I'le Dor, page 24
At that moment, a dark head popped up next to him.
“What the hell are you doing out so late?” Nick asked.
It was probably illegal for the kid to be in the bar, but the waiter ignored him.
Marcel acted as if he didn’t understand which was likely since Nick had spoken in English. But his eyes showed he understood the tone, one of surprise, of condemnation. No welcome in that greeting. Shrugging, he slipped down onto the wooden floor and walked over to the woman, whose head was now resting on the counter, her arms loose at her sides. He shook her arm and she groaned, her head falling backward and coming to rest in the beam of one bright light above her. He was saying something to her, but she only looked at him through slits in her eyes, then rolled her head away from him.
Marcel shrugged and then pushed open the back door of the bar, disappearing into the darkness of the night.
“He lives behind here, off the alley,” the waiter said. “He was looking for his mother.” He glanced at the drunken woman.
Nick sighed, and looked at her more closely. It didn’t appear as if she were going to wake up any time soon. He wondered if he could still catch up to the boy, but then he didn’t know what he would do. Take him home to his lodgings? He could get arrested for child abduction. Why did he feel it was up to him to fix this? He who ought to know better than anyone that it wasn’t possible, even that any attempt on his part might make the situation worse. When he left town, the boy would latch onto some other unsuspecting person.
Instead of feeling better, Nick felt guilty. Here he was contemplating a party for those who had grown up here and done well. Even if he felt he was a failure after the breakdown of his marriage, he knew that he was privileged. A psychiatrist. He’d fulfilled a dream and also made a lot of money. Not to mention that it was something he’d enjoyed doing, at least until recently.
“Who takes care of the boy?” he asked the bartender.
The other man, younger than Nick by twenty years, shrugged. “Dunno,” he said. Je ne sais pas. There were probably others like Marcel Blouin this man knew about. But for Nick, this boy, Marcel, had become a symbol of sorts. A challenge perhaps to his own sense of futility that paled beside the situation the boy lived in. Even as a child in an immigrant family, sometimes scrambling for enough food until his father was established at the mine, Nick had never felt unloved or alone. Even when his father had taken off his belt and left red welts on his buttocks, Nick had known that Roman was frustrated at something other than his son. He’d known that he would not be left alone or hungry. How he had known the difference wasn’t quite clear to him, but he had. Although he supposed he’d ended up in psychiatry to resolve whatever residual demons dwelled in him. In spite of that, he realized Ile d’Or still represented a time and place when he’d experienced a measure of happiness.
Nick picked up his glass and drained it.
“Good night,” he said and walked out onto the main street again.
Glancing to his right and his left, he spotted an alley leading off into the darkness. He wondered if the boy would still be somewhere around the bar. A big grey and black cat walked across his path and into a doorway where it sat and watched Nick, twisting and pushing its body against the wooden stoop. Further up the alley, there was a light shining in a window and he stood quietly, waiting to see if there were any movement there. After a while he began to feel foolish and headed for the street again.
On a whim, he returned to the bar. The man with the rolled up sleeves looked at him with his dark eyebrows raised as if to say, so now what? The woman had moved to one of the tables and now had what appeared to be a cup of black coffee in front of her. Her eyes looked glassy and every so often her body swayed a little.
“Who looks after the boy?” Nick asked again, in a low voice.
The bar tender shrugged.
“How does she get home?”
Again the man showed little interest. “Sometimes the kid comes back,” he said.
When Nick left, he didn’t feel any the wiser.
48.
THE DOG BARKED at Lucien with the exuberance of an animal that has been confined too long. Stepping inside his cabin, Lucien let him pass and run down to the lake. Straining to see through the bare branches to the clearing beyond, there was no sign of life from Guy’s place next door where Libby was staying. As soon as he dropped a bag with some bread and corn flakes on the floor beside the refrigerator, he walked down to the water with Figaro, gathering a few sticks for the dog to fetch. It was at least fifteen minutes before he returned to the cabin.
The food he’d brought home from his mother’s the previous night was stacked haphazardly inside the refrigerator. He took out some ham from the top package wrapped in aluminium foil and reached for a beer. Some vegetables from the freezer. He placed a pot of water on the stove, and dropped in some frozen peas, carrots and corn. If not for these leftovers, he would probably heat up a frozen dinner every night, Lucien thought. Or open a tin of spaghetti or pork and beans. He did not mind what he ate, but he missed eating with Susan. She was a good cook who had never felt too proud to ask his mother for recipes. Sometimes that she could cut his mother off when they had grown so close baffled him as much as her rejection of him. She was as stubborn as her father had been when she made a decision.
As the water in the pot swirled into small white bubbles and almost reached the top, Lucien turned the heat down. He thought again of that day when he had caught Susan stealing. Apparently she’d crept out the back door and had gone down the lane toward rue Champlain. She’d arrived in time to see the milk wagon in front of the Muir’s house, the horse’s head drooping. It was so cold there were icicles in the horse’s whiskers and the milk had pushed the cardboard lids on the bottles up into ice towers. Susan ducked down where the milkman would not see her, whispering to the horse as she waited for the driver to come back. When he drove off, she was crouched down on one runner of the sleigh, holding onto the back of the wagon so just her red wool mitts were visible if the driver looked around. When they reached the main street, she jumped off and went into Mulholland’s.
