“Our side? What side? We’re on the same side, V. I’m a working journalist. I write the news. I happen to do that for an English agency at the moment. Why’re you in such a shit mood? Did something happen in Ottawa?”
“No.”
“If you want to talk about hating what your partner does for a living, let’s talk about your current vocation.”
“Forget I said anything,” she says, cutting him off. “It’s brilliant. Your article is brilliant.”
“If you’re going to bitch and complain about my job,” he goes on, “at least be willing to hear how I feel about yours.”
Here comes the lecture.
“I hate that you smuggle cigarettes,” he starts. “I hate how dangerous it is. I worry every second that you’re in Ste. Barbe on a run. Worried you’re going to get caught and thrown in jail. Worried someone’s going to shoot you.”
“Are you done?”
“No, I’m not. I hate that you hang out with college guys, partying with them and pretending to be friends with them.”
“You’re jealous?”
“Yeah! I’m fucking jealous!” he admits. “Frankly, I hate that my girlfriend is a professional criminal.”
“So you wish I had a real job.”
“Can you blame me?”
He’s mentioned this to her before, though with more subtlety. He went so far as to suggest that journalism would be a good career path for her, given her enthusiasm for politics. He even looked up journalism programs in Montreal, which irritated her. She’s of the opinion that journalists are sellouts. The constraint of having to report objectively on events that are meaningful to her, without being able to assert her opinion, holds absolutely no interest for her. Besides, she’s only twenty-three. There’s time for her cause to reveal itself. “It’s not who I am,” she says. “Being part of the grind.”
She can feel herself rebelling against his desire for her to quit smuggling, to become an upstanding citizen. The more he presses, the more she resists. She’s not asking for his approval, just some acceptance. Take me or leave me.
James throws his hands up, exasperated. “What the hell does that even mean, ‘It’s not who you are’?”
“You don’t know who I am.”
“All I know is I can’t stand that you’re part of that world.”
“That world is my family!” she cries, getting up off the couch and facing him with her hands on her hips.
“Callahan is not your family,” he counters. “The gangsters and smugglers on the lake are not your family. The guys on the reservation are not your family.”
“You just don’t get it.”
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “I don’t get it. I want better for you. I want you to want better for yourself. Some integrity at least!”
His words sting, more than she could have imagined. Her face feels hot, and she turns away, not wanting him to see her tears. How dare he judge her, awash in his own self-righteousness, tossing out that word integrity. At least now she knows what he really thinks of her.
12
When two police officers show up at Elodie’s door early in the morning, she isn’t entirely surprised. At the urging of Bruno and Huguette, she filed a criminal complaint with the Sûreté du Quebec against St. Nazarius Hospital. They told her the police would show up to ask her questions. Under the Access to Information Act, she was able to obtain a single record of her transfer from the Ste. Sulpice Orphanage to St. Nazarius Hospital in 1957. She keeps a copy of it in her nightstand, taped inside her notebook, the one that contains sketches and journal entries immortalizing her decade of institutionalization.
She’s memorized her record by now, each and every word. Profound mental retardation. Danger to herself and others. Paranoid delusions. Violent outbursts and convulsions. None of those things are true, but it made her question herself. It cast doubt about her own sanity. Reading that report for the first time, it was incomprehensible to her that a doctor could have made up such horrific things and signed her life away.
Bruno is the one who helped her write the complaint. Last year the Quebec government opened an inquiry into all the criminal complaints that had been lodged by Duplessis orphans. Bruno says the more complaints they file, the more credibility they’ll have.
“Yes?” she says timidly, the door slightly ajar, just enough for them to see her face.
“We’re with the Sûreté de Quebec,” the taller cop says. “We’re here to follow up on a complaint you made against St. Nazarius Hospital?”
She lets them inside her apartment. “Would you like coffee?” she asks them.
“No thank you.”
They follow her to the kitchen, and she invites them to sit down at the small Formica table, which only seats three. The tall one has to turn his chair to fit his long legs underneath. The other one is shorter but overweight. He looks just as uncomfortable.
“You filed a complaint against St. Nazarius Hospital in June of this year?” the stocky one says. From his name tag, he’s Lucien Gagnon. The other, Paul Drouin.
“Yes,” she says.
“And you’re alleging mistreatment by the nuns and wrongful classification as ‘mentally deficient’?”
“Correct.”
“How long were you there?”
“Ten years. From 1957 to 1967.”
He writes it down.
“Will my case go to court?” she asks him, lighting a cigarette.
“We’re investigating more than two hundred and fifty of these complaints,” Drouin says. “When we’re done, we’ll make our deposition at the attorney general’s office.”
“And then what?”
“Trust me, all hell is going to break loose in Quebec when all these complaints come to light.”
“What will I have to do?”
“Once you’ve had a response from the prosecutor, you would go to the Palais de Justice and make your criminal deposition.”
“And then I get to go to court?”
“Yes.”
