“My father has led an impressive career for nearly forty years. He started from nothing, he’s a self-made man, and he succeeds in all he does. There will always be jealous people, people who try to blame others for their own failures.”
The girl who failed her comeback, David says to himself, his investigative instinct on maximum alert. The one who was destroyed by the critic everyone fears. He takes his time before asking the question, very calm. “Are you thinking of someone in particular?”
Stéphanie turns toward her husband. As if she were seeking approval she doesn’t need. “I don’t want to speak ill of anyone.”
But you will anyway, Géraldine thinks, waiting for the rest, in perfect complicity with David.
“Raphaëlle’s life is at stake, Steph,” her husband says, insistent. He takes a deep breath, finally seizing the occasion to play the lead role.
He has no clue that it’s exactly what his wife wants, think Géraldine and David, neither of them buying her act. For the cruel words to come from his own lips, so as not to taint hers, full and pure.
“A poor girl my father-in-law employed when she was young. A limited talent, you could say that, I think. But she was cute, and she was in Family Life for a while. And then... she let herself go, she became... enormous, and so he was forced to get rid of her.”
Get rid of her. Like she’s a mangy dog.
“She tried to make a comeback, and when she realized that she had no talent, no charisma, nothing, she started making up stories and telling lies.”
“What sort of lies?”
“That it was my father-in-law’s fault she hadn’t made it. That he took her out of school to make her work, that he exploited her, stole her childhood.”
“Took her out of school?”
“Yes, but her parents agreed to it. And it’s not like she was on her way to becoming a neurosurgeon,” says Stéphanie, contempt in her voice.
“Nothing’s easier than blaming your mentor when the truth is that you just aren’t talented enough.”
David nods. “You think she could resent him enough to kidnap your daughter?”
Tears flow, unstoppable, snotty tears, down Stéphanie’s polished cheeks, a torrent that the barrier of her thin hands fails to contain, even with her husband’s arm around her shoulder.
“I don’t know, I really don’t know. I don’t understand how anyone could want to hurt my little girl. She’s an innocent child. Please find Raphaëlle, find my daughter.”
Her
The day has been long. And tiring. Since the kidnapping this morning, she’s barely slept. She has an ache in her shoulder, bruised by the recoil of the rifle, a pain in her knee, which she bumped in the chase with the journalist, and a headache from driving all day. And then there’s the blood that’s seeped into her clothes; its fetid odor has nauseated her, kept her from eating, and she feels weak. Or else it’s the cancer that has spread beyond her lungs. Perhaps it’s lodged in her bones already, she doesn’t know. When the doctor told her both lungs were affected, that it was already quite advanced, she said, No, no scan, she didn’t want to know, what good would it do? She said no chemo either, and she stood up from that cursed chair, very straight, electrified by a vigor she’d never felt in her life. It puzzles her now to think that she came into being on the day she was sentenced to death.
She’d left the rifle in her truck, emptying the remaining bullets, and parked in the alley behind the house on Rue Butternut, in the nondescript enclave of Saint-Henri. The lock on the wooden garage door is still there, intact. Perfect. Roger is still inside. In what state? She doesn’t know, and she doesn’t give a damn. Last night, she brought him into the shed with a forty-ounce bottle of vodka, and before the poor idiot realized what was happening to him, the wooden door had closed him in, padlocked. She knows he didn’t find the strength to break down the flimsy partition that would’ve allowed him to escape. She knows he chose liquor. It was what he’d always done, even if it meant selling his own daughter.
She presses her ear against the door. Silence. She imagines Roger curled up in the arms of his great love, vodka, and realizes that in spite of her lungs, gangrenous from the tumors, she can finally breathe. They’re all dead. The father who was supposed to protect her daughter; the one who watched her husband rape children and did nothing; that bitch of a journalist who had nothing better to do than blame the victims; and him, finally him, the heavy-handed ogre who chased little girls and destroyed them, one after another.
As for Paul’s daughter — the one whose elite private-school education had been paid for by the work of kids he’d taken out of school to make the machine turn faster — she must know now, deep in her gut, what it meant to fear the worst for your child.
Justice has been served.
She enters the house by the back door. The smell of vegetable soup impregnates the walls, the wind comes in through the joints in the aluminum windows, and the paint is chipping, discolored by time and tobacco. Nothing has changed since that first day when Paul Normand, stinking of cologne and money, came in to make them an offer that would change their lives.
She sets the keys to the truck on the kitchen table. The sound of the television drifts down from upstairs. Canned laughter. A cheerful little tune she can tell from a thousand others: the theme song of Family Life. She hears footsteps coming up the walk, and turns to see two silhouettes looming in the doorframe. A man and a woman. Police.
Claudine is not afraid. She’s held back for so long, been silent and ashamed for so many years. She wraps a shawl around her shoulders and goes to let them in. They’re young, good-looking, especially the woman, who raises her head, hearing the sound of the television and a child’s laugh from upstairs. She exchanges a brief look of relief with her colleague.
“Madame Claudine Lachance?”
“Yes. Come in, come in, it’s freezing.”
She closes the door behind them, heads toward the kitchen, busies herself putting on the kettle.
“I only have bagged tea. Do you take it with sugar? Milk?”
“Neither,” they respond in unison. Like me, thinks Claudine, strangely comforted by the idea that she has something in common with the officers who have come to arrest her. The man pulls out a chair and sits down, laying his pencil and papers out neatly on the kitchen table. He looks like a boy who’s just come home from school. She tells him so; he smiles.
“I like my things in order,” he says, clicking his pen open.
The woman, for her part, remains standing. Her long, delicate fingers graze the cookbooks, the glass poodle figurine, the photo of a girl with big brown eyes in a white porcelain frame.
The kettle whistles just as footsteps begin to descend the worm-eaten staircase. The light steps of a child first, in ballet shoes. Then others, heavier, in Phentex slippers.
David turns around at the same time as Géraldine. Before them is the small blond head of Raphaëlle, laughing, alive. And behind her, obese and dull-eyed, an overgrown child hidden behind layers of flesh and medicated lethargy, broken.
Like every time she looks at her daughter, her little Victoria, Claudine wants to die. Her daughter who was so delicate, so sensitive, and whom she hadn’t defended, hadn’t protected, her daughter whom she’d left in the hands of Paul Normand because she was afraid of him, afraid of Roger, afraid of standing up to all the men who told her what to do, who told her to stay silent.