It takes several seconds.
Laura has a child’s impulsiveness, she does not have the patience to wait, she does not understand everything, she has seen her mother’s tears, she has heard the argument. She has recognized the binder (so many times her mother has said to her, Don’t touch that! That’s my work). At this moment what Laura wants is to get it back, to drive away Adèle, who is making her maman cry, and win praise for this good deed. She believes she can achieve this the way she believes she can climb onto the wisteria arbor without falling, or that she could fly if she had wings attached to her back. Deep down inside her she simply wants Adèle to go away for a while, a little while, so that things might be just as they were before, when her parents belonged only to her and she belonged only to her parents. She rushes forward. She is eight.
Adèle draws back, closes her eyes, and opens her arms, confronted by the little girl in pink hurtling toward her. The binder falls, the sheets of paper cascade like angels’ wings. All it takes to determine her fate is the thrusting gesture of an angry child’s little hand. She throws up her arms as if heading for death via a back somersault. It is much easier than she had imagined. Her body hits the water and she slips slowly into this dense cold world, just as she has so many times pictured the white Fiat slipping down the cliff. She no longer thinks of anything and, as Anita had so truthfully said, she is nothing, she does not exist.
When Adèle falls into the water, Laura utters a cry and takes a step sideways to regain her balance (she can distinctly hear her judo teacher’s voice: legs apart, knees bent!) but her foot slips on a sheet of paper, her ankle twists, she skids, her head hits a post but she feels no pain. The little figure tumbles over into the lake.
As for Anita, just before plunging into the water herself, and even though she has seen everything, and even though she, too, rushes in with a shout, and even though she cannot hear Adam yelling, for in truth no sounds exist anymore, she makes this unforgivable gesture, this downward lunge with an outstretched arm, as if to retrieve something and as she jumps into the water her fist is already grasping her gray binder. Long afterward, when the newspapers praise her courage and her maternal impulse to save her daughter from drowning, even though she herself cannot swim, she will think about that gray binder in her hand and, if there were nothing else to send her straight to hell, her place there would be well earned.
Adam is howling and running at the same time. Is this the perpetual stride that marathon runners speak of, this dissociation between body and mind? His body is an implacable machine but his head is on the point of exploding with distress: whom to save first, whom to search for first, his wife or his daughter? He is not thinking of Adèle, at this moment she no longer exists. The air grows denser, the light explodes in red showers, he is howling like an animal. Yet once he sets foot on the jetty and dives from it as he has done so many times, his mind and body are fused into a fierce and speedy ball of energy. If there is to be only one it will be Laura.
A kind of truth
ADAM IS SITTING ON A METAL CHAIR clutching a mug of burning-hot coffee in his hands. He is calm, he is ready. He has learned the story by heart. Now it is his story. The police officer, who has a lean face, without warmth but with no malice, looks at him. There is an extremely orderly desk between them. A laptop computer, a spiral-bound notebook, a jar of pencils, a roll of Scotch tape, a stapler, a ruler, and a little ebony elephant that Adam finds exquisite.
“Tell me again what happened back there.”
“I’ve already told you several times. I’ve told your colleague, I’ve told the emergency services.”
“I know. But I need to hear the story again.”
Did he emphasize the s in the word story? Adam must not let himself be distracted. Adam must not waver.
“We went to the lake to see the swans.”
“There are swans on the lake?”
“Yes. Last year we saw a whole family. There were nearly ten of them. My daughter wanted to see them again.”
“Was it normal for Adèle, that is to say the woman who called herself Adèle, to go with you like that on family outings?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“She was one of the family.”
“And you’d been sleeping with her.”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“Six months. Maybe longer.”
At the hospital when Laura was in intensive care Adam and Anita had again become what they had been one day long ago on a green sofa: two minds animated by a single desire, the same wish to be brave, to give the best of themselves. They had decided to tell a story in which their eight-year-old daughter would play no part, in which they would not have to explain the complex nature of their relationship with Adèle. No novel, no paintings. Just a humdrum tale of infidelity that ended badly and, according to Alexandre, their lawyer friend, who went to see them before they were questioned by
