Catherine Leroux - The Party Wall

Back home she finds the Monte Carlo parked in front. In the first rays of dawn, Yun is busy smoothing out her long hair, windblown and tangled from the drive.

“Well, it looks as though we’ve both spent a sleepless night,” she says on seeing Madeleine approaching.

“Did you have a good trip?”

“Yes! I ate clams and swam with the seals. But I didn’t come across a single Korean.”

“That’s odd.”

“How is Édouard?”

“Okay. He told me everything after you’d left.”

“Good. I warned him I wouldn’t come back until he’d talked to you.”

“How did you know that he had?”

“I didn’t know. But I figured the threat would have an effect.”

Madeleine smiles and invites Yun to come along to the kitchen. Her head is strangely clear after a night on the shore and she sets about making pancakes. While she watches the batter turn into golden parchment, Édouard comes downstairs bleary-eyed. When he catches sight of Yun he simply spreads his arms in a gesture of relief and surrender. She rushes toward him. Madeleine flips the pancake, which lands in the skillet with a slap. Shabby leaps onto the counter to get a better look at the lovers and her mistress lets him. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Yun’s finger slide over the creases in her son’s brow.

“Hey! This one is brand new.”

The day before their appointment at the hospital, Madeleine arrives at dusk to find the house suffused with a peculiar halo. On coming closer she realizes there is steam dancing behind the window. Taken aback, she goes in to discover her son drowsing in the hammock that Yun set up in the living room a few days earlier so he might have “the feeling he was travelling while staying indoors.” Tongues of yellow mist emanating from the kitchen and bearing a briny aroma brush against his motionless body. Through the mist she hears bursts of laughter.

“Watch out! There’s one missing!” Yun’s voice yells.

“Easy now, little guy. Easy now,” Joanna’s voice says reassuringly.

Madeleine treads cautiously and bumps into something hard. At her feet she discerns an armoured body moving unhurriedly and she lets out a scream.

“Madeleine, is that you?” Yun’s voice asks.

“I’ll open the windows. Make things easier,” Joanna says.

Once the steam has lifted the scene is astonishing. A small inflatable wading pool placed in the centre of the kitchen is full of lobsters, seaweed, and, apparently, salt water. The creatures are piled on top of each other and move sluggishly as potfuls of boiling water continue to fog up the room. Yun bustles around the lobster while Joanna smiles serenely, as though watching over a well-behaved child at bath time.

“Aha! There’s the runaway!” Yun shouts as she grabs the crustacean that was lurking near Madeleine’s feet. “Sorry for the mess. We wanted to surprise you. A seafood banquet to boost your morale!”

“The scallops and mussels are almost ready, but there are no lobsters.”

“Well, I wanted to give the poor things a last bath and now we’ve grown fond of them,” Yun explains.

Studying the creatures, Madeleine is entranced by their sleepwalking slowness and their prehistoric appearance. Then she turns her eyes up toward the two red-faced, dishevelled women.

“It’s true: lobsters are much more likeable than mussels.”

They gently wake Édouard and tuck into a meal that to Madeleine’s amazement actually succeeds in warming her heart. “There’s something in seafood that makes one feel hopeful,” she muses. The next day she and Édouard will be learning the results of the compatibility tests. Each hour is an endless crossing that this almost family dinner has managed to shorten somewhat.

Once the night has spread over the peninsula, Édouard goes upstairs to bed and Yun and Joanna clean up, singing softly as they work. Madeleine lingers quietly in front of her son’s bedroom to listen to him breathing, as she did when he was small and his breath kept the house in a state of weightlessness. Toward midnight the three women make their way down to the seashore to release six completely bewildered lobsters.

Sitting side by side, Madeleine and Édouard wait in the over-lit but nonetheless grey hall of the Chaleur Hospital in Bathurst. This artificial lighting, Madeleine is thinking, obliterates any notion of seasons, of night and day, maybe to dilute the sensation of the passage of time. The endless waiting.

Some old women go by with the patience of those who can’t ask much anymore of either their bodies or science. They slide with their walkers, hobble with their canes, or let themselves be pushed in a wheelchair. Others stoically shuffle along unaided. They’re on the edge of the precipice.

As a rule, mother and son leave an empty seat between them, whether at the movies or the funeral parlour. This time, though, there’s no gap, as if they wanted to improve the odds of compatibility by sitting closer together. When they are finally called, Madeleine immediately senses the news is bad. She guesses it from the sound of the nurse’s voice; she perceives it in the stagnant air of the unadorned office they are ushered into. Without knowing what she is about to be told, from the moment the doctor sits down in front of them she understands that the verdict is far worse than the worst-case scenario she was prepared for. Édouard is oblivious; he did not hear the cannon’s detonation a few seconds ago and he does not see the shell approaching. Madeleine nervously wrings her hands and her fingers feel like stranded squid.

She is not shocked when the doctor announces the test results, but Édouard’s shoulders collapse. The doctor tries to reassure them: since he is young and does not smoke his case ranks as top priority for an organ donation. From the doctor’s tone of voice, Madeleine can easily see he still has not told them everything, and a little voice inside her silently implores him to hurry up.

“Édouard, I’d like to speak with your mother in private, if you don’t mind. You can wait outside and fill out the forms in the meantime.”

Édouard does as he’s asked. The doctor turns to Madeleine and his expression grows solemn.

“Madame Sicotte, the tests show something else I’d like to discuss with you. Frankly, I’ve never had to broach this sort of matter with a patient before.”

Madeleine says nothing, does not tremble, stays dry-eyed. She waits for the blade to drop.

“The test failed to establish a genetic kinship between you and your son.”

“Excuse me?”

“Based on your DNA, you are not Édouard’s mother.”

He continues. She hears him from a distance: “You see, my professional duty… social services… an investigation…” But a rumble within her muffles the words; it is overpowering, a cyclone, a landslide. She manages to stand up and go out without falling.

The road back runs alongside the sea and its unseen clamour; inside the car, Madeleine says nothing. Édouard doesn’t ask her what the doctor had to say to her. He fidgets with his braid, probably imagining he’s just been dealt a devastating diagnosis — devastating for her too — and that both of them will have to fritter away their days around the damned hospital until life has trickled out of them like water from a leaking cistern. But Madeleine’s thoughts have taken her elsewhere. She finds herself twenty-seven years earlier, in a house on a cliff where a midwife has pulled out of her a small, viscous body. He was nestled in her arms even before he opened his eyes. She thinks of the placenta, the flood of fluids, the blood, the shit and the flesh, all that flesh, her flesh, battered and stretched, and the flesh that had come through her belly, the flesh she was holding in her hands, pressed against her breast so that it could live and grow. There ought to be nothing but the flesh, she tells herself. But no.