Coq, page 23
The night wears like a wet mitten, the air brisk, the minutes cold. I shiver, pull my sleeves over my hands, press my arm against the sharp brick of cash in my pocket. I should be back at the hotel packing and checking in for my flight. I’ve neglected my work email for two days, ignored the LinkedIn message from the recruiter. Tomorrow, I tell myself. Tomorrow I’ll be on a plane and everything will go back to normal and what happened in Paris will stay in Paris and who goes to Switzerland, will stay in Switzerland.
I text Émile: I just give them the money?
Oui.
How do I know they’re not going to go back on their word?
Trust me, he says.
I pick up my pace, dodging remnants of protest. A rainbow scarf, a lost backpack, a child’s soother. Mona sees me coming and waves. Another fifty feet and this will all be over. I glance up at the earnest moon and take comfort in its surety, fumbling for the bills in my pocket and head toward what resembles a TV set. The cops who skipped leg day, the angsty teen, the bad grandpa, the second wife, the ex.
“You have the beeznus?”
It’s not the Mediterranean cop who asks, but the leathery one with the Crocodile Dundee skin, tin soldier pants, eyes like glazed buns.
“He means the money,” Glen says.
“The bribe,” I correct.
“Claudia,” Dad interrupts. “Just pay them already. I need my pills.”
“Can you at least take their handcuffs off?” I flash the wad of euro in front of Mediterranean Cop. “Before I hand over the beeznus?”
The cop eyes me with a mix of scorn and . . . admiration? He takes a step forward, chest inflated, hands on his hips like a seventies-era detective sniffing out a scam. His body odour is sex.
“Your wife ees very bold,” he says at last. To Glen.
“I’m not his wife,” I say. “I’m her mother. His daughter. Can you just uncuff them so we can get on with it?”
“You two aren’t married?” He shifts his muddy gaze back and forth between Glen and me. “But you are a beautiful couple. And you are in Paris. What are you in Paris for if not for each other? If not for love?”
I want to believe he’s kidding. That he couldn’t possibly care about the nature of me and Glen’s relationship while actively extorting us, but there’s an undeniable curiosity in his face, a cliché so on point I nearly laugh.
“We’re in Paris to remember my mother,” I say.
He motions to a brick resting next to Joan’s ankle.
“Your mother was an activist? Une criminelle? Une femme radicale?”
“I don’t know,” I whisper. “I never knew her.”
forty-four
Glen takes the money and pays Med Cop, while Crocodile Dundee releases Dad and Joan. Mona eats a loaf of bread.
“Now what?” Dad says.
I check my phone, click on Émile’s address. A five-minute walk.
“We need to deal with that.” I gesture to my father’s head wound, his blood the cheerful red of grenadine or geraniums.
“I’ll call an Uber,” Glen says.
“We can walk.”
“Back to the hotel?” Mona asks, brushing crust flakes from her chest.
Joan tugs on my sleeve the way she did as a toddler. I stumble from the force, from the memory of her doughy hand, fingernails like pincers, her expression somewhere between madness and God. Joan of Arc.
“I’m sorry,” she says, tears so crystalline I can nearly see my reflection. She sniffs. “I got kinda carried away.”
“Did you start it? Is what they said true?”
She opens her mouth to speak but says nothing, a silent admission, and then wipes her tears with what remains of her sleeve. Glen sidles up beside me, where I need him, where I want him. I feel a shift in my body the way I do when I step through my front door. It’s the promise and comfort of home.
“What you did was wrong,” Glen says, checking Joan’s bare arm for scrapes and bruises. “You could’ve been hurt and God knows what kind of punishment you might’ve faced if your mom wasn’t able to get you out of this mess.”
I don’t tell them it was actually Liam and his bitcoin empire that paid for her release.
“It’s good to believe in something,” I say. “And it’s good to fight for what you believe. We need that. The world needs that. I mean, look around.”
A pigeon hobbles across the pavement, one leg a faded stump, feathers a child’s craft, pecking at a climate sign smeared with blood.
“But you can’t go around breaking the law.”
“Am I in trouble?” she sobs.
“Yes,” Glen says. “But your mother and I will need to discuss what that means.”
