Сандрин Коллетт - Just After the Wave

“Liam, please, please…”

Her vision of Pata is tormenting her, the pair of them clinging to opposite sides of the boat, surely the two older boys are with him, or with Sidonie and Emily who must be trembling with fear, she is convinced that at some point they will realize their mother is no longer there—when they lean over the supplies to tell her something and see the empty space. Then they will cry out and rush to the side of the boat; they will find her, they will haul up Lotte and the baby, and then her, but they’ll have to be quick, she can feel her strength ebbing. She won’t be able to keep up for long with the boat’s maddened cavorting, with each onslaught her fingers edge away from their hold on Lotte’s hood, she tugs on Marion who keeps swallowing water and coughing, she can’t hear the others, can’t see them, perhaps she has already drowned with her two daughters and she can’t even tell. The storm, the wind, shouts, the children crying. It has all gone silent in her head. The black clouds above her, the blasts of rain, the boat bouncing on the ruthless water, her eyes widened with horror. Only the buzzing in her ears will not stop, cutting her off from the world, a rumbling roar like an airplane too near, but there is no plane, just something hurting her brow, too great an effort, the pain of it, more than once she has banged her head against the side of the boat, blood mingling with water and she hasn’t noticed.

Her arm is going to slip from the rope, she knows it is. She can’t take it, tries with her legs to bring Lotte closer, in vain. Paralyzed by the waves and exhaustion, she sees Marion’s face held close against her, the face of a baby who has stopped crying, her eyes red, wide open on the storm, Marion spitting out the water that gets into her mouth, saying nothing, her good little baby, her last little soul. The mother huddles on herself with helplessness. Swings her head back, the wind whipping her, her arm slipping, she surrenders, sobbing, oh pray the father makes it, he’ll have to look after the other little ones, all on his own, yes, she didn’t manage to stay with them.

Liam.

“Mommy!”

The mother screams, eyes wild. Liam, at last. Take Marion!

The eldest, and Matteo. From the boat they reach down, grab the baby and pull her from her mother’s coat, it feels as if she is being skinned, so tightly have they been bound together, a great chill enters her, suddenly she is shivering, she bites the inside of her cheeks, a few seconds, hang on a few more seconds, if they don’t have time to save her, she doesn’t care, but Lotte—there! Marion tips into the boat.

“Lotte now, Lotte!” cries the mother, tugging as hard as she can on her arm.

She straightens to bring the little girl closer, she’s having visions with the exhaustion, she’s so light, Lotte, in her waterlogged jacket, she smiles, Liam and Matteo have paused. The mother hesitates, implores.

“Liam?”

Not a vision.

The mother doesn’t look. She doesn’t need to. From the boys’ eyes she can see what has happened. And she stares at them as she murmurs, No, no, no.

And screams: No!

She holds out her arm. Take her.

“Mom,” says Liam gently—and for a moment the storm has fallen silent because she hears him, even though he is speaking so quietly, she wishes he would not speak in that tone, with that distress, that sorrow, no.

“Take her!”

So Liam bends over, and from his mother’s hands he gently lifts up the empty little jacket.

The boat moves slowly over the smooth sea. The wind has subsided, the rain has stopped. Of the hours of nightmare, there is nothing left, just a grayness in the sky and the water. Even the soft warm air has returned. A damp air. They are crushed with fatigue.

On the horizon there is an island. That is where Pata is headed.

In the stern, Madie is curled up in a ball. She has left the baby with Emily. She doesn’t want to speak, doesn’t want to move. To see anybody. She doesn’t answer when Matteo calls to her quietly. The mother is a teardrop.

She is holding Lotte’s soaked jacket tight to her chest.

Closes her fingers around the sleeves, as if to make sure. But Lotte isn’t there. Lotte slipped out. She sank. She drowned.

Doesn’t even know where.

Somewhere in the ocean, at some point during the storm. Madie was holding onto a piece of clothing that no longer protected a little girl. Madie did not feel how there was no one left inside.

She let go of Lotte.

She had already fallen in, murmured the father. In any case. Madie, head lowered, sobbing.

“It’s my fault.”

The father put his arm around her shoulders, shook her chin. No one could have.

“Shut up, go away.”

If a mother can no longer protect her little ones. All those times she railed at Pata for being careless, his stupid hopes, his improbable expectations; and she was the one who lost Lotte. It is her mistake. Her tragedy. Why her? Like the little ones left behind on the hill: there is no reason. It’s just chance that. Oh, the sadness.

She tries to recover Lotte’s smell on the jacket, that sweet little child’s perfume, laundered by the storm; finds only a smell of silt and damp which makes her cry in silence. Lotte is gone. She doesn’t even have a picture of her.

She doesn’t have mementos of any of them, that all stayed behind in the house, frames abandoned on shelves, albums stored in cupboards. There was no room on the boat, not for anything; Madie took her children, flesh and blood.

And lost them. One gone.

The first, thinks Madie, shivering. In her head it is as if she has been gripped by a strange frenzy, she is reconstituting Lotte’s face, the sound of her voice, her crystal-clear laughter. She wants to make her fast deep inside—she knows so well how it fades. When she lost her parents, she thought their ageing forms were branded forever in her memory. Over the years she has realized she was mistaken. And now this terrifies her: she will forget Lotte. Not her life, not the suffering of her death—but her face and her hazel eyes, her laugh, her little chatter when she was telling stories. All of it will blur, features, sounds. Maybe a day or even two will go by when she won’t think of her. A long time from now. If they don’t all die during the voyage.

What did she think, Lotte, when the current bore her away? Was she afraid? The mother hopes it went quickly, that she didn’t even realize. Please.

She doesn’t want Pata to try and console her, there is no possible forgiveness. Don’t you dare tell me there are eight left. She doesn’t care if they need her: it is Lotte she wants. Give her back to me. A dream? But the little girl doesn’t come back. The world has come apart.

Now there are ten of them on earth.

And the mother lying inconsolable on the bottom of the boat.

She would like to fall asleep and never wake. Or curl up in a hole, a lair, a burrow, and be left alone for good, she deserves no better, hide way at the back, far from a worthless life, as if sleeping, to escape from life, to forget. So the pain will go away, the knives lacerating her womb. Count sheep, she used to tell the little ones, but whatever for, she doesn’t care about sheep.

Sleep eludes her, her sorrow is too great. She speaks in silence, her eyes awash with tears, My little girl…

When the boat makes landfall an hour later she does not get out. There’s nothing for it, neither the father nor the five children—she thinks, the five children left. Almost half. Four out of the nine are missing, on the evening of August 21. A carnage.

And an empty place next to her on their small craft as it rocks gently, moored to a pole planted there by those who were there before them, a place for nothing, for no one. After the storm, she almost asked the father to go back to their hill. In two days they can’t have gone that far.