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Marianne’s hand creeps across to touch Sean’s hand, or his arm, or his thigh, any part of his body she can reach, but that hand creeps into emptiness because Sean has stood up and is taking off his parka. I’m going down to see Lou. He walks toward the door, but before he reaches it the doorbell rings. He opens it and Marianne cries out — it’s her little girl.
Excited, Lou runs into the apartment dressed in a long colorful T-shirt worn over her clothes, with a scarf tied in her hair and iridescent tulle butterfly wings stuck to her back with the aid of Velcro ribbons — Lou too has straight black hair, olive skin, and mixed-race, delicately slanting eyes — and suddenly comes to a halt in front of her father, amazed to see him wearing a sweater inside the apartment. Are you back? Behind her, the neighbor remains on the threshold but pokes her head inside, like a giraffe, her face a question: Sean, have you come home? We just got here, he says brusquely: does not feel like talking. In front of him, Lou hops about while rummaging in her bag, then hands him a sheet of white paper: I did a drawing for Simon. She walks farther into the living room and, seeing her mother sprawled on the couch, asks: Where is Simon? Is he still in the hospital? Without waiting for a reply, she turns around and rushes into the hallway, wings flapping and feet hammering. They hear a door being opened, Lou calling out her brother’s name, then other doors banging, and his name called again. At last, the child reappears in the living room, where her two parents stand waiting, distraught, unable to speak, unable to say anything but — in a soft voice — Lou, while the neighbor, white-faced, steps back into the stairwell, indicating with a movement of her hand that she understands, won’t disturb them, and closes the door.
The child stands facing her parents while the day dies in the west, little by little plunging the city into darkness, and now they are visible only as silhouettes. Marianne and Sean walk toward her: unblinking, she remains silent as her eyes devour the darkness — the whites of her eyes like china clay — and Sean lifts her up and Marianne hugs them both, their three bodies joined together, eyes closed, like those monuments in memory of the drowned that you find in ports in southern Ireland. They stagger back to the couch and lie diagonally across it without letting go of each other, a Roman triad protecting itself from the outside world; they curl up inside their own breathing and the odors of their skin — the little girl smells of brioche and gummy bears — and this is the first time they have got their breath back since the announcement of the disaster, the first little nest they have been able to create in a quiet hollow of their devastation. And if you could only approach them, gently and silently, you would hear their hearts pumping, together, the life that remains, and hammering tumultuously, as if high-tech sensors had been placed on the valves and they were emitting infrasonic waves, those waves that run through space, plow through matter, sure and precise, zeroing in on Japan, the Seto Inland Sea, an island, a wild beach, and that wooden cabin where human heartbeats are archived, those cardiac fingerprints gathered from all over the world, deposited there by people who have made the long journey, and while Marianne and Sean’s beat in time, Lou’s is drumming fast, until she suddenly stands up, forehead damp with sweat: Why are we sitting in the dark? Catlike, she slips away from her parents’ embrace and moves around the room, switching on all the lamps, one by one, then turns to her parents and declares: I’m hungry.
Their phones beep more and more often now, alerting them to new voicemail messages. The time has come when they must think about talking, informing people — another ordeal looming into view. Marianne goes out onto the balcony, still wearing her coat, and lights a cigarette, readying herself to hear the news about Chris and Johan, then sees that she has a message from Juliette. She is paralyzed: fear of speaking, fear of hearing, fear that the words will get stuck in her throat, because Juliette was special. Simon had grudgingly introduced her one Wednesday in December when Marianne arrived home earlier than usual and found them in the kitchen. He hadn’t said “my mother,” but simply “Juliette, Marianne,” immediately muttering let’s go, we have stuff to do, as Marianne was engaging the girl in conversation: So you’re in the same school as Simon? She had been stunned to discover what she looked like, this girl who had a place in her son’s heart, this girl who looked like no one else, least of all a beach groupie, with her waiflike, flat-chested body and her strange, sweet little face — eyes so large they seemed to eat up her face, ears pierced with multiple holes, a gap-toothed smile and pale blond hair cut like Jean Seberg’s in Breathless; that day, she was wearing slim-fit, pale-pink corduroy jeans, bright-green high-top sneakers, and a twinset Fair Isle sweater under a red oilskin. Simon had waited impatiently while she replied to Marianne, then led her by the elbow to the door; later on, he had started dropping her name here and there, scattering Juliettes through the few conversations he agreed to participate in, until in the end she was mentioned almost as often as his friends and the names of beaches in the Pacific; he’s changing, Marianne had thought, as Simon gave up McDonald’s for an Irish pub that smelled of wet dog, began reading Japanese novels, gathering driftwood from the beach, and sometimes doing his homework with her — chemistry, physics, biology: subjects he was good at and she wasn’t — and then one evening Marianne heard him telling her how a wave was formed: look (he must have been drawing a diagram), the swell moves toward the shore, it contracts as the water becomes more shallow, this is called the levee zone, that’s where the waves arch their backs, sometimes it’s quite violent, then the swell reaches the breaking zone, which can cover about a hundred yards if the sea floor is rocky, those are called point breaks, after that the waves break in the surf zone but continue to mutate toward the shore, you see? (she must have nodded), and at the end, if you’re really lucky, there’s a girl there, on the beach, a pretty girl in a red oilskin. They used to stay up late, talking into the night while the house was asleep, and maybe they would even whisper I love you, not really knowing what it was they were saying, only that they were saying it to each other, that was what mattered, because Juliette — Juliette was Simon’s heart.