“Goodness, that little girl is in a bad way.”
The first old lady, the thin one, turns to the other one:
“If you have the strength, Lucette, bring a towel and a bowl of water, quick. And you, children, come on up here, don’t stay there on your boat.”
She holds out her arms, feebly. Louie and Noah help Perrine up onto the terrace; the girl is whimpering, and she curls up in a ball on the ground the moment the first granny leans over her, while the other one hurries with tired little steps toward the house. Noah kneels by his sister. Louie, undecided, hesitates between joining him and keeping watch on the boat. Deep down, his wariness has not gone away; he looks at the old ladies out of the corner of his eye, the one who is examining Perrine in spite of the little girl’s fingers clutching at her face, and the one who, before long, comes back from the house carrying a basin; he wonders if they too will set a trap—he dreams of lying down and sleeping without fear—fear of water, of men—and his eyes ringed with shadows watch as the old women come and go, watch the things they carry, their furtive glances at him.
“Are you all right, son?” asks Lucette, without pausing in what she is doing.
A timid little nod.
Around them, the elated hens have left the boat and are ferreting, pecking on the terrace, he can hear their tap tap, and his head is spinning.
“Adele, there’s one last tube of aspirin in the cupboard in the bathroom, if you need it. I can go and get it.”
The thin old lady straightens up slowly, looks at the other one, awkward.
“Lucette, you’re the one who needs it most.”
The round granny brushes this off: Oh, with the time I’ve got left… don’t tell me otherwise, we both know it perfectly well.
Only then does Louie notice the sweat on Lucette’s forehead, the sound of her breathing like a saw cutting into a metal beam, the pale, drawn features on her deceptively round face. Adele lowers her head, hunts for her words.
“Just one, then. For the fever.”
“Good. Good.”
The old lady seems to be in so much pain when she walks that Louie leaps forward.
“I’ll go, if you’d like.”
“But you don’t know where it is,” says Lucette with surprise.
He has caught up with her and puts his arm under hers.
“Then you can show me.”
A few minutes that seem like an eternity, the time for Lucette to lead him to the end of the corridor in the house and point to a tiny closed cabinet.
“There. In the white and green tube on the left. You have to take a whole tablet and dissolve it in a glass of water.”
When they come back, Adele explains fretfully that she has to prepare a poultice.
“We don’t have much left in the way of first aid, but it will do a lot of good. It may seem a bit obsolete, but don’t let that fool you, it will work wonders.”
Noah and Louie watch her in silence, their eyes open wide: they don’t know what obsolete means. It sounds nice. It’s bound to work.
Adele bends over Perrine.
“I’m going to put something over your eye to reduce the swelling and remove the infection. Don’t worry, it won’t hurt, it’s just lukewarm. But you have to keep it on, I’ll put a bandage over it and you’ll look like a pirate. All right?”
Attentive and trembling, Perrine doesn’t answer. Noah squeezes her hand: She’s going to make you all better!
“Tell me, your other eye…” says the lady, “is it already blind?”
This time Perrine murmurs almost inaudibly, “Yes.”
“Right. Then we’ll leave it alone, we have to take care of the other one, which is precious. Here. Drink this glass of water, there’s some medication in it, it doesn’t taste good but it will make you feel better.”
“I’ve had aspirin,” whispers Perrine.
“Perfect. Drink it all down, your fever is very high. Lucette, are you there?”
The round old lady is sitting on a plastic chair behind them. Her voice is no louder than a murmur.
“I’m here.”
“I’ll leave her to you for a few minutes. Look after her.”
As soon as she is out of earshot Noah goes over to Lucette.
“Are you sick, too?”
“Noah!” says Louie.
The old lady smiles, wipes the sweat from her temples with an embroidered blue handkerchief.
“He is right to ask. Yes, I’m a little bit sick and a little bit old. But it’s not too serious.”
“And Adele, is she your daughter? She helps you?”
This time Lucette seems momentarily taken aback—Louie kicked his brother, but too late, he can see very well that the two old ladies are the same age, so he cries out to apologize for his brother:
“He doesn’t know about… he doesn’t understand—”
“Adele’s my neighbor,” says Lucette slowly. “She can be difficult but she’s a good person at heart. I used to live in that house over there, you see?”
“No,” says Perrine.
“Yes,” says Noah.
Louie looks at the house that is no more than a roof.
“The water went all the way upstairs and flooded everything,” explains Lucette, for Perrine’s sake. “So I came to live with Adele. But even here… we’re starting to have water around our ankles.”
“And the other house?” asks Noah.
“Oh, that one. It was our third neighbor, Valerie-Rose. We don’t know what happened. Since the sea rose all of a sudden, we think she must have gotten stuck there at night and drowned. We haven’t seen her in six days… she must have died.”
The little boy opens his eyes wide.
“Is that why you’re sick? Are you sad?”
Lucette thinks for a moment.
“Oh, no. She wasn’t a good neighbor, she was always fussing. But maybe if there were three of us we’d have more fun. It’s a bit boring around here.”
Louie raises his hand the way he does at school when he wants to say something, then lowers it abruptly when he realizes.
“Why are you here the two of you? Isn’t there anyone else?”
“The people who lived here and who survived the great tidal wave decided to leave—I suppose it was the same where you’re from. But we didn’t want to leave. You know, I was born here, and I’m eighty-three years old. Adele is eighty-six. We didn’t want to go anywhere else. It’s too late for us to start a new life.”
“But you’re going to be drowned, too.”
Like us.
Lucette’s gaze mists over, thoughtful and sad, yes, that’s it, thinks Louie, there’s a sadness about her.
“That could be,” murmurs the old lady.
“For sure,” insists Noah.
“Anyway, we don’t have a boat.”
“But we do. We can take you.”
Lucette smiles: That’s kind of you—and Adele’s voice suddenly, behind them, makes them turn their heads.
“It’s ready.”
Perrine starts to cry.
“No, no, it won’t burn, or sting, at all. It’s just a bit warm at first.”
Louie has to take Perrine’s hand and squeeze it, quietly reassuring her, Come on, but even so it does not stop her from struggling when she senses the poultice, first of all the smell in her nose, and she protests, No, no, and then the heat on her eye, she doesn’t even know if it hurts but, instinctively, she lashes out behind her and hits Louie in the jaw; he cries out. A moment later Adele is winding a bandage around her head, and it’s over. Perrine is still crying, one hand on the bandage.
“Tomorrow,” says the old lady, “when I take off the bandage, I bet you’ll be able to open your eye and you’ll start seeing again. They’re so pretty, your blue eyes, even the white part; it would be a pity not to use them anymore.”