The Forgotten Daughter

by Joanna Goodman

  “He tried to escape,” Paul says.

  “His cuffs are off.”

  Laporte isn’t moving. He’s breathing, but not moving. As far as Léo can figure, he got free of his handcuffs and must have thrown himself into the window. The glass shattered, but it was too high for him to get out. Instead, he cut his wrist and chest. Strangely, he’s still wearing the blindfold. If he had just removed it, he would have had a much better chance of escaping.

  “He left the blindfold on,” Francis says, as though Laporte isn’t in the room.

  “He’s not in his right mind,” Léo says. “Let’s bring him into the living room. Do we have any bandages?”

  They half drag, half carry him to the living room, where they sit him down on a chair. Léo removes the blindfold. It doesn’t seem to matter anymore. Laporte doesn’t even look at them. His head drops to his chest. He’s slumped over, practically catatonic.

  Jacques does his best to bandage Laporte’s wounds. He uses some tape and the blindfold, some bandages they found in the bathroom. They clean him up, try to comfort him, but his body is completely limp.

  “We’re going to take you to the hospital soon,” Léo tells him, without really thinking it through. Laporte doesn’t react.

  “Maybe we should let him go?” Jacques says.

  Léo doesn’t know what to do. Seeing another man this way, so hopeless and despondent, makes him feel genuinely sorry for the guy. It’s like he knows it’s over. He must have heard the declaration of the War Measures Act on his radio and he knows it’s his death sentence. His friends and colleagues have all abandoned him; they’ve sent a clear message by not meeting the kidnappers’ demands: Your life is worthless to us. We choose to keep our power. No wonder he’s given up.

  “He needs to go to the hospital,” Bernard says. “He’s bleeding through the bandages.”

  They’re talking about him like he’s not here. In a way, he’s not. He’s somewhere else—mentally, emotionally checked out.

  “We can’t take him to the goddamn hospital!”

  “What then? Kill him?”

  They all fall silent. Léo is up pacing now. He can’t bring himself to look at Laporte. Panic is setting in for all of them.

  “Maybe we should just let him go,” Léo says, surprising them.

  “After everything we’ve done?” Jacques cries. “We’ll go to jail and we’ll have accomplished nothing. The government wins. The politicians win. The English win. The rich win. It’s always the same.”

  “I hate the thought of that, too.”

  “So we kill him. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I don’t know what the hell I’m saying.”

  There was no plan for this. No plan at all, really. It all sort of unfolded, one impulsive decision after another. For a while, it looked like it would all work out. Can Léo take a human life? Can he murder another man, even if it is for the cause? He’s not a killer.

  “He’s suffering, man. Look at him.”

  Léo finally looks over at Laporte. He’s pitiful and clearly in a lot of pain. “His life is in our hands,” Francis says, and all Léo can think is he doesn’t want this terrible burden anymore.

  We could let him walk right out that door to freedom, back to his family, and it would be over.

  “Let’s just let him go then,” Paul says. “We’ll blindfold him and dump him somewhere. We’ll have time to get away.”

  “And go where?” They’re all moving around the room, circling Laporte’s chair.

  “We’re forgetting why we did this in the first place,” Bernard says. “We’re letting him unnerve us, derail us from our purpose.”

  “Bernard’s right,” Léo says. “This isn’t about the FLQ. This is about our people. We did this for them. Do we value this guy’s life more than theirs? Look what the government is doing to our friends and family, man. Locking them up. Interrogating them like they’re criminals. And we’re going to put this politician’s life before them? The government had a choice to save him. This is on them.”

  “If we let him go, we lose all our ground,” Jacques agrees. “We did this for Quebec independence, remember?”

  “Everything we’ve ever done has been to get more power for the workers in this province. Guess what? We’re the goddamn workers! We’re the people! We’re the ones they keep exploiting.” Bernard points to Laporte, inflamed. “This guy? He’s part of it. Let’s not forget that. He’s one of the ones who forced us into this. He’s just a casualty of our struggle.”

