The Stone Boy

by Loubière, Sophie

  Damn it!

  What kind of shit storm had she got herself into?

  52

  Sitting on a chair with a frayed cobalt-blue fabric back, the man watched his hands. Usually soft and warm regardless of the season—a physical characteristic appreciated by his patients and Audrette—they were particularly damp and cool. His fingers shook in spite of his efforts to control his nerves.

  Martin pulled up the wrist of his right shirtsleeve. His watch read nine o’clock. Lieutenant Sevran was with a colleague. Their voices spilled through the open office door to him in the hallway. Sevran had found an indication of proceedings against one Elsa Préau on a list of people interviewed as part of a criminal investigation. He had asked for whatever might be pulled up from the archives for the case, which dated back to 1997. And then a policeman stopped in to see him, the one he was chatting with in the corridor.

  Knees together, shoulders hunched, Martin ignored the nagging hunger in stomach. But he was cold without his duffel coat—despite the prevailing heat in the police station. Through habit, rather than through fear of saying too much, he kept his teeth clenched. Seeing his mother lying on the floor in a pool of blood with three guys over her, trying to revive her, had made him tense.

  People think doctors can take anything.

  They didn’t bother with the kid gloves when they painted the picture for him.

  Pelvic fracture, major internal injuries with bilateral damage to the lobes of the lungs, and a concussion. And then there was the neighbor, the mass of ninety kilograms in a sweatshirt spotted earlier, he had reduced Martin’s dear mum to mush: in the fall, her head struck the edge of the kitchen countertop. They kept the most vital prognosis for last. Martin’s mother was in a coma. This just rekindled old memories. Only this time, she might not come back.

  His phone vibrated in his coat pocket. Audrette sent a text message to her husband to comfort him. She missed Martin. He missed her arms, her breasts pressed around his skull, cutting off any morbid thoughts. He imagined the house, a glass of Bordeaux in hand, standing in front of the bay window overlooking the sloping garden. The view across the hills above the city, a panorama they hadn’t grown tired of four years later. A house bought on credit, too big for the two of them, and which they tried in vain to fill with the unbearable screaming of a baby whose young parents would adore it as an affirmation of life. Martin had quickly phoned Audrette from the police car to tell her what had just happened, foreseeing that he’d be late returning home.

  “You’re her guardian! Shit! You know what she’s capable of. Why you did not have her put in care? Do you realize what the consequences of this could be? If the children and their mother don’t come out of this, how do you think it will go?”

  The first reaction of his wife was violent and had crushed him. When Audrette called in tears, vowing that if her mother-in-law was doing it a second time, it would drive her to the madhouse, he regained a bit of courage.

  His mother, his burden.

  If there were a single reason that Martin had returned from Canada, disregarding his education and a great career that awaited him there in the cardiac department headed by his father, it was his mum. Only for his mum. The letters that he received from France were miserable. With no brother or sister, her mother dead, her father terminally ill with cancer, she had only him left, her son. Miserable letters, but entertaining ones. Her letters covered her reading, her bizarre diets, her students’ imaginings, and the unlikely animals she collected in her garden, but also French social policy, the problems created by globalization and ecological disasters. More recently, in a letter dated 6 January 2006, commenting on the work of an economist, she was already foreseeing a stock market crash in the United States, the repercussions of which would be global. Of her solitude, however, she said nothing, or very little, quoting a line about the melancholy that seized at dusk, after her schooldays filled with screaming children. So the young man, his heart shriveled up by remorse, guilty of having neglected his mother to reach the father who had abandoned him on the other side of the world, returned to France. A hiatus of eight years, in the middle of which, Audrette blossomed like a flower.

