A Very Bold Leap (17 page)

“But it’s all my fault, Mr. Laprotte,” sobbed Aglaé. “He didn’t want to come here. I talked him into it.”

“Don’t listen to her,” Charles cut in, furrowing his brows. “I’m old enough to know what I’m doing.”

“That’s the way I see it, too,” said the director, rising from his chair. “Drop by the office on Monday around ten. I’ll have your paycheque ready for you.”

He was about to leave when Charles stopped him with a gesture. “Do you mind if I ask you a question? I don’t understand how… Why was it that you came looking for me?”

Roger Laprotte slapped his forehead. “Son of a gun,” he said. “I completely forgot! You received a phone call at the office at about two thirty, someone named Céline Fafard or something like that. A friend of yours was in an accident earlier this afternoon. Fairly serious, apparently; he maybe dead already. You’d better call her back right away.”

And giving the two lovers an amiable wave, he hurried back to his office.

A
t around one-thirty that afternoon, Steve Lachapelle had been crossing rue Ontario on his way to the Vieux-Montréal Cegep when he’d been hit by a delivery truck. Because he was unconscious, he hadn’t heard the horrified shouts of the driver, who stood in front of Steve running his fingers frantically through his salt-and-pepper hair, feeling stupid and powerless. Neither did he see the crowd of bystanders gathering around him, exclaiming and calling out an incredible amount of contradictory advice. Nor had he felt anything when the ambulance crew picked him up and laid him carefully on a stretcher, which in fact was a very lucky thing for him, the only good thing about the whole situation.

By the time Charles, Céline, and Blonblon arrived at Notre-Dame Hospital, he was in the operating room, being treated for multiple traumas and a fractured skull that required a delicate and hazardous operation. Isabel joined them later in the evening. After exchanging a few words with her friends, she sat next to Blonblon, hung her head and seemed to retreat into herself. Charles understood that she was praying.

From a nearby examination room came the sounds of a stormy discussion between a young man and a female doctor; the poor bugger had tried to relieve a migraine headache with a mixture of cocaine, alcohol, marijuana, and Tylenol, and the combination hadn’t helped much. The doctor was trying to persuade him to swallow a half-litre of a kind of coal-tar-based liquid, but the prospect of doing so seemed to repulse the sick man; furious, breathing hard, he declared that he wanted to go home.

“Come on, stop arguing and swallow this for me, like a big boy,” the doctor said, her voice firm but a bit tired. “You are experiencing full-blown
respiratory arrest. Do you know what that means? It means you could croak if we don’t act quickly. Do you want to croak?”

Finally the man resigned himself to his fate and drank the concoction, retching. Both Céline and Charles sighed with relief.

Among the crowd of sick or injured patients sitting on the chairs or lying on stretchers, Charles noticed a woman in her early forties wearing a black woollen coat that had seen better days, sitting on the floor in a corner with a young girl sleeping on her lap, heedless, it seemed to Charles, of the hustle and bustle taking place in the waiting room around them. Suddenly, Charles realized that the woman was Steve’s mother. He’d seen her only once before, since his friend rarely invited anyone to his house. Charles went over to her to find out what she knew about the accident, and to try to comfort her. She looked up at him with large, tearful eyes, murmured a few vague words, and sank back into her stupor.

At around ten, a large, unshaven man wearing overalls splattered with paint entered the room, spotted Steve’s mother, and walked quickly over to her, nearly colliding with a bed being rolled down a corridor. When she saw him she stood up quickly, the little girl in her arms, and all the pain she had been bottling up inside her burst forth. The man held her awkwardly, hindered by the child, who had also burst into tears, and tried to console the woman as best he could as she heaved long, loud sobs that sounded as though they were coming from a pipe organ. From what he was saying, Charles gathered that this was Steve’s uncle, whom he knew to be very attached to his nephew.

At midnight the surgeons were still operating on Steve, impressed by his fortitude but not holding out much hope. The prognostication forming in their minds was hardly reassuring.

At around two o’clock in the morning, Isabel came back from the cafeteria with sandwiches and coffee and was distributing this nocturnal snack among her friends when an authoritative-looking man appeared in the room; he was wearing a grey suit that shimmered like silk, but no tie and with his shirt unbuttoned at the collar, and looking exhausted and vaguely gloomy. He exchanged a few words with a nurse and then walked towards Madame Lachapelle. She stood up to meet him, her face flushed and her mouth trembling. A swatch of hair fell over her eye but she didn’t bother to remove it. She looked as though the angel of death had just appeared before her eyes.
Charles, Céline, and Blonblon moved discreetly closer, despite Isabel’s disapproving gestures.

“Tell me, doctor… how is he?” the woman stammered.

“He’s doing as well as can be expected under the circumstances, madame. We’ve just transferred him to Intensive Care. I won’t pretend that your son hasn’t suffered a very serious injury. We’ve done everything we could, I assure you. Now all we can do is hope for the best…”

The woman seized the doctor’s arm and, in a gasping voice, obviously gripped by indescribable terror, asked, “Is he going to pull through, doctor? That’s all I need to know. Is he going to pull through?”

The doctor looked at her, gently trying to disengage his arm from her convulsive grasp while her brother stroked her hair to try to calm her down.

“We’ll have to wait and see,” the doctor said. “In a few days we’ll have an idea of how his condition is evolving. It’s a good sign that he survived the operation. We’ll probably have to operate again.”

