party, she didn’t drink and everyone understood why. Marco took Christophe in his arms to congratulate him. The idiot was close to tears. Happiness had sneaked up on them. He had to look at old photographs to see it again now.
It was soon after this that Christophe got a job at Cani-Good and began spending his evenings at Le Casque d’Or. This place became his sanctuary. He didn’t drink, just passed his time contemplating the destinies that had washed up there. They were all so happy to sit on a stool, to lean their elbows on a bar, to find an ear into which they could pour their simple thoughts about the weather or the Rio-Paris flight that had crashed in the ocean. Christophe listened to those husky or reedy voices, the rattle of dice and the questionable jokes, the silences like a pause in the too-brief day; it was a conservatory of pain, with a deep calm at its core.
Elsewhere, everyone urged him to be a man, soon a father, to be punctual and meet his targets. All day long, he felt like an instrument in someone else’s hand, a device that made things work. This yoke was something he could neither name nor escape. But one thing about it was sure: it was the opposite of youth. At least at Le Casque d’Or, there was no road map. The machine ceased its clatter for an hour. It left him in peace.
Even so, when he saw Hélène come through the door, the bell ringing cheerfully, Christophe was seized by doubt. Maybe this wasn’t exactly the kind of place a woman like her would appreciate. And the cloud he saw pass over her face did nothing to reassure him.
“Will this do?” he asked while she sat down facing him.
“Yeah, yeah, it’s good.”
And she gratified him with a big smile that swept away his anxiety.
“Did you find it okay?”
“Yeah. I know my way around here, believe it or not.”
It was his turn to smile, although he didn’t know what he could say to that. Joss had already come over, hands on hips, an amused expression on her face.
“So what will it be?”
“A Coke Zero,” said Hélène, raising one eyebrow politely.
Joss repeated the order aloud and went back to the bar. It was warm in the café and Hélène seemed at ease. Behind her, a couple were drinking hot chocolate. At the bar, the lawyer Cécile Clément ordered a glass of white wine to recover from a particularly rough hearing, which she recounted in minute detail to two other regulars. The first of them, Nénesse, lived close by and hardly ever left the café. A skinny man who wore too much cologne, he had graying, slicked-back hair and baggy pants. The other was younger and wore his shirtsleeves rolled up; he kept sniffing and nodding vehemently in agreement. He knew the courthouse well. Bastard cops, corrupt judges. Nénesse was content to listen while taking tiny sips from his glass of Anjou.
All of this formed a useful backdrop. Silences could pass for curiosity. Hélène made a few complimentary remarks. For her, this place was pretty exotic.
“I don’t have much time,” she said then, still smiling.
This was not wholly true. The girls had a babysitter and Philippe was spending the night in Strasbourg. But by looking at her watch, she was preparing an escape plan.
All the same, she felt quite relaxed in this place. It was six-thirty. Soon they’d be able to drink an aperitif without having to make excuses. And Christophe was eyeing her with evident pleasure. When he asked if she would like something else to drink, she nodded happily and he ordered two Chouffes. The beer’s generous flavor went well with the mood of the bar and, as soon as she took her first mouthful, Hélène felt lighter. The door opened every few minutes, revealing new customers, and behind her the other conversations created a warm, cushioned background noise. Turning around, she noted a few faces. There was an ogre-like salesman with a garnet nose, a service manager with a gleaming face whose physiognomy reminded her faintly of a cephalopod, two court ushers who might easily have been sisters, and a man on his own, as tall and stooped as a Giacometti, well-known to everyone in this town, where he worked as a drawing teacher. He attended all the exhibitions for local artists and in June he organized some curious viola da gamba concerts in the ruins of the old castle. He was an artist, in other words, who lived with his mother and whose only escape was Le Casque d’Or. Hélène felt as if she were inside a Flemish painting. Returning her gaze to Christophe, she noticed that he was still staring at her.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
But she felt beautiful and his answer told her all she needed to know.
“And Charlotte?”
“What about Charlotte?”
“Have you seen her since then?”