  Martin surveyed the narrow, cluttered room: on the lower cabinet, a SWAT helmet resting on a stack of files, and safes, similar to those found in the hotel room, set the tone. Hung on the wall were a coat, a child’s drawing, and a photograph of four smiling men, their arms around each other’s necks—Lieutenant Sevran’s team. So you could be happy in the police department, have a few beers, and be chummy for the camera. The child’s drawing brought back memories of two police sergeants standing in his doctor’s surgery. One of the officers, who had a cold, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket to clear his sinuses, drowning out the announcement of Bastien and Granny Elsa’s “accident” in a tissue.

  Back then, there were also children’s drawings on the walls of his surgery.

  Bastien’s drawings.

  All this came back to him now.

  “I have nothing to add, sir,” his mother had whispered before the guards took her. The “diabolical grandmother” would make the front page of the Parisien again.

  A dangerous grandmother—but is she crazy?

  Psychiatrists have it out at the trial of Elsa Préau,

  accused of killing her grandson, age 7.

  Georges Milhau

  Special correspondent

  A question haunts the court. A key issue. Should Elsa Préau, who has been on trial for the past three days, be in a courtroom? Was she or was she not accountable when, on 6 June 1997, she led her grandson Bastien into the town park, sat down with him under a tree, and administered to him a dose of sedatives sufficient to kill him? The three experts who examined her do not agree. The case, which is already complicated, is awash in confusion. For Dr. Valente, the accused is paranoid, suffering from delusions and an obsessive fixation on Bastien, but the delirium does not affect other areas of her mind. In this state of “mental precariousness, she has become progressively convinced of the torture inflicted on Bastien by his mother.” For him, Elsa Préau’s responsibility is moderately diminished. But for Dr. Dupin, Elsa Préau suffered a paranoid psychotic break. His conclusion is unequivocal: “This crime is not judicable and does not warrant a criminal verdict.” According to the third expert, Dr. Texier, we are dealing with a paranoid personality, a pathological one, with a “hypertrophied ego” and a quasi-symbiotic relationship with Bastien. The total effect “impaired her judgement and took control of her actions at the time in question,” but it did not render the accused responsible.

  The jurors are lost, particularly since the accused absolutely insists on being tried and convicted, and doesn’t want to hear a word said about mental illness. She insists on “appearing before Martin (her son) to answer for her heinous act.” Dr. Texier has taken this reaction to be a further sign of Elsa Préau’s paranoia.

  With so many uncertainties, what followed the parade of witnesses yesterday seemed quite preposterous. We heard that Elsa Préau, 62 years old today, has had an exceptional life. Her intelligence and unrivaled tenacity propelled her from her position as a schoolteacher to headmistress, where she became known by reputation all the way up to the Ministry of Education for creating the first “nature and garden” class in 1991. It was also heard that she had loved her son Martin too much, and that her descent into paranoia began when she discovered bruises on Bastien’s body, and especially when her daughter-in-law Audrette forbade her from seeing her grandson on the advice of a juvenile court judge. Elsa Préau then tried to alert numerous people around her, convinced that her grandson was a victim of abuse. She even sent a letter to the director of the County Council that runs social services. But no one believed her.

  Then the police officer who interrogated her in custody entered. He had allowed her to “confess,” which had lasted all night. “She imagined Bastien to be suffering so.” She did not think she would be capable of living without her grandson. Denied
visits with Bastien, she wanted to die, but could not bring herself to leave the child alone with his mother. “She administered what was a fatal dose to Bastien, but insufficient for herself. She failed.” Finally, the officer stated that until that point, “nobody had listened to her,” not even her son Martin, whose refusal to listen she did not understand. “So she turned herself in.”

  Closing remarks from both sides and the verdict are expected today.

  The lieutenant turned his computer screen so that the man in front of him could read the article he had found online.

  “Does that refresh your memory at all, Doctor?”

  Martin grimaced. He needed more time. It was all happening too fast. Barely four hours had passed since the assault, and his mother had already gone from victim to the guilty party. Lieutenant Sevran took on a contrite air.

