20

LISETTE HAD LEFT the fromagerie. As Monsieur Leduc turned to Valerie, he glanced at the card in her hand. “You must go there,” he said, as if he were giving her directions. He pointed to a plate. On it were pale, creamy slices of Neufchâtel and St. Paulin.

“Try some, Madame.”

She wasn’t hungry, even for a sliver.

Even so.

The St. Paulin was mild and buttery, the Neufchâtel piquant. Valerie ordered both. Don’t forget the cream, she thought. She wouldn’t. She never forgot anything because nothing disappears from the world. Her mind still held fast to those evenings in Toronto, to the grief she’d felt at the thought of losing her child.

Nothing had changed.

She asked Monsieur Leduc if Saint-Pierre had an Internet café.

“No, but they will help you at the pottery shop.” He paused. “Tell them you spoke to me.” His voice was firm, like a policeman’s. He weighed the St. Paulin, then the Neufchâtel.

“Four hundred grams is okay?”

The TV showed a wreckage of wings and fuselage, a smouldering building, a wall crushed. Le Pentagon, the news crawler said. Monsieur Leduc wrapped the cheese and took the cream from the refrigerator. Then he watched the TV, his face darkened with sorrow.

“C’est terminé,” he whispered.

On the screen, a tower collapsed in a dark accordion of noise, and in seconds, it vanished from the earth, taking with it the precious music of a thousand souls or more. Only this cacophony was the opposite of music. It was the ugly, dissonant crash of a huge hammer smashing up a piano, all notes sounded at random and at once.

Valerie imagined a cordon of yellow tape encircling the world.

Andre had fled one of those towers. Which?

“My husband and my son are in Manhattan,” she said. “Je suis new-yorkaise.”

Monsieur Leduc handed her the parcel. He looked stricken.

She opened her wallet, but he held up his hand. “No, Madame, please. I am so sorry.”

At the bottom of the TV screen, the crawler reported that a fourth plane had crashed in a Pennsylvania field.