5

THESE WEREN’T HIGH MOUNTAINS on Saint-Pierre, nothing above three hundred metres. Steep, grassy slopes folded into valleys, and the hillsides were lush with green and studded with rocks for footholds. Valerie made her way with care. As she advanced toward the highest crest, she could see a gauze-white dusting of flowers against the green slope. Upward she climbed until at last she found a cluster of rocks sturdy enough to bear her weight. Then she crouched down to get a better look. Close to the ground, below the tatters of fog, she could see for herself the bone-cold frailty of everything that lived here. She wasn’t sure what this tiny flower was — she’d never seen it before. In her jacket pocket was a guidebook of fleurs sauvages, and she pulled it out, flipping through the pages. Diapensia lapponica, that was it. Five-petalled flowers nestled in thick, matted green, the tough leaves hugging the rocky soil, the plant groping for a roothold. She examined the slight blooms and their sturdy leaves, noticing how well adapted they were to the damp chill and the wind.

Remembering her moment of dizziness in the park, she got back up on her knees with care. From her backpack she pulled out her camera and photographed the flowers. She wanted to make notes and there was nowhere to sit. Her map told her that she’d walked north toward a pond called Pain du Sucre, Sugar Loaf, then eastward and up into the hills above the coast, meandering along a twisting path beside trees stunted by wind and clumps of shrubbery that hugged the face of the island. She could see the waters of L’Anse Coudreville in the distance and the shore road leading into town.

The fog began to lift, the sturdy hillside shrubbery glittering in the light, the blue sky unfurling like an enormous flag. Fog-bound most of the time, the island was brimming with sky. Valerie felt uneasy, as if the sun were a brassy intruder. She remembered her first summer in Canada, vacationing with Matt just before he left for Vietnam. They were walking in a farmer’s field near Tottenham, off the Airport Road, twilight hovering over the blue sky, when they saw a huge fireball streaking across the western horizon, gold with a hue of green; magnesium, he told her. A meteor. Make a wish, he said, but she felt sad for this decomposing chunk of matter that might have once belonged to a lost civilization, and she didn’t want to wish upon this poor rock’s fiery misfortune. Meteors happen, said Matthew. At least they go out in a blaze of light.

Glancing again at the brilliant sky, she felt the same uneasiness, as if the sun had emerged from the curtain of fog to take a bow before the play ended, before earth’s star collapsed into a coal-black dwarf, knocking out the planet’s delicate balance of gravity and angular momentum. Moments from now, the earth would wobble off its axis, topple over, turn into a snowball, fall and never stop falling. She grimaced. That’s your marriage you’re worrying about. Or maybe not. Maybe she’d taken a wrong turn, meandering down the cul-de-sac at the end of time. She heard no birds, no rustling of trees in the wind. No wind.

***

Valerie noticed a sheltered grotto in the rock. Sitting down on a flat stone, she pulled out her notebook and began to sketch the flower parts of diapensia lapponica. As she looked at this slight little bloom, she remembered reciting a poem for Matt, one of Tennyson’s. Flower in the crannied wall/I pluck you out of the crannies/I hold you here, root and all, in my hand…. She tried to remember what came next … root and all, and all in all…. The rhythmic words seeped into her body, along with the sun on the warm rocks. She closed her eyes.

In her dream, she’s climbing the slope, in no particular hurry. Not climbing; drifting because she can’t feel the ground. She’s a wraith. She can move as slowly or as quickly as she wishes; she isn’t bound by time or distance or impeded by obstacles in her path, and just as she begins to wonder if she’s dead or alive, she feels a rushing sensation, and she’s no longer walking but flying. Overcoming gravity, she knows she’s alive. Only Ora’s inside her, and the longer she flies, the faster she flies, and with speed she experiences the weight of her mortal body. Higher and faster, a human meteor about to burn up in the atmosphere, a red-hot torch that sets the blue cloth of the sky on fire, and it’s only now that she understands that the ancient firmament is made of glass, that the sky itself is a curtain rent from top to bottom, that she’s about to fall and will keep falling until the hard rock of earth slams into her. The last things she sees are the meadow flowers racing up, an enormous whiteness.

***

Awake, Valerie remembered Ora’s presence in the dream and she felt afraid. She looked at her watch. She’d been asleep for fifteen minutes, but nightmares were friends with darkness, with three a.m. in a frightened child’s bedroom. She’d woken up to daylight as brilliant as the dream itself. Maybe she wasn’t awake yet.