  “The policeman mentioned in the paper is our captain. He thinks that he saw your mother when she came in to file her report for our logbook last Monday. Our social worker had taken Madame Préau’s statement very seriously, you know… The captain remembered her face, but hadn’t made the connection with the trial.”

  He put a flabby hand to his chin.

  “Ten years ago… I was a sergeant in Nantes…”

  The officer turned the screen back around on its pedestal.

  “Let’s look further back…”

  Martin’s voice rose over the clacking of the keyboard.

  “Have you had any news about the children?”

  “Not yet.”

  “And the parents? What about the father? Did my mother hurt him badly?”

  “Mr. Desmoulins is in custody. He’s being considered as part of the investigation.” The officer sighed. “Ah! Voilà! ‘Killer grandmother judged not responsible: accused is acquitted.’ That’s why there’s no record of a conviction on the system.”

  The screen rotated a second time. Martin went back to looking at his shoes.

  There was no reason for him to read it.

  He remembered perfectly the reports of the trial that appeared in the press, describing his mother as a wild-looking woman, detached from the world around her.

  He could still hear them reading out the charge.

  “I have never seen distress or despair register on your face, madam. I don’t understand you. I don’t understand what makes you tick.”

  The lawyer then started in on an interminable and confusing monologue, painting a picture of an “abominable act” committed by an “egotistical, egocentric” woman, returning constantly to his failure to understand the crime and its motive. Why would he deny the despair that brought a grandmother to murder her grandson? A despair that drove her to lunacy, fed by the recent loss of her father from cancer, despair about which all the experts agreed. Why deny Bastien’s troubles and physical injuries that were worrying his grandmother when they were real? No. He took it out on the retired schoolteacher.

  “Truly diabolical!”

  When the prosecutor mocked Martin by reducing him to the level of “a little boy at his Mommy’s apron strings,” and basically accused him of perjury, the doctor was then sunk into guilt.

  Guilty of having prescribed the Tranxene, which she had hidden in the cake designed to kill her and Bastien alike.

  Ashamed to bear a name never to be corrupted.

  Five hundred pills, reduced to a powder.

  And she survived after ten days in a coma.

  An irritated cough shook Martin from his thoughts. The lieutenant was watching him, his arms crossed.

  “There’s one thing that I’m having trouble understanding, Doctor,” he said softly. “After what your mother did to you, how could you continue to see her? Is it possible to forgive someone for killing your son, even if it is your mother?”

  Martin looked up at the lieutenant.

  “People always imagine that for a doctor, it’s easier to accept a serious illness in your family, that your experience will protect you from the power of your emotions. It’s nothing like that. It’s not written in any manual how to tell your mother that her grandson is suffering from leukemia and that his fever, the paleness of his skin, and the bruises on his body are the effects of a relapse.”

  “You hid the fact that your son had cancer from your mother?”

  Martin smiled bitterly.

  “No one in the family knew other than Audrette and me. Bastien thought we were giving him a treatment to supplement the calcium in his bones. After his chemo, we went to Corsica for three months to wait for his hair to grow back. We still believed in a cure. Then he got worse… Do you know what the likelihood of survival is in a child whose acute lymphoblastic leukemia has relapsed?”

  The lieutenant shook his head, thrown. The doctor’s eyes shone with tears.

  “Thirty percent. In Bastien’s case, with a serious case of the disease, the prognosis dropped to fifteen percent. Six weeks, two months at the absolute max. He was already suffering. Without knowing it, my mother spared him the relentlessness of the medics and the ordeal that awaited him.”

  Sevran shook his head and looked up at the wall where a child’s drawing was taped.

  Martin guessed exactly what the man must be thinking.

  If it were my son, I would have bet on the fifteen percent.

  One night, at the onset of his illness, Bastien woke his parents up, screaming. A cry of terror that Martin would never forget. In his nightmare, a witch was pulling out his hair. He was holding his head, crippled with pain. His hair fell out two days later.

