She pushed past him to stride off down the path. But he caught her arm. Her head whipped around. ‘Let go of me!’
He said, ‘I’m so glad we never had that kid.’
An odd, sick smile flitted across her face. ‘Yeah, be grateful. It wasn’t even yours.’
She pulled her arm free and hurried away around the side of the building.
He stood staring after her, his face smarting as if she had slapped him. Until now he had thought it impossible for her to hurt him any more than she already had.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The news of Marie-Ange’s pregnancy had changed the way he felt about everything. If he had spent his life searching for something, a reason for being, a point to his existence, then suddenly it seemed that he had found it.
But from the start Marie-Ange had been ambivalent. Sime had been unable to understand why she didn’t share his excitement. They had been going through a difficult time, and it seemed to him that a child could provide the glue that would keep them together. But looking back on it later, he realised that she had probably only seen it as an impediment to their breaking up. A responsibility to child and family that she didn’t want.
They’d had a debate about the scan. Sime had wanted to know the sex of their child. She had not. And, as usual, she prevailed.
Four months into the pregnancy, and having regular appointments with the gynaecologist, she still appeared to have little or no maternal instinct. And yet Sime’s sense of fatherhood had been powerful. He had found himself seeing children on their way home from school and imagining how it would feel to be a father. Bringing back memories of his own first day at school, insisting that he could find his way home himself, and then getting lost. He had even caught himself looking at prams and baby seats for the car.
It had stirred memories, too, of the story about his ancestor delivering the baby on the boat, and the moment of parting at Grosse Île when the child had gripped his thumb with tiny fingers. Sime had wanted that feeling. The unqualified and absolute love of a child. The sense that a part of him would live on when he had gone.
At about seventeen weeks Marie-Ange had taken a week’s leave to visit her parents in Sherbrooke. Sime was upcountry on a case the day she was due back. That afternoon he got a call to say she’d been rushed to hospital with severe bleeding, but it was twenty-four hours before he was able to get back to Montreal.
Without any idea of what had happened he went straight to the hospital, where he was left sitting in a waiting room for almost two hours. No one told him anything, and he was almost beside himself with worry.
People came and went. Sick people. Worried relatives. Sime was just about to read the riot act to the nurse at reception when Marie-Ange came through the swing door. She was deathly pale, and clutching a small bag of belongings. She seemed oddly hunched, and when he hurried across the room to her she put her arms around him and buried her face in his chest. Sobs ripped themselves from her throat, and when she tipped her face back to look up at him he saw that it was shiny and wet with tears. She didn’t need to tell him that they had lost the baby.
Strangely, they had been closer in those next few days than they had in years. Sime pampered her, cooking, doing the washing, taking her breakfast in bed. They sat together at night on the settee with a glass of wine, watching mindless TV.
It was the following week that she had broken the news to him. Her gynaecologist had told her she would no longer be able to have children.
Sime had been devastated. Taking it almost harder than the loss of the baby. He had been revisited by the same sense of bereavement experienced after the death of his parents. Of regret. Of being all alone in the world. Not just then, but for ever. And of somehow failing, not just his parents, but their parents, and their parents before them. It would all end with him. So what point had there been to any of it?
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
I
Sime stood smarting in the doorway. She had always claimed that learning she couldn’t give him a child had changed him. Changed them. That it had been the beginning of the end. His fault, not hers.
And now the revelation that the baby had not even been his.
But for some reason, something didn’t quite ring true. Discovering Marie-Ange and Crozes in bed the night before. Realising that they’d been lovers for months, maybe years. And now replaying that awful time when she had lost the child. All of it brought a sudden reinterpretation of events. As if scales had fallen from his eyes. He felt a surge of anger and disbelief, and started off round the building at a run.
She was sitting behind the wheel of the second rental car, engine idling, but making no attempt to drive away. He ran across the car park and pulled the driver’s door open. She looked up at him, her face wet with tears, just as it had been that day at the hospital.
‘You liar,’ he said.
She flinched as if he had struck her.
‘That was my kid. But you figured if you had it you were going to be stuck with me, right?’ And when she didn’t respond. ‘Right?’
There was a singular vacancy in her eyes.
‘You didn’t go to your parents at all that week. You had an abortion, didn’t you? From some back-street quack. ’Cos you couldn’t do it legitimately without me knowing.’ He stared at her in disbelief. ‘You killed my child.’
She said nothing for a very long time, then in barely a whisper she said, ‘Our child.’ She pulled the door shut, engaged Drive, and accelerated away across the tarmac.
II
Long after she had gone, Sime stood by the sentier littoral staring out across the Baie de Plaisance towards the now familiar contour of Entry Island lying along the horizon. Children were playing on the beach, barefoot, running in and out of the incoming waves, screaming as cold water broke over little legs. The breeze ruffled his hair and filled his jacket. He felt hollowed out. His emptiness gnawed at him like a hunger. He was numbed by fatigue.
The longer he stared at this island which had grown to dominate his life these last days, the more compelled he felt to return to it. He had no idea why, except for a powerful sense that whatever answers it was he was seeking were to be found there.
He returned to the car park and got into the Chevy, driving up to the Chemin Principal and then north past the hospital and Tim Horton’s to the harbour. There he found the boatman whose fishing boat had been requisitioned by the Sûreté. He was sitting in the back of his vessel at the quayside smoking a small cigar and untangling fishing nets. He looked up, surprised, when Sime climbed down into the boat. ‘I need you to take me over to Entry,’ Sime said.
‘Lieutenant Crozes said I wouldn’t be needed till later.’
‘Change of plans. I need to go over now.’
When they arrived at Entry Island, Sime told him he could take the boat back to Cap aux Meules. He would make the return trip on the ferry. He stood watching as the fishing boat chugged out of the shelter of the breakwater and back into choppier waters in the bay, then turned to walk past the minibus where they had left it parked up for use on the island. He could have taken it. But he wanted to be on foot, to feel the island beneath his feet. He passed fishing boats with mundane names like Wendy Cora and Lady Bell, and turned on to the wide, unsurfaced Main Street that swept along the east coast of the island. Sunlight washed across the bay from the distant Cap in moments of broken sky. To the south-west, and much closer, was the Sandy Hook, a long curve of sandbank that extended from La Grave at the eastern point of the island of Havre Aubert. It reached out like a bony finger towards Entry Island.