18

WORRIES COME BACK to you all at once, she thought. It was no good burrowing into the past, as if that might provide some shelter from the fears of the moment. Memory was too aggressive. It would root you out with a wild growl, sniffing and pawing at the ground. It would make you afraid. Worried as she was about Andre, it did no good to remember Matt. She’d only be frightened for him, too.

She called Chantal in Paris to tell her she’d heard from Gerard. While she did this, Marguerite hoisted herself up on a barstool by the stove, finishing the soup she’d started making before these crazy people did what they did, and now she was keeping an eye on the hiss and pop of oil, stirring artichokes and onions into the frying pan, glancing at the TV.

“I am losing count of planes,” she said when Valerie returned.

“Don’t tell me, please.”

“Another one captured. I think a different one has crashed someplace.”

“Gerard called Chantal. She was so relieved.”

“Oui? C’est bon.” Marguerite poured chicken broth into the soup pot, added the sautéed vegetables and lowered the heat. “Taste it, please.” She handed her the spoon. “Does it need more salt?”

“It’s fine.”

“I am almost out of cream.”

“I have to go into town,” said Valerie. She offered to buy some.

“Merci. Go to the fromagerie, and you can also buy me some Camembert and Boursin.”

“I have to check my email. Andre might be—”

“Oui, je comprends.”

“I have to find him.”

“You need to find a computer. Ask in town.”

“You asked me to buy—?”

Marguerite sighed. “Buy whatever cheese you like, ma chère. It’s all good.”

***

Take your time, said Marguerite. The cream goes in at the last minute. We will eat lunch whenever you wish. In her words Valerie could sense the need for a few quiet hours, space away from so much anxiety. Robert offered her his car, along with a picnic cooler to refrigerate the cheese and cream, so that you may sit by the water, in the sun, he said. It is sad to waste a nice summer day.

And what will I do by the water, she wondered. Loll around and sunbathe? My son may be trapped in a fire. My son is missing. She remembered Gerard on the phone. Move your fucking ass. Now, he said to Andre, and her husband’s bluntness was a relief. For sure she’d find a computer, not a common thing in Saint-Pierre, but someone would let her borrow one, maybe the owner of the fromagerie. She hoped her cell phone would pick up a tower. St. Pierre was a thousand kilometres from anywhere, and it was she who’d chosen this remote retreat at the wrong time.

Blaming yourself won’t help, she thought.

Across Rue Amiral Muselier she drove, down a steep hill dizzy with bright houses, and into the centre of Saint-Pierre. Valerie parked, then walked through the old town, its cobbled streets like tipsy sailors, sloping this way and that. She edged her way along narrow sidewalks, shadowed and empty. The shops were quiet for a weekday.

Only nothing looked the way it should. Streets appeared too steep, roofs tilted at rakish angles, like sassy hats; perspective collapsing into buildings too large, too small, too flat, too distant. She wondered if she could walk without tipping over, if she could judge the time it would take to cross the street without getting hit. She imagined New York’s calamity spilling into the rest of the world, its fire and ash collapsing into the steep uphill streets of Saint-Pierre, their flimsy wooden buildings turned to rubble and sliding into the sea. It felt as if the island itself were listing, a ship about to sink.

Then she began to hear the sound — dark and hollow, a single intermittent note of music struck against the noise of cars bumping over the ancient streets. The cathedral bells were tolling, a steady heartbeat, a metronome punctuating the minutes, carving stillness into the day. She’d never heard bells toll before. The sound belonged to another century, to a lost aural landscape, like the ring of a blacksmith’s hammer, or the clop-clop-jingle of horses in the snow. Dark and medieval, the bells were tolling for the victims of the Black Plague, for unseen bodies smouldering on pyres, for all souls, living and dead.

After a while, she couldn’t hear the bells, unless she paused to listen.

The town felt subdued. A few American flags fluttered from the cabs of trucks, from the back seats of motobicyclettes. At the bottom of the hill was a TV shop, Le Salon Électronique, an array of screens in its window, each with its ugly stamp of black smoke and fire, each with the same images of frightened people running. A crowd had gathered to watch. People were murmuring, drying their eyes.

“Un avion est écrasé,” said the newscaster. Another plane had crashed.

“C’est une répétition, peut-être,” a rerun, maybe, murmured someone.

Valerie didn’t care to know which it was.

Then she saw Gerard. A troop of Gerards, one on each screen, walking through the crowd, mike in hand, asking questions of people in flight, but the announcer was doing a voice-over and Gerard was mute. Maybe he’s looking for Andre, she thought. She stared at the multiple of her husband. All the Gerards looked ashen, as slight as pencil marks about to be erased.

***

At the edge of the crowd in front of the shop, she noticed a man who looked like an airline pilot. She couldn’t have said why she thought this. Someone else might have taken him for a professor. He was slim, sunlight toying with his blond hair, eyes both gentle and intent, their light a harsh flicker of worry and fear as he watched the TVs in the window. It was his focused look, so caught up with movement and speed, that made her sure of his profession. Gerard also liked flying, but his life in the sky seemed as accidental as the fate of pollen adrift on the wind. Not so this man. What must he be thinking? she wondered. He turned to look at her.

“A friend of mine flew today,” she said. “From Boston.”

“Dear God.”

It was the tender way he said it, his words falling into the well of her fear. They made her think of Mr. Groves, the lost airman. Perhaps he’d returned to reassure her. Just now, as if time itself had been bent out of shape, struck down.

The man had an airline logo on his shirt pocket. See, he’s a pilot. He would know about these things, that’s all.

She walked away.

Maybe he was an apparition. Matt sending news.

***

Who knows where Matt is? she thought. She imagined him at Logan Airport, boarding his plane, finding his seat, adjusting his seat belt, hearing the smooth click of the buckle, then reaching up to turn the knob that regulates the air flow. He’d glanced at his watch as the plane taxied down the runway, reaching for whatever book he’d shoved in the pouch in front of him. Something serious, pastoral theology or social justice. Up ahead, the video ran through the safety procedures — a woman’s smooth, dream-whip voice backed by a cheery soundtrack. He registered her message: should you have to evacuate, the floor lights will guide you along to the beat of the bouncy music and we’ll all have a fun time riding down the slide. He went back to his reading. As the plane reached its cruising altitude, he began to hear the wild, frenetic ticking of the clocks, time running through the hourglass, running in the wrong direction or in no direction at all, and these were the same sounds she’d heard at the very same moment, walking uphill on the Rue Maréchal Foch, tick-tick-tick-tick as the pilot announced that a light breakfast would be served. Matt was seated in Business Class, and up ahead, the flight attendants were manoeuvring the trolley, preparing to serve coffee and croissants to the First Class passengers. A man got out of his seat, moving in slow motion toward the woman at the trolley with her back to him. Matt figured he was off to the washroom — a tight squeeze around her. Only the man shoved the flight attendant aside and knocked her over. There was blood, and Matt realized that the man had stabbed her. He saw the flash of a knife, and in an instant, his hands remembered the chill grip of a gun, how it had felt in the war as mercy fled him, as the enemy’s body thudded to the ground. Horrified, he watched as the assailant yanked the keys from the flight attendant’s pocket and opened the cockpit door.

Valerie kept walking. She couldn’t continue imagining this. She wondered where that man had gone, the pilot.