This is why they have to go there.
If it’s people who . . . ? We’ll see.
And anyway, at this stage . . .
The house looks like a huge wooden skeleton perched on the sea. Louie knows Noah is afraid, and he also feels an unpleasant tingling all over his body.
The two figures have come to the edge of the terrace, their hands on the railing to watch the boat come nearer. Louie narrows his eyes to try and see them better. Suddenly he says:
“Old ladies.”
Noah sits up. What?
Louie observes them. Yes: grannies, Pata used to call them, in the beginning, because they’d never known their grandparents. At the same time as he repeats it to himself, a flood of joy inside him.
Before the tidal wave, there were old ladies in the village. Sometimes on his way to and from school, he would help them carry their shopping, or pick up a scarf they’d dropped, and they would ruffle his hair. Give him some candy. They all had a particular perfume, of face creams and another era, and that faint tremor in their voices—or was it just Louie who couldn’t hear them properly, used to the clamor of a family of nine children, where you have to shout to make yourself heard.
And then the wrinkles on their faces, at the corner of their eyes as they looked at you, around their mouth as they smiled at you. It’s giving Louie shivers just to see them there now. Madie said all the old ladies had died during the deluge. He’s glad to see that it’s not altogether true. Noah, who is also looking at them, nudges him with his elbow.
The old ladies wave. Both of them are tiny, or so it looks, reduced by years and as shriveled as the crabapples from that tree they had at the end of the garden. One of them is thin, the other is round. They have identical hair, short and curly, white as snow with blue highlights—Like the sea, whispers Noah, fascinated.
The boat comes to bump against a pillar on the terrace and Louie doesn’t dare throw them the rope to moor it. In the eyes of the first old lady, who is right there next to him, he can see a terrible weariness, her resignation betrayed by a sigh; and yet, after a few seconds have gone by, she says, Well hello, children. What on earth are you doing here?
Louie detects that tremor in her voice, which brings back so many memories.
“My sister is sick.”
He adds, with a frown, to look serious:
“Really sick.”
He can see the old ladies shifting their gaze to the bottom of the boat, past the hens and onto Perrine, with the sweat on her brow and the cloth on her face. Their eyes open wide, their mouths forming an “o.”
“Goodness, that little girl is in a bad way.”
The first old lady, the thin one, turns to the other one:
“If you have the strength, Lucette, bring a towel and a bowl of water, quick. And you, children, come on up here, don’t stay there on your boat.”
She holds out her arms, feebly. Louie and Noah help Perrine up onto the terrace; the girl is whimpering, and she curls up in a ball on the ground the moment the first granny leans over her, while the other one hurries with tired little steps toward the house. Noah kneels by his sister. Louie, undecided, hesitates between joining him and keeping watch on the boat. Deep down, his wariness has not gone away; he looks at the old ladies out of the corner of his eye, the one who is examining Perrine in spite of the little girl’s fingers clutching at her face, and the one who, before long, comes back from the house carrying a basin; he wonders if they too will set a trap—he dreams of lying down and sleeping without fear—fear of water, of men—and his eyes ringed with shadows watch as the old women come and go, watch the things they carry, their furtive glances at him.
“Are you all right, son?” asks Lucette, without pausing in what she is doing.
A timid little nod.
Around them, the elated hens have left the boat and are ferreting, pecking on the terrace, he can hear their tap tap, and his head is spinning.
“Adele, there’s one last tube of aspirin in the cupboard in the bathroom, if you need it. I can go and get it.”
The thin old lady straightens up slowly, looks at the other one, awkward.
“Lucette, you’re the one who needs it most.”
The round granny brushes this off: Oh, with the time I’ve got left . . . don’t tell me otherwise, we both know it perfectly well.
Only then does Louie notice the sweat on Lucette’s forehead, the sound of her breathing like a saw cutting into a metal beam, the pale, drawn features on her deceptively round face. Adele lowers her head, hunts for her words.
“Just one, then. For the fever.”
“Good. Good.”
The old lady seems to be in so much pain when she walks that Louie leaps forward.
“I’ll go, if you’d like.”
“But you don’t know where it is,” says Lucette with surprise.
He has caught up with her and puts his arm under hers.
“Then you can show me.”
A few minutes that seem like an eternity, the time for Lucette to lead him to the end of the corridor in the house and point to a tiny closed cabinet.
“There. In the white and green tube on the left. You have to take a whole tablet and dissolve it in a glass of water.”
When they come back, Adele explains fretfully that she has to prepare a poultice.
“We don’t have much left in the way of first aid, but it will do a lot of good. It may seem a bit obsolete, but don’t let that fool you, it will work wonders.”
Noah and Louie watch her in silence, their eyes open wide: they don’t know what obsolete means. It sounds nice. It’s bound to work.
Adele bends over Perrine.
“I’m going to put something over your eye to reduce the swelling and remove the infection. Don’t worry, it won’t hurt, it’s just lukewarm. But you have to keep it on, I’ll put a bandage over it and you’ll look like a pirate. All right?”
