They had run to keep up with the landscape.
Because they both wanted to survive. And live.
Live through the death that had separated them.
Closely entwined in the bed, Lucie and Franck savored every second after their lovemaking, because soon time would speed up again. Like Alice through the looking-glass, they would have to get up and start running, run without catching their breath or looking back. Run, perhaps, so that they never had to stop.
And so they enjoyed the tender motions, lost themselves in each other’s gaze, smiled at each other constantly, as if trying to reclaim everything they had lost.
Finally, the first words came from Lucie’s mouth. Her breath was warm, her naked body burning.
“I want us to stay together this time, no matter what happens. I never want us to be apart.”
Sharko had kept his eyes glued to the numbers on the alarm clock. It was 3:06. He finally turned the appliance around so that he’d never again have to see the cursed numbers that haunted him every night. No more 3:10 a.m.
“I want that, too. It’s what I’ve wanted more than anything in the world, but how could I have believed it possible?”
“You’ve never stopped believing. That’s why you kept my clothes in your closet, with two little mothballs.”
Lucie rested her ear on Sharko’s chest, at the level of his fractured heart.
“You know, when I followed that biologist in Lyon, and I found myself facing that kid with a broken bottle, I . . . I nearly killed him because he’d snickered at my daughters’ picture. I shoved the barrel of a gun into his temple and I was this close to squeezing the trigger. This close to abandoning Juliette just so I could put a bullet in his brain.”
Sharko didn’t move and let her speak.
“I think I projected on him all the violence I was never able to take out on Carnot. The poor kid was like a catalyst, a lightning rod. That violence was buried in me, in that miserable reptilian brain the ME told us about. We all have it in us, because we were all hunters like Cro-Magnon. That episode made me understand that . . . that deep down I still harbored the remains of . . . of something ancestral, probably animal, maybe even more than other mothers.”
“Lucie . . .”
“I gave birth to my daughters, I raised them the best I could. But I never loved them as I should have, as human beings are supposed to. I should have been with them all the time. We’re not here just to wage war, or hate one another, or hunt down killers. We’re also here to love . . . And now I want to love Juliette. I want to take my child in my arms and think about the future, not the past.”
Sharko gritted his teeth. He had to dominate the emotions that were threatening to drown him. Lucie saw the little bones rolling in his temples. He tried to speak, but his lips remained paralyzed. Lucie felt his unease and asked:
“Is it what I just said that’s bothering you? Am I frightening you?”
A long silence. Sharko finally shook his head.
“I’d like to talk to you about something, but I can’t. Please don’t ask me any more than that. Just tell me if you can live with someone who harbors secrets. Someone who’d like to put everything he’s lived through behind him, who’d finally like to see a little ray of sunlight. I need to know. It’s important for me to know, for the future.”
“We all have our secrets. I have no problem with that. Franck, I want to tell you, about our sudden breakup last year . . . I wasn’t in a right frame of mind. My daughters had disappeared and . . . I’m so sorry for driving you away like that.”
“Shhh . . .”
He kissed her on the lips. Then he rolled over on his side and turned out the light.
When he turned the radio-alarm back the right way, the digital display read 3:19.
He closed his eyes but, even though he felt good, calm, he couldn’t fall asleep.
He could already feel the fetid breath of the jungle pressing down on him.