The Stone Boy (22 page)

“And what happened next?”

“I’m the one who got annoyed. She had given me such a fright… And I came all the way over for nothing!”

“So, on that occasion, she spoke to you about a mistreated child at the neighbors’?”

“I think so. I remember that she was making a connection between the telemarketing calls she kept receiving and the neighbor across the way who worked for a company that did… window installations.”

“She felt threatened?”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t take that threat seriously?”

Martin tapped his fingertips on his lips.

“You know as much as I do about her paranoia and her hallucinations. When she started talking about a child who looked like Bastien, I… I lost it.”

“You lost it.”

“Yes.”

Martin sat up in his chair.

“It has been more than ten years since Bastien died. Ten years that my mother has been asking after him. Every phone call, every letter ended with ‘and how is my little Bastien?’”

“The child, according to her, looked like your deceased son?” the lieutenant asked, perplexed.

“Yes,” answered Martin.

“When you were at her house, did she show you the child through her bedroom window?”

“No.”

The lieutenant leaned on his desk. He tried to read the name that appeared on a vibrating mobile phone. Finally, he let the phone ring out without answering and took up the Chupa Chups mug again.

“At the present moment, Doctor, other than your mother, no one has ever seen other children at the Desmoulins’ besides the two little ones who are in the hospital. And that’s all we’ve got. No third child in the record, no child of previous marriages, nothing.”

Martin stared at the red artwork on the mug.

“It’s a Dalí, that.”

“What?”

“On your mug. The Chupa Chups logo. It was designed by Salvador Dalí.”

The lieutenant turned the mug toward him.

“It was a present from my daughter for Father’s Day,” he said, with vague tenderness.

Suddenly, the officer froze. He opened one of his desk drawers and stuck his hand in, rummaging for a piece of paper he soon found.

“That’s not right, what I told you—we do have something on the little boy.”

He showed Martin a photocopy of a drawing in a clear plastic sleeve.

“It’s the work of the little Desmoulins girl. You can clearly see that she’s drawn something there, under what looks like a tree. She told us that she wanted to draw a doll, then a dog, and then she talked about an imaginary friend, her brother’s, and then she started crying because she didn’t remember anymore. Basically, we don’t really know if she’s telling the truth, or if she’s drawn something real. Frankly, we didn’t want to push it too much. That’s it. That’s all we’ve got.”

Martin crossed his arms, then scratched his forehead, embarrassed.

“In her last letter, she talked about a photo…”

“Your mother wrote you a letter?” gawped the lieutenant.

“Yes.”

“In which she broke the news that the child existed?”

“Yes.”

“Would it be possible for you to bring it in to me?” Martin opened his bag and took out the envelope. The lieutenant read it, readjusting his glasses.

“That confirms the statement made by Ms. Tremblay, our social worker. Your mother received a call from her on the twenty-sixth of October… and mentioned a camera…”

“Did you say Valérie Tremblay?” asked Martin timidly.

“Yes, you know her, is that right?”

The doctor had a fleeting vision of a body undressing in his surgery, and adorable little breasts offered up for examination.

“She was one of my patients. When I knew her, she ran the support service at a halfway house in Chelles. Does she work here?”

“Yes. She has been seconded to the station, and I have to say she’s been a huge help to us. Do you mind if I keep it?”

“Sorry?”

“The letter,” the lieutenant said. “Would you like a photocopy?”

Martin shook his head.

He was late for his appointments.

He couldn’t wait to forget about his Stilnox prescriptions turned weapons in a crime, to overlook his lack of good judgment more generally, and in particular, to erase the image of the social worker’s breasts, with nipples as round as Chupa Chups.

Martin’s shoes left prints on the wet floor, ephemeral signposts leading to the center of Raincy-Montfermeil Hospital’s intensive care unit. When he entered the room, already equipped with a protective mask, a medical gown, and polypropylene overshoes, the humming machines that kept the patient alive assailed his ears. The doctor approached the bed cautiously, peered into his mother’s face, then leaned over to caress her brow, banging a knee against a metal bar on the bed. His mother’s shriveled skin crisscrossed with veins reminded him of crossing the snow in the spring, when valiant blades of grass poke through the ice. Without a word, he took a seat on a chair to the right of the window, crossed his legs, and leaned his head against the wall. A fine rain was caressing the glass. The atmosphere in the room matched the 11 November weather, filled with commemorations to sad figures, idiot ministers too dapper to hear much less make sense of the cries of war. Martin had an aversion to death and its celebrations. His allergy to memory grew with every autumn. Martin would rush to the video shop to rent all the films available, to fill the nights and the hours of that day when, abandoned to her melancholy, Audrette would forget to smile. He then stood an army of beer cans on the living room coffee table, smiling at zombie massacres, unflinchingly witnessing the flood of blood as mafiosi settled their scores, and sleeping like a baby, neck bent back on the sofa in front of Cameron Diaz and Jude Law in a romantic comedy, half-naked in a bed.

“Excuse me! I didn’t know there was anyone here.”

The doctor sat up in his chair. Dr. Mamnoue stood in the doorway. He was wearing the same medical gown as Martin, and was about to put the protective mask on his face.

“Hello, Doctor.”

“Ah! It’s you, Martin, I didn’t recognize you with your mask. Are you growing a beard?”

The old man came a few steps closer, and they shook hands. Dr. Mamnoue was taking advantage of his day off to come and visit Madame Préau.

