Roxanne Bouchard - The Coral Bride

‘What kind of boat?’

‘A lobster trawler.’

Moralès exhaled slowly, leaned against the door frame, closed his eyes. Standing in the fridge doorway, Sébastien froze.

‘Dad? Are you all right?’

Marlène Forest’s voice snapped back to her usual scathing tone. ‘The women of the sea leave no one indifferent, Moralès. Not you, and not any Gaspesian worth his salt. If your heart’s where it should be, you’ll drop those pots and pans and hightail it to Gaspé!’

His boss was right, but Moralès couldn’t bring himself to actually say yes to her. She’d figured out just how fragile Catherine had made him, and was now playing a heartless mind game with him.

Sébastien closed the fridge door and walked over to his father with a frown. ‘You sure you’re all right?’

Joaquin looked at the son he loved, who was right before his eyes, music, pots and pans, flaws and all. He drew himself tall.

‘I’m not a missing-persons detective, Lieutenant Forest. Call me back when it becomes a homicide.’

He hung up, gave Sébastien a forger’s wink and set about towelling the remaining seawater from his skin.

Joaquin Moralès jogged to the cemetery, slowed to a walk and turned left. His anger had mellowed to indecision. He approached the old house without a sound, and sneaked past the pickup truck in the driveway to the stepladder, which was conveniently placed beside the woodpile, beneath an unlocked window. Creeping up the ladder to the window ledge, he peeped into the room. The first thing he saw was a bag of marijuana on a bedside table. The second, the hands of a man rolling himself a joint.

Cyrille Bernard was sitting up in bed. He cast an eye towards the window. ‘Heee… This pot is therapeutic, officer.’

Moralès opened the window and ducked into the old man’s bedroom. ‘You’re still alive, then?’

‘Not dead yet, at any rate.’ Cyrille licked and stuck his rolling paper while Moralès pulled the window shut.

Cyrille lived with his sister, and now the cancer was so advanced, she staunchly refused to allow him any visitors. Since the summer, the old fisherman’s friends had therefore taken to clambering up the woodpile beneath the window to pay him a visit. But just last week, Moralès had sent nearly half the pile tumbling to the ground. Unfortunately for him, the wood had been covered with a sheet of metal to stop the rain seeping in, and it had made a hell of a racket. As he fell arse over elbow into the tumbling logs, the Bernard sister, a hefty French-Canadian battleaxe, had stormed out of the house brandishing a rolling pin.

Moralès was unlikely to forget the sight that had assailed his eyes when he blinked them open, lying there in the remnants of the woodpile. Backlit by the afternoon sun, a foreboding shadow with an oddly shaped head, and wielding a blunt instrument, stood menacingly over him. Before he could even get to his feet, she had hissed like a snake, ‘Now you pick all that up, and make it snappy!’

Caught off guard, he had fallen over himself to apologise and set about restacking the wood in record time as the shadow watched over his shoulder, or so he had thought. Unbeknownst to him, Cyrille’s sister had in fact gone to fetch a little stepladder from inside the house. ‘Put that under the window, will you? I can’t stand hearing you lot huff and puff your way up that woodpile.’ Moralès had turned to thank her, but she had already turned her back and walked away. He had just caught a glimpse as she disappeared around the corner of the porch in her dressing gown, her hair in curlers. Since then, he’d been tiptoeing in as light as can be, but couldn’t quite shake the feeling she was watching him.

The old fisherman lit the joint and closed his eyes as he inhaled.

Joaquin sat down beside the bed. ‘These days, the sea is losing its sparkle. The sun’s rising ever later, as if it’s weary of climbing over the mountaintops. It’s not in any hurry to get to work. And it’s turning in for the night earlier and earlier. Must be tired of lighting up the sky for so long.’

Cyrille Bernard was no more than a shadow beneath the bed covers now. His breathing was more laboured and whistling than ever. He sounded like a man drowning, fighting for air.

‘The wind’s not letting up much. Especially not in the daytime. It’s been howling across the bay. At high tide, the crests of the waves are peaking tall and white, sharp as Jack Frost’s teeth. There’s no cold snap in sight yet, but it’s a sign that winter’s on its way.’

‘Heee … you’re getting better at that, for someone from the big city! Maybe there’s more Mexico left in you than you think.’

Moralès shrugged his shoulders, embarrassed by the compliment.

‘Soon it’ll be a full moon.’

‘Heee … you know what people say here? They say the moon is a liar, and you know what it reflects in the sea? Heee … fool’s silver.’

Cyrille was in palliative care now. He had long since finished fishing, but his boat was still in the water. There would be no wintering it this year. Cyrille had a plan to die at sea, at one with the waves, before the season’s icy veil smothered them both. He had told Joaquin. He had warned him that the autumn tides would soon be rising.

Moralès knew it was only a matter of time. For nearly a week now Cyrille had been bedridden, so he’d promised to come by and tell him all about the sea. The gulls diving into the frigid depths, splashing up spouts like shards of ice that pierce the lazy rays of the sun. The swell snorting its way through the morning frost on the sand. The wakes of boats sailing home becoming fewer and further between. The tiny nameless beaches deserted by even the most lingering of holidaymakers. The gloom descending gradually as the day gives minutes away to the night. The silence blanketing the shore.

‘My eldest showed up here this morning. Drunk, with his car full of pots and pans.’

Cyrille arched an eyebrow through the smoke. ‘Heee … sounds to me like his girlfriend’s washed up on the rocks.’

Moralès nodded. ‘Last year at Christmas, she told the whole family she wanted a baby. My Sébastien went all red.’

‘Heee … red as in embarrassed?

‘No.’

Moralès had always thought his son should be more assertive. So many times he had seen Maude speak for Sébastien, open the wine, announce the big milestones in their life together and tease him, while he smiled mutely, like one of those men who let their other half dictate the feminist course of their lives. But that time he had reacted differently.

‘Red as in angry.’

It had struck Moralès that this was the first time he’d seen any signs of anger in his son in front of his partner.

Cyrille flicked the ash from his joint. ‘Heee … he doesn’t want kids, then?’

Outside, the blue of the sky was growing fainter already.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Heee … you didn’t ask him?’

Staring out at the cemetery, Moralès didn’t answer.

‘It’ll be too late to talk about it when you’re resting there in peace. Heee…’

‘What am I supposed to say?’

‘Heee … you’re the detective. You must be able to string one or two intelligent questions together. Surely you don’t need me to tell him how to go about loving a woman.’

Moralès stood and leaned on the corner of a dresser, thinking about how his son had unravelled Joannie Robichaud’s hair that morning on the beach.

‘So what’s he doing now, then?’

‘When I left, he was trying to make himself a coffee.’

Moralès shifted slightly and watched as Cyrille puffed away at what was left of his joint.