Theory of Remainders (6 page)

He was sorry to have missed the ceremony, had hoped to pay his last respects with the others. No one had suffered from the events of fifteen years ago more than Anne-Madeleine. To be honest, he was surprised she’d lasted this long, racked with guilt as she was. He suspected she’d greeted death with something akin to relief.

“
Dieu te garde
,” he said aloud. “You’ll be missed.” He contributed a bouquet of flowers to the growing collection, lightening his load by half. A second bundle remained.

He turned to the right, walking past two more stones until he reached the one he didn’t want to see. This was a more modest grave, one of polished, reddish granite. At the bottom right corner he noticed a thin crust, the first foothold of lichen. A yellow rose lay on the top, still fresh. He added his own bouquet to the middle of the slab. Then he knelt, forcing his eyes upward to the inscription:
Sophie Marie Adler, 4 février 1979–
juillet 1993
.

He’d had to argue with that stuffy old priest for them to include her middle name. That wasn’t how it was done in France, Father Huet had said. But damn it, on this stone Sophie’s entire life had been reduced to a dash between two dates. The very least they could do was to let her have her name.

All the old imaginings surged forth. Sophie writhing on the ground, struggling under powerful arms. Darkness. Cries. Dirt. Sweat. The tear of fabric. A man’s back. Grunts. He pictured her straining to look over the man’s shoulder, desperate to focus on anything other than where she was, something far away, something she could cling to.

All this because of one man. One boy. Édouard Morin had been only seventeen years old at the time. Since the murder he’d traveled from one institution to another, first in Paris, then near Versailles, then in Marne-la-Vallée. It had taken a long time for Philip to kick the habit of tracking Morin’s whereabouts, a task that required fierce self-control and zero tolerance for relapse. He wondered if Morin had ever experienced a prick of remorse about raping and murdering a fourteen-year-old girl. He suspected not. The concept of guilt would have had no meaning for him. Not that remorse would change anything.

In the distance the iron gate creaked, the sound of another mourner headed for another grave. Philip struggled from his knees and brushed the grit from his trousers. With his camera he lined up a shot of the stone with his daughter’s name.

It was a hollow gesture, this picture of an empty tomb. Sophie’s body had never been recovered, and fifteen years ago this stone had been erected to screen that fact. Graves were always a presence pointing to an absence, but here that function was doubly true, the connection even more tenuous. He’d refused to take the picture before, wasn’t even sure he wanted it now. But there wouldn’t be another chance.

He turned, retracing his own footsteps in the other direction, heading back to the maintenance shed, back to the peeling statue, back to the military graves, back to the tipped stone crosses, back to the entrance, back to the giant oak, back to the car, back to the hotel, back to the message from Yvonne. Back to everything.

Four

As he slept that night, foreign words that had long slumbered now rustled in his mind, waking and taking wing. Along with language came images of Yvetot, dissolving into scenes from Paris: buildings, streets, places, people—all remnants from the past. In the theater of his mind an outdoor market buzzed with negotiations and the hawking cries of vendors. A bus roared down a broad boulevard. Then he found himself in a medieval knot of roads, the sidewalks narrow and empty, the scene oddly familiar. At the turn of an alleyway, he glimpsed a teenage girl, tall, dressed in jeans and T-shirt. Did he know her? She vanished around a building, and he struggled to follow, his legs numb and heavy. By the time he turned the corner, she was disappearing behind a line of trees. He forced himself on, pushing as if into a stiff wind.

The scene changed. He saw her pausing by a hedge where she flicked her darkening hair over her shoulder, glancing left and right before starting forward again, her small frame moving quickly, her thin arms swinging loosely in their joints. They were in a park now, or a garden. He had gained on her, was approaching from behind, was nearly within reach, and finally he stretched out his hand and touched her lightly on the back, making her wheel around.

It was black-haired Melanie, a scowl on her gaunt face.

He woke with a start, his legs entangled in the sheets. Where was he? Where was Edith? What was that moldy smell? From the middle of the spongy bed he surveyed the room—the writing desk, the wardrobe, the high window, the minibar—and his mind clicked: Yvetot. He flopped back on the pillow and stared at the ceiling, his mouth cottony, his head aching.

And what was he to make of that dream—the brackish waters of which had already begun to recede, leaving everything covered with a film of anxiety? Something about a park, a girl? He shook his head. Sleep amnesia they call it.

He showered and shaved, nicking himself as he curved the blade around the bottom of his beard. He coaxed his repaired shoelace into a bow. Then, as he pulled on his sport coat, the sleeve snagged on the wardrobe handle and a button broke off, rolling under the chest of drawers and leaving behind a tuft of threads on his cuff. So began the day.

In the end he hadn’t had the courage to call Yvonne last night, not after his visit to the cemetery. So this morning he would meet her at the law office. That seemed appropriate. After all, his last encounter with her had taken place in front of a lawyer thirteen years ago, where their divorce had been gutted of passion, reduced to a matter of red tape.

She had always been one for order. According to her mother, when she was little, Yvonne had kept her dolls in military rows and organized all her books by size. Her school notebooks had been works of art, filled with fine, rounded cursive, her ink color-coded to signal key vocabulary words and quotes. In the family lore, Yvonne was the one who, at age ten, trained the Aubert family dog. At twelve she announced her plan to become a professor, and when her mother humored her and asked if she had anything specific in mind, Yvonne had proclaimed matter-of-factly that she would be a specialist of Italian literature. Her father had roared, but sixteen years later that prophecy came true. As it turned out, she learned a number of languages, even studying abroad in England and Germany, but Italian remained her favorite. Her doctoral thesis had dealt with renaissance poetry, leading to her first position at the Paris III campus.