After they were married, Lucien learned that Susan found the time when she made her decision about what to steal later the best part of her day. It might be a chocolate bar in purple and white paper. Or Chiclets in a yellow package. Cookies from the grocery shelves. A new pair of mitts. As soon as she made her selection, she’d figure out how to take it without anyone seeing her. And how to get out of the store as if she had just been browsing. That day when Lucien caught her, it had been so easy to take the Jersey milk chocolate bar that if she’d had the money she would have paid for it. She liked stealing better when it was a challenge. Sometimes people commented that she was like her father — stubborn, shrewd, and determined.
Out on the street, Susan had wondered if she could wait until spring to go down to the farm on the other side of town. That September she’d discovered a horse and had started to ride him. Lucien knew about the horse, but had not wanted to tell Libby. He was not sure why. He didn’t want her to know he’d followed Susan and that was how he knew, but it was more than that. Maybe because it was after Susan left him in the car that first night, after he’d caught her stealing, she acted as if nothing had happened. Head held high. That was Susan. She did not tell him until a long time later that she had liked being with him, just turned her head in the other direction whenever they bumped into each other after that. Until she decided to taunt him on the road out past the mine when she came across him one day several months later lying near the railroad tracks, getting a tan on his legs and his belly.
“So,” she said. “Maybe now we can try it.”
Oh God, he thought. He did not have a rubber. And then he remembered that there was one stuck in the bottom of his pocket. They went off into the bush where he cleared a spot to lie down in the underbrush. She was a little hesitant as he touched her carefully, not wanting to hurt her. He was surprised that once they got into it, she’d moaned and hung onto him, her legs wrapped tightly around his back. The thought now of some other man touching her enraged him. There must be someone or she’d still be here. Always before this he’d felt confident he was the only one.
His telephone rang. He just stared at it. Sometimes he did not feel like talking to anyone, then afterwards he would wonder if it were Susan. Finally, he picked up the receiver to hear a man’s voice he did not immediately recognize.
“It’s Paul Paquin speaking.” C’est Paul Paquin qui parle. Calling from Quebec City. “I’m coming up on business,” the familiar voice said. “Could we get together for a beer one night?”
Lucien agreed readily, although as soon as he hung up he began to feel uneasy.
“You have to move on, Lucien,” his mother had said recently. “I don’t mean forget.”
How could he forget? It was all there so clearly at times that it obliterated the present. Guy. Blood on the wall. Darkening already. The smell. He would never forget the pungent odour, yet he could not describe it. A body already decomposing. If there had been flies, they would have been all over Guy. Or what remained of Guy.
“You’ve been a good son, Lucien,” his mother had said. “You are a good son.”
Lucien almost cried then and he could feel tears in his eyes now. He knew better. He had been a poor son, envying Guy. A poor husband, maybe even a dubious father. He went into the bathroom and peed in the toilet, leaving the seat up. Susan was not here to admonish him. Susan. He missed her. He put the seat down. Would he ever stop missing her? When he came out again, he heard the dog scratch at the door. When he turned on the television, he let Figaro lie down on the couch beside him. The news came on first, then something mindless during which he drifted off to sleep with his clothes still on. In the morning, he woke up cold and dishevelled.
“Oh, mon Dieu,” he groaned. His children called long distance, but they did not need him now. “What do I have to live for?” He no longer knew.
49.
OUR REAL LIFE was on the skating rink, Roch Carrier wrote. In the red, white and black sweaters of the Montreal Candiens. Libby had dreamed of playing hockey like Maurice Richard, too. If she had received a blue and white sweater ordered from Eaton’s catalogue, it would have been as much a tragedy for her as for the character in the story. It did not matter that Nanny and Gramps had lived in Toronto, her heart was with the Canadiens. Even as an Anglo, she would not have been insulted if Roch Carrier’s character had sent his sweater back to Monsieur Eaton, but she knew his mother had been right, that Monsieur Eaton would have been.
Libby fell asleep with images of Montreal after the Canadiens had won the Stanley Cup, seeing Jean Beliveau in the parade. Montreal had captured her heart in her youth in a way no other city had until much later, and when she and Barton moved to Toronto, she’d hated it at first. It took a long time to think of Toronto as anything but a place where she lived because she had to. Both she and the city she now called home had changed a lot in the interim.
When she awakened at six the next morning, she lay listening to the crackling of branches. If she could catch Lucien before he left, she would drive with him into the pharmacy. She had not seen him the evening before; instead she had curled up in her sleeping bag with the book by Roch Carrier.
Finally she slipped out into the cold room and turned on the heater. When she had drunk a cup of coffee and eaten some toast, she wrapped herself up in her coat and followed the snowy trail to Lucien’s cabin.
“Did you sleep better?” Lucien asked as they drove toward town.
