7

TRYING TO USE THE PHONE, Valerie couldn’t even feel it in her hand. She’d become a conduit of senseless information, as if she were a chopper pilot hovering above the burning tower. Ch-ch-ch-ch, rotors slicing air. Transmitting and receiving, the world pressed to her ear.

The phone rang. “Hello?”

Silence.

Gerard. I know you’re there. “Is that you, Gerard?”

Calm down, she thought. This phone must be on the blink. The island’s dampness could rot the wires. Gerard would try her cell.

Marguerite was in the kitchen when the phone rang a second time. She picked up the extension. The voice on the other end was loud enough for Valerie to hear.

“Happy birthday, ma chère.” It was Marguerite’s sister, Lisette.

“Merci. It is a birthday like no other.”

“But I have sad news.”

“We haven’t had enough?”

“Laurent Sarazin died last night.”

Valerie didn’t know this man. She listened. The telephone made Lisette’s voice sound hollow and tinny. Monsieur Sarazin had had a massive stroke. “The poor man,” the woman kept repeating. Her thin voice crackled with shock.

“I know, I know, ma pauvre,” said Marguerite. “C’est terrible.”

Lisette wanted to speak to Valerie. She picked up the phone and expressed her condolences.

“Merci,” said Lisette. “Marguerite doesn’t know that the Sarazins were supposed to come tonight.”

“He’ll be missed, oui?”

“By everyone. He owned the horlogerie.”

Valerie remembered the name on the plaque by the door.

“Could you bring an extra tablecloth?” asked Lisette.

“Oui. Of course.”

“Bien. On my lunch break, I’ll buy the flowers.”

What if Gerard’s trying to get through? thought Valerie. Or Andre? She told Lisette she had to go, and why.

“Don’t worry, ma chère. The media make too much of things.”

Valerie hung up.

***

Nothing in this world happens without consequence, she thought. She would have imagined that in the middle of a worldwide news event, the fate of Laurent Sarazin would resemble the tree that falls in the forest with no one to hear it. Yet it wasn’t so — not at all. In Marguerite’s telling, the man was a good neighbour, and therefore it was no small thing that he’d died. Had he been a tree, he wouldn’t have had a thudding fall. Yet the town would have mourned the lost shade of his flowering branches, their reliable production of sturdy, chill-resistant leaves. A native of Saint-Pierre, the owner of the horlogerie wasn’t a clockmaker or an ingenious inventor, or even an obsessive tinkerer as Matthew’s dad had been. His accomplishment was to have sold everyone in town a watch or an alarm clock. He’d kept the saint-pierrais on time for work and school, for soccer matches and christenings. He’d made the rambling flow of days a little more coherent.

She saw Robert standing by the back door, his head bowed. His skin looked raw, as if lashed by rain. His hands were clenched together.

“They were buddies,” said Marguerite, her voice soft. “From school days.”

“Why don’t I leave you two alone,” said Valerie.

“He’s already gone.”

Gone where?

Robert unclenched his hands, gazing into the far distance. Invisible was the ocean, his hand on the rudder, a sail leaning into a bitter wind.

***

Lisette had tied up the line for only a few minutes, but Marguerite checked her voice-mail anyway. Nothing. It felt to Valerie as if a dark star had blocked out all transmissions, had made it impossible to reach her loved ones. No matter how close she imagined them to be — New York City was at least in this hemisphere — her family’s light was reaching her eyes from the great distance of a lost time. She could only look back at them, as she would at starlight. It was beginning to feel ridiculous, that she’d try to call her family.

“Who called before Lisette?” asked Marguerite.

“I think it was Gerard.”

Marguerite looked puzzled. “You think?”

“I didn’t hear a word.”

“Then how could you know?”

“It was the silence,” said Valerie. “That’s how.”

Marguerite looked skeptical. She put a hand on Valerie’s forehead. A moment later, she was pointing at the TV, as a plane veered into a steep bank, and a second tower disappeared in the smoke.

“Maudits kamikazes!” she yelled.

Gerard! Valerie grabbed the telephone and started punching in numbers.

She listened. No answer, not even his voice-mail.

It felt to Valerie as if some mighty law of nature had failed them. In that case, there’d be no one to blame for magnetic poles destroyed, the earth in a dizzy wobble, the wild swinging of gyrocompass needles that sent planes swerving off course and crashing into buildings.

The newscast noted that both of those planes had flown out of Boston. As Matt might have done.

