I arrive at The Hydrangeas. Jo is there. She’s about to leave. She was on night duty. Her face looks drawn. She immediately tells me about Hélène. Explains that her belongings have already been put away, and that another resident is coming at two, and will take her place in room 19. I ask to see her personal effects. They have been put into cardboard boxes and stored in Madame Le Camus’s office. Her daughter is coming to collect them in the afternoon.
“And what about you, any news?” Jo asks me.
“I went to the hospital yesterday. She’s still in a coma; I think her body has just given up.”
“Justine, she’s ninety-six years old: you can’t expect a miracle.”
“You all piss me off, going on about age! Hélène will forever be the age she was on the day she met Lucien in the church!”
Jo asks me if I’m OK. Tells me I look rough. I tell her that it’s nothing, that I’ve just had my grandmother on the phone for an hour and she’d told me certain things, and since she’s never told me a thing in her life, not even the story of Snow White before I fell asleep, it’s shaken me up.
Jo suggests I have a coffee with her to get it off my chest. I feel like replying that, for once, the stories I’ve got on my chest are far crazier than those in the soaps the residents watch on TV. But instead, I give her a big hug and ask her what she’s done to love Patrick all her life. She tells me that she’s done nothing, that she’s been lucky.
Before going to the changing room, I go up to the top floor, and the seagull has well and truly gone. For the first time, I feel like going, too. Leaving my work, my house, exiting this life to enter another one.
As I walk back down, I pass Monsieur Paul’s room and the door is half-open. There have been no anonymous calls for months to the families of the forgotten ones.
I catch sight of someone from the back, leaning towards him, speaking into his ear. I see how gently the visitor holds Monsieur Paul’s hand, I quietly close the door.
I go to get my smock in the changing room. I disinfect my hands. I come across Maria.
“How are you going to celebrate?” she asks me.
“Celebrate what?”
“Hey, wake up Justine, tomorrow night we change year.”
I couldn’t care less about changing year. And also, I don’t like the look of next year one bit.
“Maria, there’s a guy in Monsieur Paul’s room, do you know him?”
“It’s his grandson. He comes often.”
“Really? Never seen him before. I thought Monsieur Paul never had visitors . . .”
“Well I see him all the time, he generally comes by early in the morning.”
“Really. News to me.”
I went into the storeroom. While preparing my cart, I thought of Roman, of unhappy love, lost love, nonexistent love. As I tackled the first corridor, the first door, the first room, the first hello, the first aches, the first memory lapses, the first insults, the first stories, the first protective sheets, I felt like dying in Hélène’s place. But I knew very well that it was she who’d win. She had too much of a lead on me.