Epilogue

VALERIE REMEMBERS EVERYTHING. She imagines a river in flood, the East River about to wash out the Brooklyn Bridge, this secluded park, this momentary peace. She’s seated, holding the hand of white-haired Gerard who looks older than his years. It’s late summer and there will be no flood, only a mist of soft rain, only the wrought-iron lanterns, gas-lit even in daylight, only the strangeness of this garden lush with rhododendron shrubs, the Manhattan sky as grey and soft as a cat. Time is passing, and memory drifts at the edge of time.

Six years ago, they were lost in ashes and tolling bells, in candles and murmured prayers. They’d gone to a service at a Catholic church in the Village to mourn with the friends of Andre and James. Chantal and her husband flew in from Paris; Gerard’s brother came from Montreal. Karen and her partner took care of everyone, and afterwards they all went home to sweep up the shards of grief, to dispose of them as safely as they could.

Yet Valerie remembered how Jean-Claude’s presence had brought hope that the vanished might return, how their flight together was a blessing on the sky, how in spite of their anguish, they’d touched each other with kindness. She wondered if she and Gerard could once again be gentle with each other, if she could talk to him in the depths of his suffering.

It didn’t turn out as she’d expected. On their first evening back in Toronto, Gerard took both her hands in his. She was sitting and he knelt down, kissed her hands and said, Please forgive me, Valerie for what I’ve made you suffer. Life has taught me what is important, it was always you and Chantal and Andre, and now that I have lost our son, I feel I am about to lose you, too.

Valerie hid her face in her hands. Words fled her as if she were on fire — her sanity in ashes, as Gerard’s had been. She remembered how many times he’d poured scotch into a glassful of ice and silence, and she wept. He knelt beside her, put his arms around her, held her and whispered, Je comprends, je comprends. I understand, but also I know how you feel, I realize.

And he did — she knew that. Much as she’d guessed at his infidelities, he’d feel in her body the longing that Jean-Claude could have satisfied, the place she’d cleansed of Gerard’s absences, of his constant game of cards with Death where he’d pocket the proceeds for a night or two with her. He knew he’d almost lost her, she could sense it. Even so, he didn’t have to bend down and kiss the hollow that another man had longed to fill. Didn’t have to murmur, once again, forgive me when life had been so cruel to him, first his son and then his wife who’d imagined fleeing if the worst should happen.

***

From: Matthew Reilly

Subject: Condolences

1 September 2002

Dear Valerie,

I know that this email will come as a surprise, since we have not been in touch for a very long time. Quite by accident, I learned from a mutual friend about your tragedy. It is shameful that I never wrote, never called. After the attacks, I decided to remain a priest. It was just as well. I wasn’t generous enough to give you the consolation that you needed. I wasn’t even brave enough to pick up the phone and tell you that.

I don’t believe that God saved my life so that I could do some special work. Who was lost and who was saved is no more or less meaningful than what happens when a hurricane blows through a field of flowers. We are here by the grace of God. We come and go by the wind of time, and that is all.

I’m a priest because I have my limits, not because I believe more fervently than anyone else.

Please give my best to Gerard. I hold you and your family in prayer.

With best wishes,

Matthew Reilly

***

Valerie knew that Matthew had survived by missing his plane. She couldn’t have avoided knowing it — his story was on the news, but she’d been too distraught to pay much attention. Yet she felt there was something she’d left undone and after she received Matt’s letter, she sent him a prayer card from the service held in New York City for her son. It read:

In Loving Memory of Andre J. Lefèvre

18 February 1971-11 September 2001

It was the first date that mattered, but she thought no more about it until Gerard read a report online in The Boston Globe about the city’s observances on the first anniversary. They’d mentioned Matt’s homily based on a text from the Book of Job, and only I alone have escaped to tell you, a text he used because he wanted to bear witness to the suffering of parents who lost children on that day, but no one knew he was talking about his own son, and no one knew what grief he felt, if any.

***

“You didn’t sleep well last night?” asks Gerard.

“It is six years.”

He’s silent. “What is a year?” he says at last.

***

What is a year? It’s always the same. On each anniversary they’d go to Andre’s old church in the Village, attend a service, stroll down West Broadway, pick up a deli sandwich, find a bench in Battery Park or along the Hudson River promenade to the west of the ruined towers, and then they’d lose themselves in a long meander through the same questions, the same reminiscences, a treadmill of rumination that Valerie understood to be a form of grieving, so that this year she said, Let’s go to City Hall Park, away from the crowds. It won’t feel as sad there. Only now she wonders how she could have thought that. It wasn’t as if they’d fled downtown Manhattan. They are sitting just a kilometre away from the place where they’d lost their son.

What is a year? Gerard had asked.

“Years are to time,” says Valerie, “what bureau drawers are to clothing.”

“To keep experience tidy,” he replies.

“It’s just a convention.”

“But I need to believe in years,” says Gerard.

His tone of voice makes the air tremble. She turns to look at him. I must keep sane somehow, his eyes say.

***

Your eyes said more than that, Gerard. They said, I’ve seen what can’t be borne, because your eyes speak with fierce eloquence when you cannot speak in any other way. I knew this in our youth and yet I never understood it. I always thought that in time, words would follow a look of suffering because you were adept with words. This never happened. The night I flew with Jean-Claude, when I sat half-asleep on the dock at Étang de Cap Noir, my phone played “Für Elise” and you called and told me everything you didn’t know — not with words, but with the sound of your voice. I fell as if into deep water, into every echo that the sound of your voice contained.

