All the vivacity and passion that crackled inside her, that high-speed lightheartedness, playful and ferocious, that queenly gait she’d still had this afternoon in the corridors of the ICU: all of this suddenly becomes waterlogged, dangling sodden and heavy in her brain. No sooner was she twenty-three years old than she was twenty-eight; no sooner twenty-eight than thirty-one: time is speeding past her while she examines her existence with a cold, deadly gaze that takes aim at the different areas of her life, one by one — the damp studio crawling with roaches, mold growing in the grout between tiles; the bank loan swallowing all her spare cash; close, intense friendships marginalized by newborn babies, polarized by screaming sweetness that leaves her cold; stress-soaked days and canceled girls’ nights out, but, legs perfectly waxed, ending up jabbering in dreary wine bars with a bevy of available women, shrieking with forced laughter, and always joining in, out of cowardice, opportunism; occasional sexual adventures on crappy mattresses, or against greasy, sooty garage doors, with guys who are clumsy, rushed, stingy, unloving; an excess of alcohol to make all this shine; and the only encounter that makes her heart beat faster is with a guy who pushes back a strand of her hair to light her cigarette, his fingers brushing her temple and the lobe of her ear, who has mastered the art of the sudden appearance, whenever, wherever, his movements impossible to predict, as if he spent his life hiding behind a post, coming out to surprise her in the golden light of a late afternoon, calling her at night in a nearby café, walking toward her one morning from a street corner, and always stealing away just as suddenly when it’s over, like a magician, before returning … That deadly gaze strips away everything, even her face, even her body, no matter how well she takes care of it — fitness magazines, tubes of slimming cream, and one hour of floor barre in a freezing hall in Docks Vauban. She is alone and disappointed, in a state of disgrace, stamping her feet as her teeth chatter and disillusionment invades her territories and her hinterland, darkening faces, ruining gestures, diverting intentions; it swells, this disillusionment, it multiplies, polluting the rivers and forests inside her, contaminating the deserts, infecting the groundwater, tearing the petals from flowers and dulling the luster in animals’ fur; it stains the ice floe beyond the polar circle and soils the Greek dawn, it smears the most beautiful poems with mournful misfortune, it destroys the planet and all its inhabitants from the Big Bang to the rockets of the future, and fucks up the whole world — this hollow, disenchanted world.
I’m gonna go. She tosses her cigarette to the ground, crushes it with the toe of her canvas ballet pump. The tall ginger guy watches her: You feeling better? She nods, I’m fine, see you later, turns on her heels and rushes inside. The walk back to the department is an interlude, which she uses to pull herself together before being engulfed once again in work. Everything becomes more intense at this time of day: the evening edginess, restless patients, the final treatments before bedtime — changing the drip bags, distributing pills — and the organ removal that will take place in a few hours: Révol had come to see her, to ask if she could sub in at the last minute, stay beyond her shift to help out in the OR, an unusual request, which she agreed to.
She stops by the cafeteria to grab a cup of hot tomato soup from the vending machine — she looks so tiny, walking through the vast, icy lobby, her jaw tensed, then shoving her fist into the machine in an effort to make the drink come out more quickly. The soup is disgusting, so hot that the plastic cup half-melts in her hand, but she drinks it down quickly, and is just feeling warm again when she sees them walk past her — the mother and the father: the parents of the patient in room 7, the young man she fitted a catheter to that afternoon, the one who’s dead and whose organs will be removed tonight, yes, those are his parents — following them with her eyes as they move slowly toward the tall glass doors. She leans against a pillar to get a better view of them: the glass is a mirror at this time of night, and the parents are reflected in it like ghosts glimpsed in the surfaces of lakes on winter nights. If you wanted to describe them, you would say that they are shadows of themselves, the banality of the expression not so much revealing their internal disintegration as emphasizing what they were just this morning — a man and a woman standing tall in the world — and seeing them walk side by side across the floor tiles lacquered by cold light, it is easy to guess that, from now on, the two of them are pursuing a new trajectory begun only a few hours before, that they are no longer living in the same world as Cordélia and the planet’s other inhabitants but are moving away from it, absenting themselves, drifting toward another domain, the place where, perhaps, for a time, all those people would survive, together and inconsolable, all those people who had lost a child.
Cordélia watches the figures grow smaller as they enter the parking lot, then vanish into the night. With a cry, she tears herself from the pillar, shakes herself like a foal, and picks up her cell phone. Her face regains its usual features and colors, and — with a mighty swing of the pendulum inside her — she makes an about-face that sets her on the right path again, quickly typing the number of that man who disappeared at five in the morning. Surprised by her own action, she nimbly manipulates the keys on her phone, as if wanting simultaneously to get this thing out of the way and defy the submissiveness that is holding her sadness hostage, as if she wants to fight back against the morbidity assailing her and to remember the possibility of love. One, two, three rings, and then the guy’s voice suggests in three different languages that she should leave a message. I love you, she says, and hangs up, oddly reinvigorated, divested of a weight. Suddenly, she sees life stretching out before her again, thinks that she always cries when she’s tired, and that she should take a magnesium supplement.
21
Lou. They haven’t called Lou. They haven’t tried to speak to her, have not thought about her at all, except to ask that her name be spoken into her brother’s ear at the moment when his heart is stopped. But they haven’t thought about Lou herself, that little seven-year-old girl, her distress at watching her mother leave suddenly for the hospital, her long wait, her solitude, all of that, and even though they have been caught in death’s oppressive whirlwind, dragged into tragedy, they can find no excuses and are thrown into a panic when they see the neighbors’ number on Marianne’s cell-phone screen, along with a notification for a voicemail message that they do not have the strength to listen to, and now Marianne steps on the accelerator, whispering into the windshield, we’re coming, we’ll be home soon.
* * *
The bells of the Saint-Vincent church are ringing and the sky has a creased appearance, like a melting altar candle. It is 6:20 p.m. when they climb the curving road that leads up the hill to Ingouville and drive into the building’s underground parking garage. We’re home, let’s stay together tonight, Marianne said as she switched off the ignition — but would they even have had the strength to go their separate ways tonight, Marianne staying here with Lou, Sean returning to that one-bedroom apartment in Dollemard, rented in haste last November? Marianne struggles to fit the key into the lock, can’t turn it — the metallic grating noise repeating inside the hole as Sean stamps his feet close behind her — and when she does finally get the door open, the two of them, off balance, fall forward into the room. They don’t switch on a light, just collapse onto the couch — that couch they found by the side of a country road one rainy day, wrapped up like a giant piece of candy in a transparent tarp — and around them the walls turn to blotting paper, absorbing the colors of coffee and scrap-metal that signal the dying of the day: on the few pictures that line the walls, other figures appear, other forms, while the chairs and tables swell, the patterns in the carpet fade; the room is like a sheet of photographic paper forgotten in a tray of developer, and this metamorphosis — this gradual darkening of the atmosphere in the room — sends them into a trance that deepens as the world around them slips away. The physical suffering they feel is not enough to keep them moored to reality: this is a nightmare, we’ll wake up from it, is what Marianne thinks as she stares at the ceiling. And if Simon did come home, then, at that very moment — if his key made the same metallic grating noise in the lock as hers had made and then the door opened and he entered the apartment, slamming it behind him, the way he always did, invariably making his mother yell, Simon stop banging the damn door! — if he turned up right now, his surfboard under his arm, squeaking in its slip cover, his hair damp, hands and face still blue from the cold, exhausted by the sea, Marianne would be the first to believe it: she would stand up, move toward him, and offer him scrambled eggs with paprika, or pasta, something hot and energizing, yes, what she saw would not be a ghost but her child, home at last.