The Last Life (36 page)

"Take care of your mother." My father made a broad wave. Neither she nor I had got out of the car to kiss him good-bye, and only after he had slipped between the old ladies and the sliding doors did I stir, to take his former place in the front seat.

"Well, that's one menace off our minds for a few days," my mother said.

"Do you think he has some girlfriend in Paris?"

"I've decided not to think about it. He's going for work."

"Yeah, but you said that—"

"We'll just keep our eyes on what we can see, all right?"

"That's hypocritical."

"It's realistic. You have to be a realist in this world. Your grandfather comes home tomorrow, and the last thing he needs to worry about is the state of his son's marriage."

"Is that why you don't leave him?"

"What?"

"Because you're afraid of Grand'-mère and Grand-père?"

"Don't be ridiculous. I don't leave him because—" She pulled out into traffic, and was quiet as she negotiated the exit onto the main road.

"Why then?"

"Don't be a bully, Sagesse. There are a thousand reasons. And I married your father for better or worse—"

"But you won't even kiss him. You haven't for ages. Since long before all this."

"What do you know about it? Don't talk about things you know nothing about. Honestly, I—"

"Don't, don't, don't. You're as bad as he is. I hate both of you. I hate it all."

My mother sighed. Her face in profile was like a skeleton, the skin tugged almost to breaking over its hollows. But I could see that although she was gaunt, a dewlap dangled a little below her jaw, and her neck was beginning, ever so slightly, to buckle. "Please. Enough. This is my life. This is your life, but not forever. You're young. Soon you'll be free to do as you wish. You'll escape."

"Not soon enough."

"You think I don't remember being your age? You forget that time will pass—"

"That's not it. You just wonder if you'll survive long enough."

"Well, you will. Just tell yourself it's all just a question of time passing."

"Marie-Jo used to say that."

"It's true."

"Not for you."

"Oh no?"

"I mean, you're not going anywhere. You're already here. Unless you choose to change things."

"Thanks a lot. That's a fine way to see my life. Over and done with."

"That's not what I said, Maman. You're young, too. In the world. Lots of people begin again at your age, don't they?"

"I don't know, dear. But this is my life, and I'll deal with it as best I can. Some things you can't walk away from." I knew she didn't mean me, or my father, or even my grandparents. "I figure God knows what he's about," she said.

"I don't. I don't figure that at all."

The next morning, as if in celebration, the haze had lifted and the mistral—that wind so much a part of the region that it is like a household deity, referred to often and fondly by name—gusted, furrowing the water into white caps and buffeting the windows. My mother and grandmother were to fetch my grandfather while I was at school, and after class I was to head not for home, but to the Bellevue, to my grandparents' apartment, where they, and Etienne, would be waiting. In his honor, Titine, their invalid friend (not yet then confined to her house), had had her housekeeper bake a
mouna,
the traditional Algerian Easter cake (although Easter was long past); Zohra was to stay late, to drink a toast to her returned employer. Several other stalwart friends—old people, old enough to be from Algiers—had been invited to come by in the evening, a modest party to cheer my grandfather's return from his enforced cure.

In spite of myself, I passed the day fumbling my present, eyes on the evening, barely able to concentrate. I kept remembering what seemed the last time I had seen him (although it wasn't), in the dock, which had also felt like the first time that I truly saw him, as a man;
when we had looked at each other and I had felt known, and that I knew him, too. It was the first time I had understood the family myth, or at least had felt included in it. Like my grandmother, and like my mother (although she would never consciously have admitted it), I believed that somehow, even now, my grandfather could save us, could pull our family together and back from the brink. My mother and grandmother had made room, had made myths, for his disciple, my father, willing him to take the old man's place; and still, the power lay with the patriarch.

I hadn't been to the hotel for the better part of a year. It was half a mile from the house, and yet I had turned my back on it as though it didn't exist. I approached its iron gates like a trepidatious guest, my tread heavy and my gorge rising. The palm trees along the gravel drive loomed taller, their pineapple trunks hairier than I remembered. The waxy bushes, too, were overgrown, reaching out to tickle at my elbow. The grounds whittered and rustled—a cat blundered through the underbrush—but I encountered no people. At the driveway's fork, after deliberately crushing a waddling beetle underfoot, I veered to the right, along the narrower road curling around into the wood, to the residence block from behind, rather than venturing up to the hotel itself, and running the risk of encountering Marie-Jo near the tennis courts. I walked quickly, breathless from the incline and my anxiety, grateful for the back stairs that wound up from the employees' parking lot to my grandparents': I didn't have to see the swimming pool, the paved piazza above it, the old plane tree—and yet, I was curious. At the last moment, I scurried along a disused track behind a stand of bamboo, a shortcut from our long-ago games of cops and robbers, and, edging close to the pebbled wall of the staff residence, catching dust along my back and snagging my satchel, here and there, on creepers, I emerged into a familiar hiding place (still used: three foil gum wrappers winked at my feet), a hollow behind a large bank of laurels, whence I could peer out at my former playground without being seen.

