My October (10 page)

Hannah's mother-in-law was looking at her, now dry-eyed and serene. Hannah stood up. “I've got to go.” She gave Lyse's arm a tender squeeze and reached for the tote bags stashed at her feet.

They said their goodbyes in front of the bronze bust. Lyse had commissioned it at the last possible moment. It had cost her more than the entire funeral. The artist had been forced to go
to the funeral parlour to make the mould. There was no back to it, just Roland Lévesque's proud, stern face, and the mouth into which he'd stuck the barrel of his gun.

His Luger.

Once, when Luc was nineteen, he had taken the bust down from its altar in his mother's vestibule and pushed his own face inside. He'd been drunk, he told Hannah years later. It had been late at night. He'd replaced the bust afterward so Lyse wouldn't suspect anything, but although the altar looked the same, Luc himself had been changed by this curious nocturnal act.

“Call on me,” Lyse said, pulling Hannah to her for a last embrace.

Hannah tried to smile, but the bronze likeness of Luc's father was staring so fiercely she couldn't manage it.

7

T
he staircase to the second floor seemed steeper than usual when Hannah got back from the grocery store. She'd bought more than she'd planned, probably because she was so tired. She had a chicken tucked under her arm like a football.

Chickens were on special at the Super C. Five dollars a bird. So, without giving it much thought, in addition to the milk and the bread and the eggs, she had bought a chicken. And a carton of plain yogurt, Balkan style, which she knew she would want the next morning. And cereal for Hugo. Froot Loops, which he still loved. An indulgence. What was wrong with that?

Plenty, she told herself, willing her feet to move faster. She regretted the way she had spoken to him, the assault on his conscience.

She kept thinking about the gun. The Luger. The lugubrious Luger. Heavy, dark, morose. Luc's father, whom Hannah had never met, had been lugubrious. At least, that was how she
imagined him from Lyse's accounts. Luc didn't describe him this way. To Luc, he was a hero. But then, he had died before his son outgrew the need for heroes.

Lugubrious. Was it in the genes? Luc and his brother didn't seem afflicted. Oh, they had their moods. No one was spared that. The period immediately prior to
Dreamer
had been a trial for Luc. But his response had been art, not depression. What if it skipped a generation? She pictured her son's affectless face, his strange, empty eyes. She made a mental note to read up on drugs.

Would she notice if Hugo were stoned? She knew what marijuana did to him. His face went chalky and his eyes got dry and red. Besides, she could smell it on his clothes. But he only smoked sporadically, so far as she knew. Weekends mainly, with his friends. She and Luc had spoken to him about it a couple of times, voiced their concerns. The books she had read said it was futile to try to ban it outright. What you had to do was talk.

But what if it wasn't drugs after all? What if it was something else, something internal, something harder to give a name to? What if it was a hidden grandparental legacy, sparing the father the more savagely to strike at the son? An image of the awful bronze in Lyse's front hall returned to her.

She was on the inner staircase now, huffing upward.
I think I can. I think I can. I think I can
. At the top of the stairs, she spotted Luc's shoes. Good, he was here. Maybe the clouds had lifted and they could sit down as a family for once and talk. As she opened the door, however, that thought was dispelled. Luc's voice rang out in the hallway.

“Where were you?”

He was standing in the doorway to Hugo's bedroom, his hand on the cobra's head.

She held up the chicken. “I left a note.”

He rolled his eyes. “You just got home and already you're out the door to shop? You might have said something to me.” He turned his back on her, presumably to face their son. “Meanwhile, guess what your only child was doing in your absence?”

She put the bags and the chicken down on the floor and stepped forward. She would not mention the garbage, or the empty fridge. Luc was pacing angrily. In his hand was the empty plastic case for
Red Alert
, Hugo's favourite computer game. The game he had played continuously through the eighth grade, to the exclusion of homework and family life, while his parents tried without success to limit his access, to wean him off his addiction. Every day, he would come home from school with the same hunger in his eyes, shut himself in his room, and play.