“Yes. Although I read something by Guy yesterday I found pretty disturbing. I feel as if perhaps I shouldn’t have, as if I were snooping. But the notebook’s on a shelf with old magazines and a photograph album. I’m sorry, I feel embarrassed.”
“What did you read?”
“A note apologizing for all his mistakes. Regrets about just about everything.”
“Doesn’t sound like Guy. He was a mean bastard in the last years.”
“Lucien, it sounds like he killed himself.”
“Well, he did. All that drinking.”
“I mean he went into that hotel room knowing that he wouldn’t come out again.” He had written that he would die quickly, not go on with the misery any longer, the misery of knowing what a mess he had made of everything.
“Guy wouldn’t.”
“It’s there on paper,” Libby said. She watched the road, almost afraid to see what his face revealed.
Lucien swerved the car onto a side road and backed out onto the highway again. This time he headed in the direction from which they had just come, driving straight to Guy’s cabin. He slammed on the brakes and jumped out of the car. When he went up to the door, Libby waited, hoping the storm her words had unleashed would subside when Lucien read the entry in his brother’s journal. A few minutes later when he still had not emerged, she went inside tentatively and discovered him sitting in an armchair with his head in his hands. The notebook was open on his lap. When he finally looked up at Libby, there were tears on his face and he started to mumble.
“You were right,” he said, his voice flat. He didn’t move.
She went over and put her hands on his shoulders, wondering nonetheless if her touch could offer any comfort to this man who seemed so familiar and then could quickly become a stranger.
“I don’t know when he started to go over the edge,” Lucien said. “Or why.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“No, but he was my brother. My life is beginning to look like his, except I’m older than he was when he separated from Nicole. I can understand some of what he was feeling now. I didn’t understand when he started drinking. I didn’t understand any of it. Now that I’m starting to comprehend how he must have felt, it’s too late for Guy. Maybe for me, too,” he said. “I get so frightened sometimes, tu comprends. I go into the pharmacy every day where I do the same things over and over. I’m tired of it. At night, I wake up in a panic. I don’t know why. There’s nothing to be afraid of. I just lie there and…” He stood up abruptly. “I shouldn’t be telling you this.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m here because of Guy, too.”
“C’est vrai?” Is that true?
“There was some part of me I left behind when I married Barton. I guess I’m trying to find it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t either.” Maybe it was the part of her that had still believed her dreams were possible that she hoped to find here. Not that she was dissatisfied with her life, but she felt sometimes clothed in a thin veil of cynicism she detested.
“Shall we go now?”
At the store, Lucien stepped out of the car slowly and when he disappeared inside, Libby slid across the seat and drove to the centre of town to park in front of a small coffee shop. Inside, she found a newspaper and sat with the steam rising from a cup of hot chocolate, not wanting to go back to either the store or the cabin. When she went out onto the street, she noticed two mannequins in the window of Chic Choc, one dressed in a black suit, the other in a deep blue dress with gold buttons down the sleeves. It was a dress Libby could imagine wearing and she found herself moving toward the door of Michelle Dufresne’s shop.
“Bonjour,” Michelle said. “I’m glad to see you.”
There were racks of dresses down both sides of the shop with slacks, blouses and skirts in the middle. Bright coloured casual sweaters, two-piece outfits, ski wear. Tags were attached discreetly with sizes and prices.
“It’s the nicest store in town,” Libby said as she stood next to Michelle, trying to get her bearings.
“Thanks,” Michelle said.
“The dress in the window,” Libby said. “The blue one. With the gold buttons on the sleeves.”
Michelle found her size and handed it to Libby who smiled as she held it up in front of the mirror, imagining how she might look wearing it rather than her usual slacks.
“Try it on,” Michelle said, smiling also.
“I think I will.” Libby went into a cubicle and pulled the curtain across the opening.
When she stood in front of the mirror again, Michelle drew her breath in. “C’est merveilleux,” she whispered. “It’s made for you.” Libby knew it was not a sales pitch, that she really thought so. When she took the dress off, she handed it to Michelle and said, “I’ll take it.”
Michelle folded the dress and wrapped it carefully in white tissue paper before placing it in a large yellow bag. On the bill she lay on the counter, Libby noticed she had taken fifteen percent off the price.
“Maybe I’ll wear it here,” Libby said. “To The Flamingo. Lucien asked me to go dancing.”
“Would you come round to my place before you leave?” Michelle asked. “I live at the far end of town. My daughter is visiting for a few days, but soon she’ll be gone again.”
“Les enfants,” Libby said. That was surely something they had in common as well as having known each other as children. Her father had made a mistake. Well, maybe not about the high-grading, but about forbidding her to see or talk to Michelle. What choice had he had though?
“Thanks,” Libby said.
“You’ll come then,” Michelle said. There was a slight question in her voice.
50.
THE SUN SHIMMERED on the snow by the side of the road. A few clouds in long narrow gossamer streaked across the sky. Lucien supposed many would find it a bleak landscape, but he found it beautiful. A boy on skis headed off into the bush at the junction where Lucien turned from the lake road onto the highway. Libby, who had come over to meet him for the drive into town and was sitting beside him in the front seat of the car, rummaged through her bag.
