The Years of Fire (28 page)

Céline was sobbing in her room, lying across her bed. Charles went in to see her. He sat beside her and stroked her hair.

“Oh, Charles, he could have died! Just think. And for nothing! The medics in the ambulance barely got here in time!”

No, it wasn’t for nothing
, Charles thought, shaking his head.
It was because of my father. When my father finds out what’s happened he’ll wet his pants with glee, the bastard
.

“He must be so sad! What could we have done to help him? Do you know, Charles?”

Yes, I do know
, Charles thought.
I’ve already taken steps. And I’ll see it through to the end. As much as it takes, Wilfrid. And if I have to throw you into the river to stop you, that’s what I’ll do
.

He bent his head over her and put his cheek against hers.

“The doctors are looking after him,” he said. “Everything will be all right. And I’m going to help him. There’ll be no more trouble, I promise.”

Céline turned and held him in her arms, shuddering, and her tears ran down Charles’s cheeks.

“I need you, Charles. I feel so alone. So small. I don’t know what to do any more. I’m afraid …”

“No, no,” Charles said gently, troubled by her desolation and her loss of control. “You’re not alone. I’m here, right beside you.… And Lucie, she’s here, and Henri … and Monsieur Michaud. We’re all going to look after Fernand, you’ll see, and in a month or two he’ll be back at the hardware store, just like before …”

“No, Charles,” she sobbed, “nothing will ever be like it was before.”

He went on trying to console her, patiently, though he was as tortured by doubts and worries as she was.

Henri watched them silently from the doorway, his arms by his sides. Their intimacy surprised him, and he felt strangely like lashing out with a sharp word.

Charles could see Lucie sitting in a chair at the foot of the bed in the darkened room. She looked exhausted but calmly determined. She smiled up at him and motioned him to come closer.

He entered the room and stood beside the bed.

“Five minutes, no more,” she said in a low voice. “Doctor’s orders. He’s very tired. Henri is downstairs in the cafeteria. You can go down and join him if you want.”

He nodded, then saw that Fernand was looking at him hazily. If Lucie hadn’t been there he might have doubted he was in the right room, so
changed was the man lying before him. The Fernand he knew didn’t look anything like this man, with his hollow cheeks, his flaccid face, his curiously bony, prominent nose. He seemed to have been transformed into something sinister.

Charles felt a constriction in his throat, and he had to wait before he could speak.

“Hello, Fernand,” he finally managed.

Fernand continued to look at him without seeming to have heard. He looked lost, as though he belonged to a different world.

“Hello, Fernand,” Charles said again, after looking anxiously at Lucie.

A moment passed.

“Don’t talk to me,” Fernand said suddenly, his voice weak and hoarse.

Stunned, Charles looked again at Lucie, who had stood up and placed her hand on her husband’s shoulder, looking down at him anxiously.

“You don’t want me to … to speak to you?” Charles said with a painful frown of disbelief.

“That’s what I said. Don’t talk to me,” Fernand repeated, more loudly this time. “I asked you not to talk to me.”

Charles started to cry. The destruction of the Fernand he had known and loved was now complete. This man could die now, and nothing would change.

Lucie had come around the bed to take the young man in her arms.

“You can cry all you want,” Fernand murmured bitterly. “You’ll never cry enough.”

And he turned his head away.

Lucie took Charles out into the hall and tried to console him.

“What did I do to him? What did I do to him?” he sobbed, his face pressed against her large bosom.

“Nothing, nothing, don’t be silly. You can see for yourself he’s not in his right mind. After what happened this morning, and all the drugs they’ve given him, he doesn’t know what he’s saying. He’s not making any sense at all.”

Ashamed of his weakness, Charles leaned back and looked into her eyes.

“He knows what he’s saying,” he said angrily. “And he’s right not to want me to talk to him. If it weren’t for me coming to live with you, none of this would have happened.”

Lucie raised her hands in consternation and tried to respond, but Charles had already turned and was running down the hall, so lost in his own misery that he nearly knocked over a nurse carrying a tray of medications.

Henri Lalancette looked at the tips of his fingers, which were covered with a white powder. He sniffed them, but couldn’t determine what it was. After frowning two or three times and uttering a few perplexed grunts, he cautiously touched his finger to the tip of his tongue. The substance tasted a bit sweet; maybe it was powdered sugar or something like that. But how would powdered sugar get in the bottom of his delivery boy’s backpack?

He stood motionless before the open locker, the bag in his hand, somewhat ashamed of himself for resorting to subterfuge but still wracked by doubt, even though he could think of no good reason to be suspicious. He heard steps approaching. Quickly he slid the bag back into the locker and closed the door.

For the rest of the day he was even more taciturn than usual, which was saying a lot! During the afternoon, Rose-Alma asked him in a motherly way if he was suffering from indigestion, which was sometimes the case with him. He replied coolly that his stomach was working perfectly, and concentrated on his work.