Hugo was sitting on his bed, his back against the wall. For some reason, he had no shirt on. Hannah hadn't seen him without one for years. Springy black hairs encircled his nipples, which looked vulnerable and pink. She fought the impulse to stare. Black wisps curled from his armpits too. He must have felt her eyes, because he folded his arms over his chest.

“I caught him,” said Luc. “
Red Alert
. After all we've been through. Can you believe it?”

Hugo looked up at her then. They both looked at her, waiting to see whose side she would choose. She felt the power of her position, momentary though it was. She felt their attention and their need. She wished it could go on forever, this moment immediately before choice.

“Guns!” Luc said desperately, waving the plastic case. “It sounded like World War Three when I walked in, I swear to
you.” When Hannah still didn't respond, he turned away from her and threw the case on the bed. It bounced off the mattress, striking Hugo's bare stomach.

“Enough is enough,” he said, reaching for Hugo's arm. “Tell your mother what happened.” He pulled Hugo roughly to his feet, breathing heavily. She had rarely seen him so upset. “Tell her how you brought a gun to school. Go on,” he said, shaking him. “Explain to her. A Luger, for the love of Christ.”

Hannah, who was standing in the doorway, tried to intervene, but Luc pushed her aside. The situation felt out of control. He'd never touched her like that before. And he'd certainly never lifted a hand against Hugo.

“What were you going to do, Hugo?” he kept asking. “What was the plan?”

Hannah moved in again, and for a moment the talk stopped and they wrestled with each other. Luc was trying to hang on to Hugo, who was squirming and trying to wrench free, while Hannah tried, unsuccessfully, to wedge herself between them.

“Stop!” she shouted, pushing Luc off with all her strength. But they couldn't stop. Father and son were locked in a strange slow-motion dance, trapped in a panting embrace that only ended when Hannah began to sob.

Four bright finger marks decorated one of Hugo's shoulders. On his neck was the darkened beginning of a bruise. The sight was so shocking that she stopped crying. Stopped even taking in air. He looked like a battered child.

In an instant, he was back on the bed, clasping his arms over his naked chest.

Luc retrieved Hugo's T-shirt from the floor and threw it at him. “Cover yourself.”

Hugo didn't move. His back was against the wall. His arms were mottled.

“Put your shirt on,” Luc ordered. He stepped forward, but Hannah took his arm.

“Leave him alone!” There it was. She had chosen. From the corner of her eye, she saw Hugo's lower lip start to quiver.

Luc pulled free of her grasp. “All I've ever done is leave him alone. At your urging.”

“Luc. This isn't helping.”

He held up his hands as if suddenly aware of how he looked. Shame clouded his features. Then he backed away from them, shaking his head, and left the room. A few moments later, they heard the front door slam.

Hannah glanced at her son. He was on his feet now, bending to retrieve the shirt his father had thrown at him. He didn't return her look. As he straightened, she caught sight of his shoulder blades poking out of his back like pitiful broken wings. She felt sick about what Luc had done. Sicker still that she'd participated in the drama and been unable to stop it. She tried to apologize to Hugo, but the words came out false and awkward. He kept his back to her, refusing to move until she left.

She didn't go downstairs to seek out Luc immediately, but went instead to their bedroom and lay down on the bed. When she came out again half an hour later, she happened to look out the living room window, and there he was on the sidewalk, in the bright afternoon sun, loading things into his Peugeot. Beside him were the three cardboard boxes she'd seen earlier in
his office, plus his laptop computer and a futon rolled up and tied with a strip of purple cloth. He kept this mattress in his office for power naps. Hannah could see only his backside and legs. The rest of him was hidden inside the car.

8

T
he Green Spot was empty when Luc arrived. It was Sunday, three o'clock in the afternoon; the brunch crowd had left. Everyone was outside, soaking in the last rays of sunshine. A green banner emblazoned with the restaurant's name hung over the short-order window. The name was a joke, considering that the neighbourhood around here was bereft of greenery. Not a bush or tree in sight. Luc scanned the sea of empty booths and tables. Not a lot had changed.

