“And the limp?”
“Again, mostly when I’m tired. I barely notice it anymore. It was years ago.” Unlike Isabelle’s wounds, which were mere months old. He marveled at that. It seemed both ages ago and yesterday.
“Do you think about it?” she asked.
“What happened when you were hurt?”
He turned to look at her. That face, so familiar from across so many bodies. So many desks, conference tables. So many hastily set-up incident rooms in basements and barns and cabins across Québec. As they’d investigated murders. Isabelle. Jean-Guy. Himself.
Isabelle Lacoste had come to him as a young agent, barely twenty-five. Rejected by her own department for not being brutal enough, cynical enough, malleable enough to know what was right and to do wrong.
He’d been the head of homicide then and given her a job in his department, the most prestigious within the Sûreté du Québec. To the astonishment of her former colleagues.
And Isabelle Lacoste had risen through the ranks, eventually taking over from Gamache himself when he’d become head of the academy and then head of the whole Sûreté. As he was now.
Sort of.
She’d aged, of course. Faster than she should have, would have, had he not brought her on board. Had he not made her Chief Inspector. And had that last action against the cartels not taken place. Mere months ago.
“Yes,” he said. “I think about it.”
Isabelle hitting the floor. Shot in the head. What had seemed her last act had given them a chance. Had, in fact, saved them all. But still, it had been a bloody nightmare.
He remembered that, the most recent action. But he also remembered, equally vividly, all the raids, the assaults, the arrests. The investigations over the years. The victims.
All the sightless, staring eyes. Of men, women, children whose murder he’d investigated. Over the years. Whose murderer he’d hunted down.
All the agents he’d sent, often led, into the gun smoke.
And he remembered his hand raised, ready to knock on the closed door. The rapping of the Grim Reaper. To do murder himself. Not physically, but Armand Gamache was realistic enough to know this was a killing nevertheless. He carried with him always the faces of fathers, mothers, wives, and husbands. Inquisitive. Curious. Politely they opened the door and looked at this stranger.
And then, as he spoke the fateful words, their faces changed. And he watched their world collapse. Pinning them under the rubble. Crushed under a grief so profound most never emerged. And those who did came out dazed into a world forever changed.
The person they were before his arrival was dead. Gone.
When a murder was committed, more than one person died.
Yes. He remembered.
“But I try not to dwell on it,” he said to Isabelle.
Or, worse, dwell in it. Take up residence in the tragedies, the pain. The hurt. To make a home in hell.
But leaving was hard. Especially his agents, men and women whose lives were lost because they’d followed his orders. Followed him. He’d felt, for a long time, that he owed it to them to not leave that place of sorrow. To keep them company there.
His friends and therapists had helped him to see that that was doing them a disservice. Their lives could not be defined by their deaths. They belonged not in perpetual pain but in the beauty of their short lives.
His inability to move on would trap them forever in those final horrific moments.
Armand watched as Isabelle carefully lowered her mug to the kitchen table. When it was just an inch away from the surface, her grip slipped and the coffee spilled. Not much, but he could see her anger. Frustration. Embarrassment.
He offered her his handkerchief to sop it up.
“Merci.” She grabbed it from him and wiped. He put out his hand to take it back, but she kept it. “I’ll w-w-w … wash it and get it back to you,” she snapped.
“Isabelle,” he said, his voice calm but firm. “Look at me.”
She lifted her eyes from the soiled handkerchief to his face.
“I hated it too.”
“What?”
“My body. I hated it for letting me down. For letting this happen.” He ran his finger along the scar at his temple. “For not moving fast enough. For not seeing it coming. For being on the ground, not being able to get up to protect my agents. I hated it for not healing fast enough. I hated when I stumbled. When Reine-Marie had to hold my hand to keep me steady. I could see people staring at me with pity as I limped or searched for a word.”
Isabelle nodded.
“I wanted my old body back,” said Armand. “The strong and healthy one.”
“Before,” she said.
“Before,” he nodded.
They sat in silence, except for the far-off laughter of the children.
“That’s how I feel,” she said. “I hate my … body. I hate that I can’t pick up my kids or play with them, or if I do get onto the floor with them, they have to help me up. I hate it. I hate that I can’t … read them to sleep, and that I get tired so easily, and lose my train of thought. I hate that some days I can’t add and some days I can’t … subtract. And some days—”
Isabelle paused, gathering herself. She looked into his eyes.
“I forget their names, patron,” she whispered. “My own children.”
It was no use telling her he understood. Or that it was all right. She’d earned the right to no easy answer.
“And what do you love, Isabelle?”
“Pardon?”
Gamache closed his eyes and raised his face to the ceiling. “‘White plates and cups, clean-gleaming, / Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust; / Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust / Of friendly bread.’”
He opened his eyes, looked at Isabelle, and smiled, deep lines forming at his eyes and down his worn face.
“There’s more, but I won’t go on. It’s a poem by Rupert Brooke. He was a soldier in the First World War. It helped him in the hellhole of the trenches to think of the things he loved. It helped me too. I made mental lists and followed the things I love, the people I love, back to sanity. I still do.”
He could see her thinking.
What he was suggesting wasn’t a magic cure for a bullet to the brain. A huge amount of work, of pain, physical and emotional, lay ahead. But it might as well be done in the sunlight.
“I’m stronger, healthier now than I was before any of that happened,” said Gamache. “Physically. Emotionally. Because I’ve had to be. And you will be too.”
“Things are strongest where they’re broken,” said Lacoste. “Agent Morin said that.”
Things are strongest where they’re broken.
Armand heard again the impossibly and eternally youthful voice of Paul Morin. As though he were standing right there, in Isabelle’s sunny kitchen with them.
And Agent Morin had been right. But oh the pain of mending.
“I’m lucky in a way,” Isabelle said after a few moments. “I can’t remember anything about that day. Nothing. I think that helps.”
“I think it does.”
“My kids keep wanting to read me … Pinocchio. Something to do with what happened, but damned if it makes sense to me. Pinocchio, patron?”
“Sometimes being shot in the head is a blessing.”
She laughed. “How do you do it?”
“Remember?”
“Forget.”
He took a breath, looked down at his feet, then back up, into her eyes.
“I had a mentor once—” he said.
“Oh Jesus, not the one who taught you poetry,” she said in mock panic. He had that “poetry” look about him.
“No, but just for that.” He cleared his throat. “‘The Wreck of the Hesperus,’” he announced, and opened his mouth as though to launch into the epic verse. But instead he smiled and saw Isabelle beaming with amusement.
“What I was going to say is that my mentor had this theory that our lives are like an aboriginal longhouse. Just one huge room.” He swept one arm out to illustrate scope. “He said that if we thought we could compartmentalize things, we were deluding ourselves. Everyone we meet, every word we speak, every action taken or not taken lives in our longhouse. With us. Always. Never to be expelled or locked away.”