by Patrick Bard
Mr. Stepanovic is bending over him. He gently yet firmly removes Lucas’s hand from his face. The ball hit the cheekbone, which is already beginning to swell. A few more centimeters and it would have been the eye. Benjamin’s friends are guffawing. The teacher helps Lucas up as one of the boys shouts out, “Fatso stinks!” Benjamin can hardly hide his smile. Mr. Stepanovic walks toward him decisively, skirts the net, and plants himself in front of his face.
“I can’t prove that you did that on purpose, Benjamin,” he says, looming over Benjamin by a good six inches. “But I want you and your buddies out of here.”
“But, sir—”
“No ‘but’s. Get out! I don’t want to see you until next week. If this happens again, you’re expelled. Permanently.” He turns to Lucas. “That’s enough for today, Lucas. Go home. Stop by the infirmary first and get some ice.”
Lucas thinks that this time, at least, he won’t have to lie. He definitely went to tennis. He can prove it.
23
ONE WEEK LATER
Marie and Sebastian haven’t had such a heated argument in years. In fact, it could be that they’ve never had one as bad as this afternoon. The day after meeting with Ms. Lacoste, Sebastian disconnected the router as soon as Lucas left for school. He loaded it into the car so that Jerome could check what was on it. Sebastian knows it’s easy to erase one’s browsing history but that the router keeps a traffic log of every connection.
Before the end of the morning, the router had spoken. Sebastian now knows what Lucas is up to when he cuts classes. He wasn’t lying; he’s been staying home. But not to catch up on schoolwork. He spends his days in front of porn flicks, sadomasochist mangas that feature prepubescent Lolitas. Sebastian asked Jerome to reinitialize the router, called Marie, and took the afternoon off. They met at the same café as last time.
“He disgusts me,” Sebastian told her. “He makes me want to puke. He’s a pig.”
“How can you say such a thing? He’s your son. He’s a child.”
“No, Marie, he’ll be eighteen in two years.”
“Okay, he’s a teenager, but he needs help. This time we have to get professional advice.”
Sebastian grips the edge of the table. Marie notices that his knuckles are turning white.
“Where did we go wrong?” Sebastian wants to know.
Marie takes her husband’s clenched hands in her small palms. “Stop it, Seb. We’re going to find a good child psychiatrist.”
Sebastian lowers his head. When he looks up again, he stares fixedly at Marie.
“What then? It’s all bullshit! No more computer. No more internet connection. We’ll change the password to the router and we won’t give him access. I’ll take away his cell phone too. We’re going to tighten the screws on him. We’re going to make sure he shows up at school every day. And we’re going to force him to exercise. No more being nice and indulgent. Believe me.”
Sebastian throws money on the table and stands up abruptly.
Marie hurries after him. With his head hunched into his shoulders like a boxer cornered in the ropes, he stuffs his hands in his pockets, and Marie slips her arm through his elbow.
“You know, it really helped me to see a shrink,” she says softly.
Sebastian turns toward her. When he starts to shout, the words hurl from his mouth like flames from a furnace.
“What! What are you talking about? You say any old thing! Is it because the shrink took you off the meds? Because it finally gave me a break? Because thanks to him, you were finally able to care for Lucas when he was little? Is that it?”
Marie lets go of his arm and looks at him like he’s a stranger. She opens her mouth to answer but nothing comes out. Not even a breath. She leaves him standing there and takes off in staggered steps toward her car, her heels striking the pavement.
“That’s it, just clear off!” Sebastian shouts after her. “It’s what you do best, after all. Always fleeing reality.”
He walks a little ways. He sees a bar and enters. He orders a whiskey. A double that he gulps down in one shot. He slams the bottom of the empty glass on the counter.
Screw it! Marie can take Lucas to a shrink for all he cares! He doesn’t give a damn!
24
Later, in the investigative judge’s chamber, Sebastian will explain that he failed to register the impact of the withdrawal.
* * *
—
Lucas had come home from school and tried to go on the internet. The router had refused his password. He had gone downstairs to ask why he wasn’t able to connect.
“You’re not getting the password.” his father had answered. “Hand over your laptop and your smartphone this instant.”
Lucas turned and hurried toward his room, but his father beat him to it. By the time he got there, Lucas was out of breath and Sebastian had already grabbed the computer that Lucas now desperately tried to wrestle away from him.
“Stop, please!” Lucas had begged as father and son did a strange dance around the room.
Lucas lunged and didn’t see that he’d stepped on Cuddles’s front paw, causing the cat to let out a piercing yelp. In turn, Lucas had jumped and released his grip on the laptop, sending Sebastian toppling back from the sudden lack of tension. He had the computer in his hands and he looked at it with a triumphant smile. Tucking it securely under his left arm, he put his right hand out.
“Your smartphone, now.”
Vanquished, Lucas had obeyed.
* * *
—
Sebastian admits having underestimated the effects of his son’s withdrawal when Lucas subsequently went mute. He confesses to having downplayed the bouts of the shakes that took hold of Lucas in the following days, whenever Lucas sat down for family meals without bothering to touch what was on his plate.
