“Emma—he’s here.”
Gregory was at the end of the road, crouching in a flowered shrub. He had taken off his sweater and was trying to put the cat in it. I didn’t see Jules in the fabric.
“Is he dead?” I asked as I approached him.
“No… not yet.”
I held off looking into Gregory’s arms until the last possible moment. The cat’s neck was all soft and his head was tilted at an absurd angle. Gregory had swaddled him like a baby.
“His… his tail is gone,” he said in a sob.
I looked at him, uncomprehending. “What do you mean his tail is gone?” I scanned the garment hiding Jules’s body.
“Come on.”
We walked to the house. Gregory set Jules on the armchair in the living room and gently opened the sweater protecting him. Jules breathed deeply, his whole body shaken with the effort. His fur was coarse and fluffy, and his back now ended in a tiny appendage—a little tail a few centimetres long.
“But what was he doing outside? Why did he go out? Did he get hit?”
I wanted to accuse the cat of his stupidity, to punish him. Gregory was equally baffled.
“I don’t think so.”
“Was he attacked by a raccoon?”
Raccoon attacks were common in Toronto. Any number of cats and even dogs were regularly wounded when they found themselves in the path of these wild, overly familiar beasts. Gregory turned toward me, really crying now. It was his cat.
“Emma, he’s been mutilated… someone cut off his tail. The wound is clean.”
A horrible thought occurred to me, but I chased it away. Jules was in agony. We couldn’t leave him in this state.
“We have to get him to the vet.”
“What time is it?”
We had to pick the boys up at the pool. And we had only one car.
“Take Jules, I’ll drop you at the vet and go get the boys. We’ll call afterward to figure out what to do.”
Gregory nodded his head, glad I was taking control of things. He wrapped Jules back up, holding him close, and we left.
I didn’t even have time to park at the athletic centre before Gregory called.
“Emma? They had to put him down.”
I rubbed the corners of my eyes as I hung up. When the twins came out of the locker room, I’d already prepared my speech.
“Boys, I have some bad news.”
I paused to let the announcement sink in. They looked up at me, waiting.
“It’s Jules. We found him, but he was very hurt. Daddy had to take him to the vet, and he’s gone to sleep forever.”
Then something very strange happened. The boys, without even looking at each other, smiled at me with a softness, a gentleness I had never seen in them. It was a simple, natural smile, delicately closing their eyes, bringing out their cheeks, pink from sport. I stood for a moment amazed by the radiance I had never seen on their faces. They smiled without irony or malice, but like normal children.
My shoulders sank. I didn’t know what to do. “Come on, let’s go get Daddy.”
“Okay,” said the boys, shaking their backpacks.
The next day, the first day of the competition, we left them to get ready, telling them over and over how proud we were of them, no matter what the outcome. They nodded before disappearing into the locker room. We hurried to the stands, which were already packed. All the competitors were grouped by team under their banners, which were hung on the wall beside the pool. The twins were late to join their team and I could see Marc, like me, scanning the crowd for them. When the judges took their positions, the boys still weren’t there. The trainer went to the locker room. I was about to get up, but Gregory assured me Marc had things under control. Indeed, he appeared a few moments later, accompanied by the twins in uniform, and a boy from another team. The boy, in a red swimsuit, hurried to join his group and the boys to theirs, amid Marc’s reprimands.
The competition was supposed to last the whole day. When the boys’ turns came, I squeezed Gregory’s hand, happy he was there to support them. The boys had prepared six dives: 101A, 203C, 302B, 401C, 5132D and 624C. They wouldn’t necessarily have to execute them all. It would depend on the number of events they qualified for.
They only completed four—perfectly, at that.
For the 624C, the diver starts off standing on his hands before performing a twist. The boys had recently learned to walk on their hands precisely to master this difficult manoeuvre. When the boy in the red bathing suit appeared, trembling, on the five-metre board, the crowd realized something wasn’t right. With his arms wrapped around his body, he was slow getting into position. He finally approached the edge of the platform, leaned over to put his weight on his hands, and lifted his body, one leg at a time, slowly and cautiously. He took a long time getting into the pose. In the bleachers, we held our breath. Despite the echo, the pool was quiet. I heard a long whistle. Then came the accident.
The boy’s arms shook, unable to support his weight any longer. We heard the crack when his head hit the platform’s concrete edge. His body collapsed before plunging into the emptiness and smacking against the water.
All at once the parents rose, shouting, while the trainers rushed into the pool to recover the boy. I didn’t see them take him out on a stretcher, as I was already running toward the stairs. All the parents were trying to get to their children at the edge of the pool, but the trainers wouldn’t let them pass.
They divided themselves up quickly and got the competitors dressed before returning our children to us, calling their names one by one. In the hall of the athletic centre, no one wanted to leave. Several families waited, us among them,
