The Child Read online

  Gaël was too small to reach the nest and too heavy to pull himself up by the branches and fence. Simone was afraid that Claude would see his clumsiness. She heard him calling to them. The pain had clearly not subsided, but he was making a point of being with them. Gaël instantly tore himself away from the dense bush, protecting himself from scratches and insects fastidiously. Claude pointed out reproachfully the two anxious blackbirds that were watching from the plum tree. The pillow had left creases on his face, crumpling his severity but doing nothing to soften it. Simone grumbled that he could never loosen up and have a bit of fun. It was sadly obvious that he would never win the child’s favor.

  Gaël had thought it fun to help make dinner, and Claude did not try to interfere. Simone gave him the lettuce to wash and watched him breaking off leaves in the icy water with immense concentration. His mother would not be long now, and urgency made him talkative. Simone wanted to know what he had been about to ask earlier on, when Claude had come downstairs. Her insistence embarrassed him, and he blushed mischievously. Were you already going out with Claude when he met Mommy? he said, at last. He had finished washing the lettuce and was swirling the residual dirt around in the water. Simone was peeved to think he had heard that from his mother. Her reaction made him shake with a wonderfully throaty laugh, revealing a black hole at the back of his mouth where a tooth had been extracted. Simone wondered what he guessed about her feelings of resentment. She could not bear the thought of his comparing her to his mother and seeing her as old.

  Simone spotted the car before he did. She moved away from the window, and her chest constricted with the jealous hurt she had been dreading for several weeks but that now caught her by surprise. Gaël took his time at the sound of the horn. He shook the cold water from his reddened hands and wiped them on his pants. Then he crouched down to retie his laces, stood up, and was about to go to the door but changed his mind and went to kiss her. The spontaneity of his gesture was as genuine as his impatience to leave. In the confusion of their shared embarrassment, their faces missed their mark and Simone had the fleeting surprise of his full lips on the corner of her mouth before they landed squarely on her cheek. She could not help hanging on to his kiss, which he intensified and seemed to infuse with his whole body. I love this child, she thought, watching him run to say good-bye to Claude from the living room door.

  The door slammed shut, and Simone saw him reach the garden gate in a few joyful bounds. Before he dived into the car, he took a last look (but failed to see her) over the hood. Jovana was also looking toward the house without seeing her. She was not very different from the way she looked in the photo Claude had kept of her, standing young and radiant in jogging pants on a podium. Her bangs were combed down as they had been then, very low and straight on her face, with its high, round cheekbones split by an enormous red smile. She was wearing a light gray hooded sweatshirt, and a high ponytail of thick russet-brown hair just like Gaël’s was bobbing above it. The SUV was enormous and had a stripe all down one side. A sticker warned that there were children on board. Simone had not even asked whether Gaël had brothers and sisters. It was only later, when she was setting the table, that Claude told her Jovana had brought him up alone for more than nine years. He refused to add anything at that point. His face looked like wax and was completely gray. It was crazy to think that he and Jovana had ever coupled.

  Cédric had not introduced himself, and his Yes? rang loud and false through the receiver. Simone reached out to push the study door shut. The electric blinds were lowered, and light from the street clawed fine grooves into the darkness that had fallen around her. Claude was not in bed. She waited to see if he would pick up the phone in the bedroom, but nothing, not even a hello. He was leaving them to deal with all comment.

  Is he really my brother? Cédric asked with an awkward little laugh. Simone said yes. The reaction took time coming and surprised her by its neutrality. He wanted to know if it had gone okay, whether his father had been overly upset. Yolande must have been standing beside him, holding Aude, and the little girl’s whimpers were suddenly audible through the receiver. Cédric muffled the mouthpiece for a moment, then returned to the call and apologized, sounding oddly annoyed.

  He was a teenager when Gaël was born and was living with his mother, who had already separated from Claude years before, though she was still concerned enough to have been kept up-to-date and to have thought that Jovana was trying to use him. Cédric, too, had thought his father naïve. The annoyance of being wrong added to the distress caused by his father’s sickness and must have struck him as just as arbitrary and unfair. Like his father, he was not good either at offering comfort or opening up. Simone had often marveled that Yolande, whose sweet, blond features were a painful excitement to men, had settled for a frustrating husband. Cédric was celebrating his sixteenth birthday when Simone had met him. She had thought him pleasant but uninspiring, despite his wonderful gray eyes. He had come across as polite and serious, anxious to appear glad to meet her. Simone had been going out with Claude for a few months. Their relationship was not earth-shattering, but it was genuine. Above all, it was joyless, as she had realized at that birthday celebration, watching his tall, oddly formal son helping to clear the table, shoulders hunched. She had wept about it in a panic of lucidity, staring wide-eyed and haggard at her reflection in the bedroom mirror upstairs while Cédric watched the news with his father in silence, waiting until it was time for his train. She had moved in with Claude shortly afterward and tried to believe in their happiness regardless, but she had never warmed to Cédric. Something about him deterred affection, perhaps the adult displays of care he showed for Claude, who had been shattered by a messy divorce he had not wanted. Until he was eighteen, he had devoted every other Sunday to them, escaping the dingy backdrop of the neighborhood by going out for long bike rides with his father. Simone was aware that it was Claude who had been hampered by this routine. Cédric had been snatched from him prematurely and for a long time. The efforts necessary to enforce his visiting rights had turned out to be the best thing Claude had to give. His attachment was simply a matter of guilt, and Simone guessed that, ultimately, that was what had made the separation acceptable.

