Sunday, October 6, 1996
At around seven in the morning, Annette must have gone downstairs very carefully so as not to make a noise, not to wake anyone. She must have warmed up some milk, drunk it from the mug with her name on it—a birthday present from Eugénie when Annette was “seeing” Alain. “Seeing” being the word used in Eugénie’s family for a couple before marriage.
Annette must have put on her parka, her trainers, taken the keys to Armand’s car from the nail in the hall, left the house, driven off, done the nine kilometers to the old chapel on Mont Chavanes—a place that looked like Canada in the middle of Burgundy—to go for her jog.
It was the same ritual every time. On arrival, she’d park down below, walk up to the little chapel, with its permanently open door, to admire daybreak through a 16th-century stained-glass window depicting Mary Magdalene’s burial. No more candles or pews, just the walls, the dusty floor, and this miraculously preserved window that so fascinated the Swedish girl.
She’d return home an hour later, take a shower, feed Jules, and then, over breakfast, wear them all out with this Mary Magdalene. This woman who could have been Jesus’s mistress, the mother of his children, or merely a loyal friend—no one knew. A kind of whore, exactly like her. A whore, whore, whore, whore, whore, whore, whore, whore, whore. Eugénie never said bad words, she thought them.
According to Eugénie’s calculations, Annette must have sailed through the first junction without braking because, that early in the morning, there was no one around; she must have driven along the river until the grade crossing, some two kilometers from the house, where a nasty bend would, inevitably, have forced her to brake, and . . . boom. Her pretty little face up in smoke.
From time to time, Eugénie would glance over at “that one,” who was still pretending to sleep with his back turned to her. Lying in her bed and staring at the ceiling streaked with light from the streetlamp, filtering through the shutters, she had gone through Annette’s journey from the house to the chapel at least a dozen times.
She got up to prepare the children’s breakfast. Who would come to tell them about Annette’s accident? Annette disfigured, Annette seriously injured, Annette dead, Annette reduced to dust. Who?
They would organize a fine funeral for her, among some glorious stained-glass windows. They would place white roses on her coffin. Armand would never get over it. Alain would start over, and she, Eugénie, would look after Jules in the meantime. No way was the little one going over there, to those wretched Swedes.
When Annette walked into the kitchen, deathly pale and red-eyed, with Jules in her arms, Eugénie just looked down, said nothing. Not even hello. Annette prepared the little one’s bottle and then left the kitchen.
It was the first time Annette hadn’t set off for her jog on a Sunday morning in Armand’s car. She never took the twins’ car to drive to the chapel. Armand’s car handled the hills better for getting up there. Well, that’s what she believed until last night. She had just realized that Annette liked to take Armand’s car because it was Armand’s. Even on rainy and snowy days, she would go up there, as though some invisible hand were forcing her to.
Eugénie looked out of the window: the car hadn’t moved. She noticed, too, that the two cars were parked one behind the other. Armand’s Peugeot and the twins’ Renault. That had never happened before, either. The boys always parked the Clio on the dip in the sidewalk that Armand had got made for them, just opposite the garden. A space that remained empty when the twins weren’t there. Where she’d even pull up the weeds that sprouted through the concrete when they were away for too long. Because their car no longer cast a shadow on the sidewalk. Something must have been in their way last night.
Eugénie remembered Marcel’s van . . . He’d had a drink after trying to repair the washing machine. Eugénie went out into the street and punctured the front left tire of Armand’s Peugeot so that no one could use it today. She told herself she’d fix the brake cables tomorrow.
She hurried back into the house, wanting to check that Annette and Alain weren’t taking Jules to that confounded baptism. She was too scared that a row might erupt between them.
And in any case, there’s drinking at baptisms; it was too dangerous.