She gets up and excuses herself, goes to her bedroom and retrieves her notebook. When she returns to the kitchen, she sits back down at the table and opens the notebook to the first page. Her record of transfer is taped to the inside front cover. She reads it out loud to them.
“You can see,” she says, looking up at them, “I am not mentally deficient. I never have been. I was a normal little girl.”
Drouin transcribes her record into his notepad.
“When I first got out,” she explains, “I started this scrapbook so I’d never forget what they did to me. As sickening as my memories are, and as much as I wish I could forget, I also wanted to remember so that I’d be able to tell my story one day.”
She turns the pages, showing them her drawings and descriptions.
“In your complaint, you mentioned sexual abuse,” Gagnon says, not making eye contact. “That was with the orderlies?”
“And the nuns.”
“Anything else?”
She lets out what is meant to be a laugh, but there is no humor in it. “It’s all in here,” she says, sliding the scrapbook across the table.
The cop stops taking notes and flips through it.
“It’s all true,” she says, stubbing out her cigarette. “And now I want justice. Do you think that will happen?”
Drouin and Gagnon look at each other, nodding. “I think so,” Drouin says.
“I hope so,” says the other.
After they leave, she brings her cigarettes and ashtray into the living room and calls Nancy. It’s time to tell her everything.
“Allo, M’ma,” she says, light, cheerful.
“I have to tell you something, Nance.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“I filed a criminal complaint.”
“Against who? What happened?”
“Sweetheart, St. Nazarius wasn’t an orphanage,” she blurts. “It was a mental hospital. I was sent there when I was seven, after being falsely
diagnosed.”
She explains about Change of Vocation Day, the Duplessis orphans, and the pending class action suit. She gives a very abridged version of the abuse she endured at St. Nazarius.
Nancy is silent on the other end.
“I know it’s a lot—”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“I wanted you to have a normal mother, a normal life. I wanted to forget.”
“And now?”
“Now I want justice,” she says. “And you need to know because it’s going to be in the news. It already has been over here.”
“Who’s your complaint against?”
“The Catholic Church, the provincial government, and the doctors who falsified our records.”
“Holy shit. Is that realistic?”
“I don’t know.”
More silence.
“I have to do this,” Elodie says. “It’s important to me.”
“It was such a long time ago,” Nancy says gently. “Maybe it should be left in the past? You have a good life now, M’ma.”
Elodie doesn’t expect Nancy to understand. She doesn’t know enough about what really happened to Elodie at St. Nazarius. Doesn’t know about Sister Ignatia and the monstrous lie she told to keep Elodie from her parents. Besides, Nancy is wired differently. She’s pragmatic and practical; she’s never been overtly emotional, not even when she was a teenager. When Elodie told her that her father had fought in the Vietnam War, all she said was, “Was he a hero?”
“I don’t know,” Elodie responded. “I didn’t know him very well.”
“You didn’t know my father?” she said, confused. She seemed more disturbed by that than by the fact that he might have been killed in Vietnam. “What was his name?”
“Dennis.”
“Dennis what?”
“I don’t know. He never said.”
Nancy was dry-eyed, stoic. She had no other questions. Elodie wasn’t about to go into details about that lost weekend, the prolonged one-night stand with a stranger from Boston. It was her first normal—mutual—sexual experience. It was special, maybe even more so because she didn’t know him. He was going off to war, and there was no possibility of him ever discovering that she was uneducated, possibly crazy, damaged. In its own way, it was simple and perfect. And it produced Nancy, the best thing she’s accomplished in her life. Nancy never asked about her father again. She just took it in stride and moved on.
“I wish I could shield you from all of this,” Elodie says. “Like I always have.”
“You don’t have to protect me, M’ma. You never did.”
But that’s not true. Nancy did need protecting. It’s no small feat that Nancy has no idea her mother keeps a scrapbook of all the abuses and transgressions that were ever done to her. All Nancy has are the mostly pleasant memories of her upbringing, a childhood that checked off all the appropriate milestones and included plenty of special family rituals—homemade gifts at Christmas, planting their small garden every spring, summer outings to La Ronde, the big amusement park on St. Helen’s Island. Those were the best years, when Nancy was old enough to be interesting but still young enough to see her mother through a lens of pure unblighted adoration.
“Remember when we used to go to La Ronde?” Elodie says, out of the blue.
Elodie loved the scary rides best, which was strange, considering how skittish and anxious she was back then. Her favorite was the Wildcat, a plunging roller coaster that flipped upside down and hung suspended in the air above the city. It was a more straightforward kind of terror, physical not mental. She appreciated that. She remembers how Nancy would skip off ahead of her, wild with excitement, her T-shirt stained with purple slush and pink cotton candy, and Elodie would marvel, She is so free. It would fill her heart up like a balloon.
“You gave me a happy childhood,” Nancy says. “But you don’t need to shield me anymore. You need to take care of yourself.”
“That’s exactly what I’m doing,” Elodie says. “This is really about my future, not my past.”