“Never,” Christophe replied.
She admitted that she’d known about their affair at the time. In saying this, she sensed she was luring him to the other side, to the side of secrets and skin. Le Casque d’Or was becoming their island. They were castaways.
“She was supposed to keep that to herself,” Christophe grumbled.
“She never told me about it, the bitch! But I found her journal.”
Christophe burst out laughing and took another swig of beer.
“And what did it say?”
“Lots of things. It was pretty detailed, actually.”
“Really?”
She responded with a raised eyebrow heavy with insinuations, and Christophe looked thrilled. In the smile that lit up his face, she saw again the teenager he had once been, so cute and fought-over.
“I was madly jealous at the time.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, I mean it was really detailed. It turned me on.”
“What sorts of details?”
“About her coming…”
She accompanied this revelation with a vaguely orgasmic expression and Christophe, flattered, pretended to be embarrassed.
“I wasn’t fucking at all back then. I was really uptight.”
“That’s not how I remember it,” said Christophe.
Now it was Hélène’s turn to playact. Of course she remembered that night after the exams, at the Stade de la Colombière.
“Hey! Hello?”
Hélène and Christophe turned at the same time toward the bar owner, who was shouting at them and snapping her fingers, a telephone in her other hand.
“Your wife’s trying to get hold of you.”
“My wife?” Christophe said.
He rummaged around in his bag for his cell phone and saw that Charlie had left several messages.
“Sorry. It’s my son’s mother.”
“Problem?” asked Hélène.
“I don’t know.”
He stood up to grab the phone from the owner and everyone in the bar saw his face fall as he listened to the voice at the other end. When he handed the phone back to Joss, his hand was shaking slightly.
“I have to go. I’m sorry.”
His whole appearance had dramatically changed. He was pale now, hesitant, and as he picked up his bag he knocked over a glass, which smashed into pieces on the floor. Everyone was staring at him. He began searching his pockets in the hope of finding his wallet, so Hélène took his wrist in her hand.
“Leave it. I’ll take care of it.”
“I’m really sorry,” he said again.
“It’s fine, don’t worry.”
And he left the café without another word, without a smile, clutching his bag and his coat to his chest.
It Took Christophe more than twenty minutes to drive the five kilometers that separated him from his father’s house. It was the worst possible time: right in the middle of rush hour. Every day, the same traffic jams blocked the same roads. He kept honking his horn and at one point risked his life in a bend just to save a few extra seconds. He didn’t know what made him feel more pressured, the situation itself or Charlie’s reproaches about it.
As he came closer, he recognized the Golf parked outside the house. Even from a distance, he could tell that his ex was furious. He parked the station wagon close by and heard a door slam. Then he went out to meet her in the evening cold. Wisps of steam flew from their mouths. Even the wind seemed tense.
“So?” said Charlie.
“I don’t understand. They should be here. I told Gabriel this morning when I dropped him at school. And I left a note for my father.”
“I’ve been ringing the bell for ten minutes. I called him on his cell phone about twenty times. He’s not answering. I didn’t even understand the message on his voicemail.”
Charlie’s arms were crossed and she was shivering.
“They must have gone for a walk in the woods,” said Christophe.
“In November? At night? What the fuck.”
“I’m sure they didn’t go far.”
“How many times have I told you not to leave him with your dad anymore?”
Christophe fell into a sheepish silence for a moment. Above them, the sky was empty, and the only source of light was the dim ceiling lamp in the 308. They were scared.
“Well…” Charlie said.
“Wait here, I’ll be back in a minute. We can take my car.”
Christophe ran to the house and came back soon afterward carrying a big flashlight. Then they got into the station wagon and set off. The child and his grandfather liked going for walks in a nearby part of the forest. They got there in less than ten minutes and Christophe parked on the patch of gravel that served as a parking space for hunters. He had hoped to find his father’s van there, but it wasn’t.
“They must have come on foot.”
“But what the hell would they be doing here at this time of night?”
“They scatter corn, to attract game.”
“Ugh, hunting again!”
“The kid loves it.”