As he drank coffee in the cramped breakfast room at La Cauchoise, Philip felt a rising tide of apprehension, and it occurred to him that it might not be too late to vanish into thin air, to return to Boston without seeing anyone. Wouldn’t that be the best for all concerned?

He knew the idea was preposterous, entirely irrational.

Though he used to know the center of Yvetot reasonably well, the law office was several blocks away, on a street he’d never heard of. Monsieur Bécot provided directions, which Philip retained well enough to make it through the second turn, but then his internal map blurred. None of the roads in this town were straight, and they had a nasty habit of changing names every fifty or hundred yards.

He stopped twice for directions, and every time he parted his lips his accent betrayed him, unmasking him not just as a stranger, but worse, a foreigner. He’d come to the language too late, had never mastered the vowel sounds, the slide of the R, the disappearing H and S. Long ago, back when he’d traveled with Yvonne or Sophie, the escort of natives had eased his passage. Now, his accent drew him sidelong stares, as if he were a disfigured man.

The rue Launay proved to be farther away than he thought, and he arrived late at the brick building where the notary’s shield hung over the paneled door. Before entering, he straightened his jacket and tie, but still felt rumpled. For Yvonne he’d been an attractive project, a handyman’s special. When he arrived in Paris for his residency, both orphaned and freed by his parents’ deaths, Yvonne had served as the principal architect of his reinvention. She bestowed upon him innumerable linguistic corrections while coaching him in manners and dress. She introduced him first to her friends, then to her siblings, and finally to her parents. She fashioned the two of them into a couple, and then by alchemical transmutation transformed that couple into a family. Only occasionally had he felt a twinge of anxiety, the way a magician’s dove must sometimes wonder how long the spell will hold before it reverts to an ordinary handkerchief.

Such had been Yvonne’s reputation for accomplishing whatever she set her mind to that it had come as a shock when the ultrasound suggested she was carrying a girl, despite her professed preference for a boy. Philip had half expected her to produce, by sheer willpower, a little member between the legs of the embryo. It turned out he wasn’t far from wrong. Thanks to her mother, Sophie had grown into an independent, confident, and assertive girl, one who felt she could do anything. Which had been wonderful. But also part of the problem.

He rang the bell at the door and waited for the electric click of the lock. Inside the notary’s office, the receptionist looked him up and down, her eyes stopping at the tuft of loose threads on his jacket cuff. He clapped his other hand over his wrist.

“Monsieur Adler,” he said. “I am here to meet with Maître Caumartin. And Yvonne Adler.” He corrected himself instantly. “Aubert. Yvonne Aubert.”

“You mean Madame Legrand?”

Of course. He hadn’t much practice with her new name. Although it wasn’t new. She’d been remarried long enough for them to have a twelve-year-old daughter.

The woman led him down a corridor, and Philip felt his chest tighten. Voices leaked out from the door of a meeting room, one of them a woman’s firm tone rising above the others, which he recognized at once. “Does everyone have a copy?” she was saying in French. And as he turned through the doorway, there they all were, the old cast of characters seated around a long, oval table. Dried up Évelyne was whispering to her skinny, balding husband, Sylvain. Next to pretty Flora sat the well-groomed Pierre. To the left Roger leaned back in his chair, his feet up on the table, his fingers pressed together, a half-amused, half-bored expression on his face. They looked the same, adjusted for age, having become somehow even more themselves.

A short, well-dressed man Philip didn’t know sat to the right.

But it was Yvonne who drew his gaze. She stood with her back to him, her tall form buttoned in a brown Chanel suit, a bundle of papers in her hand. “I said,” she repeated while brandishing the document, a hint of exasperation creeping into her voice, “Does everyone have a copy?” No one answered. Their eyes had all moved to the door, and now Yvonne turned. Her expression softened.

She was older now. Perhaps a bit weary. Yet still a handsome woman, square-jawed and erect. A smile came to Philip’s lips.

Roger was scrambling to his feet, grinning. “
C’est le retour de l’enfant prodigue
,” he roared. Broad-shouldered and sporting a moustache, he was dressed less formally but more richly than the others.

“Roger,” Philip said, stepping toward him, extending his hand.

“Bah,” Roger replied, continuing in French. “My dear Philip—Anglo-Saxon to the core. Don’t be ridiculous.” He ignored the outstretched hand and gripped his former brother-in-law by the shoulders. Before he could protest, Roger had planted a kiss on each of his cheeks. “Nice beard,
Monsieur l’hirsute
.”

The others around the table were less effusive. Yvonne’s sisters gave pinched nods of greeting, and their husbands acknowledged his presence with tight-lipped smiles. Sylvain was the first to break rank and reach a hand over the table. Soon Philip was making the rounds, shaking hands, kissing cheeks. Yvonne’s younger sisters didn’t seem overjoyed at this gesture of affection, but after all, they were, or had once been, family.

He took the long way around the table, postponing for a few instants the encounter with Yvonne. But then he ran out of hands to shake, and the room fell quiet.

“
Bonjour Philippe
,” she said.

Yvonne’s voice transformed his name into a familiar cluster of taut French I’s and pert consonants. He replied with a nod, clasping his hands, then wondering where to put them. The entire group was watching the spectacle of their encounter, but Philip didn’t know the script. Over the years he’d learned many of the nuances of French intimacy—whose hand to shake, whom to kiss, when to use the formal
vous
or the casual
tu
—but no one had covered this particular situation in his training. What was the appropriate salutation when greeting your ex-wife for the first time in thirteen years? He was about to extend his hand when Yvonne gave him a clue, lifting her chin and inching forward. He approached to kiss her on both cheeks, skin against skin. Her fragrance was the same. There were fine wrinkles at the corners of her eyes.