The Stone Boy

by Loubière, Sophie

  “I understand why Sevran wouldn’t be too sure. In this situation, the cops would be careful with a homicide.”

  “Did Sevran tell you that Desmoulins had a record?”

  “Not enough to make anyone worry—misspent youth stuff, driving under the influence.”

  “Huh! That reminds me of someone. A famous twenty-fourth of December, St. Adèle’s Day.”

  “Let me remind you that both of us had been drinking that day.”

  “Look! It started snowing.”

  Through the bedroom window, snowflakes danced, pushed by the wind, wheeling toward the tops of the pine trees.

  “Adèle… Adélie… That’s pretty, Adélie. I like that.”

  “You want to name our daughter after part of Antarctica?”

  “En terre Adélie! Nine hundred thousand kilometers of ice. A heart that’s hard to conquer… Adélie would share her saint’s day with Adèle. What do you think, love?”

  Audrette spoke to her belly as she rubbed it, nearly joyful. Fear of childbirth would come later, with the panic of a contraction far more aggressive than the last. Martin left his wife to her baby talk and walked out of the room.

  As he went down to the utility room, the memory of something Dr. Mamnoue said about one of his mother’s dreams came back to him; the one where a window was “fighting” with the wind and the curtains were “angry,” and the child—Bastien or Rémi—was playing the piano, his face and mouth stained with dirt. Had she foreseen a terrible fate or expressed her outrage at the death of her grandson, as the psychiatrist thought? His mother had only been wrong about one thing: the stones in the jar. Six months after the assault at the Desmoulins’ home, the DNA test results had come back. The blood belonged to an animal. Felis silvestris catus. Thus the trail definitively went cold as far as the existence of a child was concerned. Martin plugged in the iron, turned up the temperature to the maximum setting and threw a sheet across the table to iron.

  67

  Three days before Christmas, Martin received a call in his office. There were fewer patients, so between appointments he was catching up on reading lab leaflets and sorting through old mail.

  “Am I disturbing you?”

  “No, not at all. How are you?”

  “Well, thanks. I’ve just left the police station.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  Valérie Tremblay’s voice was completely flat.

  “My job as social worker has been transferred to Clichy-Montfermeil, at the new police station promised by the government after the riots in two thousand five.”

  “You don’t seem too enthusiastic about it.”

  “I don’t know anyone there. I’ll lose all my contacts. As if they couldn’t have created a job for me. What will happen to the people who need me here? Who’s going to help them? Let’s talk about something else.”

  The social worker hadn’t just called Martin to wish him a happy Christmas. She wanted to know if he had received a letter sent by the juvenile crimes division.

  “It’s nothing important, don’t worry. It’s from Laurie Desmoulins.”

  Martin put the phone on speaker and picked up the pile of letters that had amassed on his desk. He sifted through them quickly before putting his hand on a brown envelope with the insignia of the French Republic on it.

  “I think I have it. How is she?”

  “She must be traumatized by her parents’ arrest. She’s been placed in a foster family and separated from her brother.”

  “The poor things.”

  Martin rummaged in his desk drawer and found a letter opener.

  “Sevran had got news of her from the juvenile crimes investigators,” Valérie continued. “She hadn’t been very forthcoming with the police. But the drawings that she did at the psychologist’s spoke volumes. In one of them, she’s drawn herself, holding a telephone. A bubble is coming out of the phone and in it she wrote the number for ChildLine. That allowed juvenile crimes to go back to listen to a call she made last August.”

  “Had she called the number?” Martin asked, slicing open the envelope.

  “Yes. Her father had become violent with her little brother. Kévin was drawn very small next to her with red tears like fat raindrops. Do you know who told her about that phone number?”

  Martin pulled a sheet of paper out of the envelope.

  “My mother,” he said, surprised to discover a drawing.

  “Yes. The little girl hadn’t said enough for them to be able to act at the time. She had totally understood what had happened and why her parents were in prison, even if she preferred to be with them. But she refused to believe that the old lady who gave her piano lessons was dead.”

  The drawing, done in colored pencil, showed a big house with two big eyes. It took up almost the whole page.

  “Your mother had promised her something that the little girl hasn’t forgotten…”

  In front of the door, Laurie had drawn her piano teacher, with a smiling face, a helmet of hair on her head, dressed in a long purple dress. She held in her hand an object that Martin didn’t recognize right away.

  “What was the promise?”

  “She would teach her to make crêpes.”

  In Elsa Préau’s hand, Laurie Desmoulins had drawn a frying pan. Martin and Valérie wished each other a happy Christmas.

  The doctor got a box of drawing pins out of his desk drawer.

  He chose four in different colors.

  A minute later, the drawing was up on one of the walls of his office.

  68

  Dr. Gérard Préau stroked the walnut-veneer frame. He crouched down to feel the base of the columns of the carved console.

  “It really is a marvel,” he murmured admiringly.

  He got up, brushed the dust off his hands, and looked at his son, moved.

  “Do you know why your mother so wanted me to inherit her Gaveau?”

