Marianne Limbres walks through the main entrance of the hospital and heads straight to the reception desk. There are two women there, sitting behind computer screens, two women wearing pale-green scrubs and speaking in low voices. One of them—the one with a thick black braid curled over her shoulder—looks up at Marianne: Hello! Marianne does not reply at first. She doesn’t know which department she should go to—Emergency, Intensive Care, Trauma Surgery, Neurobiology—and, struggling to decipher the list of departments listed on a large sign fixed to the wall, as if the letters, words, lines are overlapping and she can’t separate them, put them back in order, find any meaning in them, she ends up blurting out: Simon Limbres. Sorry? The woman frowns—her eyebrows thick and black too, meeting in a furry clump at the top of her nose—and Marianne tries again, managing two brief sentences this time: I’m looking for Simon Limbres. He’s my son. Ah. On the other side of the counter, the woman leans over her computer and the tip of her braid caresses the keyboard like a Chinese paintbrush. What was the last name again? Limbres—l, i, m, b, r, e, s—Marianne spells out and then turns toward the vast lobby, with its pillars, its cathedral-high ceiling and skating-rink floor: the acoustics, the gleam. It is silent here, hardly anyone around. A man in a bathrobe and flip-flops walks with the aid of a crutch toward a telephone on the wall; a woman in a wheelchair is pushed by a man wearing a felt hat with an orange feather—a neurasthenic Robin Hood—and, farther off, near the cafeteria, in front of a row of doors barely visible in the dimness, three women in white have gathered, holding plastic cups. I don’t see him. When was he admitted? The woman keeps her eyes on the screen, clicking her mouse. This morning, Marianne sighs, and the woman looks up again. Ah, so it’s ER. Lowering her eyelids, Marianne nods while the woman sits up, flicks her braid back behind her head, and points over to the elevators at the back of the lobby, then explains how to get to the Emergency Department without having to go outside in the cold and walk all around the buildings. Marianne thanks her and sets off again.

*   *   *

She had fallen back asleep when the telephone rang, buried in an interlacing of pale dreams that sifted the light of day and the shrill computerized voices coming from a Japanese cartoon on the television—later, she would unsuccessfully search the dream for signs: the harder she tried to gather her memories of it, the more it dissolved and she was left without anything tangible, nothing that could make any sense of the terrible shock occurring about twenty miles away, at that very moment, on a muddy road—and she wasn’t the one who answered, but seven-year-old Lou, running into the bedroom because she didn’t want to miss a second of what she was watching in the living room and simply dropping the phone on her mother’s pillow before running back out again, so that the voice on the other end of the line seemed to weave itself into Marianne’s dreams, speaking louder, insistent, and in the end it was only when she heard those words please, madame, answer me: Are you the mother of Simon Limbres? that Marianne sat up in her bed, her brain suddenly awakened by a rush of fear.

*   *   *

She must have screamed quite loud. Loud enough, in any case, for her daughter to reappear, slow-moving and serious-faced, eyes wide, standing in the doorway of the bedroom, her head leaning against the door frame, staring at her mother, who didn’t see her but was panting like a dog, movements frenzied and face twisted, tapping frantically at her cell phone to call Sean, who wasn’t answering—pick up, pick up for fuck’s sake—her mother hurriedly dressing, in boots, winter coat, scarf, then diving into the bathroom to splash cold water on her face, not bothering with any moisturizer or makeup, and only then, lifting her face from the sink, did she see her reflection in the bathroom mirror—irises frozen under swollen eyelids, as if she had suddenly got bags under her eyes, Signoret eyes, Rampling eyes, the green flash at the level of her eyelashes—and feel a sudden dread at not recognizing herself, as if her disfigurement had begun, as if she was already another woman. Part of her life—a huge part, still warm, compact—was detaching itself from the present, toppling into the past, where it would fall away, disappear. She sees falling rocks, a landslide, fault lines dividing the earth beneath her feet: something closes, something is now out of reach. Part of the cliff separates from the plateau and collapses into the sea; a peninsula slowly moves away from the continent and drifts toward the horizon, alone; the door to a cavern of wonders is suddenly obstructed by a rock; in the blink of an eye, the past has grown larger, an ogre gobbling up life, and the present is now a line so thin it is barely visible, beyond which lies the great unknown. The ringing of the telephone broke the continuity of time, and, standing in front of the mirror, where her reflection stares back at her, hands clinging to the edge of the sink, Marianne is petrified by the shock.

