As she looked across the large room at an old grey wool hat hanging on a hook beside the stove, she thought of making a snowman. It would not be as cold as it would be lying on the ground to make snow angels. As a child, her snowsuit had always ended up wet from top to bottom and there had usually been bits of ice inside her boots, too, by the time she was finished.

  Moving around the room, she hunted through shelves, in drawers and cupboards, and found buttons to use for eyes and a carrot for a nose. A red scarf hung near some old fishing rods. Soon she was in her jacket, pulling on her boots, rushing out to roll that first big ball for the stomach. She would need more buttons for the front of the coat, but she was having so much fun that she started to roll a second ball for the chest.

  “Bonjour,” a man’s voice disturbed the silence.

  Startled, Libby looked up to see a stranger in a navy coat buttoned up to the neck, a large stomach straining to break through. The man wore dark earmuffs. When she stared at him without speaking, he smiled.

  “Paul Paquin,” he said.

  “Ah mais, c’est un plaisir de te voir Paul,” she said. “I’m so glad to see you. I thought Jacques was going to pick me up.”

  “He was,” he said. “That was the plan. But I thought there might be too much snow later for anyone to drive out to get you.”

  “I’m building a snowman,” she said, a little sheepishly. She must be a sight, a grown woman rolling big balls of snow.

  “I see that,” he said with a delighted smile. He moved toward her and lifted the second ball of snow onto the first. Then, as she watched him, he began to roll a smaller one for the head. When she turned to put the hat on the head and the scarf around the neck of their creation, he winced.

  “Guy’s,” he said, turning away from her and taking a few steps.

  Libby watched him, wondering if this was all too much for him. What she had understood was that he would find it difficult to come out here, if not impossible. But he came back with a stick he set against the snowman, making him look like a man with a cane. Or a walking stick.

  “Do you want to come in?” she asked. “There’s coffee.”

  He followed her inside and sat down with his coat on, continuing to hold his earmuffs in one hand that twitched at intervals as if he had the beginnings of some condition like Parkinson’s. He seemed oblivious to the movement. “Later there might be so much snow that I wouldn’t be able to drive you back here either,” he said.

  “I was beginning to wonder.” His hand gradually stopped twitching and she thought he may have just been nervous.

  “So I came. There’ll be too many people at Blanche and Al’s to talk much tomorrow.”

  She nodded.

  “After all this time, I would have recognized you anywhere,” he said.

  “So did Lucien. So did Michelle.” She was getting used to the fact that in this place of long ago these people still recognized her.

  “I think it’s because you look like your mother.”

  Usually people thought she looked more like her father’s side of the family, but maybe as she grew older there was more resemblance to how her mother had looked when they lived here. She shrugged slightly.

  “Michelle came back, didn’t she?” Paul said. “And Susan left. So much change.”

  “I hear you’re still married, working for the government.” He seemed to be the only one she knew of their crowd from the early days who was still with his first spouse.

  “And you’re divorced?”

  She swung around to turn on the small propane stove to heat the coffeepot. “Yes,” she sighed. “Who would have predicted any of this? Did you know that there’s a diary Guy kept in which he apologizes for how he hurt everyone? He went to the hotel intending to die. It doesn’t say how that would happen, but it’s clear that he meant to. I don’t know if there was an autopsy.”

  “I don’t think so. There wasn’t enough left of him to figure much out,” Paul said.

  “How did the two of you grow so far apart?” She sat down across from him.

  Paul shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I wish I did. In spite of our political differences, we were friends. I guess the rift really occurred when he started shouting at me in the street when he was drunk. ‘Just because there are all those Paquins on the war memorial, you think you have a reason to be a separatist.’ That’s what he said,” Paul said. “Conscription,” he hissed. “They shouldn’t have had to go to war for England. It’s not the only reason I’m a separatist, but it’s a good enough one. Do you think Mackenzie King gave a damn about Quebec? Or even about France?”

  Libby was startled by his sudden vehemence. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just know going to war and going overseas was the highlight of my father’s life. For him, it was tied to England where he lived for a while as a child. But didn’t you care about what Germany was doing then?”

  “Bien sur.”

  She could tell he was offended as he stood up to look out the window, his back to her.

  “Paul,” she said. “Listen, I’m sorry. I came here to see Guy. I came here because I needed to explore where I came from. I have a son named Paul. He’s named after you.”

  “So does Guy.”

  It sounded as if he were saying ‘Big deal. So what?’ she thought.

  “You married a lawyer, non?” he continued.

  “That’s Sheila.” She went over to the window and looked out to find the snow falling harder and she could not see the lake through it. “She married Brian Sloane. You know, the boy who lived in the green house on the corner near Mulholland’s. They live in Vancouver.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Toronto,” she said, suspecting that now she would hear what a terrible place she’d chosen. And the recurrent question, the one she still sometimes asked herself. Why hadn’t she stayed in Montreal after university?

  “I don’t like Toronto,” he said. “Where all the money is. Bay Street. Well, I guess you know by now this place isn’t controlled by the English any more.”