  “He’s also a father and a husband and a brother.” Léo says this, thinking about the letter Laporte wrote. Thinking about his own baby girl.

  “So you choose his life over ours?”

  “Of course not,” Léo responds. “We’re all in this together.”

  “If we’re not all on the same page, if we’re not all one hundred percent in agreement, we don’t do anything.”

  The other guys nod, wrestling with their consciences. There is not one among them who is more comfortable with the idea of killing a man. It was never supposed to happen, even as they wrote out their threats of execution.

  “This is the moment of truth,” Léo says, feeling the return of his resolve. “How far are we willing to go? Was it all bravado, or did we mean what we wrote in our manifesto?”

  After a long silence, Paul says, “We swore we weren’t going to give in this time. Why should we be the ones to cave?”

  They all turn once again to stare at Laporte. Spiritually, he’s already dead. He knows they’re going to kill him, even though they don’t even know it yet. Or maybe they do.

  “The deadlines have all passed and they’ve responded with the War Measures Act. They’ve played their card. We’re out of options.”

  “We either let him go or we kill him. That’s it. We have to decide right now.”

  The tension in the room is untenable. A human life. A human life.

  “I think we know what we have to do.”

  Léo goes to the kitchen and opens a window. It faces an empty field. He breathes deeply. His hands are shaking. He desperately needs to speak to Lisette, but he knows what she’ll say.

  Throwing homemade bombs into empty buildings is more of a theoretical exercise. They were destroying property, not lives. That’s what they told themselves anyway. But to stand face-to-face with another human being and kill him in cold blood, this is something Lisette would never condone.

  Release him. Kill him. Release him. Kill him.

  Hours pass while they debate late into the night. The sun rises; someone makes coffee. They chain-smoke. The radio drones on in the background. Democracy is out the window. Léo hates that the government has put them in this spot.

  Laporte still isn’t moving. They keep checking his pulse to make sure he’s alive. “Let’s just put him out of his misery,” Bernard says. “He’s already gone. Look at him.”

  “I agree. If we let him go, we’re acknowledging their authority and accepting that this is how it’s always going to be. We can’t do that.”

  Francis gets up and leaves the room. When he returns, his eyes are red, swollen. Léo has no judgment about that. He loves him for it. He wants to cry himself.

  “We have to kill him,” Jacques says, his voice breaking.

  The others nod. The room is heavy. Léo’s chest hurts. I’m going to end a human life, and I’ll have to live with that forever.

  “Who’s going to do it?”

  Nothing feels real anymore. Léo is no longer in his body.

  “Remember, this is their fault,” one of the guys says. “They could have saved him.”

  Part III

  1995–1997

  25

  SEPTEMBER 1995

  “It happened very fast,” Léo says, his eyes welling. “We made the decision and we acted. After we did it, we were all numb, in shock.”

  James hasn’t moved or breathed in hours. Hasn’t touched his coffee or asked a single question.

&nbs
p; “All I remember thinking is how fragile life is.”

  James cringes. Sure, life is fragile when you choke the last breath out of someone. “Who did it?” he asks Léo. “I know he was choked with his chain. But who actually did it? None of you has ever said.”

  “We all did it.”

  “That’s not possible,” James argues. “There’s been speculation that Paul wasn’t even there when Laporte was murdered, and also rumors that he confessed on tape to strangling him. Why keep the details to yourself after all these years? You’re a free man.”

  “It was all of us together,” Léo insists. “I don’t remember the details, who did what. We were all there. We all acted together.”

  James sighs. Why doesn’t he just come clean? Either take credit for himself or set Véronique free of the burden she carries of having a murderer for a father. If he didn’t actually do it, why not exonerate himself? Why won’t any of them tell the truth after all this time?

