To Love A Monster

by Marina Simcoe

  I didn’t get to see her in Calgary where I only had a brief stop at the townhouse to pack a suitcase with some clothes from the boxes I had filled ready to be shipped to Rocky River before I’d left for New Orleans.

  I told her about Henri’s condition and that I was going to France to see him but didn’t mention anything about what happened between me and the person I’d been sharing the roof with. The pain was still too raw to touch that subject with anyone.

  After unpacking the few things I brought with me, I had dinner in the kitchen with Madame Besson. The current Madame Morel was away in Paris for a few days, and there was no reason to serve dinner in the dining room just for me.

  Afterwards, I sat on the bed in my old room, staring at the wall without actually seeing it. Plagued by more than I could process, my mind must have blown open and every single thought had floated away, leaving complete emptiness inside.

  Emptiness was good. It meant there were no pain and no darkness. And I let myself sink into it, grateful for absence of any feelings.

  I seemed to have outrun the darkness after all.

  A knock on the door broke me out of the empty cage.

  “Monsieur Morel can see you now,” Mademoiselle Perrin announced when I opened the door.

  She was young and attractive, with thick chestnut hair brushed back into a neat bun. In fact, she was far too pretty for any of the Madames Morels to let her come anywhere near Henri under normal circumstances. He must truly be on his deathbed for that to happen.

  “I’ll take you to his room.”

  I’d spent months in Henri’s house over the years of my childhood, and I had never entered the bedroom behind the high double doors.

  Until now.

  The usual position of the large four-poster bed must have been right in the centre, between the two tall arched windows, but it had been moved to the side, making room for the white hospital bed and several tables and rolling carts with medical equipment.

  “Henri?” I took a few steps into the semi-darkness of the room, the sterile smell of medicine and impending death filled the air.

  “Monsieur Morel can hear, Mademoiselle, but he does not acknowledge anyone,” replied Mademoiselle Perrin in a subdued voice. “He is fully paralyzed and can no longer speak.”

  I came closer to the pale figure on the hospital bed, barely recognizing my own father.

  His smooth, always perfectly tanned skin had paled to the point that it almost blended with the white sheets on the bed. The rich, walnut colour had been entirely bleached out of his hair by time and sickness.

  “He is asleep?” I whispered.

  “He often has his eyes closed and seems to doze off at times. Take a seat, Mademoiselle.” She maneuvered a high-backed armchair between the roller carts closer to the bed and removed the textbook she must’ve been reading from it. “Talk to him if you wish. You can hold his hand, too. I’ll leave you for a few minutes. Ring the bell when you’re done.” She pointed at the button on the frame of the bed before exiting the room and leaving me alone with Henri.

  I stopped short of touching his hand and lowered myself into the armchair.

  How does one say goodbye to someone when you never had anything to say to each other even when both of you could speak?

  My last conversation with Henri ended with me slamming the door and running away in tears, cut by his bitter disappointment in me. And I still had nothing to tell him that he’d want to hear.

  My gaze fell on the stack of books in the bottom tray of the nearest roller cart.

  “Do the nurses read to you?” I wondered out loud, my voice invading the somber peace of the bedroom. I picked up one of the books. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. The others that I could see were also classics, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

  I’d never seen Henri reading a book and had no idea what his reading tastes were. Still I guessed these must have been left here by the nurses for their own use, possibly to kill the time by reading during their long shifts at his bed.

  I opened Jane Eyre.

  “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day,” I started reading just to break the heavy silence in the room.

  I lifted my gaze back to the bed after finishing the first paragraph, and almost dropped the book—Henri’s eyes were open. Unable to turn his head, he stared straight ahead, but his eyes flickered my way when the reading stopped.

  “Hi, Henri,” I said quietly. “I hope you don’t mind my being here.” A feeling of unease slithered inside me. The nurse claimed he didn’t respond, but there was a clear awareness in his eyes. The gaze itself was a response.

  He glanced my way again then down, to the book in my hand.

  It occurred to me that he might be just as burdened as I was by the complete silence around him interrupted only by a faint buzzing of the machines keeping him alive.

  I nodded and continued.

  “I was glad of it: I never liked long walks . . .”

  Chapter 41

  OVER THE NEXT TWO WEEKS I read daily to my father. We finished Jane Eyre. Then I brought La Reine Margot by Alexandre Dumas from the library of the chateau, guessing that Henri might prefer historical adventure to the romance.

  Not that he ever let me know either way. The only communication we had was through his eyes, and even that was extremely limited.

  He didn’t always open them at my greeting when I entered the room, and would mostly keep them closed while I read. The only thing that remained consistent was that he opened his eyes whenever the reading stopped and glanced at the book, urging me to continue. I would keep going until eventually his eyes remained closed when I stopped, signaling to me that he must have drifted asleep to the sound of my voice.

  This was by far the most time I had ever spent one on one with my father.

  I began looking forward going to his gloomy, way too quiet room every day to re-read old classics. I wanted to believe I was doing something useful and hoped he enjoyed these hours as well, or that it at least distracted him from reality, even if for a short while.