Mona wraps a scarf around Joan’s shoulders. I have no idea if it’s one of hers, or one she stole during her Paris crime spree, but despite the scarf’s gaudy pattern and dizzy fringe it’s exactly what Joan needs.
I forward Émile’s address to the group text, clear a mangled barricade and head south across the square. Dan and company beat us there. Bobo’s been recovered. It dangles from Emma’s hand, a poor dance partner.
“What is this?” Dan asks, staring up at the beige building. It’s beautiful in its simplicity. Only the balconies are complicated, severe and tight as mesh.
“This is the house of Émile Fontaine.”
“He a fashion designer?” Wes asks. A hickey the size of a Liechtenstein pulses from his neck.
“He was grandma’s boyfriend,” I explain.
“Before she met me,” Dad chimes with misplaced bravado.
“Grandmas have boyfriends?” Emma asks, her nose scrunched in disgust. She fondles Bobo’s giant plastic eyes.
“Yes,” I reply. “Grandmas can have boyfriends.”
“So why are we visiting our grandma’s boyfriend?”
“Because he’s the one that got Joan and Grandpa out of trouble. We’re going to thank him. Plus, he’s offered to help clean up Grandpa’s head so we don’t have to go to the hospital and hand over any more beeznus.”
My family stands obediently around me like mercenaries promised a cot and paycheck and a second chance. I push the buzzer to Émile’s apartment and we all look up as if he might appear in a window, as if he’d always been expecting us.
forty-five
The fifth floor. If there’s an elevator, no one sees it. We ascend the black staircase in single file. After sitting for too long hunched on the sidewalk, Dad can barely bend his knees. It’s uncomfortable watching him cling to the banister, hearing him grunt with each flight. Célestine is still with us, silent, dragging Wes behind her. Tomorrow she’ll hijack our plane and kidnap him.
Three missed calls and a text from Allison-Jean. Cindy and I have reiki tomorrow, Harrison will pick Emma up from the airport. I nudge Emma up the final flight of stairs. Allison-Jean and Dan will do their best to make their divorce amicable. They’ll attend parent-teacher interviews and spring concerts. They’ll co-host birthday parties and share pictures when one of them can’t be there to watch Emma’s piano recital or Harrison’s graduation ceremony or Liam’s first trip to space. But for now, the divorce is fresh and terrifying and raw as an exit wound. This is why Emma clings to Bobo. Bobo represents before.
Mona keels over on the top stair to catch her breath. A door at the end of the hall opens and Émile steps out, finely dressed. He looks just like his photo, perhaps a little smaller, a tad older.
“Soyez la bienvenus,” Émile says, extending an arm. Dad and Dan shake his hand. I give him a hug. His presence is warm and benign, unthreatening as a sloth. He gestures us into a sitting room with built-in shelves and palatial drapes, velvety couches and stiff militaristic chairs. An ancient rug covers the floor. Laid out on the coffee table is a medical tray: angled scissors, bandages, rubbing alcohol, gauze, an unmarked jar of ointment. I can’t help but notice the stack of books beside it: an atlas of untamed places, another on textiles, and a thin irregular-sized book on lighthouses — did Mom give it to him?
I take Joan to the bathroom, fill the sink with warm water. She washes the makeup and dirt from her face, unravels her braids. I pluck a tiny shard of glass from a crease in her dress.
“You okay?” I ask as she scrubs her hands. The pipes bray and we both look up like the ceiling might cave in. In the mirror, Joan’s lip quivers.
“I’m sorry I ruined our last night in Paris,” she sniffs.
“You made it more complicated and expensive, but you didn’t ruin it.”
She frowns. “I got arrested and Grandpa has a hole in his head.”
“Those things are true, but somehow I think Grandma would approve.” I pull a burr from her hair. “I feel like we were meant to end up here, tonight, all of us together. Perhaps not for the reasons we did, but life rarely unfolds how you think it’s going to. We can dream and plan and practice and work hard — and those are good things to do — but it doesn’t mean life will work out the way we hope.” I dab at a scratch on her neck with my finger. “Disappointment comes from expecting life to be different than it is. Peace comes from recognizing that.”
