I’ve used a pastry bag to pipe the macarons onto a cookie sheet, baked them, and even started to prepare the lemon filling, before I finally notice people getting up around me. Adèle sighs deeply in a mixture of relief and pain, and Charles comes over to help me stand her up, as if the two of us have known each other forever.
He quickly figures out that my little sister can’t put any weight on her foot, so together we carry her to the exit. It’s rather ridiculous, each of us with one arm under Adèle’s and the other on our heads, since they asked us to come out with our hands up.
Out in the street, I watch as the EMTs bring out the injured, carrying them on crowd-control barricades used as makeshift gurneys, and I realize we’re lucky to be alive.
We’re in a crowded building courtyard, and I hear someone behind me ask drily if this is where the after-party’s happening. Nobody laughs.
A uniformed woman comes to take care of Adèle. She carefully takes off her ankle boot to assess the injury. There’s so much blood that it’s clear she’ll need to go to the hospital. As I climb into the ambulance with my sister, I look back at Charles and finally ask him his name.
“Léopold,” he answers.
When he offers to give me his number, it occurs to me that it’s going to be hard to call him anything other than Charles.
“Just in case you want to get together sometime . . . No obligation, though!” he adds almost immediately.
I want to ask him if he likes macarons, but the ambulance doors close before I can reply.
III
AFTER
1
ABIGAËLE
A few moments later
When her daughter didn’t come home after school that evening, Corinne immediately guessed where she’d gone. A quick phone call to Clara’s parents confirmed her suspicions.
As usual, her husband suggested that she let it go, not get too worked up about it. “We’ll give her a real talking-to when she gets home later. There’s no point in ruining our evening!”
But—also as usual—she couldn’t simply shelve her anger for later. “You do realize this means we have absolutely no authority over her, that she couldn’t care less about what we say?”
Her husband sighed and turned off the TV, realizing his plans for a relaxing Friday night had just gone up in a puff of smoke.
Corinne paced the room in circles like a caged lion, furious that her daughter had disobeyed her, that at barely seventeen years old, the girl seemed to have nothing but disregard for her mother. Her anger continued to mount as the hours ticked by. Her husband chose to keep quiet, simply nodding from time to time when the moment seemed right. There was no way he was going to take the brunt of his wife’s anger while his daughter enjoyed a concert.
After a while, Abigaëlle’s mother finally snatched up her coat and her keys and headed angrily out the door to wait for her daughter outside the concert hall. She figured that it’d be even better if in so doing she managed to humiliate her daughter in front of her friends.
Her husband momentarily thought about trying to dissuade her, but then it occurred to him that if he didn’t, he might still get his relaxing evening. As the front door slammed shut behind Corinne, he settled down comfortably in the living room sofa with the TV remote in hand and a slightly guilty smile on his face.
As Corinne climbs the stairs out of the Metro station at ten thirty, the streets of the city’s eleventh arrondissement seem awfully noisy, even for a Friday night. All around her, ambulances and police cars are flying past, so she’s careful to stay well back on the sidewalk—given the way the night is going, getting run over would be the icing on the cake. The flashing bluish lights leave her with a lingering glare as she walks briskly up Boulevard Voltaire, worried she’ll arrive after the end of the concert, miss her daughter, and be left with no outlet for her anger.
When she finds herself facing a wall of police barricades blocking her way, Corinne exasperatedly questions a police officer shouting frantically into his walkie-talkie. He gently pushes her back, motioning for her to turn back.
“You can’t stay here, ma’am. It’s too dangerous.”
“What? What are you talking about? I just want to go pick my daughter up from the Bataclan!”
Looking into the distraught eyes of the uniformed man, Corinne finally realizes something is wrong. She waits for some sort of explanation to come out of the man’s mouth, or at least out of the walkie-talkie, which is spitting out snippets of sentences. But when nothing seems forthcoming, she shoves aside one of the barricades and starts forward.
“There’s been a mass shooting, ma’am.”
Seeing Corinne go pale, clearly unable to grasp what he’s just said, the officer continues, “Inside the Bataclan.”
She pushes the young man aside with her arm, trying to get past him.
“I’m going to get my daughter.”
He holds her back, with a firmness that surprises even him.
“I’m sorry, but you can’t go any farther. Have you tried calling her? Hundreds of people have already escaped . . .”
Corinne would like to tell him how many times she’s tried to reach her daughter, to explain to him how her anger had mounted as she listened to the phone ring, over and over, until she was filled with a rage that drove her out of her house, drove her to come here with the intent to scream furiously at her carefree daughter who doesn’t take anything seriously—especially not her mother.
But all that anger has suddenly turned into fear, into a panic that’s dripping down her spine like ice-cold rain. Corinne rifles through her purse to find her phone and dial Abigaëlle’s number yet again, in front of the officer, who’s clearly uncomfortable. She closes her eyes and holds her breath.
“Hi, you’ve reached Abi! Can’t answer my phone right now, so leave a message!”
“I have to get by, please . . .”