Picking up her bag, she turned around and fell over her daughter, who had not moved. Oh Lou. The child lets herself be hugged without understanding, but everything in her look, her attitude, is interrogating her mother, who evades the question—put on your socks, take a sweater, come along—and, as the door bangs shut at the top of the stairs, the thought suddenly enters Marianne’s head—an icy slash—that the next time she unlocks this door she will know the truth about Simon. On the next floor down, Marianne rings the doorbell of the apartment below hers, then rings it again—it’s Sunday morning, everyone’s sleeping—and a woman answers it. Marianne mutters the words hospital, accident, Simon, serious, and the woman, wide-eyed, nods her head and whispers gently I’ll take care of Lou. In her pajamas, the little girl enters the apartment, waving to her mother through the half-open doorway, then suddenly changes her mind and rushes out to the staircase, calling: Mama! So Marianne runs back upstairs, kneels next to her daughter and hugs her tight, then, looking deep into her eyes, repeats the cold litany: Simon, surfing, accident, I’ll be back, back soon. Unfazed, the child kisses her mother’s forehead and returns to the neighbor’s apartment.

After that, she had to fetch her car from the underground parking garage: panic-stricken, she’d had to make two attempts to extricate the vehicle from its narrow space, maneuvering it carefully, millimeters to spare on either side, until she reached the ramp that sloped up to the street. The garage door opened and, dazzled, she blinked several times. The daylight was white, the sky that milky color it has when it snows, though there was no snow—a dirty trick. Marshaling her forces, her reason, she concentrated on where she had to go, driving east through the upper part of town, following the perfectly straight roads—Rue Félix-Faure then Rue du 329 then Rue Salvador-Allende—the way arrowing forward and only the names changing as she reached the suburbs of Le Havre. Opulent villas overlooking the garbage dump of the poor part of town, vast and perfectly apportioned gardens, private institutions, and somber-colored sedans, gradually changing to decrepit buildings and suburban houses with verandas and little gardens, small cement courtyards where mopeds and beer crates stood in puddles of brown rainwater, and now delivery vans were weaving slowly past sidewalks too narrow for two people to walk side by side; she drove past the Tourlaville Fort, the funeral parlors across from the cemetery, the marble headstones behind tall windows, spotted a bakery with lit windows in Graville, an open church—and crossed herself.

The city was sleeping, but to Marianne there was something menacing about it; she had the sailor’s fear of a calm, flat sea. It even seemed to her that the space around her was bulging slightly, as if to contain the phenomenal energy lurking inside the matter, that internal power that might easily turn to dazzling destructive power with the splitting of a few atoms; but the strangest thing—she came to this conclusion when she thought about it later—was that she saw no one else at all that morning, not a single other car, not a single human being, not a single animal—no dog, cat, rat, insect. The world was deserted, the city as empty as if its inhabitants had all taken refuge in their homes to protect themselves from a catastrophe, as if the war had been lost and they were all hiding behind their windows to watch the enemy troops file past, as if they were all quarantined out of fear of some contagious fate, as if they sensed her anguish and fled from it. Metal shutters were closed behind store windows, blinds lowered. The only things that greeted Marianne as she drove were the seagulls, breaking ranks above the estuary, circling above her car, which, seen from above, was the sole moving object in the entire landscape, a little rectangle that seemed to gather up what little life remained on earth, powered forward like a pinball—irreducible, solitary, shaken by spasms. The outside world slowly expanded, seemed to tremble palely, the way the air above a desert or a sun-baked road trembles palely. The landscape changed into something fleeting and distant, turning white, almost vanishing completely, while Marianne drove with one hand on the steering wheel, the other hand wiping away the tears that ran down her face, eyes on the road, and her mind tried to ward off the intuition that had been solidifying inside her ever since the phone call, an intuition that shamed her, hurt her, and then the road dipped down toward Harfleur, the exit for Le Havre, the expressway interchanges where she carefully overtook the car in front of her, passed a forest, motionless and enclosed, and finally reached the hospital.