Her mind groped for an explanation. She thought of the plane that had vanished into air when she and Karen were children. Maybe it had just returned, transformed into an angry hornet driving its needle-nose into the tower. Soon would come another lost plane, and another. Fighter-bombers, kamikazes from World War Two, single-engine Pipers and Cessnas, the plane that carried Gerard’s beloved Ora, all of them hurtling over the edge of time. Only time is an arrow that points in one direction. You cannot come back.

And I’m nuts, she thought.

Where are you, Andre? And James?

Valerie held the receiver to her ear, and strangers’ voices roared in her blood. We’re as high as heaven. The plane crashed below us. Please help.

Putting the phone down, she rifled through her purse, looking for James’s business card. She found it, turned it over. Andre’s number was scribbled on the back. She grabbed the phone again. The line was dead.

“I can’t get through to my son,” she said.

“Ma chère, you haven’t dialled,” said Marguerite.

She tried Andre’s cell and got a recording. Please try again later.

Marguerite turned up the sound on the TV. The newscaster said it was a terrorist attack. Two planes had been hijacked, and the culprits were from the Middle East.

Gerard used to talk about these guys, thought Valerie. I should have paid more attention.

Robert left the kitchen and went upstairs.

Valerie felt dazed. “I’ll have to phone again,” she said.

“Ma pauvre.” Marguerite patted her arm. “Later. It is all right.”

***

Dank waters of memory rising, her father drifting away, Robert setting out to sea, and Valerie herself was far from home. She could feel sun in the warmth of Marguerite’s touch, in the brilliant colours of the garden, in the morning when the sky collapsed on Laurent Sarazin. What madness. She imagined Madame Sarazin, paralyzed with shock when she learned what had happened. She’d know the woman by her stricken look, the same as her mother’s when the police came to the door.

The phone rang again.

“Tell them my birthday is cancelled,” said Marguerite.

It was Valerie’s daughter, Chantal, calling from Paris.

“Thank God, maman, that you’re not in New York,” she said.

“Maybe I should have gone.”

“Have you spoken to Papa and Andre?”

She had to tell her daughter, no.

Chantal started to cry. The sound startled Valerie, as if moments ago her young daughter had fallen off her bike, as if she’d need stitches.

“Maman, have you ever lived through anything this terrible?”

No, said Valerie, she had not.

Yet as a child, she’d lived through a deep sadness, one belonging to the same downtown that was now under siege. She couldn’t tell her daughter that sometimes life flips a switch and the past lights up, as if it weren’t the past at all but some part of the present hidden in shadows.

Years ago, the shops on Canal Street had bright red banners with Chinese characters for good luck and prosperity, but her family, still grieving for her father, didn’t notice. Her mother’s hand felt brittle, and her Aunt Ann was saying, Now Valerie, you’re the birthday girl, and what would you like? because Karen had already chosen a yellow paper parasol with a green pattern of leaves. Valerie wanted her father. She wanted the ache in her heart to go away.

She’d felt bewildered by all of it — painted fans, joss sticks, embroidered silks, her mother picking through a rack of Chinese dresses. Valerie wanted to hold on to her so she wouldn’t go away, too, so she ran over and hugged her mother who didn’t respond, who kept pushing aside each flower-patterned dress, the hangers squeaking against the metal rack, her face streaked with tears, crying in front of such a pretty display, and then Valerie was crying, too. Karen put her arm around her sister. But it’s your birthday, she whispered. She dried Valerie’s eyes with her handkerchief, then drew her under the parasol. Be good, she said. I’ll help you choose a gift.

“You will let me know when you hear from papa?”

Valerie told her daughter that she would.

After she hung up, she turned on the kitchen TV. Another plane had been seized, or maybe two, or maybe more. No one seemed to know how many. You’re safe, you’re not in America, be glad you’ve come to an isolated place, she thought. Yet she worried about going outside, as if some avion détourné might fall through the broken sky above the island, as if a rockslide of lost souls would rumble down and crush her.

Valerie’s thoughts went skidding off the road. They’re with God, said her mother. Now and then collided until Valerie didn’t know which was which. The police had closed off Canal Street and New York City was under martial law. Her mother was weeping for the dead. Her Aunt Ann wanted to treat them to Chinese tea and sweets, but Canal Street was black with smoke, and all the shops were closed.

Valerie didn’t know why anyone would be eating.

In the middle of an attack.