25

VALERIE WASN’T SURE WHERE she was going. Then she knew.

I am going toward my son.

She felt in her pocket, checking her cell phone to make sure it was on. Then she held it to her ear like a child clutching an enormous seashell, toddling along the beach. The ocean filled her head, the roar of an electronic sea as it crashed on the shore of her native city, and she imagined herself a human antenna, pulling in voices from far away.

Officer, I’m looking for my dad.

My buddy, he’s a rescue worker — gone, like that.

My brother’s a firefighter, pray for him.

To this fragile net of voices, she added her own. Please help me find my son, she said into the phone, as if someone were bound to hear. He’s tall and fair and he carries a laptop. He’s wearing a grey sports jacket and tie.

Let us help each other find whomever we have lost.

Through the centre of town Valerie walked, the phone to her ear, striding past the new lopsidedness of everything, the odd angle of the hardware store, the pâtisserie, the Place du Général de Gaulle tidy with chrysanthemums; past its small, elegant fountain, its empty benches, none of it looking quite as it should, as if she were comparing this scene to a photo in a travel book, as if memory had deceived her. Clouds had returned to the island sky. Floating above the greyness, its steeple hidden, was a slender metal cross, frail and wire-thin. Valerie started walking in what she hoped was the right direction, toward the cathedral in the Place de l’Église.

The church was close by, and for a cathedral, it wasn’t grand; an austere stone-and-concrete building, the colours of its stained glass windows invisible from outside, its clock too slight for the tower’s rocky mass. Valerie turned off her phone. It would be impossible to hear it if it rang. All sound had been driven out by the dead weight of the tolling bell, swinging from its ropes like a hanged man. Yet the dark sound didn’t seem to emanate from this stone tower. Gazing upward, she walked around the periphery of the church, and although the tolling grew very loud, she couldn’t locate its source. It seemed to be coming from everywhere, darkening the town, seeping into the pores of the soil as if the earth itself were tolling.

She felt certain that Andre was here.

As she completed her circle of the church, Valerie noticed a park across the square where a small crowd stood facing the cathedral entrance. They appeared to be swaying in the breeze, gentle as wildflowers lit from inside; a garden full of poppies, cosmos, bluebells, alive with the solemn beauty that plants claim as they grow and die. It felt to her as if these people belonged to this ground, to this particular patch of earth, their roots entangling them, pulling them deep into the soil. The ragged edges of wild asters were alive in the frayed cuff on a fisherman’s shirt; the colour of dark maple in the jersey worn by a young man.

Andre, are you here?

A woman wearing a lace collar dabbed at her eyes. She whispered something. “What a shock for the family,” and everyone grew silent until the young man in the soccer jersey spoke in a soft voice. “You could not have had a better coach,” he said.

Laurent Sarazin, Valerie thought.

“Let us pray also,” said the fisherman, “for the repose of the lost souls in America.”

It was then that Valerie saw the copper light of a man’s hair, the collar of his raincoat turned up; a fair man beside him in a grey sports jacket and tie, a laptop slung over his shoulder. James and Andre stood before her in a human forest without paths, its energy bound into a state of prayer. She slipped into the group, drawing as close as she could to the two men as they clasped hands with others in the circle. She reached out toward her son.

The two men vanished into air.

Where did they go?

They were lost in eternity, in reverent awe, as they had always been.

Alive, she thought.

One afternoon James had brought his art books over for Andre to share, and the two of them spent hours sitting in wonderment, contemplating the sombre icons of Jesus and the saints. Please come back, she thought. Please be alive for me in flesh and blood. Don’t sit talking about the richness of the Church or the visible signs of a hidden God, one of them friendship, the other, love. Don’t stay there in that memory, that living room of ours. Just come back.

Only she remembered what Andre had said to James. “How do you — get all that,” meaning the manifestation of love in the world, and James answered, “I don’t ‘get’ anything. I watch it unfold.” As he said this, James gazed at an icon of Saints Peter and Paul, as if he saw some nuance of tenderness between the two men, and he said to Andre, “Did you know they died together as martyrs in Rome?”

“Oh, cheer me up,” said Andre.

James laughed.

***

She felt a hand in hers. “Don’t cry,” Jean-Claude whispered. “Come.”

It didn’t surprise her that he’d shown up here. She was beyond surprise.

The group began to file into church, but she held back.

“This is not for you?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“I understand. You don’t have to explain.”

She sat on a park bench beside him, closed her eyes, and tried to forget about Andre and James. She could almost picture Matthew celebrating mass inside. If she’d walked into the cool darkness of the nave, she could have imagined him vested, reciting the ancient prayers. Only Valerie knew that since she never went to church, she wouldn’t have seen him. Even if he were there.

“My friend who was flying from Boston is a priest,” she said.

“Have you heard from him?”

“We were lovers, long before.”

She wasn’t sure why she’d said this.

***

They were silent.

“My son and his partner have disappeared,” she said at last.

“Don’t give up hope, Valerie—”

“Then I saw them in front of the church. In that group.”

“They are trying to talk to you,” he said.

She drew in his words like breath.

***

James once asked Andre if he’d been baptized, and Andre told him no.

“Why not?” James asked.

Because his parents don’t take solace in religious bric-à-brac, that’s why not, Valerie’d thought, but James said to Andre, “I could baptize you, if you were dying.” Andre was intrigued by the thought of ritual anointing and cleansing, and he was struck by the fact that anyone could administer the sacrament to a friend in need. He’d grown up agnostic, but later he decided he believed in God. He loved James for his kindness, but he didn’t expect to die soon.

***

Valerie felt Jean-Claude’s hand on hers. “They have all gone into church,” he said.

“Praying won’t help,” she remarked.

“Flying will.”

“You are strange.”

“No, listen. At the heart of flying is a still point, a great silence. It is for people who do not—” He folded his hands in a pious gesture, gazing upward.

“Why did you follow me today?” she asked.

“I think you followed me.”

“We were both followed,” she replied.

He moved to embrace her, but she pulled away. “If you touch me, I’ll fall apart,” she said.

“I am sorry. I am not thinking today.”

“It’s all right.”

He paused. “What did you mean, ‘we were both followed?’”

“We were. By two men who love each other,” she said.

He looked at her, puzzled.

“One of them is my son.”

***

Jean-Claude walked with Valerie across the cathedral square. Then he paused, and gazing far away, he remarked on the clarity of the view, reading the names of one or two shops on Rue Jacques Cartier below them. Valerie, who wore glasses for distance, found his vision remarkable.

“Can you really see that far?” she asked him.

“I must see that far,” he said, “in order to fly.”

Just then, Valerie was distracted by the sight of Lisette. What’s she doing here? She was going into the cathedral, carrying her enormous bouquet of flowers. Valerie hoped that Marguerite’s sister hadn’t noticed Jean-Claude, that the huge blooms would block her view. Gossip could start over nothing. She remembered that inside the church, they were praying for the soul of the late Laurent Sarazin. Lisette must have been fond of him, that she’d come here. Slept with him, maybe, thought Valerie. Who knows?