  “That’s for sure,” she sighed. “But you know what? I think that’s a good thing. No one in Canada who doesn’t live in Toronto likes it, do they?” she asked. “Even I took a long time. After thirty years, I still cheer for the Canadiens. Anyway, Toronto’s changing. People come there and they stay. They may not be passionate about it at first, but there’s something that draws you in and over time it’s where you want to be. Have you ever been there?”

  “Conferences,” he said. “It’s not like Montreal or Quebec City.”

  Libby poured coffee into a mug for him. “Would you want it to be?”

  “No, of course not,” he said. “But they want us to be like them. They don’t want to recognize our different culture. Merde, Libby, we have different laws. A different history. Two nations.”

  “Were you part of the FLQ?” she asked, not sure if this question would annoy him. But she felt she needed to know.

  “No,” he said, his face reddening as his voice rose. “I have no sympathy for kidnapping or killing. That’s not the way to get anywhere. Laporte should never have been killed. But some awful things happened under the War Measures Act. I suppose if I’d been in Montreal, I might have been one of the ones thrown in jail. People were taken away in the night, people who had nothing to do with the FLQ, people where there was no evidence, no proof. I have a cousin in Montreal who’s an artist and singer who was in jail and was later proven not to have had any involvement at all. None at all.”

  “I know that happened to a lot of people,” she sighed. “It was a sorry time for all of us. Still…”

  “The politicians panicked. They already had enough laws to arrest anyone they wanted. I know Laporte was killed and Cross kidnapped, but they didn’t need…”

  “Yeah,” she sighed. “Yeah.”

  “I need a cigarette,” he said. “I’ll go outside.”

  Libby looked over at the shelf at Guy’s diary. “Do you want to read what Guy wrote before he died?”

  “Je ne sais pas.” I don’t know.

  “It’s here,” she said, placing it on the end table near the couch.

  “After a smoke.”

  He went out, closed the door behind him and through the window she could just make out his figure hunched over to light his cigarette. Then he walked over to the snowman and seemed to adjust the scarf. When he came back inside, he took off his coat before sitting down in a large wooden rocking chair with a red cushion on it.

  Libby passed him the diary and watched surreptitiously as he flipped to the back right away. His expression changed as he read the part that was more a letter to everyone than a journal entry. When he was finished, he sat staring straight ahead.

  “It used to make me angry that he was wasting his life, that he had no interest in politics at all,” he said quietly. “But we were still friends until he started making passes at my wife.” He put the diary on the table beside his chair. “I suppose it was a cry for help. He did it to make me see him, to make me hear him. But how could I have known?”

  “I don’t think anyone likely would have. It sounds as if he did everything to drive people away.”

  “How long are you staying?” Paul asked.

  “Not much longer,” she said. It felt at this moment as though he actually saw her for the first time, and that now he wanted to spend more time with her. But they would both be gone in a matter of days. “The time’s flying by so quickly. I’m planning to fly out on Thursday.” She was surprised at the wave of panic she felt at the prospect of leaving. So quickly had she come to count on morning or evening coffee with Lucien, that visit to Michelle’s dress shop that she intended to repeat, these small things she had built into her days without effort even though at first they had all seemed like distractions.

  “What do you think?” he asked. “Do you want to risk going into town for dinner?”

  “I have enough for us to eat something here.”

  “You know,” he said. “I thought you’d marry Guy.”

  “You, too,” she said. “I’ve thought a lot about that since coming here. I don’t think it would have worked out. I wasn’t ready to marry anyone then. I don’t think he was either. I think he’d started drinking already, too, although he didn’t think I’d noticed.”

  “He started early, for sure.”

  “Your son doesn’t look like you. He showed me around the mine, you know.”

  “He looks like Colette. Ma femme.”

  “I thought so. But he has his father’s politics and pride.”

  “Sure. Quebecois should be proud. Not like Guy.”

  “He was proud. There are a lot of stories about what people saw, but that diary tells another side of it.”

  “Did you read it all?”

  “No, but I read enough. All it takes to know that is a few pages.”

  “Did he ask you to marry him?”

  “Yes,” she said softly. “He asked me. On the road to the mine at Manitou where I worked in the summer. We were only seventeen years old. Again in Montreal, later that same year.”

  “I wanted to see you because you loved him, too,” Paul said.

  56.

  “I'D BETTER GET going,” Paul said when he looked out the window into the storm. “Before all of this snow prevents me from getting back to town.”

  Libby followed him outside to his car and, using her mitt, started to brush at the snow that was burying the wipers on the windshield. He opened the car door to reach for a long brush with dark bristles on the back seat.

  “Lucky the rental agency remembered this.” He’d noticed it when he picked up the Firebird, he said. “Guy would have liked these rental cars I choose to drive when I’m on business trips. I try out new models,” Paul continued. “This Firebird was just brought out earlier this year, Guy would have particularly liked it, especially this red one. I drove Pontiacs for a long time. My first one was also red, but with long white panels.” He and Guy used to drive around town in it, both married by then, their wives often in the back seat while they cruised, honking at people they knew on the sidewalk.