“How is she?”

“Stable.”

Martin didn’t comment further. Both knew that Elsa Préau was going to a better place. The doctor in turn went to the patient. He tried to warm his hands, then smiled and spoke softly to her: Dr. Mamnoue apologized for not having come earlier, he regretted that he wouldn’t be seeing her every Wednesday at his office.

“I miss you, Elsa. I’m very sad about what’s happened to you.”

Upset, Martin turned toward the window.

How he envied this man’s capacity for tenderness and kindness.

Not once since the attack had Martin managed to speak to his mother.

Would he ever be able to express his feelings?

Leaning on a teak counter in front of a drinks dispenser, stripped of their protective gear, the two men shared a similar malaise: feeling blameworthy for not having foreseen the danger, and for not having intervened earlier. Martin had inherited a double penalty, having twice missed his mother’s insanity. He was also the only one to put sugar in his coffee. Dr. Mamnoue, anxious, shared his thoughts.

“The strange figure of the child appeared very early in our sessions. From mid-August. She had noticed that the child never played with his brothers and sisters, and that bothered her. At the time, she was also obsessed with the dust and dirt caused by lorries passing on her road. I didn’t really give much attention to this story about the neighbors. And then, in September, there was this dream that she told me about…” The old man pulled lightly on the collar of his shirt, clearing his throat.

“There was mention of Bastien. Or rather, that’s what I understood. But now, I would lean toward the idea of her having seen—or imagined—a child in the neighbors’ garden.”

Martin swallowed his coffee in small sips; it was so bitter that despite the huge amount of sugar, it rasped at his taste buds.

“What was the dream?” he asked.

“I took notes after the session it was so frightening: a child was playing your mother’s piano in the middle of the night. Elsa came down from her room in the dark. In the room, a window was ‘fighting’ with the wind, and the curtains were ‘angry.’ And when the child turned around to her, there was dirt on his face and in his mouth.”

“Terrifying.”

“As you say, ‘terra-fying.’”

“Weren’t you worried that my mother was having such anxieties?”

The old man raised his eyebrows, surprised.

“Your mother was always burdened with anxieties, Martin. And her nightmares, believe you me, are much more shocking than those films where they torture people with vegetable peelers or sewing machines. This one was unusual insofar as it was the first in which, in some way, it seemed that your mother had taken on board the idea that her grandson was dead.”

“The presence of soil in his mouth…”

“Exactly! And that was very encouraging after years spent in denial. Why would I be alarmed?” Dr. Mamnoue picked up his coffee. His hand was shaking. “Hmmf! This coffee would raise the dead.”

Martin managed a smile.

“Did my mother tell you about other dreams?”

The man shook his head.

“Elsa started to shut herself off at the beginning of October. We would speak about subjects of little importance, her worries about the telephone, her new diet… Then there was that flu that she recovered from so well. And then you called me to say that you suspected that she had stopped taking her medication.”

“That’s right. She’d stopped taking the Risperdal.”

“Do you know why?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” he said, sighing.

The two men, lost in their thoughts, looked at each other sidelong, like customers elbow to elbow at a counter. Only the angle of their shoulders revealed the strain particular to those eaten up by remorse.

Martin accompanied the old man back to his car, an olive-green vintage Mercedes with cream leather seats. The rain had stopped. A ray of sunlight transformed the puddled parking lot into a mirror. The doctor was looking for his keys, well versed in the exercise after years.

“I’m incapable of always putting them in the same place… I hope they didn’t fall out of my pocket…”

Martin smiled. He offered to have a look under the car. The doctor put a hand on his arm.

“Don’t bother, Martin. Look.”

Through the tinted window, you could make out the keys on the driver’s seat. The old man opened the door and picked up the bunch of keys with a little laugh.

“Whatever you do, don’t say anything to my wife,” he joked.

“Promise.”

They shook hands warmly. The doctor was about to get into the Mercedes when he thought better of it, throwing the keys back into his palm.

“Martin?”

“Yes?”

“The keys got me thinking… A police officer questioned me last week about your mother. It seems that she changed the locks.”

“Indeed.”

“So you don’t have keys to get into her house anymore.”

“No.”

“That’s odd.”

“Why?”

“She must have thought that you were up to something.”

Martin shrugged. “She knew I was going to put her back on her medication.”

“I don’t doubt it. But keys are very symbolic. By preventing you from having access to her private life, her world, she’s also trying to protect you from it.”

A dozen pigeons crossing the sky caught Martin’s eye.

“I hadn’t looked at it that way,” he said.

“Do you know by any chance where she kept her notebooks?”

“What notebooks?”

“Elsa wrote down everything she did in little black notebooks the size of a diary.”

Martin had no idea.

“It could be helpful to the police, of course. She had certainly logged a great deal of information in them about her neighbors and the stone boy.”

“The stone boy?”

Dr. Mamnoue took his place behind the wheel of his car.

“Yes, that’s what she called him, all right. You didn’t know?”

The two exchanged contrite looks. The iridescence of the wet tar disappeared with the arrival of a dark gray cloud.

“Chin up, Martin. I’ll see you soon.”

Dr. Mamnoue slammed the door three times before it would close. Then he turned the key in the ignition and pulled out of his parking space, leaving Martin standing in a puddle of water.

He turned toward her. He could feel her warmth through the sheets. Pressing his stomach against his wife’s back, Martin felt desire overwhelm him.

“Martin, I’m sleeping.”