THE NEXT MORNING, WHEN I WENT INTO THE kitchen, I saw that Nicolas had cut out the photograph of me from the front page of the newspaper and had stuck it up on the fridge with magnets on every corner. He had written, “Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!” all around the photograph.
I knew that the crew would for sure be going to see Étienne. My father would not turn his back on them. He would be ecstatic and want to expound all his ridiculous thoughts until the tape ran out. He would show them baby photos of us if he had them, but I was quite sure that he did not.
I was distracted from these thoughts as the day unfolded. Something much more interesting happened. I saw Raphaël three times that day.
In the morning, as I was about to leave the lobby of my apartment, I noticed him through the glass door, sitting on the front stoop of his mother’s building. He looked like he hadn’t washed his hair, because it stuck straight up above his head. He was wearing a suit jacket but no shirt underneath and purple track pants with yellow piping down the sides. He had a pit bull that was carrying a Cabbage Patch doll in its mouth. The dog had a face like a fist. It would put the doll down for a moment and bark like someone trying to plunge a toilet.
I moved out of the way to let an exterminator pass. He was there to see about an infestation. A puzzle box had spilled and the pieces were multiplying and living in all the cracks. I pushed on the door, trying to open it, even though I was supposed to pull on it. I had no idea how something like this was possible since I had lived in the same building my whole life. I felt so self-conscious when Raphaël was around that my IQ dropped a hundred points.
As soon as I turned the corner, I took a pocket mirror out of my purse to make sure that I had looked all right. What the hell? I thought to myself. I had never felt that anxious around a boy before.
Then, in the afternoon I saw him at the grocery store with a white Pomeranian that had a face like a chewed-up toothbrush. The small dog was sitting in the part of the grocery cart where you ordinarily put a baby. The dog was trembling with excitement, wanting to hop up, like he was waiting to add a detail to your anecdote.
Raphaël was wearing enormous sunglasses. Nobody in the store would dare say anything to Raphaël about having a dog in a place where you sell food. He opened a bottle of beer while in line at the cash and drank it while flipping through a magazine about homes and gardens. They just wanted him to get in and out of the store as quickly as possible. It was hard to imagine what would happen with a guy who looked like that, if he was provoked. There was this feeling of an electrical storm everywhere he went.
Then, after work I saw him at the Portuguese café. He was drinking a cup of coffee and reading Papillon. You came out of prison incredibly buff or with an addiction to paperback novels. Raphaël would buy paperbacks that the homeless people were selling for fifty cents each on the street corner. He walked down the street with paper bags filled with books like groceries.
I got two cups of coffee to bring home, one for me and one for Nicolas. I looked over at Raphaël again while I was in line, and he was scribbling on the front page of his book. He got up to leave and left the book lying on the table. After I watched him leave, I went over and picked it up. I opened up the book and read the inscription: “If a broken fool with broken teeth and broken tonsils were to go all the way out of his way to say hello to her, what on earth would she say back, I wonder?”
I slapped the cover of the book down, startled, as if I had just opened up the door on someone changing and quickly closed it.
Was that a message for me? It had to be. I looked at the book cover, which was a photograph of a hard-ass dude with a butterfly tattooed on his chest. He refused to tell me no matter how I begged.