“I know. We’ve talked about that before too.”
They walked along the narrow dirt path through the trees that the old man and his grandson usually took. Christophe went first. His father liked to teach Gabriel the names of mushrooms, animals, and birds, and how to recognize a creature by its tracks; Christophe had no idea about any of that stuff. As soon as the season began, the two of them would start to hunt game. In his younger days, Gérard had been part of the hunting club, but his financial situation no longer allowed him to pay his yearly dues. Shopkeepers, as everyone knew, did not have generous pensions. On top of that, he had suffered several setbacks with the rental property he had invested in to give him an income in his old age.
Gérard had poured most of his savings into an apartment building on the edge of Cornécourt, on the Chantraine road, midway between the Leclerc supermarket and the municipal swimming pool. The location was good: a former office building transformed into two one-bedroom apartments and one two-bedroom. He had chosen his tenants carefully, opting for young couples who were solvent with promising careers. Unfortunately, appearances could be deceptive, and two of the three apartments had been occupied for three years without his receiving a single euro in rent. Meanwhile he still had to keep paying property tax and overheads every month. He had done everything he could think of to pull himself out of this mire: letters sent by registered mail, bailiffs, visits to the police station, threatening phone calls. He had even had the outside shutters removed, hiring some tough travelers to carry out this task. None of it had worked. In the end, he’d had to start a fire. The firefighters had arrived quickly, but the insurance company lawyers had found some clauses in his contract that damaged his case. By the time the dust had settled, he had lost close to two hundred thousand euros, not to mention all the rent that the apartment building had been intended to produce.
There had been a series of other misfortunes, then a cascade of catastrophes when Sylvie was diagnosed with cancer. After a life of unremitting hard work, he now found himself choosing the cheapest laundry detergent at the supermarket or calculating how many liters of heating oil he could afford to keep him going through the winter.
All these tribulations had left him embittered toward his homeland. Politicians, cops, judges, insurance companies…he considered them all untrustworthy. Same thing for social security, pension funds, government welfare, all of which seemed designed to help only work-shy slackers and immigrants, even if all they knew how to do was burn cars, rape girls, and beat up bus drivers. And every day, he would fan the fire of his resentment by watching certain news channels that confirmed his intuitions and drove his ideas toward the extremes. His life felt pleasureless now, choked with disappointment, stretching out interminably into growing darkness, and yet he clung to it all the same.
Because of the kid. The two of them had fun together. Especially when they went hunting in the woods or played card games.
“Maybe we could try calling out to them,” said Charlie. “We’re not going to find them like this.”
She and Christophe had been walking for quite a while, not speaking, listening to the cracking of twigs under their feet, eyes scanning the beam of light ahead of them. Charlie called out her son’s name now and it echoed through the trees. Christophe did the same. Then he called out to his father:
“Da-ad!”
He sounded pathetic, he knew, as if he himself had become a kid again, calling out for help. Around them the forest seemed to grow bigger, darker, alive with menace. He kept staring into the flashlight beam. When he tried calling again, Christophe felt his voice die in his throat. Charlie’s shoulder pressed against his.
“Where the hell are they?”
“They can’t have gone far. It’ll be okay.”
“We should go to the police station.”
But they didn’t. They kept walking, shouting out “Gabriel” and “Dad” on a regular basis, despite the forest’s stubborn silence. As they advanced, the black smell of earth grew more intense, as did the squelching sound made by the drenched leaves underfoot, the dull plop of raindrops falling from tree branches onto their shoulders. Now and then they would feel the cold at the backs of their necks like a stranger’s gaze. Charlie nestled into him and he put an arm around her. Both of them were thinking about their son, imagining his little body amid the dark disorder of the woods, his tears in the night, all alone. They imagined his snowballing fear and then it was theirs too. Christophe hugged her tight.
“Did you hear that?”