  Reading to Henri freed my mind, too. Day after day, I followed the flow of the familiar language of the old masters, losing myself in the story. But at night . . .

  At night, thoughts of him returned. I couldn’t think of him as Monster any more. That name belonged to someone who, apparently, existed only in my imagination. I couldn’t bring myself to refer to him as Hunter either, for reasons I hadn’t figured out yet myself.

  I just thought about him as him.

  And I thought about him every moment I had to myself.

  Every night I would lay in bed for hours, waiting for the sleep to come. Darkness lurked on the edge of my awareness, but it didn’t scare me as much as it once did.

  At first, I thought it was because I had run halfway around the world to get away from it. But then I remembered that no physical distance used to ease fear in me before.

  I had fought the darkness and fear and won.

  ‘The monster I was could not take your strength.’

  He was right, he hadn’t. My strength was all mine, and it was still within me. I just needed this long to find it again. I’d allowed the assault to gain power over me. Now, I had been working hard, taking that power back, little by little, and regaining control over my own body and emotions.

  Ironically, the man in the woods, no matter what I’d call him, played a huge part in the process of my recovery.

  And this was where my thoughts and emotions tangled into a Gordian knot.

  He was the assailant, the perpetrator, someone I vowed to stay away from. Yet, would I have taken those first steps on the way to healing without him?

  He was the one who made me open up about my issues, leading me patiently and helping me cope.

  On the other hand, I wouldn’t have these issues to deal with in the first place if it wasn’t for his actions eight years ago, would I?

  This was where my mind came full circle, leaving
me unable to decide if I was supposed to feel gratitude or resentment. Hate or love?

  Which one of the many conflicting emotions should I even allow myself to feel for him?

  Was it up to me to choose at all? I was afraid I had very little control over my feelings for him.

  Every night, in bed, at that moment when commonsense had drifted asleep already but the longing was still awake, the pillow in my arms turned into his back, and the fabric under my cheek into his thick, familiar fur. I could almost hear the soothing rhythm of his heartbeat, falling asleep with the memories of feeling calm and safe at his side.

  My dreams in France were not nightmares. Yet all of them were about him.

  A FEW DAYS AFTER MY arrival to the chateau, I finally met Henri’s current wife.

  “Gabrielle Marceaux,” she corrected me curtly when I greeted her as Madame Morel. “I’ve build a successful career in modeling under my name and have no intentions of changing it.” Her gaze, the colour of dark chocolate, swept me head to toe. “Well, you can call me Gabrielle. Since we are a family.”

  Over the years while Henri aged, his wives had become increasingly younger. Gabrielle was no older than I, making it even more difficult for me to see her as my stepmother.

  In any case, I never got a chance to figure out the relationship between us because Gabrielle didn’t stay long enough or often enough at the chateau for us to build any relationship at all. She preferred to stay in the city, mostly because of her work there as she explained, but she didn’t make a big secret that ‘the hospital smell upstairs made her nauseous.’

  She did inform me on one of her brief visits to the chateau that Henri had a legal will.

  “It will be read a week after his funeral, to give an appropriate time for grieving for the deceased first,” Gabrielle explained when she ran into me on my way to Henri’s room with yet another book under my arm and warned, “If you intend to contest his will, I won’t make it easy.”

  “I have no plans of contesting anything, Gabrielle,” I snapped, truly infuriated now with my father’s taste in women. “My only intention is to spend as much time as possible with Henri. Before he is deceased.”

  That evening I started La Dame de Monsoreau. I had made it through a couple of chapters when I saw that Henri must have dozed off as his eyes failed to open during a pause in my reading.

  I closed the book and noiselessly got up from the chair. The rolling cart, where I usually left my book overnight, had been moved to the other side of the bed, so I opened the top drawer of Henri’s nightstand, with the intention of leaving the book there this time.

  On the bottom of the otherwise empty drawer, an envelope with familiar handwriting caught my attention. It was an unopened letter from my mother addressed to my father.

  “She wrote to you.”

  Using traditional mail was the only way for my mother to reach my father directly. Over the past two decades, my parents had been communicating mostly through each other’s lawyers. She had no other contact information for him but this address since the chateau had been in the Morel family for generations.

  I looked up to see my father’s eyes directed at me.

  “Did you know that Mom wrote to you?”

  Whether or not he knew, he couldn’t open the letter himself. And whoever brought it here—either the nurse or Gabrielle—didn’t bother to do it for him.

  I sat back in the chair, holding the letter in my hand.

  “Would you like me to read it to you?”

  Henri continued staring at me.

  Despite his severe limitations, we could have developed a more sophisticated system of signs, using whatever movement of his eyes he still had left to communicate. Except that Henri wouldn’t go for it. Whenever I tried to build a better understanding between us by asking him to blink once for yes and twice for no, he didn’t cooperate. Gabrielle questioned his cognitive abilities, wondering if they had been impaired due to his strokes. But I was convinced it was either his rebellious stubbornness or innate laziness that prevented him from even trying to cooperate.

