by Michel Bussi
On the morning of her release, Amanda met Professor Lacroix. He made her wait for nearly an hour, even though there were no patients in the waiting room, not even a child playing in the Lego corner, just three secretaries giggling in the next corridor.
At last, the doctor received her. He had spent a long time talking to the judge.
Malone belonged in a specialized institution, he said.
Malone needed regular surveillance, care, treatment. Amanda could see him as often as she wished.
“Give me back my child,” Amanda said simply. “Please, doctor . . . ”
The neurosurgeon did not reply. He was playing with a silver pen, not even bothering to take the documents that Amanda had brought him out of their plastic folder: the authorization for Malone to live at home. Only he could sign it.
“Please, doctor.”
There was no hostility in Amanda’s voice.
Lacroix’s response was to push the medical file towards her. Amanda read it mechanically. She already knew the results by heart. There was nothing new here. Stable condition. No development in his cognition or reaction levels.
“It’s for the good of the child, Mrs. Moulin,” the neurosurgeon told her. “This is no reflection on you. Malone will be better off in a specialized institution, and that way he’ll be able to . . . ”
Amanda had already stopped listening. Her gaze wandered down to one of the pages of the medical file, even if she had read that quote from Harper University Hospital in Philadelphia dozens of times before. The only laboratory in the world to mend cerebral lesions by implanting new axons in the damaged neurones. A team of thirty qualified neurosurgeons to serve their patients, the publicity brochure claimed. Unique technical facilities, a vast tree-filled park to aid peaceful convalescence, a list of famous Americans successfully operated upon spread over three columns, even if none of the names were well-known in France.
Cost of the operation: $680,000.
“You understand, Mrs. Moulin,” concluded Lacroix, “I’m sorry for you, but I can’t take the risk of leaving Malone with you. Not in his state. Not after everything that’s happened.”
Amanda hated the neurosurgeon’s smile as he put the silver pen in a drawer. That pen alone would probably cover about one-thousandth of the cost.
Nothing had changed on Place Maurice-Ravel. The neighbors had reserved seats by their windows for her return. The house was cold, dusty, empty. The bamboo rug had been returned but it still had red stains on it. The Mother’s Day poems still hung in their frame, decorated with hearts and butterflies.
Amanda didn’t even have the strength to cry.
She didn’t leave the house for the next three days, didn’t eat, hardly slept. It was the mailman who broke through her inertia, knocking at the door since Amanda wasn’t going down to the letterbox, where her mail was accumulating.
A letter from French Guiana. The postman proudly showed Amanda the postmark.
Amanda opened it at the kitchen table, sitting in front of a cup of coffee, the only thing she could still swallow.
The first page was almost blank, except for two words:
For Malone.
And a signature.
Angie.
The second contained more lines, about ten of them, which Amanda read diagonally.
These lines apologized for not having written earlier, and mentioned a parcel sent to Venezuela, a jeweller in Anvers, a Dutch intermediary, a complicated distribution of the loot to clients in Singapore, Taipei, Johannesburg, Dubai.
Then nothing else, except for the last two lines.
Two letters, a series of numbers, and a name.
CH10 00230 00109822346
Lloyds & Lombard, Zurich United Bank
76
Marianne had decided not to set any limits.
Not to the number of guests, nor the number of bottles she would drink. Only one number was set in stone: the number of candles on her birthday cake.
Forty.
For one night, Marianne forgot the internal affairs investigation—the blame hanging around her neck, her possible suspension—and she mingled with her guests, glass in hand. She was wearing a skin-tight T-shirt with the words No Kids on it, and kept repeating:
“To freedom!”
JB turned up at about 11 P.M., on the arm of a girl ten years younger than him, who was dressed in a pair of denim hotpants with a fuchsia top that barely tickled her belly button. He was carrying a bottle of champagne behind his back, to celebrate his divorce and the judge’s refusal to grant him shared custody. He stayed barely three hours, then planted a friendly kiss on Marianne’s forehead and whispered into her ear that he was off to a club to meet some friends of Loreen.
The others began to disperse a little later, around three in the morning. By 5 A.M., amid glasses scattered here and there, cardboard plates abandoned on the furniture, bottles that had not been recorked, crushed petits fours and slices of cake with only a bite or two taken out of them, the only guest remaining was Papy.
Marianne collapsed on the sofa, next to Mogwai, holding a bottle of Desperados.
“Shall I give you a hand tidying up, my love?”
“Don’t worry, Papy. I’ll deal with all this later. I’ve my whole life to tidy up.”
Papy opened another bottle of beer.
“Look who you’re talking to.”
Lieutenant Pasdeloup had celebrated his retirement the week before. He’d taken it at exactly fifty-two years old, after twenty-seven years of service, as all active functionaries in the French police were entitled to do.
Marianne was drunk. She let go of the bottle she was holding and it fell onto the carpet, the beer spilling under the sofa.
“It’s so stupid, calling you Papy. You’re barely ten years older than me, and you’re in better shape than most men my age. You’re single. You’re not answerable to anyone anymore. Why don’t you come over here.”
She curled up to make room for him, pushing Mogwai off the sofa with her foot. Papy just smiled.
“What exactly are you proposing, Marianne?”
The captain smiled back at him.
“Sex. To celebrate my new life. Yours too. Just sex. Nothing more, I swear. I’m sure you don’t want any more kids. You’ve got plenty of those already.”
Lieutenant Pasdeloup was trembling slightly. He grabbed a chair and sat facing Marianne.
“Would you really offer me that, Marianne?”
“What? Sex? Yes, I told you . . . Just once, to see how it goes . . . There’s no hierarchy between us anymore.”
“Another kid, I mean. Would you offer me that?”
Marianne’s head felt terribly heavy, but she nodded anyway. It was supposed to mean yes, or why not, or let’s see.
Papy leaned forward and took her hand.
“Really, Marianne? You’d offer me the possibility that in six months’ time, I could put my hands on your round belly and feel a living part of me growing inside it? You’d offer me the chance to spend my nights watching over a crying kid who needs me instead of surfing the internet? The chance to have a tree and shining stars at Christmas instead of spending it alone? And with the white-bearded old man coming every year? The chance for the swing in my garden to start squeaking again? The chance for me to get the bike out again and a reason to go for walks along the port and start swimming again? An excuse to go on all the rides at the funfair and binge-watch cartoons? Really, Marianne? A little kid giving me a kiss every morning even when I’m in my sixties, jumping into my lap and saying, ‘Papa, you’re bristly!’ but kissing me anyway? Not ending up a miserable old sod who refuses to even call his grown-up children every week because they’ve got nothing to say to him, but instead having a kid demanding a story and hanging around my neck until my back breaks just so I won’t leave his bedroom? Really, Marianne, you’d of
fer me that? You’d offer me the chance to start over, to turn back the hands of time, to rewind my life, to become twenty years younger overnight . . . You’d really offer me that, Marianne?”
Marianne took hold of Papy’s hand and pulled him towards her.
The ex-Lieutenant Pasdeloup let her do it.
“You won’t be disappointed. I’ll be the perfect father.”
Marianne moved her lips towards his, and just before she kissed him she whispered:
“You’d better be. Because I’m going to be a real pain of a mother.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michel Bussi is a professor of geopolitics and one of France’s bestselling authors. His novels have been published in 35 different countries. He is also the author of After the Crash (Hachette, 2016), Black Water Lilies (Hachette, 2017), Time Is a Killer (Europa, 2018), and Don’t Let Go (Europa, 2018).