Сандрин Коллетт - Just After the Wave

“On we go,” she murmurs, to give herself courage.

She reaches for the oars. She hasn’t done a lot of rowing in her life, she left it to Pata, and to the children because they thought it was fun. For a quarter of an hour she struggles with the oars, they swoop up too high or plunge too deep in the water, or get muddled in her hands—this thing that looked so easy when the father and Liam went at it all out. What an idiot! she scolds herself, tears welling when she realizes she is going sideways, wasting time, zigzagging despite her efforts, making no headway. Bit by bit the boat gets back on course; she finds it too heavy, and hesitates to dump the outboard into the sea to be rid of its weight, but gives up at the sight of the bolts which keep it in place. Their neighbor must be happy, she thinks with a sigh. She has put on some gloves because of the blisters she knows she will get, but half an hour later, neither the leather around her hands nor the hope that grips her have allowed for the fact that her shoulders, arms, and back are pleading for mercy, already, her face is covered in sweat, her body shakes every time she pulls the oars toward her; Madie’s mouth is wide open and suddenly there is doubt, huge doubt all through her.

Slow down.

She shakes her head at the thought, like a stubborn animal.

She hasn’t brought enough to eat and drink, if she has to spend two days on the water to reach the island. And yet she has no choice, she resolves to paddle slowly, letting herself ride on the currents which, fortunately, are going her way, moving the boat a little, slightly. From one hour to the next her gestures become more automatic, and she begins to make headway, stiff, breathless. Has she been overambitious? She did not think it would be like this. To her mind, a mother driven by determination to find her children knows neither fatigue nor resignation; the truth is completely different. The truth is that Madie hasn’t been eating or sleeping or moving for days. Her body is imploding. Her arms are swelling, her veins are bulging, her blood is pounding against her flesh. And now her heart has begun racing, erratic, refusing to beat steadily, obliging her to stop rowing for several minutes—yes, this is all very different from the irrepressible élan with which she leapt in the boat shortly before dawn, very different from the magical currents that would carry her straight to Levet, or so she thought.

In fact, she reckons she is doing four miles an hour, and according to the map she still has between fifteen and twenty hours ahead of her.

So she’ll have to stop for the night.

This reinvigorates Madie, because the thought of spending a night alone on the boat, of feeling the darkness enclose her, deadening her vigilance, her sight, her gestures, makes her so frightened that she has a sudden burst of energy from who knows where. She won’t make it to the island but she prays she will find a small hill where she can land and tie up the boat, even if she has to go off course, just not to fall asleep in the middle of the ocean with black shapes swimming underneath her that she cannot see, and waves forming inexplicably, murmuring threats, dull sounds from the depths of the water hatching into growls as they break through to the surface and up the sides of the boat into her ears.

But the thing is, no matter how she struggles and pants and sees strange sparks before her eyes when she closes them, the night has forced her to a halt, and she hasn’t found a single island to land on. So she throws the anchor out into the middle of the ocean, terrified by the shaking of the chain which seems to go endlessly down, fathom upon fathom, she tries not to imagine what is down there, waiting for her, sniffing around her. Intermittently drowsy, she wakes with a start whenever the boat moves; her heart, her arms are full of palpitations, slicing her irregular sleep with an exhausting shuddering. Once dawn turns the sky to gray she dreams of a few hours’ sleep; the fear of sleeping too long sends her back to her oars, without rest, she feels the fatigue draining her face to the bone, her eyes sinking into the black circles beneath them which she rubs now and again when her vision blurs.

All day long Madie stifles in the never-ending summer heat. The compass on one knee and the GPS on the other, the map open on the floor of the boat, on she rows, sometimes just barely skimming the surface because her body, resistant to deeper water, refuses to fight. With each forward thrust she gives out a moan, bone-tired, in pain, jaws clenched not to give in, with the effort to plow through the sea and hold back her guts which want nothing more than to spill out of her, burning, about to burst, she thinks, she is making so little headway that she cannot understand it when she measures her pace across the water—so she stops looking, her eyelids red from the sun and the silver reflections on the water; her hat is no longer enough to protect her.

At 18:07—Madie will remember this because she checks her watch, an old habit—she crosses the border into the Canton of Levet. It’s not because she recognizes the place, everything is still as empty and flooded as one hour or five hours earlier; but the GPS beeps. She had keyed in their address in the field marked “destination,” astonished, moved that the little box still knew where their house was. And when the electronic voice calls out, You have reached your destination. Your destination is on the right , Madie feels a lump in her throat, she sets down her oars, is overcome by a sudden trembling: she is here, she has made it.

And the trembling grows stronger, but not because she has won. Around her there is nothing left.

On the map, on the GPS screen, this is the place.

In the mother’s eyes: a void.

This time she knows there is no mistake. She has circled all around, in ovals, in a spiral, she has crisscrossed the calm ocean, she has gone back and forth in tight rows across the water, like a dog looking for game, always returning to the central point where the house should be.

The boat knocked against something, she leaned over to look at it. A stone. A brick and a piece of metal. This is when she understood. She put her hand in the water and it is as if she could see it with her eyes, she is that familiar with the shape, she remembers it so well, three or four years ago, the little Yagi antenna.

So she is home.

She looks around her, to the left, to the right. Water, everywhere.

Home.

She has no more home.

She does not want to think about what this means, which is so much more painful: Louie, Perrine, and Noah are dead. For the moment, the words fail her. There is just this awful sensation of her legs refusing to support her, her trembling hands, her heart stopping, and to be honest she doesn’t need any words to fall to her knees in the boat, to pull her shirt tight over her chest with pain, to gasp for breath, just a little bit of air, she can’t breathe, everything is severed, everything is finished. Yes, because now Madie has seen that she was wrong, against all expectation; she was so sure of the opposite, the conviction was rooted in her flesh, vibrant, but it was worn away as she plowed through the sea, that’s it, contrary to every law of nature, Madie is floating above her house and sobbing.

Just when, hundreds of miles from there, Madie is crying that there has to be a mistake, yet another one, a huge one, Pata comes home from work and it is greeted by the little girls’ screams.

Daddy, Daddy!

And it’s not an exaggeration to say that his heart skips a beat or two when he hears them shrieking like this, because he has grown accustomed to misfortune, he knows that bad news often takes advantage of absence to surface. Only this time he is wondering: why, what else, what more, is it fated never to end, and he throws his jacket on the ground to run into the house, already crushed, eyes wide. He has time to see Liam, Emily, and Sidonie in the garden downstairs, calling to him, waving their arms, and he turns to them, searching for the baby, his little Marion, where is she if the others are there? Breathless, he arrives with a shout, What, what?