THE NEXT MORNING I WOKE UP TO THE NOISE OF Raphaël moving about the bedroom quickly. The sun was coming through a little hole in the blind, like the police shining a flashlight into a car where lovers are kissing.
“What are you doing waking up so early?” I asked. “Did you ever even take off your clothes?”
“Yes, we had sex, remember?”
Raphaël said he was going to see about buying some more dogs to breed. He was packing his suitcase in that terrible way of his that made no sense, piling it full of random things. It was almost as if he thought that packing was a superstitious, superfluous activity that you just did for appearance’s sake, like wearing a tie.
“Don’t leave me. Not right now,” I said.
He said that he was going to be back before sunset, but I knew that he wasn’t.
“Oh, what do I fucking care? Do me a favour. Leave me! Get out of here. I saw this shit coming. I saw this shit coming like the fucking five o’clock train.”
“Why are you being crude. It’s not attractive.”
“You know what? You can’t leave me. Because I’m leaving you. I’ve been on eggshells for months, wondering how you’re going to psychologically tell your fucking left hand from your right hand.”
I got out of bed. I started throwing my clothes on. I started pulling my clothes out of the dresser drawers and putting them on the bed.
“Come on. Come on,” he said. “What are you doing?”
“I didn’t get pregnant all by myself, you know. I’ve been fucking accommodating. I came out here to the middle of nowhere. I eat boiled hot dogs for dinner. I didn’t even get to say goodbye to my brother. I didn’t complain about anything. You want to go into business raising lions; I don’t say anything. I tolerate bikers hanging around for two weeks. I put on a red dress. I went dancing. We have a good time and then you lay this on me. Do you have any idea how insulting this is? It’s too much.”
I started packing my suitcase on the opposite side of the bed.
“Sit your ass down. You’re my wife. You can’t leave me. Or else I can legitimately murder your fucking ass. You do what you want, Nouschka. I don’t make you wash dishes. You’ve never even heated up a jar of spaghetti in the history of our marriage.”
“You talk about what good am I for? What good am I for? How dare you ask! What good are you for?”
We were hysterical. We couldn’t figure out who was leaving who.
“How dare you threaten to leave me?” I screamed.
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re accusing me of accusing you of.”
“All I know is that you’re leaving this morning and you have no intention of coming back and you can’t say it to my face.”
“You’re the one who’s leaving.”
“That’s right. That’s right. Just watch me leave first, and then have the nerve to say that I left you. You know that I could never leave you in this lifetime.”
“Then what are you doing?”
“I’m leaving!”
“So leave.”
“You would let me leave!”
Then we just started really going at each other. We were frustrated because neither of us was ready to be an adult and we didn’t know how to be married. Because we were both terrified of the baby that was on the way. And we both knew that Raphaël was going to run away from it because he could. And I knew that I couldn’t run away from the baby. I could run to the opposite ends of the earth, but wherever I went, I was still going to have the baby. I would fall madly in love with it, with a love that was enormous and unshakable, with a love that was six feet deep and would be buried with me in the grave, with a love that transcended our names and our beginnings and our ends.
He threw the armchair at me. I ducked. It hit the wall and made a hole in it. As I tried to get up, Raphaël came over and held me down on the floor. He held my hands in his hands, and his knees were on the sides of me. I don’t even know what on earth I was screaming.
He let go of my hands for a second and I started slapping him wildly in the face. As he leaned back, I got up. He jumped up too and pushed me up against the wall. He grabbed a kitchen knife and held it against my throat.
“If I killed you, then I wouldn’t have any more problems. Would I? I have to have my head examined for having gotten involved with a crazy family like yours.”
“What? You haven’t had your head examined enough already? You’re not worried about what this is costing the taxpayers?”
“You’re pushing me over the edge, Nouschka.”
“Whatever. Just hurry up and do it then, because I don’t have time for this kind of shit. I’ve got things to do. Besides, I want to go get a new husband. If I get to Montréal early enough, the lineup at the food bank will have started. There’s always a few lookers in it.”
“Sure, sure. I’ll go see if there aren’t any girls being let out of jail for soliciting cops last night. Maybe they’ll be hungry. I’ll buy them breakfast.”
“Why not? Dip into your savings.”
We started laughing at this. He let go of me. We both collapsed on the bed. We lay there next to each other, breathing heavily.
“I wanted you to feel happy with me. But I’ve only made you feel the opposite. I’ve tried to be good enough for you. I can’t do it anymore.”