  “The two of you did things on the piano?”

  The old man smiled. His steamy breath escaped from his mouth. Martin’s garage, where the instrument had been stored, was never more than six degrees centigrade.

  “More than that,” he answered. “Your mother, at the time, had literally enchanted me.”

  He lifted the cover and tinkled the keys covered in yellowed ivory. The piano sounded sadly out of tune.

  “Elsa fascinated me.”

  “Really?”

  “Someone who talks to ghosts is by definition captivating.”

  Martin pulled up the collar of his jacket.

  “Mum was a bit special.”

  “She was an exceptional woman.”

  “But you left her.”

  Dr. Gérard Préau met his son’s eyes.

  “Because she asked me to, Martin. And I think that it’s the greatest proof of her love that she ever gave me.”

  Martin scraped his heel through the dust, tracing sinuous lines across the tiled floor.

  “That, Dad, you’ll have to explain.”

  Martin’s father closed the cover of the piano and put the plastic tarp back in place to protect it from the dust.

  “Your mother was a very good mother, and a remarkable teacher. But she would have driven any man in her life mad, starting with me. She had to have it all. We lived in an exhausting meeting of minds. She made of me what she would. When I found myself back in Algeria, I understood just how symbiotic our relationship was, fed by our own frustrations, our childhood suffering, our hopes, our aspirations…”

  Martin gave a nervous laugh.

  “This has to be the first time you’ve ever spoken about her like that.”

  The old man looked annoyed.

  “Have I ever said a bad word about her to you?”

  “… No. That’s true.”

  “I warned you about her excesses, her contradictions, but never against her. And if mental illness did take such a firm hold on her, it’s because pain carved a bottomless pit in her.”

  Martin’s father took a handkerchief out of
one of his pockets and blew his nose discreetly.

  “Why didn’t you come to the funeral?” Martin asked brusquely.

  “She was dead. I didn’t see what my presence would have changed. And you seemed perfectly capable of dealing with it by yourself.”

  The handkerchief went back in his pocket.

  Martin stiffened.

  Something wasn’t right.

  His father had never seemed so upset talking about his mother. In the last weeks since her death, he hadn’t stopped making his almost shocking indifference clear to him by phone and e-mail. Up until now, when he got emotional when faced with an old piano no one knew what to do with, himself first and foremost.

  “Did Elsa ever speak to you about her mother?” he asked in a broken voice.

  “Not much. She died when Mum was very young, right?”

  “A bit before the end of the war. Your mother was eight.”

  Gérard Préau took a few steps, and shivered.

  “Do you know what happened to her?”

  Martin repeated what his mother had told him: that his grandmother had left the house one day and never come back, because she had been unhappy with her husband. She had got together with a man somewhere, with whom she made a new life. An adventurer, or a rich businessman.

  His father cast his eyes down to the beige buttons on his coat.

  “That—that’s just the fairy tale she told herself. One day in May nineteen forty-four, my aunt Deborah, Elsa’s mother, went to turn herself in to the French police. The idea of not following her parents and her brothers and sisters into deportation had become unbearable to her.”

  “What?”

  The old man opened the garage door, letting a glacial wind cut inside. He gestured to Martin to follow him.

  “She was among the last people deported from the camp at Drancy. She never found her family members. Deborah, née Mathias, was gassed on arrival at Auschwitz. A pointless sacrifice.”

  “Why? Why did she do that?” demanded Martin, stupefied, following his father.

  “She was Jewish, Martin. Like your mother. And like you.”

  Martin needed more than a coffee to warm him up. Standing in the kitchen, his hands still frozen from the December cold, he stared at the contents of the boiling cup between his fingers. His father was busy putting logs in the living room fireplace. The crackle of the fire highlighted the wooly silence that reigned in the house in the absence of Audrette and Madelyn, Gérard’s second wife, who had gone out to pick up useless Christmas nonsense in the Rosny II shopping center. Since his father arrived, Martin had been bitter: Audrette had to be pregnant for Dr. Gérard Préau to deign to visit his son. There was also a medical conference that the cardiologist attended each year, penciling in time in his schedule for a lunch with his son. Rarely would he show him any affection. He hadn’t been particularly encouraging about his son coming back to join him in Canada in the fifteen years since he decided to leave his mother. Nor had he prevented him from going back to France eight years later. His son embarrassed him. Dr. Gérard Préau was much more affectionate with his other children, those Madelyn, the Quebecois medical secretary he had met after his divorce, had given him. Something didn’t click with Martin. His father had, however, taught him to tie his shoelaces and to drive on his knees. But the two had taken part in a stubborn cold war, using obsolete weapons, ignoring the origin of the conflict. No doubt he hadn’t been aware of it, but was his father, deep down, waiting for the day when his son would start talking to ghosts? Even if that did turn out to be true, didn’t they have some secrets to share?

  Martin went to the fireplace.

  “Why didn’t you tell me anything about this before?” he said with a sigh.

  “Because your mother was still in this world, and that wasn’t her truth.”

