Michaud needed a respite before visiting the wanderer who’d found the body, Ménard, Gilles Ménard, a francophone who probably wouldn’t understand a single word he said. What with things unfolding so quickly, that hadn’t even occurred to him. As Cusack mopped his brow, he pretended he had to piss, and asked his colleague to find someone who could act as an interpreter. While waiting, he was able to ponder the fact that despite his name he only spoke a few words of French, a shortcoming he’d once vowed to remedy, wanting to learn the language of his ancestors, a language that for him was like a whiteout, a blizzard, drifting snow. He would have liked to tell the story of the land that flowed in his veins in words native to that land, poudreuse, verglas, nordet, which he would have connected to tough, straight-talking verbs. His view of his origins was idyllic, inspired by the rough bark of bare trees, and it was amid that roughness that he felt he belonged. Then as the years passed, the desire, along with the words, succumbed to fatigue. What was the point, he said to himself, since he had no ancestor with whom to talk. What was the point, since his day-to-day life was also filled with howling winds, freezing rain, northeasters, gusts, blasts, flurries, and he had no child to whom he might pass on that heritage.
He watched Cusack knock at the door of a yellow cottage whose shutters bore cutouts of clubs and diamonds. Hansel and Gretel’s house, he thought, forgetting that the gingerbread house belonged to the witch. He hadn’t swallowed anything since that morning other than a cup of black coffee, and the thought of spongy bread made him salivate, even if he wasn’t that fond of sweets. He was more a steak-and-potatoes kind of guy, that was how he’d been raised and that was how he’d been fed, and he wasn’t the least bit curious about food off the beaten path. Dorothy, his wife, sometimes tried a new recipe, adding fruit to pork tenderloin or ham, slices of pineapple that brightened up the plate but that he pushed to the side, scraping at the meat on the sly when Dorothy had her back turned, so as to get rid of the disgusting syrup that altered the taste of the meat. He only liked food that was not gussied up, that was raw, natural, as close as possible to its original state.
Those thoughts made his stomach growl, and he wondered whether he and Cusack might be able to grab something at the campground after he’d come out of the house belonging to Gretel, whom he’d thought he’d spotted on the doorstep behind her mother’s striped apron. Hope Jamison, Gretel’s mother, had told Cusack that a certain Brian Larue, who lived on the other side of the lake, could act as an interpreter for them, assuming he’d agree to do it. Larue was apparently a loner, a recluse who didn’t mingle with others and stayed shut up in his log house with his books, visited occasionally by a girl, his daughter, who lived with Larue’s wife, who’d left him for whatever reason, perhaps the books themselves and the way they could take over some men’s minds.
Go in the car and see if you can convince him, Michaud said to Cusack, I have to think. He didn’t like using his higher status to slough work off on his subordinates, but the heat had plunged him into one of those foggy states that slow your movements and clog your mind, in which all those hopes dashed by time and fatigue lined up against happy memories that were redolent of innocence and youth. He had to deal with all that free of any distraction, to focus on the landscape, on a tree picked out from among other trees, on a stone, a bit of froth, to try to empty himself out.
While Cusack moved off towards the car, Michaud went down to the lake, sat on the sand, and located a willow tree near the shore that might ease his lassitude, while removing his shoes, too heavy for the season. The sand was white hot, but if you buried your feet in it you soon reached a layer of coolness that soothed your entire body.
Despite the beautiful weather, he was alone near the lake. No child splashing in the water, not a single man fixing his dock or his fence. Boundary was cloaked in the kind of calm that follows on a drama, a numbness of days of mourning, when everyone feels compelled to whisper, to lower the radio’s volume, to keep the children inside. That silence would last a day or two at the most, and then the noise would reassert itself. Zaza Mulligan’s death, like any other death, would not forever stifle the survivors’ laughter. Life would resume around the still centre of this absence, and all, except for her intimates and cops like himself, who were powerless to ward off ghosts, would forget that in that space lorded over by absence, there once existed a young girl. That’s the way it had to be, there was no role in this game for those who were no longer there.
