Métis Beach

by Claudine Bourbonnais

  She didn’t really have a plan. She wanted to scare us, but didn’t know how. She wrote sentence fragments on pieces of paper and memorized them. Which ones? She couldn’t remember. Maybe something like, “My loyalty for your parents forces me to denounce you,” or “What you’re doing is wrong, and everybody knows it.” What was she expecting to do with them? Slip them somewhere? Recite them for us? She hadn’t decided.

  “Why, Françoise, why?”

  “Because I was in love with you, and I knew I couldn’t compete with the most beautiful girl in the world. I was fat and ugly, you know that. I was the fat cow. I knew what desire looked like in your eyes, I saw it so often when you looked at Gail when her back was turned. It made me sick with jealousy. I was just the fat cow.…”

  She managed to leave the Tees’ party early, on the pretext of a headache. It wasn’t like robust, imposing Françoise to ever be indisposed, and my mother, worried about her, forced her to take a few Aspirins. Françoise pretended to swallow them, before spitting them back in the sink. She left by the back door so that nobody would notice. She left her white apron on the kitchen counter, knowing it would be too easily spotted in the dark. The moon was full. By chance, her dress was black. A straight polyester dress Mrs. Tees had forced her to buy with her own money.

  She wasn’t drunk. Alcohol gave her courage, courage that might have left her at the crucial moment.

  “Why, Françoise, why?”

  “Because I hated you, both of you.”

  She waited until we went up to Gail’s room. Through the window, she had seen us laughing in the living room. Drinking alcohol. She thought of surprising us, reciting the words she’d written, but decided against it. She didn’t want to be seen. She only wanted to scare us. Make us understand that someone knew.

  She hadn’t anticipated seeing the great bay doors open, and Gail taking the dog out and tying him outside. From where she was on the veranda, Gail could have seen her, but there was something off about her that night, she seemed strange.

  “And that’s when you had your idea?”

  “Seeing Locki, I thought of Louis, and what he did to animals.…”

  On the veranda, Locki immediately detected her presence. A smell he recognized. He began wagging his tail. In the Egan kitchen, Françoise often gave him a morsel or two of whatever was left, despite Mrs. Egan’s strict orders to the contrary. She would slip food in her hand and give it to him to eat or lick, watching his grateful eyes. But she didn’t like Locki. What she liked was to contravene Mrs. Egan’s rigid rules.

  That night, he looked at her with those same loving eyes. She petted him, before telling him, very softly, to lie down. He turned around a few times, making small scratching sounds with his claws on the wood, then obeyed, unaware of what was about to happen. Françoise knew what she would do now. And that certainty made her lose her nervousness. She took off her shoes, placed them on the veranda. Inside, only the living room was lit, the other rooms basked in the soft silver light of the moon. She walked silently towards the kitchen. The darkness didn’t bother her: she knew the place well. The first drawer to the left of the sink. That’s where the sharpest knife was, the one she used to cut the Saturday roast. She heard small, joyous slivers of sound coming from upstairs, and was filled with jealousy. Tears of rage slid down her cheeks. She put a hand in her pocket, feeling the small pieces of crumpled paper on which she had written her messages. Perhaps she should slip them under Gail’s door, or better yet, throw them in the air like confetti. But, no, she gave up on that idea. Someone knows we’re here. Who? Françoise? The risk of being caught was too great. She wanted to keep her job as cook; the summer was coming to an end, but there was next year, and the year after that.

  She got out of the house, put her shoes back on and petted Locki once more. The dog was rolling on his back, offering up his warm, soft belly. She slit his throat.

  “How could you do that? Only maniacs hurt animals!”

  “You have a right to hate me, but I ask for your forgiveness.…”

  She was lucid enough to hide the knife under the veranda. The next day she retrieved it, cleaned it, and put it back in its place, when Mrs. Egan called her in a panic to help her with the suitcases.

  Oh, how she wished she could have undone it all the next day, hearing Mrs. Egan on the phone saying how her daughter had been raped by a French-Canadian bastard. How she wished she could have said it wasn’t true! That nothing wrong had happened. That it was all her fault. But too late. Like a car accident, a broken vase; you can’t put shattered things back together.

  “Unbearable guilt?”

  “Yes, Romain … my whole life.…”

  “It didn’t stop you from continuing to see my parents, did it? As if nothing had happened. Hypocritically consoling my mother. Taking care of my father, who hated me because he thought it was all my fault. And you accepted that goddamn store he gave you because you, at least, you could be trusted! The daughter he wished he had had, not like me, his scumbag of a son!”

  “I beg you, Romain. Forgive me.…”

  3

  “That was then. What happens next depends only on me.”

  I wrote those lines sitting on the veranda at the very same spot where Moïse and Louise “hosted” me at my own place a long time ago now, the day my mother was buried. I can still hear Moïse, in the tone of a wiser older brother, “Okay, man. Let’s be honest. It’s time to get you back here.” Then, reproachfully, “Amazing! You can’t even see what’s right in front of your nose!”

