34

JUST AS SHE WAS about to take the tarte out of the oven, Valerie heard Marguerite coming downstairs, making her way into the kitchen.

“No peeking,” she said.

“You are forcing me to watch TV.” Marguerite rolled her eyes.

“You can go outside and watch the flowers grow. It’s nicer.”

Marguerite went out into the garden and sat facing the herb bed, her back to the kitchen window. Valerie had meant it as a joke, but the gesture touched her. She took the tarte out of the oven, glancing at the TV screen, filthy grey with the haze of New York City’s dust and smoke, and she recalled how when she was a kid, the picture would grow fuzzy if the antenna were off-balance. Her sister Karen used to look at the dots and squiggles and say, Use your imagination. You could be seeing anything at all.

A few minutes later, Marguerite came back inside. She was holding a clump of cosmos, their petals pink, their centres dabbed with yellow. She put the flowers in a glass of water and set them on the windowsill.

Poor cheerful little things, thought Valerie.

“As you can see,” said Marguerite, “the plants are still growing out there.”

Valerie was gazing at the TV screen. “When we were kids,” she said, “sometimes you’d get nothing but fuzz.”

“Je ne comprends pas.”

“The screen. Those black and white dots. We used to make up faces. We used to pretend.”

“But you have not heard anything more of—”

“Andre?”

“Oui.” Marguerite looked troubled. Who did you think? her look said.

“He’s out there somewhere,” Valerie whispered.

***

Down from the sky floats the white ash of the dead. Thirty years old, Andre was wandering, dazed and lost in New York City, lost because he no longer knew his way around streets entangled with darkness, with tolling bells, with “the sign that the Cross makes on the world,” as James said once.

For certain, this was happening.

Ash in his hair, on his skin and clothes, he was searching for his friend, a good man who loved God. Poor Andre, who doesn’t even know whose son he is.