  “It wasn’t an accident,” Léo says. “I can tell you that. The media thought maybe it was, or that’s the story they told to make us look incompetent. But we made the decision to kill him and we did. Sometimes I can’t believe we did it. I couldn’t believe it then, I still can’t. But it happened.”

  “What was it like? Watching another man die?”

  “You’re numb. I was . . . It’s impossible to describe. It’s surreal. You have to shut a part of yourself down. You act on instinct. We just kept moving after we did it. We had to keep moving, stay busy, so we wouldn’t think about what we’d done. We weren’t violent guys.”

  James has to suppress his anger. He tries not to react, bites his tongue.

  “Anyway, that’s it,” Léo continues. “We wrapped his body in a blanket. We carried him out. We were gentle with him. I don’t know why. Guilt, I guess. It wasn’t personal. We put the body in the trunk of the Chevrolet, and one of the guys drove to the airport and left the car there. We took off to the Townships. We had a friend in the country. We hid in the crawl space of his farmhouse until they found us.”

  “In a tunnel, I read?”

  Léo nods. “I’ve never talked about this to anyone before,” he says. “Not a word.

  “Why now?”

  “For my daughter. She asked me to.”

  “That’s it?”

  Léo shrugs. “Maybe part of me hopes to make people understand why we did it.”

  “Do you regret it? Or at least how it turned out?”

  “I don’t regret any of it,” he says. “I acted on my convictions. It was a tough decision, but it was sincere.”

  “Not a youthful transgression?”

  “What we did was for our people—the workers, the exploited, the long-suffering French slaves in Quebec. It was for a cause I still believe in today. You’re too young to really understand. You’ll never know what it was like for us back then.”

  “So you’d do it again?”

  “I would,” he responds, not missing a beat. “We may have been idealists, but we were not misguided.”

  “You don’t regret going to prison?” James presses. “Missing out on your daughter’s life?”

  “I didn’t enjoy prison,” he says sharply. “They strip you of all your dignity. They systematically destroy your spirit. You’ve never seen poor treatment until you’ve been inside a jail. They treated us like we were animals. Obviously I would have rather watched my daughter grow up, but I did what I had to do.”

  “Was it worth it?”

  “Ask me after the referendum.”

  “I’ve seen the footage of your arrest,” James says. “You looked into the camera and said you’d done it for Véronique.”

  “I did.”

  “You mean you killed Pierre Laporte for her?”

  “No, of course not that.”

  “What then?”

  “The political act. It was for her and her generation—for all of you—so you’d have a better future. Violence happened to be a part of it.”

  “Part of it? A man lost his life.”

  “It was necessary. The federal government forced our hand. Laporte was a casualty of war.”

  “But there was no war.”

  “There was indeed a war, M. Phénix. Your father knew it. It’s sad that you don’t.”

  “How do you think Véronique feels about what you did?”

  “You’ll have to ask her.”

  “Looking back with the perspective of twenty-five years, do you think you advanced the cause enough to warrant the murder of an innocent man?”

  “I think so,” he says. “The October Crisis paved the way for the Parti Québécois victory in ’76 and the ’80 referendum, and now this referendum. It had to start somewhere.”

  “A lot of separatists would disagree that the FLQ had anything to do with the PQ’s success.”

  “Sure they would, because it’s easy to distance yourself from the dirty work, even though you benefitted from it. The ones who denounced us, you don’t think they were secretly overjoyed about what we accomplished for them? Someone had to break ground. Violence was required.”

  “You don’t sound at all remorseful.”

  “Remorse is complicated. Why don’t you ask your former prime minister Pierre Trudeau if he’s remorseful? He is as much to blame for Laporte’s death as we are, if not more.”

  “You can’t be serious,” James says, shaking his head in frustration. He wants Léo to feel remorseful, to say he’s sorry for what he did. For personal reasons—not just for this story—he needs Léo to be a decent human being.