“He’s heavy enough as it is; it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t eat,” he told his wife when she pleaded with Lucas to swallow some food.
He admits not having paid attention to the fact that Lucas was sweating and that his breathing was labored. He simply attributed it to his son being overweight. He acknowledges, as does Marie, having overlooked that their son was practically not sleeping, neither at night nor in class. How could they have known, they argue, since Lucas had ceased to communicate with them?
“Still, you finally realized something was terribly wrong since you agreed that he should see a child psychiatrist, no?” the judge asks. He pauses, then continues, “And the high school principal…Ms….”
He shuffles the papers of the file in front of him, trying to locate the name.
“Ms. Lacoste,” Marie says.
“Yes, that’s it. Ms. Lacoste. She should have flagged the problem and sent Lucas to the school psychologist.”
Marie snickers, causing the judge to give her a startled look.
“What is so amusing?”
“There is no psychologist at that high school.”
Embarrassed, the judge sets on another course.
“And why Paris? Why head to Paris to see a child psychiatrist? There are quite a few in Chartres that I’m aware of.”
“Yes, but we don’t know any of them. The one we were going to consult was recommended by one of my coworkers,” Marie answers. “He treated her nephew for panic attacks after he quit taking marijuana. We wanted a really good doctor.”
“That’s the truth. I agreed with my wife,” Sebastian pipes up. “We scheduled an appointment for the following week. We told Lucas, and on the day of the meeting, we put him in the car. He was like a lump, not reacting at all. I remember thinking that he smelled bad. I asked him when he had last showered and all I got in reply was a slight shrug.”
Marie confirms that Lucas stank up the car, that it smelled as if they’d picked up a homeless hitchhiker. At the house, she had never realized how awful he smelled. She aire
d out the place frequently, and the rooms were large.
“Didn’t you hug your son anymore?” the judge inquires.
I wasn’t paying attention, Marie thinks. Not enough attention.
“Lucas had become distant” is the only reasonable response the judge gets out of Lucas’s parents as to why, when they reached the highway and the car was going at a speed of seventy miles per hour, Lucas suddenly opened the rear right-side door and jumped out.
TURNING POINT
25
Marie is driving and peers into the rearview mirror. In one glance she takes in the empty backseat and, farther off, her son’s body bouncing off the asphalt.
“Lucas!” she cries out. “No!”
Her cry gets lost in the rush of wind that invades the passenger compartment. The door beats against the body of the vehicle for a second, and then the wind and speed slam it shut. A brief, strange silence returns inside the car.
“Stop!”
Sebastian’s command is unnecessary. Marie has already slammed her foot on the brake. She didn’t even look to see if there was a car behind them. She hears other cars skidding as they swerve, brake, and honk furiously, without really hearing anything at all.
“Pull over!” Sebastian shouts. “Pull over!”
Instinctually, Marie falls back onto the emergency lane as Sebastian opens the passenger door before the car comes to a full stop. Without waiting, he bolts from the vehicle. Several other cars have stopped behind Lucas’s still body, which is spread across the right lane some hundred meters back. Another motorist is the first one to rush over. In the left lane, trucks are passing and honking. For a few seconds, Marie remains paralyzed, gripping the steering wheel. This isn’t possible. This can’t be happening. In a fury, she unbuckles her seat belt and leaps out of the car, a bitter taste in her mouth, and runs after Sebastian, who has almost reached Lucas, whose body a man is already bent over. Behind the man, someone else is taking out a cell phone.
As Sebastian runs the last few meters, his legs feel as if they’re glued to the tar from which he must extract himself with each step, and in his head he repeats, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. At last, he’s by Lucas’s side, but his brain has short-circuited. He has simply stopped thinking. He bends over his son’s body without hearing himself cry out his name, or hearing Marie’s cries as she arrives. He hears nothing but his own furious heartbeat, even as he searches for Lucas’s with the palm of his hand. Lucas’s right leg seems connected to his pelvis at a bizarre angle. His head lies in a pool of blood that spreads out behind his skull. His eyes are closed. He’s unconscious. Sebastian lowers his ear to Lucas’s mouth. The fact that he no longer registers the tumult around him allows him to grasp Lucas’s tenuous and irregular breathing. Lucas is breathing. It’s labored, but he’s breathing. Fast, fast!
The motorist who called for an ambulance is still talking on his cell phone and Sebastian knows that help is on the way. It will be here quickly, which is what he tries to tell Marie, but she’s screaming, so he attempts to calm her.
“Hold his hand and don’t let go!” he orders so that she’ll have something to do, something useful. “Talk to him and hold his hand!”
He doesn’t feel the first drops of rain that plop down on his face. Someone brings an emergency blanket and covers Lucas in a silver shroud. My God, he’s so pale, Sebastian thinks as his brain begins to function again. He takes hold of Lucas’s other hand as someone behind him says:
“Don’t move him. It’s important not to move him.”
A distant wail of sirens finally grows nearer.
26
“It’s a miracle,” Marie says again as she lies in a heap in a chair.
“A damned miracle,” agrees Sebastian, who’s sitting next to her, both of them facing the judge. Sebastian’s eyes wander and follow a flight of pigeons in the gray sky outside the window until the birds merge into the clouds, then land on the zinc roof of a nearby cathedral.