  “But still, I could have understood that—”

  “You would have ended up talking to her about it some day, Martin, and that would have hurt her no end. Do you have any idea what she endured all those years? Being abandoned by her mother—is there anything more devastating for a child?”

  The poker glowed amid the flames. Martin’s father used it to ensure that no bit of wood went untouched by their tongues, adding in twigs.

  “My uncle didn’t know what to do with her anymore. She was regularly expelled from the private schools he sent her to. She finally quieted down as a teenager. She stopped talking to her mother but didn’t break from her… her fantasy.”

  Satisfied, he leaned the poker back in its stand and put the Plexiglas fireguard back in place.

  “Elsa was eccentric,” he said fondly. “Charmingly, deliciously eccentric. That’s what made her fascinating, and so different from the others… Your mother saw things that we couldn’t even imagine, things that reassured her. For her, there was no divide between the real and the unreal. If your grandmother came to speak to her at night, she would give her a sneaky little sign on a train platform or do a little dance move in the attic, and that was entirely normal, because she was alive somewhere, on the arm of a handsome adventurer.”

  The old man stood, making his knees crack.

  “Elsa was a great beauty and had a rare mind,” he said.

  Then he sat down on the sofa and, with an affectionate gesture, invited his son to join him.

  “You know, Martin, when you were born, it was the best day of her life. And for me, too. I was so proud of having married that woman. But how to forgive her for Bastien… your little gent.”

  Martin sat down next to his father.

  Dr. Gérard Préau put a hand on his son’s knee.

  A sweet warmth filled his eyes.

  The fire emblazoned the last of the twigs.

  Sleep, Bastien, sleep tight.

  Granny Elsa is watching over you.

  I won’t let them make you suffer

  like they made my poor mother suffer.

  They won’t get you with a needle like they did

  to my father and like they do to animals.

  I won’t let them give you any more injections

  of that rotten stuff in your blood that makes you ill

  and makes you vomit, my Bastien.

  You’ll never be part of something bad.

  I won’t leave you.

  I’ll stop them from getting to you.

  I’ll always be by your side.

  You’ll never be cold again.

  Sleep tight, my little kitten.

  Granny Elsa’s watching over you.

  Acknowledgments

  This work was created thanks to the patience and support of the people around me and whom I love biggest and best, as my son would say: my husband, my children, my friends. I would like to thank in particular my friend and doctor, Françoise Brélivet-Iscache—my very own Martin!—who could single-handedly take on the job of GP in Seine-Saint-Denis any day. Thanks also to police captain Olivier Martin, Sgt. Pascal Delannoy, and Madame Alexandra Depauile, social worker, who occupied a post similar to that of Valérie Tremblay for a time at the Gagny police station. All three do remarkable work with a socially marginalized population in which violence against women prevails. May they continue to do their work in the best possible conditions. Thank you to Jean-Marc Souvira for weighing in on my prose and removing the last niggling doubts of a worried author. And to my lovely neighbors—may they forgive me for drawing inspiration from their garden. Now that J.–B. Pouy has seen right through me in revealing my dishonest and perverse nature, it won’t be a piece of cake to invite them over for tea.

  It would be unfair not to mention the composers who through the emotional force of their film scores started me on the right note and gave me the tone of the characters and the events in this book. Elsa Préau owes a lot to Alexandre Desplat (Benjamin Button, The Queen, Afterwards), Gabriel Yard (1408), and James Newton Howard (The Interpreter, Snow Falling on Cedars, The Sixth Sense). The melancholy and the internal clash of feelings in Martin’s character were sketched out list
ening to the music of Terence Blanchard (Inside Man), Thomas Newman (Cinderella Man), and Deborah Lurie (An Unfinished Life), not forgetting Erik Satie, whose music Elsa Préau uses to build bridges.

  This novel was born on a table at the Salon du Livre in April 2009, a Sunday, at the end of the afternoon. I recounted what I knew of my story without knowing its true ending to Céline Thoulouze. It took a good three-quarters of an hour, until the Salon was closing—they had to throw us out! It was thanks to Céline that this book exists. And as I would never have met Céline without Nicolas Watrin and Anne-Julie Bémont-Lelièvre, thanks to them.

  About the Author

  Sophie Loubière is a novelist, journalist, and radio producer. The author of five novels, detective short stories, and a children’s book, Sophie Loubière won the Lion Noir prize and the Ville de Mauves-sur-Loire prize for The Stone Boy. She is also the winner of the SACD Meilleur Jeune Auteur Radio prize for her work in radio.

  1 French sculptor César (César Baldaccini, 1921–1988) was a founder of the Nouveaux Réalistes group: artists who took inspiration from urban, everyday life and materials. In the early 1960s, César used scrap metal and car parts to mold his works, compressing them to the point of being unrecognizable.

  2 Estelle Mouzin was nine years old when she disappeared on 9 January 2003 in Guermantes, Seine-et-Marne, on her way home from school. Though her case was covered extensively in the French press, and reopened repeatedly by the police as they followed different domestic and international lines of inquiry, she has never been found.

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