The policeman refuses. Corinne waits. The minutes trudge by slowly, punctuated by muffled gunfire. Every time she hears a new pop of gunfire, she wonders if her daughter’s been hit. All she can do is wait. Her powerlessness is torture.
Suddenly her eyes widen at the sound of a huge explosion that sends vibrations running through her legs.
“What was that?”
The officer shakes his head, panicked.
“You can’t stay here! You have to go!”
Abigaëlle’s mother holds tightly to the barricade, as if to a ship’s helm, her eyes focused on the entrance to the Bataclan.
When her husband arrives a few hours later, she hasn’t moved. He gently warms her hands, then slowly pulls her tense fingers off the cold metal one by one. He walks her to their car, parked a few streets away, outside the blocked-off area.
“We’ll find her. I’m sure she’s okay. She must have found a safe place, in a café or at someone’s apartment. Clara’s mom told me Clara was among the first people to make it out. I’m sure Abigaëlle is safe and sound somewhere.”
Corinne doesn’t even glance at her husband.
“But where? If she were okay, she would have let us know!”
“Maybe she’s lost her phone, or the battery’s run out, or . . .”
“Or maybe she’s still inside, maybe she’s unconscious, or hurt, or even . . .”
Corinne bites her lip, unable to let the thought cross her lips. Her husband can’t find any words to comfort her.
They spend the entire night calling police stations and all the hospitals in and around Paris. They position themselves at the town hall of the eleventh arrondissement, and every time a bus rolls up with survivors, they expect to see their daughter trembling in a gold emergency blanket. Every five minutes, Corinne wants to cry, There she is! and run over to take some brunette teenage girl in her impatient arms—until she realizes it’s not Abigaëlle. It’s never Abigaëlle.
She falters when she realizes the last bus has arrived and that her daughter isn’t on it. In a fit of desperation, she goes so far as to climb inside the
bus, checking every row to make sure her daughter’s not there, huddled alone on a seat—like when she was six and she’d fallen asleep on the bus during a school outing and her teacher had forgotten about her. In that instance, the driver found her and brought her back to her distraught parents waiting outside the school.
But this time the driver just looks away.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he mutters, and Corinne wants to explode because she’s so tired of hearing that perfectly absurd and useless word.
Her husband is glued to his phone. The answer on the other end is always the same: “We don’t know.” Nobody knows anything. Everyone is overwhelmed. And their daughter is still missing.
He keeps repeating the same thing over and over again in his head, to keep from panicking or falling to pieces. As long as she’s missing, she’s not dead. As long as she’s missing, she’s not dead. As long as she’s missing . . .
Saturday morning seems to go on forever, every minute drawn out in an unbearable waiting game marked by a mix of hope and primal fear that they will never find their child. One of the hospitals asks if their daughter has any kind of distinctive marking—a tattoo, a scar—but there’s nothing on Abigaëlle’s body that would make it easy to identify her at a glance. They ask what she was wearing, but her parents have no idea. They’d barely seen her that morning before she left for school. On the phone, Clara sobs as she tells them about the turquoise tights, but that detail seems pretty small and pointless.
“I can’t even tell them what my daughter was wearing last night! Brown hair and blue tights, that’s all she is now! So we’re sitting by our phones, both hoping for and dreading a ring, helpless . . . We can’t do a damn thing, and it’s driving me crazy!”
Her disconcerted husband nods gently, just like he did the night before.
Back home, late that afternoon, Corinne’s phone vibrates on the kitchen table, and she jumps up to answer, bumping into an open cabinet door on the way.
“Hello?”
“Hello, ma’am, I’m calling from Pompidou Hospital. Your daughter Abigaëlle is here, in the post-operative recovery room.”
Corinne is silent, unable to believe what she’s hearing. Maybe she’s imagining the conversation, like she imagined seeing her daughter dozens of times last night.
“She was shot twice, in her lower back and thigh, but the operation went well. The surgeon will explain everything face-to-face . . .”
The tears finally start rolling, without a sound.
“Ma’am? Can you hear me? Hello?”
Corinne swallows the lump in her throat and takes in a sharp breath of air, just enough to whisper, “We’re on our way.”
When they finally arrive outside room 223, Corinne lets her husband go in first. She takes a second to steady herself and quiet her fears.
Abigaëlle seems so small, lying there on the big white bed amid IV lines and beeping machines. Her daughter opens her eyes with difficulty and offers a small smile.
Wordlessly, her mother walks over and clasps the teenager’s hand in her own.
“I thought we’d never find you . . . ,” she whispers before bursting into tears.
Abigaëlle squeezes her mother’s hand to get her attention, and Corinne strokes her daughter’s face.
“You know what I was thinking, Mom?”
Her mother shakes her head, wiping tears from her cheeks.
“If you’d let me dye my hair red, you would’ve found me faster, you know!”
Corinne perches on the side of the bed and clumsily bumps her daughter’s leg. Abigaëlle doesn’t react, as if she hasn’t felt it. Her mother furrows her brow, but says nothing, preoccupied.
“We’ll talk about that later, okay?”
Reassured, Abigaëlle closes her eyes, leaving her hand in her mother’s.