*   *   *

In the parking lot, she turned off the engine, then tried again to make a phone call. Sitting tense, she listened to the quick, regular ringing noises that the call produced and visualized its progress: the sound speeding away to the south of the city, carried on one of those radio waves that formed the invisible matter of the air, crossing from one relay mast to the next, riding an ever-changing frequency, entering the port area, then an industrial wasteland located near the oceanside dock, snaking past the construction sites of buildings under renovation until at last it connected to that freezing warehouse where Marianne had not been for a long time; she tracked the call as it weaved between the pallets and the wooden beams, between chipboard planks and plywood sheets, merging with the sound of the wind as it was gobbled up there by the sound of splitting tiles, mixing with the whirlwinds of sawdust in the corners, with the smells of polyurethane glue, marine varnish and resin, piercing the fibers of the piled-up work T-shirts, the thick leather gloves, ricocheting between the tin cans used as paint-brush holders, ashtrays, kitchen drawers—a shooting gallery at the fair—the continual vibrations of the circular saw, against the vibrations of the song blasting from an old stereo—Rihanna’s “Stay”—against everything that juddered, pulsated, whistled, including the man working there, Sean, who was at that moment leaning over a cradle with an aluminum rail and stops set at a certain distance for cutting slats of the same width. He was a supple, muscular man with tanned hands who moved slowly, leaving footprints on the powdered floor. Wearing a face mask and ear protectors, he was whistling, the way a decorator whistles as he stands at the top of a ladder, paintbrush in hand, the same shrill melody over and over again. The call reached the inside pocket of a parka hanging close by and triggered a ringtone in the casing of a cell phone—the sound of rain landing on a lake or a sea—a ringtone he had downloaded the week before, and which he did not hear now.

The ringing ended, and the call went through to voicemail. Marianne closed her eyes, and saw the warehouse in her mind’s eye. In particular, she saw Sean’s treasured taonga, shining golden-brown on the metal hanging rails that ran along the wall: the clinker-built skiffs from the Seine Valley, the sealskin kayak made by the Yupik in northwest Alaska, and all the wooden canoes he had made there—the biggest of them had a finely sculpted stern like those you find on waka, those outrigger canoes used by the Maoris in their ritual ceremonies; the smallest was light and supple, the hull made of birch bark and the interior covered with strips of pale wood, Moses’ basket when he was left on the Nile to save his life, a nest. It’s Marianne—call me back as soon as you get this message.

*   *   *

Marianne crosses the lobby. It seems to take her forever, each footstep weighed down by urgency and fear. Finally she reaches the huge elevator, which takes her belowground, to a wide landing, the floor paved with large white slabs. She sees no one, but hears women’s voices. The corridor turns sharply, and then she sees a crowd of people, walking in different directions, sitting, standing, lying in mobile beds parked against the walls. Something happens and there are murmurs, complaints, the voice of a man losing his patience, I’ve been waiting here for an hour, the moaning of an old woman in a black veil, the weeping of a child in his mother’s arms.