Stephanie once accused her of not wanting to close the chapter on her past. It was after a particularly contentious sisterly argument, and she called Elodie a “lifelong victim.” She was wrong, though. Elodie’s life mission has always been to keep moving forward, as far away from the past as she could get. But she’s starting to realize that closing the chapter on her past will require much more than just willpower and tenacity. Real freedom, she is convinced, can only come from the triumph of justice.
13
JANUARY 1994
The delicatessen where Elodie works is a few blocks east of the record store, but with this insulting wind, it feels more like miles. When Véronique reaches Len’s, with its famous window display of brisket slabs and Black Forest cakes, she opens the door and is immediately welcomed by the smell of smoked meat.
Elodie looks up from where she’s reading behind the counter and waves.
“Sorry I’m late,” Véronique says. “There was a problem on the metro.”
Elodie is wearing the same beige uniform Len’s waitresses have been wearing for decades. Elodie once told her that nothing really changes here, which is why she likes it. In fact, the only thing that has ever changed is Len himself, who died in ’89 and was replaced by his son, Barry.
She pops her head into the back room, where her boss has a small office. “I’m taking lunch,” she tells him.
Véronique can hear a muffled response, and then Elodie grabs a big plastic menu and hands it to her. Usually there’s more of a lunch-hour bustle, but they have the place to themselves today. Véronique’s gotten in the habit of stopping by for a weekly smoked meat sandwich or a coffee before the start of her shift at the record store.
“What would you like?”
“Just coffee.”
“You sure? I can make you a smoked meat sandwich?”
“I’m fine. I’m not that hungry.”
Elodie pours a cup of coffee for Véronique and a Pepsi for herself. They sit at one of the booths.
“What’s happening with the criminal case?” Véronique asks her.
“I haven’t heard yet, but Bruno says nothing ever happens over the holidays.”
“How are you doing?”
“It’s definitely bringing up a lot of the old memories,” Elodie says.
“It’ll be worth it, though, won’t it? When you win your case?”
“If we win.”
“You will,” Véronique states. “How can you not? When the court hears all your stories? My God. They owe you.”
“They sure as hell do.” She pulls a pack of Du Mauriers out of her apron pocket and lights a cigarette. “I need more of these,” she says, holding up the pack. “I’m getting low.”
“I’m doing a run next week. I’ll bring you a few cartons.”
Elodie smiles appreciatively. This is exactly why Véronique smuggles—to help good, hardworking people like Elodie who can’t afford to pay what the government charges them for smokes.
“How’re you and James?” Elodie asks her.
“Good. Better.”
“You sure?”
“It’s been a lot better the last couple of months.”
Elodie cocks her head, waiting for more. She exhales a straight line of smoke above Véronique’s head.
“We were fighting a lot in the fall.”
“About?”
“About these,” Véronique says, holding up the pack of cigarettes.
Elodie nods, understanding immediately.
“He hates me smuggling,” Véronique confides. “He’s the reason I got the job at the record store.”
“But you’re still smuggling.”
“I told James I would stop as soon as my uncle finds someone to replace me.”
“Will you?”
“I don’t know,” Véronique admits. “It’s such good money, it’s easy. Plus, I can’t just shaft my uncle. He needs me. I don’t know what to do.”
&n
bsp; “James worries about you, that’s why he wants you to stop.”
“He’s ashamed of me.”
“No,” Elodie says. “I know he worries. Even I worry about you. It’s dangerous what you do.”
“He wants me to go to school.”
“That sounds like a good plan.”
“It’s James’s plan,” she says. “Not mine. I mean, I have nothing against school, but it just hasn’t been necessary for me. I’m not sure it ever will be.”
“Meaning you plan to continue smuggling.”
“As long as I’m making good money, I plan to keep seizing the opportunities that come up,” she says, thinking about the record store. As far as everyone knows, she’s just a cashier there.
“James wants me to know exactly what I want to do with my life,” she goes on. “But I don’t think that way. All I know is that I want to feel excited by what I do. I want to feel passion, the way my father was passionate about the FLQ, or the way your mother is passionate about her seed store. I’m willing to wait for it.”
“How long?”
“My dad was in jail at my age, his life basically over. I’m just at the beginning of mine.”
“I love your optimism,” Elodie says. “Who says you need to have it all mapped out by your early twenties?”
“Your brother.”
“You know he just wants you to be happy.”
“Enough about my shit,” Véronique says, taking a small sip of coffee. It tastes awful, bitter and watery. There are grounds floating on the surface, which stick on her tongue. “James mentioned you also filed your civil complaint?”
Elodie nods, not looking especially enthused.
“Do you ever think about taking matters into your own hands?”
“You mean like revenge?”
“I guess. I just wonder if winning your lawsuits will be enough.”
“What’s the alternative? Buying a gun and murdering them all? I wouldn’t even know where to start. The nuns, the orderlies, the doctor who put me in St. Nazarius?”
Her uncle Camil probably knows someone who would gladly take out a few child abusers. She almost says, You could hire someone, but Elodie is from a different world. “This is probably the last thing you want to talk about.”
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