Pan Bouyoucas - Portrait of a Husband with the Ashes of His Wife

“Why, for Alma,” Zak replied. “And for you and Mélissa. They love you.”

“I hope they don’t start hugging and kissing me,” Doctor Maras said to his daughter.

“You’re the one who insisted on coming, so be quiet,” she responded.

A table had been set with salads, fruit, and pastries because, like his biblical namesake, Frère Isaïe dreamed of the lion eating straw with the ox and insisted that all the members of his Alliance be vegetarians like him. But before they tackled the buffet, Zak invited everyone to come to his studio to look at sketches of the monument he suggested putting up in memory of his sister.

“I’ve never worked so fast or got such good results in such a short time,” he told them. “It’s as if Alma were guiding my eye and my hand.”

Everyone was impressed. Even Mélissa who, seeing her uncle in a new light, told him:

“I envy artists like you and my mother. Your path is already laid out by your talent.”

“You too, young lady, you will do great things,” Frère Isaïe said, clasping her shoulders. “I see your aura. An aura as dazzling as the ones with which we adorn the saints on icons.”

Liza was listening with a beatific expression as if golden eggs were emerging from the mouth of her spiritual father.

“Frère Isaïe has the gift,” she murmured to Doctor Maras. “I’d always suspected that I came from another world. Frère Isaïe has confirmed it.”

Meanwhile, Frère Isaïe was saying to Mélissa:

“There are two kinds of individual: those who think that they could walk on water if they put their minds to it and those who have to be constantly reminded that they have two feet. That’s all you need to understand, my child, and the talent the Creator has given you, that gift which is hidden in you, will blossom just as mine has done, late in the day as well, after I had a vision.”

Mélissa, who adored that kind of story, forgot her sorrow for a moment and asked the man to tell her what had happened to him. And while he was describing the vision that had transformed his life and the others were attacking the buffet, Doctor Maras made his way to the garden.

Had it not been for Mont Saint-Hilaire facing him, he’d have sworn that he had taken the wrong exit.

While everywhere else the trees were in blossom, Alma’s once luxuriant garden was now a desert. Literally. The three neighbouring gardens too. It was not only the fences separating them that had been torn out but also the trees and shrubs, to make the four lots into one flat, open field that had been covered with sand. As well, in the very centre had been planted palm trees made of some synthetic material, as if to create an oasis.

In vain Doctor Maras tried to picture Alma as a young actress, a young wife and mother; the only image of her that he could see was the last one he had held onto — Alma at her moment of bliss murmuring: Yes, yes, before she expired.

As a result, the anguish that had gripped him as he approached Saint-Hilaire fell away and when his daughter joined him, he smiled at her again. He also smiled at the guests who were emerging from the house behind his daughter. He smiled at Zak and Liza who had erased every sign of Alma from their property. He even smiled at Frère Isaïe who, addressing Melissa and her father, said:

“My brother, my daughter, I have the pleasure of telling you that the monument in memory of our beloved sister, Alma, whom the Eternal, our Creator, has received in His glory, will be ready to be inaugurated on the evening of the feast of la Saint-Jean, known as well as the time of enchantments.”

“Hallelujah!” replied his flock in unison.

“Now, my children, form a circle. And hand in hand, let us pray to our beloved sister Alma and ask her where she would like the monument to her memory to be erected.”

He gave one hand to Mélissa and offered the other to her father.

Rather than take it, Doctor Maras said to him:

“Thank you for your welcome and your love, but this is not the place where we will leave her ashes.”

A murmur of disappointment rose from beneath the fake palm trees.

“You sure gotta bitching black karma, ain’tcha!” Liza exclaimed, losing briefly her beatific expression and her affected accent.

Frère Isaïe, unaccustomed to being contradicted, glared at the rebel as if to intimidate him into retracting.

Doctor Maras turned his back on him and said to Zak, who was regarding him with clenched jaw:

“I thank you for your invitation and your drawings. But this oasis, welcoming though it is, is no longer my wife’s garden.”

A FEW MINUTESlater, en route to Montreal, he said to his daughter:

“Carmen was right to be wary of Zak. Just like Pauline with her theatre, he only wanted the ashes to raise the profile of his sect, and he asked Raymond Cholette to call me and say that Alma had confided to him that she’d spent the most beautiful moments of her life in Saint-Hilaire.”

“That’ll teach you to listen to others instead of to your own heart,” Mélissa replied.

Her father did not defend himself or explain that to hear his heart he would first have to silence the doubts in his head. Instead he erased the visit from his mind. Except for the remark that his daughter had made to Zak: “I envy artists like you and my mother. Your path is already laid out by your talent.”

Why had she said that, when she’d just completed her first year of medical school? Surely it wasn’t sycophancy: that was not her way. He would talk about it with her later, at the house. When they had buried the ashes in the garden he would have plenty of time to broach the subject.

Unfortunately, a large envelope from Priority Post that appeared in the mailbox stopped him.

The envelope contained two sheets of paper.

The first was a hand-written note that read:

Here is the proof I mentioned. See you soon.

The second was a photocopy of an interview Alma had given to the Journal de Charlevoix . In it she spoke mainly about the comedy in which she’d acted at the summer theatre in La Malbaie two decades earlier.

It was the most wonderful summer of my life. Utter happiness. It was before the casino opened and we were the only attraction in town. Everyone came to see us and every night the other actors and I were invited all over and we ate and drank and danced until three a.m. I lived in my father’s house and that summer, I realized why I hadn’t stayed in France, where I’d been offered roles in both theatre and film.

The interview was dated barely a year earlier.

When Doctor Maras showed his daughter the two sheets of paper, she said:

“Here we go again!”

With a lump in his throat, her father replied:

“Don’t you think I’d have liked to know that she was happiest with me? ‘It was the most wonderful summer of my life.’ The most wonderful summer of her life! When she’d always told me that her most wonderful summer had been the one we’d spent in Greece, when you were five.”

Mélissa had never seen her father so disconsolate.

“She told me too that she’d spent the most beautiful summer of her life in Greece, papa,” she said. “So let’s bury the ashes here and that will be that.”

That was also his wish, poor soul, but being the kind of man he was, he replied:

“I have to be clear about it in my own mind. Your mother wanted her ashes to be buried in the place where she was the happiest, and I intend to respect her wishes.”

Two minutes later he called his sister-in-law to tell her they were coming. But when he hung up, Mélissa told him she wouldn’t go to La Malbaie with him and that this time, nothing would make her change her mind.