  I shivered. The wind off the water is still cool in early June, though the sun was out, and radiant. The sea was a deep blue, swaying under frothy peaks, a perfect moment, a postcard. Over the cliffs, I watched an osprey circling, immense and majestic. In a flash, he tumbled towards the waves, aiming to spear a fish only he saw. At the last moment, an unexpected wave forced him to give up and, with amazing power, he climbed back into the sky. I smiled. The bird started off towards the point where the lighthouse stood, his long wings beating like a slow heart. Again, something attracted his attention, and he began circling over the sea. This time when he dove towards the waters he came back up clutching prey between his talons.

  Why this fish and not the first?

  A tiny modification to initial conditions, an unexpected wave, can change everything.

  To punish Gail and me, Françoise killed the dog and thus knocked over the first in a long series of tragic dominoes — the “rape,” my escape to New York, Dana and the accident that killed her, my son found, then lost, Ann’s murder, the loss of Moïse. What if Françoise hadn’t been filled with that macabre desire to satiate her jealousy? What if she hadn’t slit Locki’s throat?

  The sensitivity of initial conditions.

  In the end, Françoise wasn’t very different from Moïse or myself; we all three had something in our pasts that wasn’t entirely right, which ended up catching up with us. Was I right to be so mad at her? Hadn’t my life been filled with luxury and excitement like John Kinnear said, despite the pain and sadness? A film that I would never tire of watching, despite the innumerable regrets. But we all have regrets.

  The osprey was gone. His first prey had perhaps reached deeper waters now, never to know the fatal danger it had barely escaped. I like the idea that a simple wave can change so much.

  The sun began its slow descent towards the sea, the blushing sky giving the veranda an unreal colour. The temperature dropped a few degrees, and I felt my fingers numbing with the cold. Yes, I was cold. And I knew exactly why. I got up, taking my notebook with me and the thick wool blanket that kept my legs warm. Inside, I poured myself a scotch for courage. At fifty-eight, I no longer had the rest of my life in front of me to let external forces determine what was to come.

  “That was then. What happens next depends only on me.”

  When it came to Len, there was nothing to do but
wait. We hadn’t spoken in five years. An eternity. How old was Cody now? Seventeen? And Julia? Fifteen? My God, they were so much older now. Would they remember me? Would they remember Ann? Had Len ever told them what had happened to Ann? No, of course not. It’s the sort of thing you’d want to spare your children from. Grandma Ann was murdered; she was shot twice in the head. My only hope was this book I was writing, a book that might help Len understand my story. I sometimes think Len got from his mother that tragic inability to be happy, but perhaps I’m wrong. If one day you read these lines, Len, know that your father is there, waiting for you, in Métis Beach.

  Shaking, I swallowed a mouthful of Johnnie Walker, then another. Anxiety constricted my thoughts, and to calm myself I concentrated on the sequential toppling of dominoes that I needed to stop, the implacable fate that could be turned around if only I could banish fear. My hands shaking, I grabbed the phone, and hesitated only a few more seconds before dialing his number.

  “Moïse? It’s Romain.”

  A moment of silence, barely a breath. Then his voice broke. “Hey, man … Ho … How are you?”

  “I … I’m sorry, Moïse.”

  We stayed silent a long time. Both knowing we’d been betrayed by our pasts and, somehow, a little bit by each other as well. Certainly, we could have done things differently, though no one, and especially not that bastard Bill Sweeney, could accuse us of having been truly dishonest. His voice shaky, Moïse mentioned that for the first time in our long friendship, we were each where we were supposed to be. “You in your house in Métis Beach, and me, well, still in New York.”

  He was injured but not down for the count. He would find a way to get back on his feet, he assured me. Another storm stirred up by the grand inquisitors of the ultraconservative right. “They went after Clinton, and they didn’t get him. So how could they get Charlie Moses?” I laughed. How could I not, listening to my friend, his slightly nasal voice, almost cartoonish. I listened to him admiringly. I had no idea whether I would successfully adapt to my new life, now that I had fled his country, Moïse’s country, which had offered me freedom, so long ago.

  I had a house to rebuild, and a book to write — to establish the truth.

  This edition copyright © Dundurn Press, 2016. Originally published in French under the title Métis Beach. Copyright © Les Éditions du Boréal, 2014.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

  All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cover Image by Esther Bubley

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Bourbonnais, Claudine

  [Métis Beach. English]

  Métis Beach / Claudine Bourbonnais ; Jacob Homel, translator.

  Translation of: Métis Beach.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-4597-3351-0 (paperback).--ISBN 978-1-4597-3352-7 (pdf).--

  ISBN 978-1-4597-3353-4 (epub)

  I. Homel, Jacob, 1987-, translator II. Title. III. Title: Métis Beach.

  English.

  PS8603.O94426M4713 2016 C843’.6 C2016-902733-3

  C2016-902734-1

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