  Paul tramped through new snow around the car, sweeping more of the white stuff off the top as he did. “I don’t understand it,” he muttered.

  “What?” Libby asked.

  “What he must have been thinking to kill himself. The despair. The anger.” Their friendship had been so strained, he told her, that the care he still felt surprised him. “Colette forgave Guy. She said he wasn’t himself, that he didn’t know what he was doing. I figured the booze was just an excuse Guy used for his erratic behaviour. Maybe it was. But if I’d tried to find out what was underneath it all, things might have turned out differently.”

  “Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Libby said.

  “No,” he said. “You’re right. I need to concentrate on getting back to my room at the Alpha before there’s so much snow I get stuck in it.”

  “I wish you could give me a call to let me know you’ve arrived safely,” Libby said.

  Paul nodded. “You know, I’m used to driving in winter conditions. I’m not too worried.” Nonetheless, he didn’t linger and as he drove out toward the highway, she saw him hit a patch of hidden ice and slide precariously close to the ditch before managing to let the car ease slowly into a bank. When he moved onto the road again, he drove even more cautiously.

  After a certain amount of time, Libby imagined he must have reached his destination. It would have taken him much longer than usual, but he would have arrived without incident.

  Earlier, he’d told her if she’d married Guy, he imagined that Guy would be alive still, but he didn’t think their marriage would have survived. “Who’s to know,” she’d said, not wanting to engage further in that conversation.

  She imagined that he’d walked through the lobby, picking up his key at the registration desk. The receptionist would have smiled at him sleepily.

  “Bonsoir, Monsieur.”

  “Bonsoir.”

  The woman would have turned to reach for a message and handed it to him, looking embarrassed that she’d forgotten. Noticing it was from Colette, he would have moved a little faster toward the elevator. When he reached his room, in the new part of the hotel, he would take off his shoes, sit on the edge of the bed and turn on the television. Flipping channels with the remote, turning the sound to mute, that would have been the moment when he remembered to call his wife.

  He’d reach for a drink and then place a call to his home number. When his wife answered, he would tell her about dinner. About Guy’s words in his journal.

  “C’est dommage,” Colette would say.

  Libby wondered if in those few words, or similar ones, Colette would have summarized what he felt. His wife, who sounded like a sensitive woman, would surely know his feelings would be deep and painful. And would also listen if he wanted to talk. Would he imagine her there beside him in a nightgown he’d bought for her birthday, black satin cut low in the front, with spaghetti straps at the shoulders? Imagine kissing the skin on her shoulder and moving onto the cleft in her breasts revealed so stunningly by the new gown.

  “Je t’aime, chérie,” he would say.

  “Je t’aime aussi, mon petit lapin.” Her little rabbit.

  Likely Paul would say none of this and would have fallen asleep as he fell into bed, exhausted.

  57.

  AS HE ROUNDED the curve near the cabin, the car’s engine hummed. More than once, Lucien had felt hidden ice under the tires. It was more treacherous than he had anticipated, but a few minutes later he arrived at the lake. Leaving the car a bit higher up on the road, he shovelled a path before going to Libby’s door to knock. When she answered, he could feel his shape illuminated by the beam from the lights inside.

  “Quite a snow storm,” he said.

  “Paul was just here. He left before it got this heavy.”

  “The roads are bad, but it’ll all be cleared before morning.”

  “It doesn’t look as if it’s going to stop.” She moved aside, gesturing for him to come in.

  Stamping his feet so the snow and ice would fall away outside, his cheeks red, his dark hair and eyebrows glistening with melted snow, Lucien stepped inside. There was something he wanted to say, but he wasn’t sure how to say it. He took off his coat and hung it on a hook on the back of the door.

  “I shovelled the path,” he said. “So you can come across when you want to.”

  “I think Guy’s snowshoes are over there.” She gestured toward the fishing rods and skis piled up in one corner. Above them on the wall were two pairs of snowshoes. “If it keeps on like this, how will we get to Blanche and Al’s party tomorrow night?”

  “The plough will come.”

  “I’m so used to living in a city,” she said. “The whole place collapses under snowflakes. Everything is paralysed. People can’t get to work or to school. The cars slip and slide around, sometimes even the subway doesn’t work. I’d forgotten that here we always got where we were going because of skis and snowshoes and everything. All the same, it’s a few miles to town from here.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. About to sit down, he saw the pile of papers, sketchpads and pencils that had been moved to the side of the table to make room for the plates that were still out from her supper with Paul. “You’ve been working,” he said.

  “A little. Thinking at least.”

  “Paul gave up on Guy, too, you know.”

  “Guy didn’t leave much room for anyone who might have wanted to do something. I mean, from all I’ve heard he was doing some pretty strange things. He says so, too, in the diary. I think he’d gone so far he had no idea how to get back. Like swimming out into an ocean. He was drowning.”

 

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