The boat rocks. Madie feels a presence next to her, keeps her eyes closed. To be alone and wretched. She can hear a child breathing, saying nothing. It lasts a long time; she does not have the strength to speak. At one point there is a hand on her arm, stroking her. A little hand. Not Liam, not Matteo. Tender, awkward. The mother shivers, they mustn’t make her weep anymore. The gentle rubbing is filling her with too much emotion. Stop, she thinks.
No, don’t stop.
She opens her eyes. Sidonie is gazing steadily at her.
There you are, thinks the mother.
A pale smile. The little girl smiles back, her hand still stroking.
“Will you come and eat with us?”
“I’m not very hungry…”
“Because of Lotte?”
The way she says it. A lump in her throat, the mother replies: Yes.
“Are you sad?”
“And aren’t you sad?”
“I am, but maybe she’ll come back someday.”
“I don’t think so. She drowned in the sea, you know.”
“What does drownded mean?”
“It’s when you go all the way down in the water and you can’t come back up again, because of the waves or the storm.”
“Like fish.”
“Not exactly. But a little bit.”
“So you see, if she’s a fish, she’ll come back.”
Madie wishes it were true. For hours she has been wondering when, where, Lotte slipped from the jacket she was clinging to. It’s pointless, of course. But she can’t help it. Trying to find those last seconds, the instant when Lotte was still alive. Her face against the hand that was holding the jacket, her body buffeted by the storm—the mother remembers hearing her cough several times when she swallowed water, or maybe that was Marion, she honestly doesn’t know anymore, it all got mixed up in the wind, the only thing for certain was that one second earlier Lotte was still there.
After that, a black hole.
Until Sidonie’s clear little voice.
“Are you coming to eat? You have to eat to be strong.”
Then the mother’s slow wrenching. She feels as if steel slings are holding her to the floor of the boat. It takes her several minutes to sit up, her head is spinning, a mixture of sorrow and exhaustion. Standing next to her, eyes smiling, Sidonie holds out her hand.
She takes it.
-
When did the days begin to pass so slowly, wonders Madie, shriveled in upon herself as if she were a hundred years old. Since when, her features as ravaged as a drunkard’s, her guts and her courage in a tailspin, vanished, null; and how many days? Nine, ten. Who knows. Time slips over her. Lotte’s death has woven a strange shell around her. No one else can see it, a transparent web that brings muffled sounds, veiled images. Lights are dim, voices distorted. The mother can’t do anything about it, it came all by itself. Sometimes it suits her; sometimes she would like to get away from it, because something inside her is aware that this odd lethargy must not prevail, in the long run, she has to stop it, otherwise she will founder once and for all, which wouldn’t bother her all that much, God, but there are the others, after all. She cannot see that her heart is slowly mending, going back and forth along a path toward a kind of healing that will never truly be one, a bandage, perhaps, a compress, pressing hard where it’s bleeding, just enough to keep going, to get up in the morning; an ointment for the vanished child.
But Madie wouldn’t dare, it’s too soon. She cannot imagine that necessity could get the better of pain in such a way, with so much indifference and abnegation. Sorrow devours her and deserts her. If she had time, if she had an inkling to—yes, perhaps, if things had been that way, she would have knelt on the ground and begged, for weeks. But it wasn’t like that. There are the five children on the boat, and the three who stayed on the hill. There are currents, and storms, and the beginnings of hunger; there is the beast she sometimes sees behind them, concealed in the boat’s wake. There is Pata who is wearing himself out rowing, while Liam and Matteo take turns, the father is white as a ghost, when he lets go of the oars in the evening his hands tremble, they have nothing left to squeeze—everything speaks of urgency and Madie can feel it as strong as her suffering, so she straightened her knees, like a scarecrow kept ramrod tall in his field by a stick, she went back to her place, the mother was once again the mother. Now she observes her family, six ghostly figures—as if they had lost their consistency in the course of these ten days, gradually fading, shadows, dotted lines. The little ones don’t even ask to leave the boat when they come upon island hills, more and more frequently, almost every day now, they don’t shout, don’t throw tantrums. They are enveloped in a sort of torpor, and if she could choose, the mother liked it better when they were insolent, rather than listlessly lapsing into this strange stupor, their gazes drifting on the water, their eyelids swollen with the bites of mosquitos they don’t even bother to brush away. That is why she has started talking again, started pointing to grassy patches or clouds, picked up stories where she left off. She is pretending. She murmurs in silence to herself that everything is the way it used to be.
And yet something huge has changed: the number of children on the boat. Madie forces herself not to count. She remembers. One by one, between dreams and delirium, she goes back over the children’s names, the memory of each of their nine births, the ones that were difficult, the ones she hardly felt. To pass the time? To lessen the pain of Lotte’s death, to bring her back to life, to give birth to her again and again. She spends more time thinking about that particular birth. And it’s true, her mind fills with emotions, when she recalls those moments of pain and joy.
With Liam, it lasted twenty-seven hours, yet he wasn’t a big baby; then only four for Matteo. At the time she figured she could go on having children, since they came so easily, now that her body was acclimatized. But then for Louie she had suffered again, over a day, and she thought: why have so many children? She and Pata had already decided to have seven or eight, they didn’t know why, probably one day they were horsing around and came up with that number, and it stuck in their memory, they didn’t discuss it any further, it was self-evident. And the reason was not that either one of them came from a big family—Pata had only two brothers, and Madie one sister and one brother, both younger—nor a shared dream or a challenge or anything like that, it was really just a game, random chance, a lack of imagination, perhaps, and then after Liam, Matteo, and Louie, Madie desperately wanted a girl. So Perrine was born eighteen months later. Pata thought that was a bit too soon. Madie wept with joy. And the birth went well, and quickly, she was in a sort of trance until they put the little girl on her belly, Madie was dying to see what she looked like and wasn’t disappointed: the most charming baby on earth. So it had been all that much harder, three years later, when Matteo, playing around with a stick, had blinded Perrine in her left eye, at the hospital the doctors couldn’t do a thing, and she became a one-eyed little princess, with her pretty face and her good nature, and now her blank eye—because she didn’t want to hide it, she said she wasn’t ashamed, just as on the day of the accident she had said it didn’t hurt and would they stop talking about it. But in any case, the day of her birth, since that was what Madie was thinking about now, had been a fine day. And it was in part because of it that Madie figured she was game for another round, and she would gladly hatch a few more children, how many exactly she hadn’t decided, that would depend—on desire, fatigue, Pata’s joyful incursions. And clearly they both went at it heartily, because not eighteen months had gone by when Noah came into the world, ever so calm and weighing less than four pounds; now that they had both boys and girls, Pata and Madie decided to keep the sex of the child a surprise, and it was only on the day of his birth that they became acquainted with the baby they would call Noah. If he had been a girl, they would have called him Emily.