Attentive and trembling, Perrine doesn’t answer. Noah squeezes her hand: She’s going to make you all better!
“Tell me, your other eye . . . ” says the lady, “is it already blind?”
This time Perrine murmurs almost inaudibly, “Yes.”
“Right. Then we’ll leave it alone, we have to take care of the other one, which is precious. Here. Drink this glass of water, there’s some medication in it, it doesn’t taste good but it will make you feel better.”
“I’ve had aspirin,” whispers Perrine.
“Perfect. Drink it all down, your fever is very high. Lucette, are you there?”
The round old lady is sitting on a plastic chair behind them. Her voice is no louder than a murmur.
“I’m here.”
“I’ll leave her to you for a few minutes. Look after her.”
As soon as she is out of earshot Noah goes over to Lucette.
“Are you sick, too?”
“Noah!” says Louie.
The old lady smiles, wipes the sweat from her temples with an embroidered blue handkerchief.
“He is right to ask. Yes, I’m a little bit sick and a little bit old. But it’s not too serious.”
“And Adele, is she your daughter? She helps you?”
This time Lucette seems momentarily taken aback—Louie kicked his brother, but too late, he can see very well that the two old ladies are the same age, so he cries out to apologize for his brother:
“He doesn’t know about . . . he doesn’t understand—”
“Adele’s my neighbor,” says Lucette slowly. “She can be difficult but she’s a good person at heart. I used to live in that house over there, you see?”
“No,” says Perrine.
“Yes,” says Noah.
Louie looks at the house that is no more than a roof.
“The water went all the way upstairs and flooded everything,
” explains Lucette, for Perrine’s sake. “So I came to live with Adele. But even here . . . we’re starting to have water around our ankles.”
“And the other house?” asks Noah.
“Oh, that one. It was our third neighbor, Valerie-Rose. We don’t know what happened. Since the sea rose all of a sudden, we think she must have gotten stuck there at night and drowned. We haven’t seen her in six days . . . she must have died.”
The little boy opens his eyes wide.
“Is that why you’re sick? Are you sad?”
Lucette thinks for a moment.
“Oh, no. She wasn’t a good neighbor, she was always fussing. But maybe if there were three of us we’d have more fun. It’s a bit boring around here.”
Louie raises his hand the way he does at school when he wants to say something, then lowers it abruptly when he realizes.
“Why are you here the two of you? Isn’t there anyone else?”
“The people who lived here and who survived the great tidal wave decided to leave—I suppose it was the same where you’re from. But we didn’t want to leave. You know, I was born here, and I’m eighty-three years old. Adele is eighty-six. We didn’t want to go anywhere else. It’s too late for us to start a new life.”
“But you’re going to be drowned, too.”
Like us.
Lucette’s gaze mists over, thoughtful and sad, yes, that’s it, thinks Louie, there’s a sadness about her.
“That could be,” murmurs the old lady.
“For sure,” insists Noah.
“Anyway, we don’t have a boat.”
“But we do. We can take you.”
Lucette smiles: That’s kind of you—and Adele’s voice suddenly, behind them, makes them turn their heads.
“It’s ready.”
Perrine starts to cry.
“No, no, it won’t burn, or sting, at all. It’s just a bit warm at first.”
Louie has to take Perrine’s hand and squeeze it, quietly reassuring her, Come on, but even so it does not stop her from struggling when she senses the poultice, first of all the smell in her nose, and she protests, No, no, and then the heat on her eye, she doesn’t even know if it hurts but, instinctively, she lashes out behind her and hits Louie in the jaw; he cries out. A moment later Adele is winding a bandage around her head, and it’s over. Perrine is still crying, one hand on the bandage.
“Tomorrow,” says the old lady, “when I take off the bandage, I bet you’ll be able to open your eye and you’ll start seeing again. They’re so pretty, your blue eyes, even the white part; it would be a pity not to use them anymore.”
* * *
During the night, Louie tosses and turns. A strange restlessness prevents him from sleeping, a restlessness that followed the relief of knowing they are safe—for a few days, a few hours, just so long as there is some respite. But in spite of himself he wonders which one of the three of them is bringing them bad luck, causing the days to go by with neither sweetness nor light, never leaving them the time to regain hope between two tragedies, or even catch their breath, just a little gasp, an intake that is too short and too fearful.
Because there is an evil spell on them, on them or on one of them—which one? And how long before their mere presence will make Adele’s house sink to the bottom of the sea?
The house will not capsize.
Because of Perrine and her blind eye—there used to be an old woman in the village who, whenever she saw her go by, would cry out and cross herself: The eye of the devil! It used to make them laugh. But now?
No, no.
Noah, who forgot to grow up?
The house is strong, resisting the onslaught of the waves, the way you cling to a rock, it’s the world around that’s moving, not the house, the house is standing, the house doesn’t tremble.
Or he himself, Louie, with his game leg.
The waves smashing to bits against the walls.