“You’re rarely peaceful,” she says.
“Rarely?” I ask.
She shrugs. “I don’t know. You just always seem stressed.”
“Probably because it took me nearly forty years to figure that out.”
Joan smooths her hair with her mangled gel-tip Paris-themed nails. “I’m still going to play professional soccer,” she says.
“Yeah,” I nod. “You probably will.”
She examines her reflection one last time before drying her hands and nudging open the door. “You should have seen Grandpa, though. This guy in like, coveralls and a ski mask blew up a store and Grandpa dove through the window headfirst. It was crazy.”
I stay in the dim-lit bathroom tracing the floral wallpaper and contemplating whether Dad’s behaviour is a new stage of older adulthood: the terrible seventies, the first signs of dementia, or the first signs of Gerald. For all I know, it could’ve been an attempt to end his long, boring, mostly well-behaved life. A radical end to a predictable existence. Why grieve, when you can hoard? Why die of pneumonia when you can bleed out in a tourist shop in the name of Mother Earth?
I hear the electric razor before I see it: Dan shaving Dad’s head. Bloody tufts of hair fall to the floor. Mona sweeps them up with her hands. Émile’s given her a garbage bag to collect the mess. Everyone else is eating. Cheese, bread, strawberries. Emma sits cross-legged on the couch fishing through a bowl of wrapped chocolates, leaving Bobo facedown under the coffee table.
“Have you enjoyed your time in Paris?” Émile asks. He seems pleased and not perturbed by having a house full of guests, as if revelling in the experience of a large family with the blessed knowledge they’ll be gone tomorrow taking their regrets and grievances with them, their dysfunction, their DNA.
Have we enjoyed our time in Paris? I don’t know if I would call implosion enjoyable.
“My dad made me look at a bunch of dead bodies,” Emma blurts.
“The catacombs,” Dan corrects.
“Ah yes.” Émile smiles, crosses his legs like a storyteller and leans back in his chair.
“Versailles was cool,” Liam offers, gagging down a piece of cheese. He’s probably already bought Versailles and made plans to turn it into a nightclub.
The conversation continues. I only hear fragments: Notre-Dame, Disney, rats, soup, bitcoin, bikes. I imagine another life where my mom, who wouldn’t be my mom, is sitting in the pale gold bergère chair across from Émile in a sweater she purchased in Scotland. They’ve just come from the American University of Paris where a handsome oceanographer with a heart problem gave a lecture about marine ecosystems and loneliness. They’re having a glass of champagne in honour of their anniversary. Fifty-two years? Fifty-four? They don’t know. They stopped counting after twenty-five, the years since a glorious blur. Quiet nights reading, warm afternoons tending the balcony herb garden, harvesting the basil and thyme, winters in Norway for the aurora borealis and fish for breakfast, summers in Malta. A charitable organization registered in the Philippines. It wasn’t perfect. Two miscarriages, homesickness, an almost affair, skin cancer, arthritis, botched investments, disagreements over the cutlery drawer. But, love.
“Is that a yes?” Dad asks.
“Huh?” I stare up at my bald father, his head patched as an old pair of jeans, Mona hovering behind him, a squat Vegas bellhop.
“Émile’s offered to show us the roof.”
Right. The roof. I rise from my chair and follow the procession through the kitchen, down a narrow hall to a windy staircase. The stars are pink. I wait at the bottom, watch Mona give Dad a helpful shove. Célestine and Wes have temporarily detached and the boys walk up in tandem, glued to something on Liam’s phone. Emma makes it a third of the way up, then comes barrelling back. Bobo wants to see Paris. Bobo wants to see the stars.
“You coming?” Glen asks. He leans against the railing, weary and distinguished, a five o’clock shadow. Somewhere in Émile’s apartment a bygone clock announces midnight.
“Dan up there?”
“He went to the bathroom.”
“I’ll be up in a sec.”
Glen nods. “I’ll wait,” he says, turning. “I’ll wait for you.”
Glen, waiting. For how long? I head down the hall toward the bathroom, knock softly on the door.
“Who is it?” Dan calls. “It’s me.”