But just before five, the need to confide in someone overcame his reticence, and after a few false starts he told his cashier about what he had found, and about the suspicions – so far baseless, he admitted – that the white powder had raised in his mind.

Rose-Alma laughed.

“Really, Monsieur Lalancette,” she said, “the ideas that get into your head sometimes! You must have watched too many movies on TV this week!
I’ve been working behind a cash register for twenty-two years now, and I’ve seen a thing or two, but Charles? Involved in drug trafficking? You can’t be serious! He probably bought a box of doughnuts at the bakery, he sometimes does that, and some of the icing sugar got into the bottom of his bag. That’s all it will be …”

Her words reassured the pharmacist, and after a few hours he regained some of his quiet good humour. He even allowed himself a joke or two with his customers. But that night, lying in bed beside his sleeping wife, whose anti-aging cream smelled strongly of cucumbers and made the room smell depressingly like a cellar, his suspicions reasserted themselves, and sleep was a long time coming.

It took a lot of courage for Charles to return to the hospital. Squeezed into an elevator with a tightly packed group of secretaries in sundresses who were visiting a friend who had gone into labour, he chewed his lips, lost in thought and oblivious to their giddy, schoolgirl chatter and the abundance of bronzed flesh oozing pleasure and life.

It had been ten days since Fernand’s suicide attempt. The previous night Lucie had come home with good news. Doctor Berthiaume’s therapy sessions were beginning to bear fruit and Fernand was on the road to recovery. He had smiled three times, eaten his dinner without complaint, no longer talked of selling the hardware store, and was even beginning to find his stay in the hospital a tad overextended.

“You must go and see him,” she’d said to Charles, with her mother-knows-best smile. “He asked me about you. He probably doesn’t even remember what he said the other day.”

Charles had given the matter some thought. He was torn between the desire to tell Fernand that from now on, thanks to him, there was no more danger of a fire breaking out at the hardware store, and his fear of having to tell him why that was so.

He pushed open the door to Room 6281 with a knot in his stomach and promised himself that he would keep a firm rein on his emotions. Fernand was sitting by the window, spreading his newspaper out in front of him with a loud crackle.

“Hello there,” he said, looking sombrely at Charles as though trying to figure out what to say next.

“Hello, Fernand,” Charles replied in a low voice. He stayed near the door, suddenly filled with apprehension and unable to walk farther into the room. “How are you feeling?”

“Not too bad.”

He smiled faintly, and Charles felt relief wash over him. He stepped away from the door.

“Don’t just stand there,” Fernand said, indicating a chair. “You’re going to grow roots down into the floor.”

Charles laughed, not at the joke, which was an old one, but because of the joy he felt inside: Was Fernand getting better? Could it be that their friendship was still intact?

“You look good,” he said, sitting down.

To be honest, it was the word “better” that had come to mind, but he substituted “good” as a way of encouragement. “Sick people recover faster,” he thought, “if they think they look like there’s nothing wrong with them.”

“Well, that’s not what my mirror told me this morning when I shaved, but thanks anyway. It’s always nice to hear.”

“No, I mean it,” Charles insisted, almost convinced of it himself. “You look good.”

Fernand nodded with a skeptical smile. He folded his newspaper in half and tossed it on the radiator.

Neither spoke for a time. This was what Charles had most feared. He searched his mind desperately for some way to start a conversation. Fernand sighed deeply.

“I’m told I said something stupid to you the last time you were here. I don’t remember it, myself.”

Charles smiled. “Neither do I,” he said.

And he made a gesture to imply that as far as he was concerned the whole thing was of no importance at all.

“All those shots they gave me, my brain was like a bowl of pea soup. And I was in pretty bad shape. I didn’t know where I was, everything was strange and sort of jumbled. I hope you didn’t take me seriously, eh?”

“Don’t even think about it, Fernand,” Charles said, tears filling his eyes, and furious at not being able to keep his resolution not to cry.

He placed a hand on Fernand’s knee.

Now he wanted to tell Fernand the good news; his natural caution was giving way slowly to the pleasure it would give him. Fernand, however, always embarrassed by shows of emotion, changed the subject by talking about the quality of the food he was being served. At least they were helping him to lose weight, he said. But he was getting the best of care, really remarkable care, and it was made all the better by the beauty of his two nurses, one of whom, a magnificent Filipina woman, seemed to have developed a crush on him.

“But it’s mostly Doctor Berthiaume who has helped me get through all this,” he added seriously.

He tapped his temple with his forefinger.

“He’s helping me understand what was going through my head, Charles. I can’t tell you everything because it’s still very complicated and mixed up. But there’s at least one thing I do understand, and that’s that I have a problem with anger. I was full of rage against myself, against everything that wasn’t going as well as I wanted it to, against Wilfrid, against the police, all that kind of thing. Anyway, instead of taking all that rage out on whatever it was I was angry at, and getting rid of all that negative energy, as they call it, and making myself feel better by pounding the living daylights out of whoever happened to deserve it, I was turning it against myself – which apparently was not a good thing. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? But it never occurred to me that that’s what I was doing.”