  “Trudeau could have saved Laporte’s life!” Léo shouts, his face turning dark red. “He just had to meet our very reasonable demands. Instead, he called in the troops and declared war. He sentenced that man to death. You don’t think he bears any responsibility?”

  “He was just trying to protect the people,” James says. “The FLQ was a threat to society.”

  “Trudeau was protecting his pride. Nothing else.”

  James takes a breath. Gives Léo a minute to calm down.

  “So, what’s next for Léo Fortin?”

  “Everything depends on this referendum result.”

  “Your old friend from the RIN recently said it would be a very dangerous situation if the Anglos and “the ethnics” hold back the will of the Francophone majority. Was he threatening more violence?”

  “I don’t know what he meant by that.”

  “Your daughter is a passionate supporter of Quebec independence,” James says. “Would you advocate violence for her if the outcome doesn’t go your way?”

  “Not if it means she winds up in jail. Jail is the worst place on earth.”

  “Worse than a coffin?”

  “I think so.”

  “You still haven’t said how you killed him.”

  Léo is quiet.

  “Was it like they said?” James presses. “You choked him with the cross around his neck?”

  Still nothing.

  “Was it you, Léo? Or was it one of the others?”

  “We acted as one.”

  He sees now where Véronique gets her stubbornness. The Fortins are nothing if not dogged.

  26

  OCTOBER 27, 1995

  Nancy steps off the bus onto Union Street, pink-cheeked and smiling. She’s got her backpack slung over her shoulder. Elodie waves, her heart filling at the sight of her girl. Nancy spots her and rushes over. She drops her backpack on the ground and hugs her mother.

  “Let me look at you,” Elodie says, pulling away slightly but still holding onto her.

  She’s tall and lanky, wearing high-waisted jeans and Doc Martens, just like Véronique wears. Her hair, once blond, has darkened to a warm nut brown. She has traces of all of them in her features—Gabriel, Maggie, Elodie, and, she sees now, Dennis. The Irish coloring, a splatter of freckles on pale skin, bright blue eyes, red lowlights in her hair. “You’re so beautiful,” Elodie murmurs, tugging Nancy back into her arms. “I’ve mi
ssed you.”

  “Me, too,” she says.

  “I’m glad you came.”

  “How could I not? My flight was only ninety-nine dollars.”

  A couple of Canadian airlines offered huge discounts to fly Canadians to Montreal for today’s Unity Rally. The flood of support from Canadians outside the province is supposed to show how much they care about Quebec and hopefully persuade Quebeckers to vote No in Monday’s referendum. It’s yet to be determined if this last-minute “love-in” will sway the province’s undecided voters.

  The polls are showing it’s neck and neck, with Yes slightly ahead. It could go either way. Unlike 1980, when the No side was the clear front-runner, this referendum is going to be dangerously close. Even three days away, no one knows what’s going to happen. The overriding sentiment everywhere in the country seems to be one of grave tension, a looming dread that Canada may be days away from separation. Even Elodie has found herself swept up in referendum fever—watching coverage on the news, discussing it with her friends. Everyone has an opinion. Elodie is going to vote No. In the end, it was Nancy who swayed her. It means a lot to her, keeping the country together. She’s worried about the economy if Quebec separates; worried about her future, Elodie’s future. Nancy said to her one night over the phone, “You’re voting No, right, M’ma?”

  “I’m not sure,” Elodie responded, afraid to admit she wasn’t planning to vote.

  “What do you mean you’re not sure? If Quebec separates, I’ll never be able to come home.”

  “Why not?”

  “I won’t be able to build a life in the midst of all that political and economic chaos,” Nancy said. “I certainly won’t start a family there, not with everything so uncertain. Canada is going to cut Quebec off and let them fend for themselves, that’s what the federal government is saying. Quebec can’t survive without federal support. Why would I ever come back to that?”

  Come back? Build her life here?

  Elodie was stunned. She had resigned herself to Nancy staying out east, making a life for herself in New Brunswick. Nancy seems to have a different plan.