  Cédric was less interested in Gaël than in the situation. Simone was happy she did not have to tell him that she had liked the little boy. She was angry with herself for being moved by such affection, for the warmth of her feelings was gradually dissolving her courage of recent months. Cédric wanted to know what Claude had in mind with this kid, whether he hoped to be loved by him before he died, and if he was expecting them to act as his family. Simone at least had to allow him that: his lucidity was more charitable than Claude’s guilt. A car had just drawn up a few meters away alongside the hedge. Simone held the receiver away from her ear to listen to car doors slamming and voices echoing disproportionately in the dark. Outside in the garden, watched over by the towering apartment buildings and barricaded shopping center, the noises sounded more threatening, as though squeezed up against the ludicrous plastic screen of the roller shutters. Simone had never been aware of her fears before Claude fell sick; explaining them demanded an energy that now seemed too dispersed. She told Cédric that she would rather continue their conversation about all that tomorrow when she and Claude went over to see them. The car had driven off and silence had fallen heavily about her by the time she hung up.

  She went into the living room to raise the electric blinds. Slowly, the night and hedges appeared, split by light from the streetlamps. Beyond the cluster of round paving stones, the lawn stretched like black water. The air was still and fresh, sweet with the scent of mock orange. Simone had only just realized that she would probably have to live here on her own afterward, at least for a while, until she had found something to do and somewhere to go. Dread wrung a groan from her. The blinds of two neighboring houses were lowered on total silence. In the distance, toward the city center, a rotating light ground into the night’s cloudy vastness. Simon
e walked over to the forsythia, lit to transparency by the blinding glare of a porch bulb. The female was there with her feathers all spread out and her beak poking over the edge of the nest like a thorn. Simone parted the branches to get closer and wondered how long the bird’s fortitude would hold out. This instant of cruelty absorbed her just long enough for the feeling of panic to abate and let her breathe. She withdrew gingerly from the aggressive tangle of branches. Claude’s face was glued to the window of Cédric’s old room. He had gotten up and switched on the light when he heard someone moving around in the garden. He had grown fearful, too, now that pain had left him with no hold on his body. Simone waved to him to go back to bed and went in without shutting the blinds behind her. He was the one who insisted they barricade themselves in; she had never gotten used to the oppression of the rooms behind their flimsy plastic defenses. Loneliness, she reflected, brought with it the return of these little liberties.

  Simone turned out the light in the hallway and waited for her eyes to get used to the thick, heavy darkness of the bedroom. Claude was not asleep. A move under the sheets raised the new, irksome odor of the bed, where he lay distant and frozen, battling with his horror at the slightest contact, the smallest expression of concern. Simone would not get to sleep while she felt him tense and hostile despite himself. It was as though they had turned into thistles for each other. His apprehension of her was the only outward sign of the onset of death. Simone knew the exact spot beneath his left shoulder blade where the pain had first started up. There was no seeing it and no reaching it, however much she pressed as he first asked her to, embarrassed to find himself worried—really worried—and bizarrely offended. The word cancer had been a relief to him, since he had at least not been wrong in insisting about the pain. On the X-rays, the milky shadow smudged out the top of his left lung and spread over the pleura and ribs. Claude was irritable and taciturn when he came home from his hospital appointments. He had put up with it for too long and now there was no hope; his one aim was to hurtle to the end as fast as possible. He gave them no option and refused to discuss it. His intolerance of pity and questions was nasty. Simone no longer knew how to love him properly, or, indeed, how to love him at all, and there was no one around to whom she could admit that she had started to resent him for it. The memory of Gaël’s affection and the way he had kissed her with his whole face planted firmly against her cheek continued to make her tingle. Soundlessly, she began to cry about her physical loneliness, imagining that it would be forever.

  You didn’t shut the living room blinds. The rebuke broke the silence abruptly, like a dry cough. Simone countered it with slow, regular breathing, as though she were asleep. Tears rolled into her mouth and over her neck. She dared not suggest moving into a separate room, and he would never admit that the presence of his partner in bed with him was unbearable for his body, for his anxiety about death, and maybe, too, for his guilt at abandoning her. Simone wondered how long you could share a painful space guarded against you with such hostility.