The judge is short, with fine hair that lies plastered to his head. His lips are thin. He wears round steel-framed eyeglasses, and though he is narrow-shouldered, his blue jacket looks a little tight on him. He’s younger than I am, Sebastian thinks, but he looks so much older that it’s like he was born old.
“Are you listening to me, Mr. Delveau?”
“Huh, yes, sorry, can you repeat the question?”
“I was asking why you didn’t activate the child lock on the rear doors of your car.”
“But…Lucas is sixteen!”
A court clerk takes notes on everything that is said. Sebastian’s reply hangs in the air in a heavy silence. The judge, whose name Sebastian has already forgotten, nods.
* * *
—
Lucas fell on his side. He sustained multiple fractures to his right leg and pelvis. His head hit the ground only after he slid a good way. He suffered head trauma. The emergency medical services arrived quickly, followed by the police, who promptly realized that Lucas had not fallen out of the car by accident. Marie and Sebastian were so devastated that they did not try to deny this when Lieutenant Peretti asked them if that was what had happened. The officer leaned over Lucas and noticed his black-and-blue cheekbone.
“Is that an older bruise?” he asked, turning toward Sebastian.
Marie didn’t give him time to respond. “It’s your fault!” she started to shout. “You and your stubbornness! It’s all because of you! Why did you refuse to take him to a shrink? Why?”
As she came closer, Sebastian pushed her back. “If you hadn’t forced him he would never have climbed into the car and this would never have happened!” he yelled at her.
Lieutenant Peretti took down the Delveaus’ heated statement to write up his report, and explained that they would be summoned at a later date to give a detailed account of the incident under calmer circumstances, but what was important for now was that Lucas get the care he needed.
Lucas was transported by helicopter to the hospital in Chartres. He had already regained consciousness upon arriving but did not remember what had happened. Fearing cerebral swelling, the doctors were reluctant to give him sedatives against the pain.
When Lieutenant Peretti asked about the bruise on Lucas’s right cheek, he didn’t get a clear response from either parent because they were too busy blaming each other for what had happened. He had seen similar situations before. Situations in which kids and teenagers were abused. Regularly hit. Did the blow that happened prior to the accident indicate abuse? Had Lucas jumped out of his parents’ moving car to escape violence at the hands of one or the other? Unsure, Lieutenant Peretti decided to write up a report that he forwarded to the prosecutor in Chartres. The prosecutor hesitated at length between sending the case file on to an investigative judge and filing it without further action. For several years now, cases involving child abuse had been treated seriously. He couldn’t risk any mistakes. If the situation soured, it would cost him dearly. He had no desire to find himself reassigned out in the boondocks. So he decided to be cautious and tasked Rémy Boulay, a young and newly appointed investigative judge, to handle the case.
27
Sebastian and Marie were summoned to appear before Judge Boulay the following week for further questioning. Sebastian’s face looks drawn, with circles and bags under his eyes. As for Marie, she’s been completely out of it since Lucas tried to…No! She doesn’t want to even think that her son tried to kill himself. She wants to convince herself that he simply jumped out of the car in a moment of folly, without thinking of the consequences.
With effort, and regularly cutting each other off, Sebastian and Marie each tell the judge how rough the recent months have been with Lucas. About his addiction to online pornography, his ballooning weight, his lack of personal hygiene. About the conflicts. About his increased isolation. About everything prior to the accident, without omitting a thing.
* * *
—
“Accident?” the judge ponders. “I would call it an attempted suicide.”
He doesn’t look happy, Marie tells herself. The judge seems to think it was our fault. He thinks we were neglectful parents.
* * *
—
She isn’t wrong. Judge Boulay is not happy. He’s especially against online porn. This case of a teenager addicted to sex via the internet reminds him of another case he would rather forget. A case that he forwarded to the juvenile courts the month before on the prosecutor’s orders. It all started with a woman who simply wanted to warn her son about the dangers of pornography. The boy was in seventh grade. The mom had been unprepared for his answer—that given what happened in the school bathrooms with the girls in his class, he didn’t need the internet. When she asked for an explanation, he disclosed that twelve-year-old girls gave fourteen- and fifteen-year-old boys blowjobs in the school bathrooms in exchange for cigarettes and money. Shocked, the mother immediately phoned the school. The girls were called before the principal, who gave them a stern lecture.
“But we see that all the time on the internet,” the girls said, surprised. “A blowjob isn’t sex!”
The boys were temporarily suspended. Furious at having been ratted on—the principal carelessly let the name of the complaining mother slip out—the boys waited for her son at the end of the school day and beat him up, with blows to the head. He ended up in the emergency room, where an intern on call stitched up the ridges of his eyebrows. The mother filed a complaint. The perpetrators were questioned and ended up before Judge Boulay. It didn’t take long before they confessed, relaying more or less the same story the girls did. They didn’t see that they had done anything wrong. Nothing more than run-of-the-mill porn. The boys didn’t comprehend the seriousness of their actions. And the girls couldn’t understand that the incriminating facts amounted to prostitution. The judge was horrified by that case and those teenagers.