NOVEMBER 1992
Outside the Verdun metro station, an Arctic wind pummels Véronique’s face, and she has to pull the hood of her parka down over her eyes. She probably thinks the same thing every year, but this feels like the coldest November she can remember. Head down, she passes a parked car and notices a brand-new Le Château bag on the passenger seat. The door is unlocked, and she could easily swipe the bag. Not that she would ever steal from one of her own, but the carelessness of it annoys her. It’s not always a bad thing to think like a criminal.
She continues walking quickly toward Rue Rielle, where her parents have lived in the same beige-brick duplex with the S-shaped balcony for the past nine years. This afternoon the sky is matte gray, dull, giving the neighborhood a depressed feeling. She opens the door without knocking. “Allo? M’ma? Papa?”
It’s Sunday dinner, and the foyer smells of cigarette smoke and roast chicken. Her father is in his recliner, beer in one hand, cigarette in the other, with a Montreal Canadiens ashtray balancing on the arm of the chair. His shaggy hair is completely gray on the sides, but it’s still a full head. He’s got his own teeth—impressive for a French Canadian pushing fifty—and only a slight beer pooch above his belt buckle. A thick moustache covers most of the lower half of his face. He barely looks up from the TV to greet her, but his voice is warm, fond. “Allo, ma belle fille.”
“Hi, Pa,” she says, unwinding her scarf. “How was your week?”
“Same as always,” he complains.
There’s an undercurrent of disappointment that vibrates around Léo. Even he acknowledges on a regular basis how much jail changed him. “A man gets broken in prison,” he’ll say. “That’s what it’s designed to do: tear you down, destroy your spirit, take away all your passions, one by one. First you forget what music sounds like. Then you forget how to sing, how to laugh, even how to cry. They take away every single thing that’s precious to you. It’s damn hard to get the joie de vivre back.”
When he first got out, he still had some fire in him. He probably thought he could pick up where he’d left off with his crusade, but he soon realized that the eighties were very different from the sixties. He tried to reestablish himself as a prominent nationalist. He saw himself as a hero, and although he’d always had a cultlike following of admirers and hard-core separatists, his attempts at repurposing a career in the nationalist political milieu went nowhere. His supporters were, and always had been, the marginalized and disparate minority. Léo wrote a few articles for a leftist Quebec magazine that advocated sovereignty and democratic socialism, but when the magazine folded, so did Léo. He talked briefly about running for leadership in the Parti de la Démocratie Socialiste, but his talk had a delusional undertone, as though even he knew he was living in a fantasy world. The separatists had lost their first big referendum in 1980, and people were sick of thinking, hearing, and talking about it.
After his first few exhilarating months out of jail, the high began to wear off and the promise of everything he would accomplish with his newfound freedom began to fade. He settled back into life on the outside, and Véronique watched as the fight slowly began to seep out of him, replaced by an unhappy resignation. He went back to work, operating a forklift at a plastics factory, and bought the small house on Rue Rielle; Lisette continued to clean houses.
The only thing that remained stalwart was their marriage. Prison, at least, had not managed to diminish Léo and Lisette’s love for each other. Together, they quietly continued to pit themselves against the unjust world, the Goliath that had always oppressed them. The only difference between now and then—youth and middle age, pre- and post-jail—was that their battle was now waged from the couch or kitchen table, not through bold action or violence.
“I pulled my back again,” he mutters, still staring at the TV. “Goddamn factory work. Promise me you won’t let this happen to you”—“this” being a regular job, working for the man. “Don’t let my twelve years in the slammer be for nothing.”
She can see he’s in one of his moods. She leans over and kisses his forehead. He has his usual smell of tobacco and hair gel. “I won’t,” she says, appeasing him.
It hasn’t always been easy with Léo. Even though she no longer lives at home, his erratic temperament still rattles her.
When he first got out of jail, he barged into their lives with his big personality and his dark moods, his unrealistic expectations for everyone and everything around him. As his expectations began to topple, he grew even more sullen. Véronique, who was used to Lisette’s steady pragmatism, was unnerved by him. But he tried to be a good father. He genuinely adored her, always wanted to spend time with her. Too much, she sometimes thought. He didn’t discipline her; he left that to Lisette. His domain was imparting life lessons: The French are as exploited as they’ve always been. Nothing has changed. The rich are evil. The Anglos are the enemy. The government is corrupt. The system is fixed against us. You have to stand up for what you believe in, no matter what. Lines are made for crossing. True freedom is living outside the law.
He put great effort into making up for lost time. His generosity was overwrought, slightly smothering. He wanted things from her, too—forgiveness, approval, absolution. Even at twelve, Véronique understood this and knew what was expected of her. It was a lot of pressure, the responsibility for mending his broken spirit and grouting his unfulfilled cracks with her potential.
Around the age of fourteen, assailed by puberty, she became angry with him. Angry that he’d missed her entire childhood, frustrated with the burden of having to make up for a decade of lost time, of having to carry the torch of all his failed ambitions and dreams. Who the hell did he think he was? He’d homed in on her territory, and all she wanted was some privacy. They began to bump up against each other. They fought often. She used to tell him he wasn’t a real father. She was fond of saying, “You don’t belong here.” About his crime, Léo said very little. This was unspoken in their house; they were all complicit in the shroud of silence. But one day, in the midst of those turbulent teen years, Véronique said, “Are you the one who murdered Pierre Laporte?”
They were outside washing his car. “It was all of us,” he said, not looking up from the windshield he was scrubbing. “We acted as one.”
“Why did you do it?”
“So you’d grow up in a better world than I did.”
He’d said as much to the cameras, too, the night they captured him hiding in the Townships: “I did it for my baby girl!” It was all over the news, her father declaring that a man’s life had been sacrificed for his child’s.
“Well, I don’t want someone’s murder on my conscience,” she said.
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 inside 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.”