28
VALERIE CLEARED THE TABLE and told Marguerite she’d tidy up. She turned on the kitchen TV, watching the news ticker crawl across the screen. Tous les vols sont annulés. All flights cancelled.
I’ll be here a few more days, she thought.
Marguerite made her way into the kitchen. She read the crawler, too, and her eyes gleamed. “Stranded in Saint-Pierre, you can go to the Joinville disco and meet some nice guys. That’ll take your mind off Gerard, at least.”
Valerie didn’t answer.
“You dance, oui?”
“I’m not in the mood. But I met a nice man today, and all I did was walk.”
“Mon Dieu, and on what street did you find him? Tell me!”
“I met a pilot, stranded here. From Paris.” She paused. “His brother’s missing in New York.”
Marguerite grew still. “Please forget what I said about the dancing.”
“It’s just someone to talk to. That’s all.”
“Ben, oui. You might as well have company, ma chère.”
Valerie caught her insinuation like a baseball, a pitch low to the ground. Gerard will not be alone, I can assure you.
It’s not what you think, she thought. Gerard was on the job. He’d try to do his work, to be calm, as a good reporter should be. His missing son would be his sole obsession. He would not be fooling around.
The phone rang.
“For you,” said Marguerite. She left the room.
***
Would you like to join me at the café? Jean-Claude asked. That odd little one on Rue Albert Briand, where you checked your email. He could meet her at five. No, better — he’d come by earlier and they could go together. Had she any word of her son? Not yet, Valerie told him. It is the same for me with my brother, he said. My sister-in-law tells me there’s so much confusion, he might have been swept away in a crowd, safe up in the north end of the city. It’s too soon to know.
Let’s hope then, said Valerie.
In flying, I will find hope, he replied.
Soon, she said.
Maybe tonight, if I am lucky. But I am so grateful for your company today, he said, and she answered, I feel the same, you’re helping me get through this. As she hung up, Valerie entered her own words as if they were a foreign country and she were a refugee. Her son dead. James dead. Her flying away with Jean-Claude, navigating by pirate radio beacons, guided by hidden towers into another dimension of time — disappearing, as Mr. Groves had done, inside a place where memory did not exist. Emptied of the past, she’d start again. That’s what Jean-Claude offered her. Erasure, forgetting.
Oh, but it wouldn’t happen, couldn’t.
Andre and James were in front of the church. They didn’t die.
Forget you ever thought that.
***
Marguerite stood in the doorway. “Going out?” she asked
“Later.”
“Could you pick me some lavender and bergamot?”
“You’re making tisane?”
“I am making you a sachet for your pillow. So you will sleep well tonight.”
Valerie doubted she’d have trouble sleeping. She thanked her.
“It is old-fashioned, but you will see it works.”
Valerie could have told Marguerite that her bed linens were already sweet from drying on the clothesline in the fresh breeze. It was only yesterday that she’d yanked the creaking rope toward her, grabbing each billowing sheet, pulling it off the line, piling it into the basket. Later she’d folded the linens, smoothing them into rectangles, each sheet fragrant with the day’s good air. Some pillowcases were trimmed with Marguerite’s embroidery; others with crocheted flowers. Valerie’s bed had the prettiest set, with a pale blue ribbon threaded through a border of lace. She imagined a sachet, redolent of summer. Tonight she’d close her eyes and sleep, resting her cheek against a lost world.
***
The attacks will change everything, said the TV news.
Back to work. Platters went on the right side of the dishwasher, small plates in front, salad bowls on the left, glasses and serving bowls above, cutlery in the basket. Whatever else happened, everyday things remained the same. In Marguerite’s pension, there was nothing vertiginous, no collapse of visual perspective. There was gardening and laundry and a right and a wrong way to load a dishwasher. Separate the knives from the forks and the spoons, she used to tell Andre. Oh, Mom, get real, he’d say. Knives go blade down for safety, she continued. You think I’ll fall into the cutlery and stab myself in the gut? he said. I think one of us will cut ourselves, pulling the knives out, she answered. Okay, okay, he replied. Andre, do you know what happens if you put the spoons in back to back? Andre broke up laughing. No, what? Do they have better sex that way?
They get clean that way, she said. Valerie gave him points for imagination.
Andre picked up a pair of spoons. Okey-dokey, here goes. He held them back to back and started playing them, doing a little shuffle with his feet. Fifteen years old, what a kid. Jacket off, sleeves rolled up, running down the stairwell thick with smoke. Hurry, Andre, hurry. Her eyes teared up and stung, her hands were shaking, knives, forks, spoons clattering to the floor. She crouched down to pick them up. Chill, Mom, she heard him say.
***
As she worked, Valerie wondered what kind of a man Jean-Claude was. Lean and fit, as pilots were — a man with excellent vision. His eyes were pale blue, and she felt as if she were looking through him, right into the sky. He didn’t wear glasses and he could read the names of shops thirty metres away. Likewise, he’d seen into the depths of her, but his own suffering was open to her gaze in a way that Gerard’s was not. She remembered that night in Toronto when Gerard went trawling for the memory of his injured brother because he couldn’t bear to talk about his lost beloved.
There were things she understood now, that she hadn’t in her youth. One of these was Gerard’s way of being vulnerable, yet skittish, of hiding from her eyes. She’d lived so long with shadows, having to guess at the feelings of a man, at what grieved him.
With Gerard, she’d dig things up on her own. She could still recall the date when he told her how Ora had died. July 21st, 1970. It is five months today since my friend is gone. That was all he’d said.
Valerie dried her hands, turned around and glanced up at a tea towel that Marguerite had hung on the wall. On it was printed a calendar, its borders adorned with trumpet-vines and blue morning glories. What month is this? It seemed strange, that she’d have to remind herself. September. A drowsy fog assailed her, as it did once when she was coming awake from anaesthesia, resting in the recovery room of a hospital, someone checking her vital signs. What day is it? a nurse had asked her. Tues-day, said Valerie, stressing the first syllable as if clarity counted, as if her knowledge of the day of the week could get her out of the hospital faster. Today was that kind of day, thought Valerie. A Tuesday.
September was, for the most part, a summer month. June July August September. Summer in the northern latitudes. It helped to have context. Calendars and clocks were good things, she thought, especially on such a chaotic day as this one.
***
You told me, Gerard, that Ora died in a plane crash. Five months to the day and so the next day I’d counted back, walking to the Central Library, the old one at St. George and College, tucked into the edge of the university campus. In the microfilm room, I unspooled The New York Times on a reel threaded between two glass plates, the page turned right-side-up, my hand cranking past the blur of world national local news: Lord and Taylors Macys Saks Broadway TV listings Book Reviews. Front Page, February 22nd, 1970.
A Swissair passenger plane exploded and crashed yesterday, fifteen minutes after take-off on a flight from Zurich to Tel Aviv, Israel. Forty-seven people perished. A Palestinian splinter group has claimed responsibility.
***
Under the sink, Valerie found dishwasher soap. She poured it into the well, closed the machine and turned it on. The cleansing noise was soft and familiar, the dishwasher’s water heating up with a comforting shhhh. She could hear the TV. Thousands of people had been murdered before her eyes. Poor Ora. Her blood a river, from that day to this.