That morning you’d covered the disaster from a water-taxi bobbing around the tip of Manhattan, and as you moved westward toward the Hudson, your cameraman was shooting; he had a telephoto lens on his rig, a zoom, and he let you look through it toward the burning towers, the southmost one from which Andre had called you, and you saw specks of humanity floating like ash into the sky. You felt sick with disgust, as if the act of looking might honour the destruction forced on these victims, and so you turned away from the videocam, handing it back to your cameraman, and then you felt a humming in your pocket. It was your phone, and you knew without asking who it was.

“But I saw him alive,” I interrupted.

“Forgive me, chère Valerie. I, too, was convinced he was alive. I imagined him running down the stairs as we spoke. I did not want to believe, but then...”

“But how can you be sure…?”

“He said, Je t’aime, papa. And that he loved you, too. He could not get through to Saint-Pierre.”

“But he did, Gerard. I saw the two of them in the Place de L’Église.”

“Mon pauvre,” you said.

“All day I was certain. I was so sure he made it.”

“All day I lied to myself, Valerie.”

***

Remembering this, Gerard sits forward, his face in his hands and Valerie rubs his back. She always rubs his back when he speaks like this, as if she could ease the knot of grief in his body. That sign you saw on TV, I had to do it, he’d said. I knew you’d be watching the vigil. I wanted so much to have hope. I didn’t want to know the truth myself. She remembers that night, that conversation, how Jean-Claude came and took her back to the pension, how kind Marguerite and Robert had been, how they’d looked after everything when she had to leave for New York. She wonders what they’d think of the city. Marguerite, she feels certain, would admire City Hall Park, its jungle of lush rhododendron shrubs, their long leaves glistening. Robert would feel at home with the moody coastal weather, knowing better than to check the forecast. Earlier this morning, there’d been showers. Warm, soft rain.

***

“Come, let’s walk,” says Valerie.

Gerard gets up, and the two of them make their way through garden paths, admiring the elegant wrought-iron gaslights, the glossy shrubbery, the flower beds near City Hall.

“Do you remember your garden?” she asks.

Gerard is silent. “I’d rather not,” he says at last.

“It inspired me.”

“But you are a true gardener,” he says. “You have hope.”

“And you don’t?”

“I am not so patient.”

“You weren’t happy when you gardened. That’s all.”

“And now flowers remind me of death,” he says.

Valerie pauses. “You’ve never told me that.”

“I’m telling you now.”

“How sad. Flowers console me.”

“Que Dieu te bénisse.” His laugh is tart. “Imagination is as good as a stiff drink, ma pauvre Valerie.”

“Gerard.” She hears her voice break.

“What, ma chère?”

“Does nothing console you?”

***

It’s a foolish question. We’ve had to struggle, mourning Andre and forgiving each other at the same time, and it has been hard and painful. Forgiveness is nothing more than the shape you give your life — you are a forgiving person or you are not. In marriage, you open your body to tenderness and human failing. We knew the frailty of our relationship, and we knew it might break and fall apart under the weight of grief.

Yet a child’s murder is so terrible a thing that even estranged spouses have mercy on each other; even in our regret, we had to acknowledge the love and support of Chantal and our son-in-law, the presence of our new grandchild. We had to accept that too much happens in the life of a family, much of it inexpressible.

Too many lost souls gather and abide with us. And then they depart, as unconsoled as we are, for we have life and they do not.

So you are not consoled, Gerard — I understand. As for myself, wary and uncertain about love, I look at the empty sky where those towers were. Everything leaves us, says the void. Everything remains.

***

“I do not feel hopeless,” says Gerard. “It is just that — I loved my son.”

“Je comprends. Bien sûr.”

“Ask me next year, how I am.” His smile is sad.

***

When Andre died, Ora died all over again, you told me that. Only this time, everything changed. You stopped drinking, you cut back on your work, and now you’re an anchor on local French TV; desk work, no reporting — a man whose penetrating gaze has witnessed its final act of savagery. Nowadays, you don’t know what to make of the world, of its grave injustice. You look at me with fearful eyes, as if you could never be certain of anything again.

I try to reassure you, but not with words. About this tragedy, far too many words have already been said. You need to know that because of your tenderness, Andre was born, when he might not have been. Because of your compassion, he had thirty years of life. So I return to you what you gave my son. I touch your face — your eyes, your lips. With my hands I turn your gaze toward me so that you may look into my eyes and see him.

***

Valerie gazes at the New York City sky, and then she drifts into its greyness, seeing invisible boats, hearing the clank of rigging in the barachois — early morning in the town of Saint-Pierre, the steep island street as it was before everything happened.

In City Hall Park, Gerard takes her hand between his, and in its warmth, she feels an infinite strangeness. There’s no sense to be made of anything. Sense isn’t the point, she thinks. Life is too mysterious for sense.

“You never know,” she says.

“Know what?”

She can hear an engine’s purr grow louder, and then she sees a small plane threading itself through the haze; in, then out, like a needle through silk. The plane’s headed east, toward LaGuardia.

“It may be Mr. Groves.”

Gerard looks at her, and his face softens.

“You wrote a song about him once.”

“Trying to come home,” she says.