Today
IT IS 7:00 A.M. The morning is here, sidling into every nook and cranny in the house, proclaiming this day in all its cruel density and reality. Anita swallows a vial of royal jelly and avoids looking at her reflection in the bay windows. She must not flinch today. She is so afraid of this day, she dreads every step she will take, every word she will utter, she dreads her daughter waking up, she is afraid of taking her husband in her arms, she is afraid of what they can say to one another. These days Anita is afraid of everything. A few years ago she believed she and Adam had a destiny. This was neither vanity nor arrogance but the quiet certainty that they were, in their own way, exceptional. Where did it come from, this conviction that together they would achieve something unique?
Anita remembers with a twinge of embarrassment that on occasion she pictured an article about the two of them in a very smart magazine along the lines of Architectural Digest. She would have written a great novel that attracted notable coverage; he would have painted pictures of great beauty, designed a striking modern building; they would arrange visits to their fine timber house, the study, the studio, the extensive bookshelves, they would pose beside the lilac tree with the forest visible behind them. They would be witty, mysterious, intelligent, generous, humble, and respectful and insist that their daughter’s face be pixelated.
Anita had been convinced that someday they would step into the limelight, they would be discovered, as a perfect diamond is suddenly discovered in a mine explored a thousand times before, a remarkable manuscript in a trunk in an attic, or a painting by an old master hidden beneath a layer of dirt. One little thing would suffice, so she surmised, to catapult them into something extraordinary, into what she called a destiny.
That “little thing” was Adèle.
“Maman? Maman!”
Anita is snatched out of her reverie, hurries through the living room without looking at the mist rising off the forest, ignoring Adam’s triptych that still hangs over the fireplace. As she reaches the threshold of the bedroom she straightens her back, tenses like a bow, smiles broadly and her jaw makes a little clicking sound. She goes in.
Laura is sitting on her bed, her face set in an expression of surprise and fear. She is almost thirteen, her once curly hair is smooth now. Her eyes are slightly slanted. Sometimes, when her movements and words are measured, she has the elegant look of an Asian woman. Laura eyes her mother, then the wheelchair near the door, then her mother again. She grasps the bars that are raised on both sides of the bed.
“Maman? What’s happening? Where’s my bed?”
On some days Laura’s memory is disturbingly sharp: she remembers the hoarfrost on the ferns, her pink coat, Adèle on the jetty at the lake, she recalls waking up in the hospital and all that she has lost. Those are difficult days. She is upset, furious, desperate, refuses her medicines, loathes her life, her mother, her father. At other times, as today, she thinks she is still eight years old, she does not know that her father is in prison and that Adèle is no more. She believes she can climb trees, run about in the garden, go to school.
Anita goes up to her, slides the bar down, slips in beside her daughter.
“It’s only a bad dream, ma chérie. Go back to sleep for a little while, it’s still early.”
“Will you stay with me, Maman?”
“Yes, of course, ma chérie.”
Adèle often used to sleep in this room. A few of the things she loved are still there: the pretty turquoise box on the bedside table, the lamp mounted on driftwood, the faded postcards of the region in frames the color of old gold. She used to say to Anita that this house was as warm as a mother’s embrace. She told Anita that here she could forget her past life.
Anita chokes back her tears. She presses close to Laura. If only she could borrow a little of her amnesia from her this morning. It would be so good for the space of a few hours, to forget those four years, five months, and thirteen days. It would be so wonderful still to believe in that destiny of hers.
PART TWO
The day of the grass snake
ON THE MORNING OF HER MEETING WITH ANITA, Adèle catches sight of a grass snake behind the bus shelter. She spends a good while observing this long creature, which is yellower than she would have expected, the way it slithers very slowly toward the fallow land nearby, and the stirring of the vegetation as it moves along. She cocks her head on one side, intrigued by the presence of this reptile, as if it were an animal from another era, not quite prehistoric, but from the days of her childhood (she calls to mind the columns of ants she used to like watching in the backyard). She remembers her mother used to say that a grass snake was a portent of change, but Adèle has long since ceased to believe in such things.
They are all there at the bus stop, the daylight phantoms, more or less the same as those she has been coming across there for quite a few years. (Adèle does not count, she says a few, quite a few, a long time, not such a long time, many, not many, a few, very few.) She does not remember faces but she recognizes the look of things, habits, sounds, smells, gestures: the blue smoke from a cigarette being shared by the young people gathered at the back of the bus shelter, the sound of tapping on a packet of Tic Tac mints held in the palm (a rhythm of maracas), a ring finger applying balm to the lips, the cotton