2
PHILIPPE
An hour later
He doesn’t know how much time they spent like that, lying with their noses pressed flat against the floor, their faces crying out in pain, arms and legs totally asleep. An hour? Two, three? Pascal feels like it lasted for days, but at the same time like it went by in a flash. It’s hard to explain; it was as if time no longer existed, like in a nightmare, when it feels like it’s been going on forever, but in reality it’s only been a few seconds.
He closed his eyes to keep from seeing, to try to block everything out, to forget. Philippe’s voice soothed him for a long time—he held on to it like a lifeboat. His friend kept talking, kept reassuring him, and Pascal chose to believe him, to trust him when he said it’d all be over soon.
And then Philippe stopped whispering in his ear. Probably because he’d gone through his stock of comforting words. The two men stayed there, still and silent, plastered to the floor.
Pascal didn’t even budge when a huge explosion shook the whole building. He crossed his fingers that the ceiling wouldn’t come tumbling down on them—that would have been a shitty way to go. But the walls held, and so did he and Philippe.
He only dared open his eyes when a cop told them to get up and head outside. He felt others hurrying to stand, wobbling, but he preferred to wait until the navy-blue uniform came into view, to make sure it wasn’t the shooters tricking those who’d only been playing dead into showing themselves. There was no way he’d fall for that, not after waiting for so long already.
Philippe didn’t say anything, and that surprised him, because he’s used to Philippe making the decisions. What to do, what game, concert, or bar to go to, what day and time. Pascal likes following his lead.
But Pascal had to move after a while. He heard people yelling for help, people who were wounded and couldn’t walk out on their own. He wriggled out from under Philippe and to his knees, then shook his friend.
“Let’s get the hell out of here! C’mon, let’s go!”
He shook him again, but his friend didn’t move. It took all his strength to turn Philippe onto his back. He’s a big guy—at least two hundred pounds. That’s when Pascal saw the red stain on his friend’s beige sweater, on his chest.
“Philippe, wake up!” he urged. “Wake up, damn it! We have to go!”
He slapped his friend’s cheeks while putting pressure on his torso—he’d taken a first-aid class last year through work, just before getting laid off.
And then he panicked.
He refused to understand, because it was all so unbelievable.
People passed by him, eager to reach the nearest exit, to make it out into the street and take a deep breath of the cold November air. But Pascal felt like all the oxygen in the room had been sucked out in a single second.
He was suffocating, choking. He took his unmoving friend in his arms and screamed, begged someone to come help them. The silence had protected them for so long, but now he wanted everyone to hear him. His voice was unrecognizable, distorted by fear and anguish.
A police officer took Philippe’s pulse, then shook his head sorrowfully. “It’s over, I’m sorry. You can’t stay here. I’ll escort you out.”
No way was he was going to abandon his friend in that room, alone in a puddle of blood.
“I won’t leave him.”
“There’s nothing more to be done. You really have to go . . .”
Pascal was dazed, acting as if on autopilot.
“I won’t leave him,” he said again, more firmly. But the officer explained that he had to take care of the wounded first, that he couldn’t leave him sitting there.
So Pascal stood and tried to carry Philippe. Impossible. He started dragging him, hands under Philippe’s arms, leaving a bright-red trail on the floor. The policeman watched him without saying a word. Pascal could see that the officer felt just as lost as he did.
Then all of a sudden his strength abandoned him. He saw himself for the poor idiot he was, trying to drag his dead buddy out of there. He let go and stood up straight, but then had no idea what to do next. His head was spinning and there was nothing to grab hold of. The police officer he
lped him move slowly toward the main entrance to the Bataclan—or what was now the exit.
“You’re lucky, you know,” the cop muttered. “Whatever you do, don’t look around.”
Of course Pascal looked around after that—he couldn’t help it. Bodies, flesh, sticky puddles of blood. He couldn’t even see the floor through the human wreckage. But that didn’t make him feel any worse than he already did. Philippe was dead and that made enough grief to fill his whole body—there was no room left for any others.
The young officer led him to a courtyard stuffed full of people and left him there, propped against a wall. Pascal slid down toward the ground until he was seated, knees pressed against his chin.
He doesn’t know how long he stayed in that cobblestone courtyard, with everyone’s adrenaline still pumping, though the threat had vanished. He was examined, offered orange juice and coffee, wrapped in an emergency blanket. People asked if they could get him anything, if he wanted to talk, but he had no words. The din made him wish he still had his earplugs to block everyone out, to cut himself off from the world.
It all just seemed so absurd. He’d let Philippe die, lying on top of him. He’d been listening to the sound of his voice, but didn’t even worry when it suddenly went silent. His friend had protected him that whole time, and Pascal didn’t even realize he’d been shot, that Philippe was bleeding out as he soothed him. He didn’t even feel his old friend’s blood on his back or his body getting heavier. Pascal never tried to comfort Philippe, or answer his whispers. He’d only thought about himself, about his own survival. Philippe died a hero—but for what? For a loser who could never have done as much, who even now can’t manage get off his ass to help the people suffering mere feet away from him.
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