Or all three of them together, because that’s a heap of deformities if you put them side by side, it’s enough to make you laugh, if it weren’t so sad, you’d hardly notice, maybe someday someone would say, yes, there’s something weird about those three, nature or fate needn’t have bothered—isn’t that the reason why they were left behind on the island and not the others, not Liam or Matteo, not Emily or Sidonie, not Lotte or Marion, just those three, the gimp, the dwarf, and the one-eyed wonder?
Three runty little pigs.
I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down.
The next morning Adele and Lucette open their shutters onto a sea of glass. The children slept on mattresses on the floor, exhausted. It rained during the night, and the wind had been gusting, Adele tells them, but the children didn’t see or hear a thing, not even the lightning that usually wakes them with a start. Louie, who thought he’d been awake from nightfall to dawn, can’t get over it, and yet, the puddles of water on the terrace and the steam here and there on the windows and walls indicate the passage of the storm. Louie runs his palm over the sea: so smooth and silent, contemplative, the wind is calm, the sky as blue as Perrine’s eye. So he sighs, as if he had been keeping the waves at arm’s length all night long, watching the gray line of the horizon and the vanished waves.
And that next day, as Adele had predicted, beneath the poultice there was a surprise waiting: Perrine’s eye, almost normal, still a bit swollen, her eyelid torn, but clean, with a red circle below it like a strange bruise. It’s looking good, whispers the old lady, pleased. The fever has gone down, too; Perrine’s forehead is dry and warm, but still too warm for Lucette’s liking, and saying nothing she goes to fetch a second aspirin in the bathroom and hands it to Adele. Once again, Adele frowns and hesitates.
“How many left?”
“A dozen or so.”
They exchange glances and they both know that Lucette is lying, but the ailing old lady tosses the tablet into a glass of water and gives a shrug:
“Now she’ll have to drink it.”
Adele slowly cleans Perrine’s face, even though the girl cries out. Bit by bit the wounded eye blinks, flickers, finally opens not completely but halfway, sitting nearby Louie and Noah can see the blue of her iris. So Perrine gives a start and recoils suddenly, and Adele leans over, then smiles as she straightens up.
“So there you are, you can see me today, can’t you?”
Perrine nods without speaking, her lips trembling.
“I’m the one who looked after you yesterday,” says Adele. “I’m an old lady. Didn’t your brothers tell you? In a few years I’ll be a hundred. Don’t be afraid, they’re right here.” She takes Noah by the arm and stands him in front of Perrine: You see? Everyone’s here.
She changes the bandage, while Lucette hums. They share their food among the five of them, the hens’ eggs and potatoes from the children, and canned food and smoked fish from the old ladies. Hmm, exclaims Noah, this is good.
Yes, now all is well, from Perrine who has regained a bit of appetite to Louie who has left off his wariness. Until Lucette asks him the question. Louie frowns. But she was bound to ask, because the two grandmothers don’t exactly run into three children adrift on the sea every day, and Lucette is clearly the more curious one, in spite of her illness and fatigue, so there it is, she asks the question they already heard yesterday, an innocuous little question, and yet it is huge, with everything it implies:
“So what are the three of you doing on that boat all alone?”
Perrine’s eyes are bandaged again, but if she had opened them, she would no doubt have done the same thing as Noah: look at Louie. And like Noah she remains silent, waiting for her older brother to reply, and at last he murmurs:
“We’re headed toward the high ground.”
Adele looks puzzled.
“But . . . just the three of you?”
“Our parents
left before us. We have to meet up with them.”
“And they let you go to sea all by yourselves?”
“Um, in fact . . . they left with the others but there was no more room for us. We were waiting for them on our island but the water was rising. So—”
Noah breaks in.
“Then there was Ades, and he wanted to steal everything we had to eat. And he drowned, and we took his boat. That’s why we have a boat.”
Adele rubs her eyes—I’m not sure I understand. They explain it again, the children, even Perrine from behind her bandage, it gets all muddled up, and it takes all the old ladies’ patience to get the story straight, patience and common sense—and after that they are silent for a long time, their fingers on their lips, eyebrows raised over their wrinkled eyes. Adele clears her throat.
“ . . . so you’re going to the high ground?”
“Yes,” says Louie.
“And you’ve come from Levet.”
“Yes,” says Noah.
“Do you know where we are, here?”
“No,” says Perrine.
“In Tanat.”
Silence. So Adele looks at them and continues.
“That doesn’t mean anything to you.”
And as it’s not a question, they don’t answer.
“Tanat,” explains Lucette, speaking in turn, “is about ten miles from where you lived.”
Louie suddenly turns pale. He understands.
His siblings, no.
Adele looks at him. She smiles at him. She says, it doesn’t matter.
And Louie, in trembling voice, Yes, it does matter.
“What’s wrong?” says Perrine, worriedly.
Three, four, ten seconds. His sister murmurs, Louie? And Louie, almost in tears, suddenly exclaims, pale and unsteady:
“We got lost. We went backwards!”
* * *
Just After the Wave Page 23