  In my opinion, the intelligence in the clear grey eyes staring at me now did not allow for any doubts in his cognitive abilities.

  I tore the envelope open and took out the folded piece of printing paper, tightly filled with my mom’s girlish handwriting.

  “Dear Henri,” I started reading after clearing my voice. “I can’t believe I’m actually writing to you after all these years. But life circumstances change. Sadly, it took hearing from Sophie about your condition for me to finally reach out to you. I honestly wish I’d done it sooner.

  You and I would have never worked as a married couple. I know it now—we weren’t right for each other. Even as lovers, we couldn’t stay together for long.

  It took me years to get over you. And only now that I’ve finally met my soul mate, I realize how wrong you and I were. There was no one to blame for things not working out between us, and I’m sorry I blamed you all this time.

  My biggest regret is that we didn’t work harder on remaining friends. If not for our own sake than for the sake of our daughter. I regret Sophie’s growing up with parents unable to stand each other long enough to even have a civil phone conversation.

  I loved you too much in the first place to even consider a friendship after we parted our ways. I’m sorry. I let my broken heart reign over my feelings for you for too long.

  After all these years of hurt and bruised egos between us, I just want you to know that I have no ill feelings towards you. I hope you have no regrets with the life you’ve lived. And if you do, I hope you make amends and let them go, because above all I wish you peace.”

  It wasn’t signed. It didn’t need to be.

  I lowered the letter to my lap and lifted my gaze to my father’s face. His eyes were closed, but a single tear rolled down the papery white cheek.

  I wondered if he felt any regrets at the moment, and suddenly I didn’t want to be one of them, not anymore. I knew all his life he regretted having me, but I was in this world because of him. Whatever his motives for showing any interest in my life were, it was because of him that I was able to have the life I had.

  I took a tissue from the nightstand and dried the lone tear off his face.

  “Thank you, Henri. Thank you for being the only father I ever had.”

  I covered his thin, frail hand with mine and squeezed it gently. For the first time in my life, I held my father’s hand.

  Chapter 42

  FOUR DAYS LATER, HENRI was gone. He passed away while I read the final pages of La Dame de Monsoreau to him.

  I looked up after finishing the chapter. His eyes were open, but unseeing, as if he was afraid to close them to the very end, lest I stop reading and he would be left in the silence alone.

  My father spent his life surrounded by people. That was how he preferred to live—among noise and bustle of an endless party with a multitude of colourful characters, none of whom stayed in his life for too long.

  It gave me comfort to know that he didn’t die in a complete silence at the end, even if my voice was his only companion during his final hour.

  I watched the dirt hit the lid of the coffin at his funeral, feeling sadness for the man who had passed, but filled with light instead of regret, grateful that I was there to share the past weeks of his life. I hoped I managed to make those weeks a little brighter for him, too.

  I hugged myself, rubbing the mid-morning chill of the cemetery out of my upper arms, and desperately wished for someone else’s arms around me. The weeks spent in the cool, distant household of my father made me miss human contact that much more.

  What wouldn’t I give for a simple warm hug right now?

  To feel big, furry arms wrap around me again.

  His hug.

  The thoughts of him came back once again, bringing along anger and disappointment, as well as confusion and longing.

  During the weeks spent away from him, these emotions had a chance to
settle to the point that I was able to think back to our last conversation more calmly.

  He had lied to me. There was no excuse for a lie.

  Still, it could be understood, couldn't it? I believed I understood the reasons for him keeping silent about who he was.

  ‘How long would you have stayed anywhere near me had you known my real name?’

  The answer was, I would not. Had I known who the monster in the woods was from the beginning, I would not have come back. Ever.

  The right thing would have been for him to tell me the truth right away and let me go.

  But then the past few months would have never happened.

  Longing swelled tight around my heart at the memories of those months, the happiest time of my life. I was not ready to give those memories up, even if they were a lie.

  Were they?

  ‘My feelings for you are real.’

  I closed my eyes and for the first time since I left him, I allowed myself to remember everything. The tenderness, even reverence, in his touch when he made love to me, as if he tried to exorcise the dark memories of our past from my mind by replacing them with loving caresses. The warmth and yearning I always found in his eyes for me. The passion in his words. I fell in love with him, feeling the sincerity of it all.

  He didn’t tell me his name, but did he try to pretend to be someone else?

  He didn’t embellish the kind of person he was when he spoke of his past. Could he have truly changed? I could not reconcile the arrogant teenager I knew years ago with the loving, caring, passionate man who told me he loved me. Could anyone pretend this well to fake it all?

  The person in the woods might not be my Monster the way I thought of him, but he also couldn’t be the Hunter Reed I remembered. How could the pain and remorse I felt in him be faked?

  I begged Cecilia to give him a chance to say sorry. The least I could do was to give him the same chance myself.

  Besides, regardless of how I felt about him, I couldn’t turn off my worrying about him. There was no way for him to get help if he needed it. He was alone, a prisoner of the estate, and I was the only one in the world who knew about his existence. No matter what, I felt responsible. And if something happened to him while I was away, I’d never forgive myself.