As he was thinking on this, a door opened behind him and little Gretel bounced down from the gingerbread balcony. You stay here and you be quiet, her mother whispered, and the door closed. The silence came back for a few moments, then Michaud heard the child hopping on the gravel, and a small voice, unable to say no to life, carried into the humid air. “Hurry Scurry had a worry / No one liked his chicken curry…” “Stuck his finger in the pot / Chicken curry way too hot,” Michaud continued, picking up on the little girl’s rhyme, remembering that he was hungry, and, barring proof to the contrary, that he too was alive.
That night my father didn’t shut his eyes. He installed himself on the veranda, telling my mother that he’d join her soon, but he was still there on the old rattan love seat when the crows got me out of bed at dawn. The night before, he’d refused to tell us where Gilles Ménard had taken him, not knowing how to announce the death of a child to other children. He’d preferred to put that painful task off to the next day, and to spare us, for a few hours more, the nightmares that would keep us from sleeping. But today he’d have no choice if he wanted to stop rumour from falsifying the facts and our following in the footsteps of those gossips and weasel-faced men whom the scent of blood set to yapping under Bondrée’s clouded sun.
Come here my mite, he said quietly, in that voice, a bit hoarse, that all adults have early in the morning, a voice that’s done too much breathing, perhaps, or that has to get used to the light, and he motioned for me to sit down next to him. As much as I wanted to know what had set Gilles Ménard to running, I feared what my father was going to tell me. I have to make pee-pee, I lied, throwing myself into the bathroom, where I took the time to count forwards and backwards all the red squares alternating with the white ones on the wall facing the toilet. Twenty-one, I whispered, opening the door, twenty-one, twenty-one, as if that were a magic number whose repetition would alter the course of time, and stop Gilles Ménard in his tracks. By the time I rejoined my father the sun was rising behind the cottage, and I prayed, shutting my eyes, for it to be yesterday’s sun, let it be so, God, let it be so, but my father had aged too much since the day before for Sissy Morgan’s watch, quietly ticking away in my bedroom, to have stopped.
It’s Zaza Mulligan, he blurted out before I could get away again, parroting my sister’s words, it’s Zaza, it’s the Queen of Hearts. She’s had an accident, she’s not coming back. Sitting cross-legged on the love seat’s faded cushion, I played with my toes while waiting for the rest, but my father didn’t utter the word that would have made clear Zaza Mulligan’s fate if I’d been able to get it out of him. I asked if that meant that Zaza was in the hospital, and he answered no, that Zaza from now on was nowhere. Maybe in heaven, he added, but he didn’t believe that any more than he believed Communists were going to invade America and turn Maine into a concentration camp. He said that because it was less complicated than to try to explain death and to explain that heaven was just a dream that allowed my mother to deal with the world’s absurdity. He’d known for a long time what I’d know later, that the earth was, like us, just an accident, that the body was just dust, and that no will, divine or anything else, could bring this dust back to life somewhere in the beyond. It’s down here that dust came back to life, in the midst of the world’s senselessness.
I wasn’t able to worm out of him the word he refused to inflict on a twelve-year-old girl, the word that would age me in one fell swoop and would fade the freckles that dotted my cheeks, but he’d said enough
. Zaza Mulligan was no longer anywhere. Zaza Mulligan was dead. I went to get a raisin bun from the bread box and walked down to the lakeshore, avoiding my father’s eyes, where my image had gone watery in the few tears that had welled up there, tears of love, of those who anticipate the worst: if you die, my mite, I’ll hang myself.
At that hour the beach was deserted, aside from a few ants that began to swarm around a pile of branches being grazed by the first rays of the sun. I threw a breadcrumb in their direction, and two of them grabbed hold of it, breaking it into pieces to carry it to their nest on the tips of their mandibles. I plunged my teeth into the pastry, but the bites went down the wrong way. Zara Mulligan is nowhere, sweetie, my father had murmured, meaning Zaza didn’t exist any more, because no one, no one could be nowhere. And yet I couldn’t picture to myself the sudden inexistence of Zaza, couldn’t conceive of a reality where all that made up Zaza had disappeared. How could I still say Zaza if there were no more Zaza?