Leaving his sister, who had collapsed in tears on one of the chairs, the man in overalls stepped in front of the doctor and spoke in an aggressive, almost threatening voice.

“Look here, doc,” he said, “I want to know what that goddamned son of a bitch of a truck driver whose ass I’m gonna kick from here to the middle of next week did to Stevie. And I want to know
all the details!”

The doctor sighed with exhaustion; his eyes began to flutter and his tired expression spread across his entire face.

“Your son, sir …”

“He’s not my son, he’s my nephew.”

“Your nephew, then, has suffered a double fracture to his pelvis, clean breaks to the left leg and the left arm, multiple fractured ribs with a possible lesion to his liver; the tests will tell us more accurately when they come back tomorrow. But mostly he’s had a serious cranial concussion that has caused an effusion of blood to the brain. The good news is that his spinal column has not been compromised.”

“Can we go in and see him?” asked the man in the same aggressive tone.

“Tomorrow. Right now, the best thing you can do, my dear sir, is to go home and get some sleep. In any case, your nephew is still in a coma.”

At the word “coma,” which to him was practically synonymous with “dead,” the man began to swear with such fury that the doctor backed away, raising his arms helplessly, and left the room.

Before getting out of the taxi that had just pulled up in front of his apartment building, Charles gave Céline a hug.

“I forgot to tell you, the Taxation Service gave me my walking papers today … or I guess yesterday. I’ll tell you all about it, it’s nothing serious…”

He opened the taxi door, his mouth stifling a yawn, then turned back to Céline.

“Do you think Fernand would hire me back at the hardware store, until I have time to find another job?”

She made a vague gesture and sank back against the head rest, closed her eyes, and let her head fall on Isabel’s shoulder.

Charles had been working at the hardware store for three months. Despite another slump in sales, Fernand had taken him on without hesitation, as though keeping Charles afloat was a sacred duty. The former barker had made up a story about office politics to explain why he’d been fired, and Céline had believed it without question. He was humiliated by his lie; it made him feel weak, and he had always forced himself to be as truthful as possible. Infidelity seemed a thousand times more acceptable to him than lying. After all, having an affair was a kind of adventure that required dexterity, sometimes audacity, and implied that the person having the affair was charming and seductive. In any case, he was certain of two things: he did not love Aglaé Mayrand, and he adored Céline. Wasn’t that all that mattered?

He hadn’t seen the pharmacist since losing his job in Verdun. His new job kept him busy, and she had gone directly from Saint-Georges-de-Beauce to Fermont, which was a snowball’s throw from the North Pole. But he dreamed of her sometimes, while he was tinting a gallon of paint, or weighing a bag of nails. Aglaé displayed a passion for him that older women often feel towards younger men, perhaps seeing it as a final glimmer of their own youth. She telephoned him two or three times a week, which sometimes put her lover in an awkward position, since she always called him at home, and sometimes when
Céline was there. Each time the phone rang he leapt to his feet, but once or twice Céline beat him to it.

“Who is that woman?” she asked one night, out of curiosity.

“Who? I don’t know. Just a wrong number.”

“But she asked for you.”

“No, she wanted someone named Charles Bilodeau. Not me.”

“Charles Bilodeau? Charles Bilodeau?” Céline repeated thoughtfully, giving him a long, skeptical look.

“Come on, Céline, you don’t think for one minute that —”

“You’re a liar!” she cried in sudden rage. “If you think I’m going to play silly cops-and-robbers games with you, you’re wrong! I won’t sink that low! I won’t humiliate myself like that! You want to cheat on me? Go ahead! Just don’t pussyfoot around about it — jump right in, head first, ass in the air. Sleep with everyone on the block, everyone in the city, if you want, I couldn’t care less! I don’t give a dog’s first fart what you do! You can lie to me like Pierre Trudeau lies to everyone in Quebec for all I care! You can …”

Her deep sobs prevented her from going any farther.

“But Céline, what’s come over you all of a sudden? I’ve never seen you like this before! And all because of a simple telephone call?”

And then, to his astonishment, his own eyes filled with tears. He held Céline in his arms to console her, filled with self-loathing and seeing clearly the ugliness of his betrayal.

Céline calmed down quickly and was soon smiling through her tears; and an hour later she even seemed to have forgotten her outburst. Charles was relieved but still anxious. Would she trust him again? Or would she suppress her suspicions and close her eyes for fear of losing him?

The next afternoon Charles hurried out of the hardware store during his coffee break and, from a telephone booth, dialled the pharmacist’s number and absolutely forbade her to call him at home. He came within a hair’s breadth of breaking it off with her altogether, but at the last minute a sudden weakness came over him; some soft and infinitely disappointing part of himself intervened and prevented him from saying the necessary words.

The day after the accident, Charles, Blonblon, Isabel, and Céline went to the hospital to see Steve during the evening visiting hours. They were given only five minutes, but even that seemed a long time. Steve was still unconscious, almost unrecognizable with his swollen face, a thick, transparent plastic tube protruding from one nostril, his hair wildly askew and scalp partly shaven, and a huge swath of bandages covering most of his head. A horrible, gasping sound came from his gaping mouth through deeply cracked lips, and the metal framework that had been constructed around his body to keep him from moving made him look frightening. Could this mutilated thing before them really be the carefree, irresponsible guy they knew, always ready to entertain them, to make everyone within earshot laugh at his antics? What had they done with the real Steve? Would they ever get him back again?