34. What have I done to that boy?

I hurry back to the hospital parking lot. My son’s car is still sitting in the blazing sun.

Someone comes running behind me—it’s him, it’s my son. We wordlessly climb into the car, in our usual seats. It’s so hot inside that I can’t hold back a groan.

I sense anger in my son, not the guilt I was expecting. And I also realize that the raging resentment I’d long felt toward him, ever since he left Lanton and maybe even before, maybe from the very beginning (did that really never happen, my too brusquely repelling his embrace, the anxious, devoted child he was on Rue Fondaudège falling back and hitting his head on the tile floor, did that really never happen, my picking him up, more afraid for myself than for him, and desperately pressing him to tell no one? Oh it’s true, how can I deny it, and I hated that he was forcing me into such acts, such a loss of control, and into making him my accomplice in secrecy, because everything about him filled me with muted irritation), that resentment is gone from inside me.

I’d like to lay my hand on his thigh and tell him, but that would mean admitting the anger I once felt, and so I keep quiet, sitting motionless at his side, in that silence heavy with his anger and annoyance.

He starts back up the mountain road. The soothing shadow envelops us. Very quietly, I ask, “Why did you bring them here?”

My son shoots back, “Who?”

“Your grandparents,” I say.

“Because they were dying of sadness back in that horrible apartment, that’s why,” says my son in a hard voice.

“But you didn’t know them,” I say. “I never took you to see them when you were little.”

“So?” cries my son. “They’re still my grandparents, aren’t they? Besides, that’s the whole problem, I never met them, thanks to you, and it’s hard to have a natural, relaxed relationship when it started so late.”

He stops the car at exactly the same spot where he took off his leather jacket earlier. He puts it on again, buttons it up, as—amazed to hear myself speaking so freely—I ask, “The baby, that’s Souhar?”

“Yes,” sighs my son.

“She lives with them?”

“Yes.”

“She’s pretty,” I say, “she’s already got beautiful hair.”

My son has started off again, back up the deserted, silent road, which pushes us deeper into a hostile winter with every passing yard. His jaw has hardened, his lips are tucked back into his mouth. He’s not going to say another word.

And no, I never told him my parents were dead, I simply never said they existed, never spoke their name, never described my life as a little girl in Les Aubiers, so he would understand and accept from his earliest childhood that no question on that subject would be tolerated, and wasn’t I hoping he’d get the idea that even thinking about them was forbidden in just the same way?

Breaking the silence, my son says to me stingingly, “You never knew it, but the day I turned twenty I went to see them in that filthy project where you were letting them die.”

“So you had their address,” I stammer.

“I got it from Papa,” says my son, “poor Papa.”

I wasn’t blind back then to my son’s father’s weaknesses and forebodings, no, I wasn’t blind—I kept a close watch on that man, vulnerable as he was to emotion and apprehension; I suspected he might seize any occasion to flout the rule that we must never, no matter what, tell my son of my parents, but I knew all about his failings and fears, and I knew what he thought: that one day some act of providence would avenge my parents for the way I’d treated them, without a trace of reverence or piety.

Again my son stops the car. He covers his face with his hands, and I hear him sigh. Because he’s thinking of his father, my ex-husband? Or because he’d spoken of Souhar?

A surge of affection for my son rushes to my face, making my cheeks hot and damp.

I think I can say your daughter’s name now, I’d like to tell him: Souhar, Souhar!

I give the back of his neck a quick, light stroke.

“I saw your father not long ago,” I say. “He’s doing all right.”

My son shakes his head, rubs his eyes, turns the key again.

“I’d like to bring him here too,” he says, “but he doesn’t want to come.”

“He’s moved a horrible woman into my study,” I blurt out, immediately sorry I did.

“I know,” my son answers softly. “He doesn’t want to leave her, he says he owes her so much.”

I can’t help but laugh in derision. But immediately that laugh makes me ashamed.

“If you could only answer Lanton!” I say.

My son taps his fingernails on the steering wheel. Between the flaps of his leather jacket I see his thigh twitch, bare, golden, smooth, and slender, as if, I tell myself, an eternal youthfulness were preserving my son’s lower half just as it was when he was fifteen, while, to compensate, an excessive maturity fills his gaze with the earnest gravity, the lofty dourness that yesterday made me almost doubt that this man, this fanatic, could possibly be my son.

But a fanatic for what cause, what faith? The attainment of his own moral perfection? Oh, I would tell him, you’re not a naturally good man like your father, that would be too much toil and pretending for a soul such as yours, is there really any point?

“I will never,” says my son, “never answer Lanton.”