He hadn't been here in years. When he was small, his father had brought him and Rémi almost every Sunday. It had been their little weekend ritual. Luc had eaten his first poutine here. And his first Pogo. His parents hadn't been churchgoers. Lyse had never prepared a Sunday dinner in her life, unlike most mothers in Saint-Henri. In the Lévesque household, Sundays were Lyse's day off, the day her menfolk dined at the local
casse-croûte
.

It was fun. Luc's father would greet the men he knew from the Imperial Tobacco plant. At the sight of him, they would get up from their tables. Luc's father had been a great talker. A lover
of politics, much like Azarius Lacasse in
Bonheur d'occasion
. Not world politics. Local matters, workers' matters. He had been a security guard at Imperial, and before that he'd worked the assembly line. He knew the cigarette business inside out. He lived and breathed it, he used to joke. He knew everybody at the plant, and everybody liked him. He was regarded as a hub in the communal wheel. A union man, through and through.

Dinners at the Green Spot stopped abruptly when he lost his job after nineteen years of service to the company. Luc was twelve years old. They'd steered clear of the restaurant after that. It was only at the end of high school that Luc began to frequent it again. By then, his father was dead, and years had passed since those Sundays of his childhood. Few people recognized him. He went with Serge Vien. They were taking the same classes, both lovers of Charles Baudelaire, both convinced that they belonged to his exclusive club of poetically damaged souls. They came after school and sat right here in the booth at the far back of the restaurant next to the washrooms and gum machines, strategically out of sight of the guy at the cash. They ordered fries in little paper bags that darkened as the grease soaked through. They pushed quarters into the jukebox. “Crimson and Clover.” The first time Luc encountered that song, he'd heard it as “Christmas Is Over.” Part of it was his English, which hadn't been particularly strong, but part of it was the lead singer swallowing his words. This was what, in his innocence, he had sung for years, until one day Hannah heard him and set him straight.

He flipped through the little jukebox at his table. The Beatles, Bon Jovi, the Backstreet Boys. A bird's-eye view of rock
'n' roll through the ages, and that was just the
B
's. He found what he was looking for under the
T
's. Tommy James and the Shondells.

Vien walked in just as Tommy James began to croon. Luc watched his face light up. “Lord,” Vien said. “They still have that?”

Luc bobbed his head to the beat, inhaling the comforting smell of refried grease, his own variant of Proust's madeleines.

Vien's head was bobbing to the music now too. He resembled a bird. A beaky, stork-like bird with a jowly wattle under his chin and a silly misaligned eye. “Nothing's changed,” Vien remarked, grinning.

“Maybe a bit,” Luc answered, his eye on the wattle. “But not a whole lot.”

“The waitresses are younger.”

Luc burst out laughing. It felt good to be here. Seeing Vien again was the silver lining to all this. He took two menus from beside the jukebox and slid one toward Vien.

As if on cue, a woman with a mop of dyed black hair came over to take their orders. Her arms glowed a strange coppery colour that, Luc supposed, was the product of regular visits to the tanning salon. “What can I get you two gentlemen?”

She was chewing gum. She could still carry off a pair of tight pants, but her cleavage, revealed by a low-buttoned white blouse, was fissured like soil gone too long without rain. The tanning salon had done its work well. She thrust out a hip while she jotted down their orders on a dollar-store notepad.

Luc watched her retreat to the kitchen and sighed. “Not yet forty.”

“A child,” Vien agreed.

At the kitchen window, she rose up on her toes and gave the cook their order. From the back, she looked a decade younger. The skin was what gave her away.

The last strains of Tommy James's voice echoed as Luc turned back to face Vien. “I suppose you know about the suspension. You've spoken with Bonnaire?”

Vien brought his hands up from his lap and interlaced his fingers, exposing knobby knuckles that looked a little arthritic. “Not just with Bonnaire,” he admitted. “The school's had two emergency staff meetings on the subject of your son.”

Luc tried to hold Vien's gaze, but it was too much. On the sound system, a new song selection started up: “Come Together,” by John Lennon.

Vien unlaced and relaced his fingers, as if he didn't trust them. “What can I tell you, Luc? Everyone's taking this pretty seriously.”