A door is opened. Inside she sees a glass desk. Behind it, another young woman, sitting in front of a computer screen: she looks up, her face round and very open. A student nurse, she cannot be more than twenty-five. Marianne says the words I am Simon Limbres’s mother, and the young woman frowns, disconcerted, then swivels on her chair and addresses someone behind her: Simon Limbres, young man, admitted this morning, know anything about it? The man turns around, shakes his head and, seeing Marianne, says to the nurse: Call the ICU. The woman picks up the phone, has a brief conversation, hangs up, nods, while the man comes out from behind the desk in a movement that sets off a surge of adrenaline somewhere in Marianne’s guts. Suddenly she feels hot. She loosens her scarf and unbuttons her coat, wipes the sweat from her forehead, it’s like a sauna in here. The man offers his hand. He is small and frail-looking, his neck thin and creased, like a small bird’s, inside the overlarge collar of a pale-pink shirt. His white coat is clean and buttoned to the top, with his name tag in its correct place on his chest. Marianne shakes his hand but can’t help wondering if this is how hospital staff greet all visitors or if this ordinary gesture somehow manifests an attitude on the man’s part—solicitude or something else—motivated by Simon’s condition. She doesn’t want to know, doesn’t want to hear anything, not yet, that belies in any way the unspoken statement “Your son is alive.”

The doctor leads her through the corridor toward the elevator. Marianne chews her lip as she follows him: He’s not here, he was admitted directly to Intensive Care. His voice is nasal-sounding, the tone neutral. Marianne stops, staring at him, her voice broken: He’s in Intensive Care? Yes. The doctor moves soundlessly, his footsteps small in his rubber soles, his white coat seeming to hover above the ground, the waxy skin of his nose gleaming in the fluorescent light, and Marianne, who is a head taller than him, can see his scalp through the thin covering of hair. He crosses his hands behind his back: I can’t tell you anything, but come with me, they’ll explain everything, I assume his condition required admission to that department. Marianne closes her eyes and grits her teeth. Suddenly her whole being draws back. If he says anything else she will scream, or cover his big mouth with her hand to shut him up, please stop, I’m begging you, and then, as if by magic, he leaves his sentence unfinished, dumbfounded, he stands in front of her, frozen to the spot, his head wobbling above the pink shirt collar, and, stiffly, as if made of cardboard, his hand rises, palm up, toward the ceiling, in a vague gesture that somehow expresses the contingency of this world, the fragility of human existence, before falling back down to his side: They’re expecting you in ICU. As they arrive in front of the elevator doors, their conversation comes to an end; gesturing with his chin to the end of the corridor, the doctor concludes in a calm but firm voice, I have to go, it’s Sunday, the ER is always crazy on Sundays, people don’t know what to do with themselves. He presses the call button, the metal doors open slowly, and, suddenly, as they shake hands again, he smiles at Marianne, a bleak smile, goodbye, Madame, be brave, and turns back toward the sound of shouting.

*   *   *

Be brave, he said. Marianne repeats this word to herself as the elevator takes her to the next floor up. How long it is taking her to get to Simon, the damn hospital is like a labyrinth. The walls of the elevator cabin are covered with medical advice and union announcements. Be brave, he said, be brave, her eyes are gluey, her hands damp, and the pores of her skin are dilating in the too-warm air, ruining her features. Screw bravery, screw this stupid heating system, she can hardly breathe in this place.

*   *   *

The Intensive Care Unit takes up the entire south wing of the ground floor. Access is strictly controlled—there are signs on all the doors forbidding entry to non-personnel—so Marianne waits in the hallway, eventually leaning against a wall and letting herself slide down until she is squatting, her head moving left and right, the back of her skull hard against the wall, lifting her gaze toward the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling. Closing her eyes, she listens: still those voices busily teasing or informing each other from one end of the corridor to the other, still those rubber-soled feet, ballet slippers or ordinary sneakers, those metallic chimes, alarms going off, the wheels of carts rolling on the floor, the continual hum and buzz of the hospital. She checks her phone: Sean hasn’t called. She decides to move—she can’t just wait here—and, standing in front of the double fire doors edged with black rubber, stands on tiptoes to look through the window. All is calm. She pushes the door open, and enters.