I tossed the rest of my breakfast to a duck passing close to shore with its little ones, quack-quack, then I walked as far as the stream mouth that separated our cottage from that of the Lamars. The previous day’s rain had increased its flow, but by the end of the summer the trickle of clear water would disappear. All that would be left would be the bed carved out by its passage, the imprint of its existence. But the following spring the stream would be reborn, it would keep on reviving forever, until the forest dried out and became a desert, or a mountain appeared, turning it into a waterfall. Maybe that’s what would happen with Zaza Mulligan, perhaps she’d become a mountain, forest, desert, since it wasn’t impossible that a bit of Zaza flowed in this water, a bit of her dust, which would settle into its sandy depths and come back to life with the autumn rains. I didn’t know where her body had been found, but she might very well have lost consciousness near the stream like princesses in fairy tales, in a long sigh causing their veils to fall, or she could have drifted there to ease her wound, like the deer, bear, and moose, leaving behind a bit of her physical self.
I watched the water flow until the sun rose over the trees, captivated by the progress of the leaves and bits of grass hastening towards the frothy banks, then I began to walk upstream, hoping to find some sign of Zaza Mulligan’s presence, a jewel, another bag of chips, a Pall Mall cigarette butt, but my father, who hadn’t taken his eyes off me, came running over, you’re not leaving the yard today, my mite. I understood right away what that meant. I was forbidden to go off on my own as long as we didn’t know why Zaza had fallen off the edge of the world into this nowhere I couldn’t imagine, as long as there was no answer to all the questions raised by death when it strikes without warning. In other words, never.
A girl had disappeared, and as a result the hypothetical disappearance of all girls took the age-old foreboding of any normal parent and blew it up into an enormous tumour, a menace to all unable to conceive that their flesh and blood might not survive them, might not be pledged to eternity. The unforeseeable took centre stage, clacking its teeth, and hordes of parents, aghast, shut their eyes, murmuring that it could have been Sissy, Françoise, it could have been Andrée, Sandra, Marie or Jane Mary, names fate would doom them to incant forever, were the hypothetical to become real. Zaza had awakened this fear, and the summer would never be the same. The freedom of movement I’d enjoyed up to then had just gone up in smoke. I’d be placed under surveillance, along with everything that was too small or too weak to defend itself, everything that had to be restrained so it wouldn’t die. Faced with this injustice, I wanted to protest to my father that I’d die anyway one day, but his anxious eyes, scanning the underbrush out of which a rabbit had just bolted, didn’t deserve that I torture him any further.
I went back to the beach, and saw that the quarantine was already in effect. Besides me, there was no child near the lake, and you only heard birds, and fish jumping at the surface to catch flies. Even old Pat Tanguay wasn’t in the hole his boat had made for itself in Ménard Bay. Bondrée was under quarantine, but also in mourning, because a girl was dead, because we were all going to go that way. I wrote a word on the beach with my left big toe, “Zaza”, and under my breath, apologised for my anger. Sorry Zaza, I know it’s not your fault. Then I cried, burying my neck in the collar of my pyjama top so my father wouldn’t see that I was afraid, me too, afraid that Zaza’s end augured the end of our happy days.
Brian Larue, as the principled grandson of a Canuck, had made it a point of honour to learn his grandfather’s language. He did, however, hesitate when asked to act as an interpreter between the police and Boundary’s francophones. Larue was a loner, and the idea of having to violate the intimacy of men and women set apart by a dead body was repugnant to him. He accepted for his father’s sake, for the pride this man would have felt, raised as he was in a hybrid, bastardised language with no proper place in the world, if he’d only known that his son was working to affirm his origins, that he now mastered the two tongues spanning the confines of his childhood. He was also drawn to the task by his daughter, Emma, who would soon be as old as the victim, and would enter that long corridor where women must make haste once night has fallen. Some thought that Larue had called his daughter Emma because of his admiration for Flaubert and Madame Bovary, but that was not so. If he appreciated Flaubert, he avoided the Bovarys like the plague. It was his wife who had chosen the name, seeing there a resemblance to the verb “aimer.” Larue was too dumb at the time, too much in love, to contradict her and point out that Emma put the verb in what was, in fact, the past tense, j’aimai, tu aimas, il aima: he loved. He regretted it now, whenever he thought of his daughter’s bearing the name of a heroine whose love became just a memory.