  CÉDRIC HAD LEFT the gate open to the narrow brick house and the walled garden, now completely white with blossoming fruit trees. He was on the phone, picking absently at bubbles of green paint that were flaking off with rust. Claude gave a little hoot that jerked him upright, like a slap, out of the slouch brought on by the boredom of waiting. The maneuver to get into the yard without scraping against the walls of the alleyway was clumsy. Still on the phone, Cédric eyed him closely. But it was really the expression on Claude’s face, drawn by concentration and pain, that he was watching. It caused him deep, overwhelming anxiety to see his father suffer, but he found no other means of expressing it than through this total seriousness. He had put on weight in recent months and his shoulders and thighs filled out his city clothes with confident solidity. Simone was always struck by how conscientiously he played the adult he had been so eager to become.

  They had bought the house shortly before Yolande had given birth; brambles had invaded the planks and rubble intended for alterations that had never come to fruition. As she stood up out of the car, Simone felt her foot come down on a plastic figurine, which she sent into the bushes, her eyes on Yolande, who was coming toward them from the garden at Aude’s tottering pace. She smiled at them from her blond, supremely delicate features and called out Hello and How are you? Claude waved back and slowly extricated himself from his seat. She must have thought him changed, because tears rose to her eyes, glistening and surprising. Simone had heard her sob the day the news of the cancer had broken. She was suspicious of these displays of emotion: her own pain had been slow to be released. She stepped forward to take Aude in her arms and warn Yolande under her breath that things weren’t great. The little girl’s warmth as she trustingly crumpled against her breast almost wrung a moan from her, so tense was she from Claude’s mood that morning. At breakfast, he had dropped a cup. Things were slipping away from him; he was starting to lose his sense of feeling, and again, there had been no way of talking about it. Not even Gaël’s arrival had elicited comment, and it was too late to say anything now without embarrassment or tension.

  Cédric took Claude into the house, his arm around his father’s shoulder in a gesture of newfound intimacy that was terribly awkward. Yolande waited for the door to close behind them. So, is it true, Gaël looks like him? she asked after a moment’s hesitation, with the same edgy laugh Cédric had given the day before on the phone. Simone replied that she adored him without elaborating, because that was the truth and she didn’t think she needed to spare the couple’s happiness. Yolande listened to her, stroking her daughter’s hair, so fair that it was almost white. She could not understand why no one had tried to make contact with Jovana during all those years. A truculent frown appeared on her forehead, a kind of old rebellion against them or a determination to think her own thoughts, which Simone would never have suspected her of. As happened so often, Simone blamed herself for not being able to love her.

  Attention was focused mostly on the little girl during mealtimes, and Claude was happy to go along with not being expected to take part. In any case, he coped better with his impatience at the pain in gatherings than in one-on-ones. Simone thought with a pang that she had only ever shared with Gaël the distress his abruptness caused her. The incident with the cup that morning preyed on her till she felt she would choke. It was a symptom they had expected, and it presaged the start of the worst. She resented Claude for his ability to bluff.

  It wasn’t his way to take the floor, and his voice was probably less firm than he would have liked when he announced over coffee that he had finally decided to undergo treatment. Cédric froze, and Yolande, who had Aude on her lap, seemed to shrink into the baby’s soft body. Claude had been so determined and convincing in his rejection of a pointless battle that this U-turn forced them, without warning, to face their awareness that they were waiting for him to die. He stared down at his folded hands on the cloth, anxious to soothe or conceal any telltale signs on his face. Jovana couldn’t handle the little boy, he had inferred, and he was ashamed of giving up; that was all. He thought he was being a coward, a disgrace. Cédric looked now at Simone now at his wife, whose eyes grew big with tears. He seemed to be seeking support for his revolt. Whereas we, we’re not worth wanting to live for, he said sardonically, rolling up his napkin while Yolande got up from the table with the baby in her arms. Claude made a face to dismiss the remark. You’re not the ones with anything to complain about. It was said without pity or compassion for the pain he was inflicting, or maybe just with no thought for them. Simone sat leaning forward with her hands on her thighs. Nothing but a groan could have passed her lips. The idea of having to go back, in reverse, along the way they had come to reach his decision not to accept treatment appalled her. She would not have the courage for a long illness that would not get better. She had just enough courage for a few months, she kept saying to herself, trying calmly to pile up the plates. Claude fell silent when he saw her get up, and he apologized for
not having spoken to her about it sooner. To her amazement, Simone found she was not even capable of anger.

  Yolande turned around when she heard Simone enter the kitchen. Her whole face was stammering with incomprehension. Why didn’t he ever listen to us? she sputtered unhappily. Simone could not fathom why Yolande needed to feel she mattered to her father-in-law. She envied Yolande her ability to think about him, when all she felt was self-pity. There was a scraping of chairs; then the front door banged shut with a loud rattle of windowpanes. Yolande put her head into the hallway, looking disoriented and guilty at her resentment. But Cédric was already coming to join them, a clutch of glasses in either hand, motioning that everything was all right. He’s waiting in the car for you, he told Simone, raising his eyebrows in irritation and surprise at Yolande’s tears.