The door opens a crack. I slip inside. Dan’s sitting on the closed toilet, head in his hands.
“You okay?”
“I can’t believe we’re going home tomorrow.”
“Thanks to Liam,” I reply. “I think he’s rich. You should keep an eye him. As much as Emma and Harrison. I mean, probably more. Emma’s young, but tough. And Harrison, he’s thriving. The worst is behind him. Liam needs guidance. He needs his dad. Maybe you and he can go into business together, flip houses, buy a country.”
“Things aren’t going to change,” Dan says. “I’m gonna go home and Cindy will still have her shit in my closet and her stupid charcoal toothpaste on my side of the sink. They already replaced my Nespresso with a tea caddy.”
I hand him a tissue.
“I guess I just thought she’d change her mind and we could go back to the way it was.”
“You won’t always feel that way. Georgia can help you find a chic little condo downtown. You can finally buy that ugly BMW you’ve always wanted. Order pizza, without it having to be marked on the calendar. You just need a fresh start.”
“Yeah,” he says, hands on his lap as if poised to get up and go for it.
“I’ve got an idea. Wait here.” I go back to the sitting room and get the razor. Bits of Dad are still mangled in the blade. I tap it on the edge of the sink, plug it in and hold it up. “Yeah?”
Dan doesn’t object. I shave my brother’s head. Above, the bathroom light flickers. The razor emits a pleasing hum. It sounds like a fresh start, even if it’s symbolic, especially if it is. When I’m done, Dan leans forward on the toilet, studies himself in the mirror.
“Looks good,” I say.
He wipes his face on his jacket, adjusts his bowtie, stands. “What are you gonna do about Wes?” he asks.
“What can I do? He’s going to have to learn like everyone else.”
“That love is awful?”
“I was going to say hard.”
“And?”
“And so we love.” And hurt. “Go,” I say. “Go see Paris from the roof. Take a picture, make a wish. Check that Wes and Célestine haven’t jumped.”
I clean up the hair and then stop in the kitchen for a glass of water. I find a teacup in a cupboard, hope that it’s for everyday use. The rim might be real gold. The tap chugs to life. I don’t wait for the water to cool. Off the kitchen is a study with deep red walls and high ceilings. More books. I look to see that no one’s searching for me and then tiptoe toward the study. It’s both grand and simple, masculine and quaint. Manuals, law texts, stone sculptures, a tiny glass horse blond as a beach, Sable Island. On the wall, a portrait of my mother, the one I never knew: green, hopeful, childless. The teacup drops from my hand.
forty-six
“Eet is from a peecture.” Émile’s materialized behind me, an apartment-sized broom and dustpan tucked under his arm. “My favourite peecture of her. One of my old partner’s wives was an artiste. I had her paint eet.”
“I’ve never seen it before,” I say frantically trying to pick up the broken teacup.
Émile steadies my shaking hands, assumes the clean-up. “Eet was taken on a Saturday in June, the day before I went back to France.” He dumps the porcelain in a waste basket beside his desk.
“Sorry,” I say.
He waves a dismissive hand. We both gaze at the painting. Joan looks so much like her.
“You want to see zee original?” He slides open a thin drawer and removes the photograph from a yellowed, but otherwise immaculate envelope. The photo is black and white with a crease in the corner most likely caused by Émile’s thumb. On the back, my mother’s signature cursive, sleek and Victorian: I will always love you. Janice. Below her name, a heart. One I recognize from birthday cards and lunchbox notes, Christmas tags and the margins of cookbooks. The last on a postcard she’d sent the kids from Cuba that cruelly arrived a week after her death. I traced that heart a thousand times.
“You never married,” I say. “Why?”
“I told her I would wait.”
“But you knew she was married and she had us and a job and . . . she lived in another country.”
He shrugs. “Hope.”
“Or despair? I mean, was it worth it? Waiting all those years and ultimately ending up alone?”
“I have zee memories.”
“But they gotta be like sixty or whatever years old! She’s been gone ten years and I’m starting to forget things. Mannerisms, expressions, the sound of her voice. The other day Joan asked if she had the same colour eyes as Grandma and I actually had to look it up on Facebook because I couldn’t remember.”
