Сандрин Коллетт - Just After the Wave

“Come in, son.”

So Liam sits on the bed across from his father and he takes his mother’s other hand. He tidies a lock of hair that has fallen across her face, and he in turn begins chatting, looking at Madie, then Pata, tells them about his day at high school, what he understands, what he doesn’t understand, Your mother could help you , says his father, he shrugs. He goes along as he sees fit, about the food at the cafeteria, the friends he’s beginning to make, how hot it is for early September, they’d feel better outdoors. Pata doesn’t interrupt his son, lulled by the rhythm of his voice, it brings some life into the bedroom, he hopes that Madie is looking at them, that she wants to come back to them. But there is nothing. Later, when he stretches out next to her, he doesn’t dare touch her, not even for a caress, not even to say goodnight, he remembers the first night on land, her skin as cold as a corpse’s, white and stiff, he thinks, Madie is changing. She will end up like a ghost, or a pebble, he is sure of it. It’s only a question of days, or months. He waits for her to fall asleep, stretches one finger toward her to touch her, and it has no effect on him, neither on her nor on him, she goes on sleeping, he doesn’t shudder, doesn’t feel like running his hand any further along her body, and yet God knows they used to have a good time together, the two of them, before, it was joyful, between two babies, that is surely why they had so many. And now, nothing. Madie has become a stranger, he doesn’t recognize her. It hurts to feel so far away from her and not to know where to put his goddamn hands at night, they used to rest on her hips or around her belly, it hurts, too, the way she keeps him at a distance through her absence and her furtive glances, he feels sorry for wanting to live, maybe he didn’t love his kids enough, no, he did, it’s just that it won’t bring them back, lying in bed all day long, and besides there are the other four, the last four, they have to watch over them twice as carefully as before to thank them for still being there.

So Pata rolls onto his back and opens his eyes on the night, and thinks of the only pathetic words Madie has been mumbling since they got there, and which lend her gaze an incredible force.

“Have to go and look all the same. Maybe they went to the wrong place.”

He knows that in the middle of the night, as she has every night since they got there, she will shake him to say this; and like every time, it will take him hours to calm her down, to explain that the rescuers could not have missed the island, what with maps and the GPS on the boat, it’s their job, they’re used to it. And anyway Pata already went back to them to make sure that they couldn’t have left anything to chance, or missed anything, but the men in uniform shook their heads, so sorry, they crisscrossed the entire former canton to look for people, there was nothing there, they swear, just a few chimney tops still poking through the surface of the water. So you see, Pata did go back to them, because Madie had woken him up with this mad idea of hers which had kept him breathless all the rest of that first night, to the point that by dawn he was almost sure of it himself, full of hope, filled with illusions, and it all came to nothing when the first responders described the sea to him, the bits of houses and belongings floating on the water, an island, yes, there was one, tiny, that would be a summit for a few more hours, with an apple tree at the top—that apple tree, thought Pata, the one that never bore any fruit, above the house. You see, Madie, they did go that far. They searched everywhere. But the mother won’t listen, she moans, hides her head beneath the pillow— You said you would go— and while she gradually drifts off once the father has forced her to take some pills, again she murmurs the unbearable litany:

“Maybe they got it wrong.”

Before, Pata would have held her in his arms to console her. Would have tried to make her listen to reason, drying her tears, kissing her hair and her cheeks. Now he looks at this woman who isn’t really his wife anymore and he thinks, This madwoman. He keeps it to himself, utterly silent so the children won’t hear; but there is this disconcerting feeling of loving Madie through thick and thin, the mother of his children, twenty years of happiness even during the difficult times, and now this shame that runs through him when he gazes at this distraught creature, this strange scarecrow, he doesn’t want the neighbors to see her, to talk about her behind his back and feel sorry for him, he doesn’t want anyone to make fun of her.

In the morning, when she sits lifeless at the window watching the sea as if the dead little children might emerge from it, there is only one thing he feels like doing, and that is shaking her, screaming in her ear, even throwing her out if that’s what it takes, so that she’ll get a grip on herself, gather her wits. A moment later he dreams of holding her to him and murmuring words of comfort, how much stronger they would be together, Remember, Madie, how good things were, before , but he does neither. He waits soundlessly for her to sense his presence and turn to him, tirelessly he smiles at her and murmurs:

“How do you feel today?”

There’s no fear of her venting her distress, pouring out the torrents of suffering and ill-being her body displays: she never replies. This is why he asks again, because he knows she will remain silent—he could not stand any more of her pain. And she looks back at him with that gray and black look of hers, berates him in silence and destroys his hopes, does he really think that one morning she will get up and it will be all gone, absence emptiness sorrow, she will toss back the sheets and begin to hum, just like that, as if nothing had happened, as if she’d been healed during that night for no reason, not before, or after: don’t even think of it. Madie will not free herself of her sorrow, it is her sorrow that keeps her going. Without her sorrow, she would have already become a puff of air, a shadow, a mote of dust of a mother. She would no longer be here.

And this is what Pata tells himself on the eighth day following their return to land, when he goes into the living room at dawn and Madie is not standing by the window. Initially he pauses, surprised—not because this would be abnormal, but because the thought that occurs to him then is that she was still lying next to him in bed and he simply didn’t notice. Perhaps he is the one who is making her so transparent? What if it is his own gaze that no longer knows how to see her? He steps back, silently, his hands running along the walls to find his way through the declining darkness and through the door to the bedroom. Goes in. Cannot see, refrains from switching on the light. A shape under the sheet; he stretches out his arm cautiously, gropes, feels; but it’s just the pillow rolled up underneath. He pulls on the blanket: there is no one in the bed.

Something catching in his throat, suddenly. He runs back to the living room.

Madie?

He whispered, his voice hoarse, not to wake the children.

Idiotic, this panic that has suddenly come over him, his thoughts running riot, wondering where she could have…

No, not her.

Pata runs out like a madman, around the house toward the tall trees. She wouldn’t do that, no. Why did he leave a rope in the shed, why didn’t he think of everything. He runs, one hand gripping his sweater. Of course he thought of it. It was two or three days ago, because Madie was staring at the tall, broad-leaved trees with her sad expression. So why didn’t he hide that damned rope?

The line of beech trees with their wrinkled bark, turned toward the sky, like lanky, long-haired human shapes. Pata looks. His legs feel like jelly, his arms, his heart. He leans against a tree to catch his breath, coughing and spitting, tears in his eyes.