  In keeping quiet the reasons for Bastien’s deteriorating health, Martin and Audrette had planted a seed in the already fragile mind of his Granny Elsa, and her psychosis swelled to the breaking point. Like a castaway lost in the middle of the ocean grasping a life jacket, Martin still held on to the idea that he had saved his son from the worst.

  53

  Audrette was sleeping on her side, her head half-buried in the pillow held tightly in her arms.

  Like every night, she woke up at two in the morning. After shuffling to the toilet and drinking a few sips of water from the tap, she returned to bed, pressing her chest against her husband’s bare back in the hope that the contact would give her better dreams.

  Martin looked at her face in the light of day. In the duvet, her waist cut a valley dominated by the voluptuous curves of her hips. Her shoulder-length hair, coiled at the neck, reflected glints of amber.

  He desired his wife as much as always, with the same fervor, the same addiction. But Martin doubted that Audrette still wanted him.

  Since the return of Madame Préau after ten years in a nursing home in Hyères, Audrette resented the relationship that his mother had renewed with her son. Their relationship was strained. The last memory she had of her mother-in-law was that of a woman sitting in the dock, saying softly to the court: “My daughter-in-law is completely ignorant of the evil she carries in her. That is why I am so indulgent of her.” The tragedy of Martin. Who was to blame? In 1988, hadn’t he played a dirty trick on his mother by coming back from Montreal with a little surprise—a foreigner with a ridiculous name? How could you commit such a blunder as the only son of a divorced mother? She wasn’t best pleased that Martin had been seeing his girlfriend since university, that she was an agricultural engineer and very pretty.

  The birth of Bastien had signaled an end to hostilities. Granny Elsa, struck dumb with happiness, would even have smoked the peace pipe and had lunch at McDonald’s with her daughter-in-law if asked.

  Nothing could happen to Bastien.

  There should not be bruises on his skin.

  Granny Elsa had succumbed to panic. She needed a scapegoat. A scapegoat not related to her by blood.

  After Bastien’s death, Audrette had gone back to be with her family in Canada—a desperate fugue, a penance. Her return to France years later was accompanied by a requirement: that Martin cut all ties with his mother. Of this, he was not capable.

  The couple’s long separation, how
ever, had helped to heal some of Martin’s wounds. He gave up his one-night stands, his addiction to alcohol and Xanax. He gained enough courage to rebuild his clientele, strangely thin on the ground after his mother’s trial, left the family home where he had seen fit to take refuge after Audrette’s departure, and ordered a plane ticket to Montreal online.

  Martin could not live without this woman’s love. He didn’t flinch when they found themselves face to face, in Beijing, a small Szechuan restaurant in Chinatown with large colored windows that contrasted with the chalky white drifts heaped on the footpaths. In this welcoming room where burning hot plates overflowed with Singapore noodles, he confessed that Bastien deserved better from his parents. Neither should ever forget him, they who must obey his dearest wish: that Bastien should become a big brother. After two ice-cold beers, their fingers intertwined again. A little more time was needed before they could shed their modesty. Nevertheless, ever since their first attempted reunion Audrette’s belly refused to oblige. As the days passed, making love became a source of anxiety and apprehension. Each month, Audrette lived through a day of “menstrual mourning.” And although Martin desired his wife constantly, sex became rare. Recent events had not been brought to any conclusion.

  Martin closed his eyes to still his pathetic impulse.

  He kissed the oval of her shoulder, stroked his sleeping wife’s hair, and went down to the kitchen to drop a capsule into the espresso machine, failing to listen to the France Info news.

  Before going to his office, he would visit his mother in the hospital as he had taken to doing over the past week. For fifteen minutes, he contemplated a bruised body supported by a shell, her neck set in a disproportionately large collar, the mouthpiece of a respirator filling her lips. In his hands, his mother’s felt sometimes warm, and sometimes cold. Madame Préau was still holding back in the face of death, plunged into an irreversible coma.