Below and to the east, she saw the wet and sinuous curve of the shore road snaking toward water, the cove jammed with picturesque dories and fishing boats bristling with radar. There were squat fishermen’s cottages clinging to the sides of hills. She thought of mudslides and erosion dragging these frail batches of timber into the sea, and she wondered why she hadn’t seen the danger before. Yet the boats and the houses, solid and real, reassured her. There were no clouds in the blue sky, and the sun was beginning to roll southward. It was almost nine-twenty, and she’d had enough for this morning.

Valerie started downhill, wending her way along the narrow, overgrown paths, gripping tree branches, stumbling on rocks. It was a three-kilometre hike from here to the edge of town, and once she’d made it to the bottom of the hill, she kept an eye out for the park where she’d rested earlier that morning. There it was, near Rue Maréchal Foch. The old men playing pétanque had gone, but she noticed a set of silvery balls rolling around in the square, as if the game had ceased only moments ago. Or was continuing, played by ghosts.

***

Downhill she walked on Rue Maréchal Foch, edging along the narrow sidewalk past ramshackle shops, past houses lit with colour, each with its lace-curtained window, each curtain stitched with white-on-white patterns of windmills and sailboats, each windowsill holding its tangle of potted geraniums in flower. Silence. Mid-morning and no traffic, no gridlock of mini-cars and vans, no honking klaxons and irritated drivers. A short block away, she saw the photo shop on a side street, and she looked for the horlogerie next door. It was gone. The fog had wrapped itself around it and fled. Time had folded it up and put it in its pocket. Valerie felt uneasy.

She walked through town along the shore road. The water was calm with a glassy stillness, and she imagined a bright river lapping against the pier, Gerard standing just below the Brooklyn Bridge, feeling the power of its cabled steel, an enormous loom weaving everything into its play of light. He and his cameraman were ambling along, walking up Wall Street to Broadway, standing beside the Morgan Bank, its concrete wall nicked by an anarchist’s bullets. That happened back in the twenties, she recalled, and they never caught the guy.

In the centre of Saint-Pierre, the promenade was empty, along with the benches surrounding the fountain at Place du Général de Gaulle. No customers sat at the café tables; no young mothers were wheeling strollers and chatting. As she passed the gendarmerie, she saw a police car whizzing off in the direction of the airport. Past the harbour she walked; past the quais where the ferries left for Miquelon and Newfoundland. Nothing was moving. It reminded her of the game of Freeze they used to play as kids — everything held in suspension, like human chunks of fruit in aspic. It felt like the East Coast blackout of the sixties. Her mother’s stove off. Her neighbour’s lights out. Then the whole street dark, the shoreline dark, an entire city of blackness. City after city after city.

A bomb that kills people, but leaves buildings intact — what’s it called? She couldn’t remember. She still felt exhausted from the time-change, not to mention the hike. Prone to misjudgement, to the mind playing tricks — even on vacation, she was overdoing it and losing sleep. Ten-forty a.m. Two hours ahead of Gerard. Strange, how she measured time, as if New York City sat on the Prime Meridian. Here she stood in a tiny speck of France where everyone took it easy at mid-morning. When she got to the pension, she’d take a nap.

She glanced again at the water, imagining a boat, a ferry, a water-taxi plying the East River. Gerard was smiling because he loved the water. Now he was facing the river, eyeing the reflective surface of a building, wondering how to work that bouncing, morse-code light into a news clip. He’d leave Henri to fiddle with the light meter. Rue Amiral Mueslier. Before her was a bright blue house, trimmed in red; a sign out front: Pension Gervais. Robert’s black Pugeot was parked on the street. Valerie walked up the stairs, turned the key in the lock, and opened the door.

***

She stood in the hallway. To her right was the dining room that led into the kitchen. To the left was the living room, its sunny front window crowded with geraniums, the lace curtains pulled wide open, the furniture protected with plastic slipcovers from the bright sheet of light. The room had the formality of an old-fashioned parlour, the sort of place where no one sat but guests who came for dinner. Down the hall, at the back of the house, was a TV room. Part of the room had been a porch once, but Robert closed it in, leaving the back door that opened on to the potager, its produce ready for harvest. Last night Marguerite was saying that the vines were heavy with ripening tomatoes, that they had to start picking them for canning, and here she was with a twisted ankle. Valerie had told her she’d look after it. Is that the TV? She listened. It was.

Injured or not, it wasn’t like either of them to be indoors on a fine day.

Valerie walked into the TV room. From where she was standing, she couldn’t see what was on the screen, only its pale, unnatural glow reflected in the fixed stares of Robert and Marguerite. Beyond them, the back door was open, a bright square of daylight punched into the shadowed room. It framed a patch of garden, staked vines bending under the pendulous weight of ripe squash, enormous leaves, brilliant yellow flowers.

Neither Robert nor Marguerite turned to look at her.

“Regarde le télé,” Robert whispered.

Look.