It was almost noon when the investigators finished questioning Ménard, and he felt both drained and dirty, as if Zaza Mulligan’s blood had seeped right up to his hands. He wanted nothing so much as to throw himself head first into the lake, but it looked like the day had just begun, because Stan Michaud, in charge of the investigation, was determined to knock on every door and to grill every last halfwit in Boundary. He seemed to be taking the affair personally, and would not give up until he knew what had impelled Zaza Mulligan to venture into the woods in the middle of the night. Larue himself was also questioned. Michaud was certainly not going to work with someone who, if there was a crime, was as much a suspect as anyone else living in Boundary. But the interview was brief, Larue being as pure as the driven snow, which allowed Michaud to explain to him in detail what he wanted from him: to translate without omitting even a comma, to note any hesitations, inconsistencies, extra words, unusual emphases, in short to slip into the skin of a cop and to pull the zipper up to his chin.
Michaud must also have a daughter, Larue thought, a little Emma resembling Zaza Mulligan and all young girls, a young Nicole or Deborah who in his mind’s eye he saw mouthing her first words, daddy, puppy, every time she crossed the threshold Saturday night to go out with her friends, equally oblivious to their own beauty and to the danger it represented to them.
But Larue was wrong, Michaud’s only daughters were those he questioned in dumps and damp forests, and for that very reason his grasp of the perils to which they, in their innocence, exposed themselves, was all the more acute. However it may be, Larue warmed to Michaud when the man shook his hand with a joint-crushing grip, and his grey eyes bored into his own as if to assure him that he was dealing with someone he could count on, a person of honour. Larue saw in those eyes the determination of someone who never laid down his arms unless they were torn from his body, someone who faced up to life’s follies but carried on all the same, head high, because to be on the move is less despairing than to stand still. The world needed men who sacrificed their lives, pitting themselves against the violence and idiocy of others.
Seeing Michaud wipe his brow with a dubious-looking handkerchief, he forgot his wish to throw himself into the lake, and followed him and his partner to the campground, where
they scarfed down one or two hot dogs and a cone of fries before getting on with more interrogations. Michaud insisted on paying for Larue’s fries and hot dogs and, what with the heat, offered him a Mountain Dew, and the three men ate in silence around a picnic table on which were incised almost all the names of the young people who’d spent the summer at Boundary over the last twenty years. A work of art, Larue thought, an object to be preserved in the archives of adolescence, while Cusack, the partner, squirmed around on his bench, uneasy with the silence, the flies, and Michaud’s gaze transfixed on Zaza’s name, carved into one of the table’s rough boards. Cusack tried a few times to get a conversation going, but he soon gave up, faced with Michaud’s familiar silence. Still, he griped about the humidity all through the meal, casually dipping his fries into the pool of ketchup at the bottom of his cardboard cone, hoping, in vain, that one of the others might react. But they were lost in thought, in the memories stirred up by the names carved into the table.
Michaud was concentrating on Zaza’s name and on the sun that had browned the young girl’s skin, while Larue, light years away, was thinking about Monica Bernstein, his first love, of her first name carved into the bark of a birch that had perhaps now given up the ghost or been ground up in the jaws of a machine that converted trees and their memories into newsprint or firewood. The picture of steel teeth chewing into bark made him think, of course, about Zaza Mulligan, whose memories had poured onto the forest’s damp floor, but then he turned back to Monica, today a teacher in Bangor and the mother of three children, two girls and a boy. If Meredith, Emma’s mother, had not taken Monica’s place, giving him the eye between the shelves of the Stanford library, he’d never have known Emma, whose absence he couldn’t envisage without thinking in terms of his life running on empty. Yet he didn’t miss his non-existent children. If Emma hadn’t been born, it would have been the same thing. He’d never have known that a girl called Emma might have changed his life. His tomorrows were rooted in this stroke of luck, in this pearl born of a night of love that might well have been only a night of sleep or insomnia, and this dizzying primacy of fate shook his faith in any kind of freedom. Nothing, or almost nothing, was rooted in a man’s choice.
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