They froze, listening, staring into the darkness for a sign. Was that a voice behind them? Or perhaps it was just the wind, playing tricks on them. As soon as they paid attention to it, the silence broke down into an infinity of tiny noises, deceptive whispers. Christophe swept the flashlight through the darkness around them. But it was Charlie who spotted them first. Gérard was holding a small flashlight in his right hand and Gabriel’s hand in his left. A plastic bucket hung from his arm.
“Where the hell have you been?”
They rushed over. Fear was already giving way to anger.
“What do you mean?” replied the old man, pouring out the rest of the corn at the base of a tree.
“We’ve been looking everywhere for you. Do you know what time it is? What the hell were you doing in the woods at night? And I told you his mother was coming to get him.”
The old man stood silent, waiting for the storm to pass, then shrugged before tapping the bottom of the bucket to make sure it was empty. Charlie, meanwhile, had knelt down and was holding Gabriel tightly in her arms.
“Are you okay, baby?”
The child, who was hugging his mother back, kissed her on the forehead as if blessing her.
“Yes, I’m okay.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course, everything’s fine,” the grandfather replied cheerfully.
Even so, Charlie could see traces of tears on her son’s face. Gabriel sniffed but smiled reassuringly. Everything was fine.
“Well, come on then. We’re not going to stay here all night, are we?”
The old man led them back toward the gravel parking space. Christophe, bringing up the rear of their procession, wondered what would have happened if the batteries in his father’s flashlight had gone flat…Better not to think about it. At last they reached the station wagon and Christophe asked his father what he had done with his van.
“It’s at the house,” the old man said.
“No it’s not. It’s not at home and it’s not here. So where is it?”
His father’s mouth trembled silently. Then, unable to find an answer to this question, he turned to the boy.
“Come on, he’s exhausted. Let’s just go home.”
It was true: Gabriel looked pale and drawn, and his teeth were chattering. Christophe sighed and they all got in the car. On the way back, nobody spoke, but everyone knew where they stood. The boy fell asleep, head tilted sideways and mouth hanging open, and Charlie, unable to stand it any longer, leaned toward the passenger seat and asked the question that had been gnawing at her.
“Did you get lost?”
She pronounced these four words as calmly as she could, almost in a sigh, but the accumulated fear behind her anger was clearly audible.
“What?” the old man asked, turning so that she could speak into his good ear.
“Did you get lost? Is that what happened?”
This time, she could not suppress a hint of aggression.
“No, no. We were scattering corn.”
The lie drew an exasperated sigh and a scowl from Charlie.
“Well, this won’t go on much longer anyway.”
“What does that mean?” the old man asked.
“Shhh,” Christophe said, “you’ll wake the boy.”
He drove slowly and carefully, in no rush to get to the house. Because as soon as he did, he would have to do something he’d been trying to avoid for months: explain. And then he remembered Hélène at Le Casque d’Or, earlier that evening. And the thought blew him away.
After Charlie had moved the sleeping child to the back of her car, she sat behind the steering wheel and Christophe thought he had gotten away with it. But the driver’s-side window slowly lowered, and he had no choice but to go over there.
“I’m warning you now,” Charlie said, “I don’t want any more of this. I mean it. Don’t force me to take away your custody.”
“Come on, it’s not that big a deal…”
“Yes it is. Your father’s ill. I don’t want him being left alone with Gabriel anymore.”
“I know.”
Forearms resting on the roof of the Golf, head hanging down, Christophe waited for the verdict to be delivered. The whole weight of the night pressed down on his shoulders.
“Have you seen a specialist at least?”
“Of course. We went to a neurologist.”
“When?”
“Two or three weeks ago. We’re still waiting for the results.”
“Well, there’s no mystery. We know what’s wrong with him. Have you told him about the move yet?”
“Not yet. I’m afraid he’ll take it hard.”
Charlie leaned her head through the open window and said: “Tell him, or I will. Understood?”
Christophe nodded. Then she raised the window, and he watched in silence as they left, mother and child inside the black car. This girl he had known in middle school, with whom he had made love and racked up debt, with whom he had fought and separated. And now this. She was taking his son away. He became truly aware of the fact for the first time. What the hell was he going to do, with this huge hole in the middle of his life?