I didn’t say anything. I did want him to leave. I wanted to get on with life. Being married to Raphaël would be like being married to a hurricane. I would have to be putting up storm windows and climbing up trees to rescue the dog. It was wonderful in a way to be so marvellously distracted, but it didn’t leave you any time or boredom for being a person.
Maybe there was nothing out there. But I felt too young to give up on the world yet. I loved Raphaël, but I loved my life more. I loved Montréal more. And Raphaël would be back. Men always came back. Men always come back. When you least want them back, that’s when they come back.
“Look, I’m going out to Saint-Raymond to see a guy who might want to go into business with me and I’ll be back in two days.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
I left a note on the table for Raphaël, saying that I was back at our old place.
I hitchhiked to the bus station and caught a night bus back to Montréal. I looked out the bus window. The stars in the sky were like candles on the birthday cake of a one-thousand-year-old man. Somewhere in the night there were bears and raccoons with jars stuck on their heads. Like astronauts lost in space.
Someone on the bus had a portable radio that they turned on. The chief negotiator for the separatist movement, Lucien Bouchard, was talking. Everyone on the bus quieted down to hear him. He was magical. He had gone into the hospital months before with a flesh-eating disease. Everyone thought that he was going to die, but he had his leg amputated and was walking in the Saint-Jean-Baptiste parade a month later. He had been spared from death so that he could lead us to having our own country. It had been so long since there had been miracles in Québec.
Everybody wished that he would take one of his suits and cut it up with a pair of scissors so that we could carry a tiny bit of it in our pockets. Give us a relic.
The Canadian politicians said that we were all going to lose our jobs. We were all going to lose our homes. We were going to lose our trading partners. Our economy would totally fall apart and we would never recover. But Lucien Bouchard said very calmly that it was okay. Just vote Oui. Then we would be our own people. We could control our own finances and culture. We wouldn’t have to go to Ottawa for anything. We would have a partnership with Canada. Not to worry.
He had turned the referendum around. Oui was climbing in the polls. And listening to Bouchard, I thought, okay, okay, okay. All that I had was five dollars in my pocket and two hearts beating inside of me. That was enough. I would have faith that Québec would make its own successful country. It seemed natural to vote Oui, because since we were little, Nicolas and I had been taught by Étienne that Québec should be its own country. It was our family’s religion.
I took out my notebook and started working on my speech for Étienne. Writing always took my mind off things. I wanted to think about anything other than Raphaël right at this moment.
As soon as the bus drove into the city, I started to notice that the signs and slogans had already been put up. People who wanted Québec to separate had tied great big signs saying OUI to their balconies. People who didn’t want separation put big signs that said NON on their lawns and in their windows. The telephone poles each had signs that said OUI and NON right on top of each other.
The first thing I did when I got off the bus was go and see Nicolas.
I climbed in through our window. The whole house smelled different. It smelled kind of rotten, the way a house smells when a girl hasn’t been in it for a while.
The trees on the wallpaper had grown taller and many, many more blossoms had opened up on their branches. The drummer boy on the sheets had grown up. He was a tall, handsome teenager with a bayonet in his hand. The birds in the painting had migrated. They were now in the bathroom on the windowsill.
Nicolas was sleeping on top of the covers. He was wearing a puffy pink sweater and white briefs. I turned the small lamp on. Nicolas opened his eyes. He acted as if it was the most natural thing in the world that I had come back to him. He put his arms out. I fell into them.
Nicolas marvelled over my belly, which had gotten much bigger.
“You look like a fucking whale, but in a good way. I knew you were going to come back. I was just about to go look for you. I was trying to round up some people. I was looking to borrow a car. We were going to drive right out to Val-des-Loups and get you back. But you know how I feel about leaving the island. Once I cross the bridge I lose all my magical powers. So I just decided to think about you really, really hard and I knew you would come back.”
“I’m exhausted; you can tell me about everything in the morning.”
It felt good to smell his breath and his skin again. I wondered how it was that I had ever been able to be apart from him. He smelled like winter and tobacco and leather. He always smelled like fireworks had just gone off. I could feel Nicolas’s breath falling and rising. My heartbeat slowed down to his heartbeat.
There I was, back in my room with Nicolas, just like nothing had happened at all. Except there was another teeny-tiny heartbeat in the room, and it was beating as rapidly as that of a little bird.