43

VALERIE’S CELL PHONE RANG. She excused herself and stepped out on to the terrace. Jean-Claude was calling to tell her he was on his way.

“Have you heard from your husband?” he asked.

She mentioned the email.

“Mon amie, I’ve found us a sea-plane.”

“I’ll look forward to that,” she said.

“I just have to be in the sky.”

Valerie took a deep breath. “Have you had any news of your brother?”

“Non,” said Jean-Claude. His voice broke. “I have not.”

***

Valerie came inside. She’d decided to join the men in the TV room.

Lisette glanced at the cell phone in her hand. “Is everything all right?” she asked.

“That’s what I need to find out.”

Marguerite got up and followed Valerie.

“This is no way to spend a birthday,” Lisette sighed. “What’s done is done.”

The TV room was as silent as church. On the screen was a park in New York City. It was shrouded in flags and banners, filled with hundreds of grieving souls. Everything shuddered in candlelight. Valerie remembered the stone steps, the statue of George Washington on horseback.

“It’s Union Square,” she said.

As if that means a thing to anyone.

Squat vigil lights crowded the steps on the south side of the square, waxy stubs as thick and bruised as thumbs crushed under hammers. Their flames were quavering in the breeze, casting light on flowers and crucifixes, statues of the Buddha, people burning incense. As she watched, Valerie felt excised from her surroundings, as if an invisible trowel had pried her loose, shallow root and tender branch. She wanted to be planted in this soil of human nourishment. More than this, she wanted to dissolve into the crowd of mourners, to be the wind passing through the image on the screen of a tall redheaded man in a dark raincoat, his arm around a fair man with a sports jacket and a laptop.

Andre, James. If I were wind, I could touch you.

Nausea came rushing in at high tide. Valerie excused herself. She wanted air.

“Are you finding this hard, ma chère?” asked Marguerite.

She didn’t answer. Alive. Yet the sight of the two men had made her feel ill.

She doesn’t like to let on, whispered Marguerite to her sister.

Valerie felt for her cell phone, then ran out the door.