A young couple lounged in the cleft of the plane tree, straddling it like a rocket, looking out to sea. I glimpsed only their backs, the woman's swathe of long black hair, the man's muscular arm stroking the woman's slimmer, paler one. They were not people I recognized; Marie-Jo was nowhere in sight. A flat-capped gardener pruned in the flower bed to their left, at the edge of my sight, whistling erratically through his teeth. Beyond them the water glittered, crisp, to the horizon. This was an alien idyll; it belonged to other people now. I told myself I had nothing to fear from it, from them; they would know neither me nor my relationship to this place. And yet I couldn't bring myself to crash through the bushes onto the open ground, and I could not imagine striding boldly up to the building's front door. Instead I retreated, back through the foliage and radical clutter and slowly (I told my heart, "beat slow-ly") up the rest of the stairs to the building's back entrance.

Rather than take the elevator, I climbed to the penthouse, lurking on landings in the dark between each floor to be sure no one was coming or going from any of the other apartments. I heard, through the walls, Thierry's mother calling to someone from her kitchen; I thought I caught the sound of footsteps behind Marie-Jo's double-fronted door, next to which the bell button flickered invitingly in the half-light, and took the next set of steps two at a time to get out of range. By the time I rang the chime at my grandparents', I was perspiring everywhere, my shirt stuck unpleasantly to my back and its spots, and a trickle oozed down the cleft of my buttocks. I just had time to smear the sweat from my upper lip before Zohra opened the door and crowed at the sight of me.

"My big girl," she cried, throwing her arms around my waist and raising her brown cheek for my embrace. "How tall! How fat you're getting! This is a day for rejoicing; all the loved ones home again!"

"Everyone's here?"

"Only your dear father is missing. But he has already telephoned. Come in, come in!" She grasped my biceps in her tight little fingers and pulled me across the threshold.

"Can I wash up, do you think? Before I say hello?"

"Bathroom, yes, the bathroom! You want to be nice and clean for your grandfather, my little chickadee. Poor girl, straight from school. Come!" She came with me to the bathroom, and followed me inside. "The red towel—you'll use the red towel, yes?"

"Sure."

"And the little soap, the one for guests? The other is your grandfather's—brand-new for his homecoming."

"You bet."

She stood watching me as I approached the sink, apparently unwilling to leave. I could hear my grandmother's voice in the living room.

"The friend, Titine, has come already, with an oxygen tank, no less. Your brother is also here—a big boy, now, too."

"He certainly is. Do you think—would you mind if I shut the door?"

"No, no. I'm going." Still, she stood. And then whispered, as she pulled the door closed, bowing out like a courtier, her eyes bright with emotion, "It's so sad, in the living room. Everyone is wounded. I'm glad that you're here now—a strong, healthy girl."

I took off my shirt, surveyed my clammy torso in the mirror. The bathroom smelled familiar, of breeze and lavender soap. Its little slatted windows, up high, were half open to the afternoon, and an occasional edge of mistral wafted in. I washed at the sink, soaping my back as best I could, and rubbing it hard with the rough towel, an old one, as sharp as a scrubbing brush. As I passed my blind hand over one of my scrubbed spots it started to leak pus; I encouraged it with my fingers until it bled, a liberal leak in my skin. My shirt was white; I could not dress again until I had stanched the seepage. I rifled through the cabinets for a Band-Aid, but found only a packet of gauze and surgical tape, from which I fashioned a bandage. It took several tries, and more than one length of tape, before I could be sure the poultice was properly stuck over the welt. The bandage, lumpy, felt like a little hunch. I thought of Cécile's back, a village of such bandages on the landscape of her shrapnelled skin.

I dressed carefully. It was unpleasant to drape the shirt, still moist in patches, back on my body. I was combing my hair, preparing to rebraid it, when my mother knocked.

"Everything all right?"

"I'm coming."

"What's taking so long?"

"Nothing."

"Your grandfather is wondering where you are."

I felt a surge of irritation at this ritual deference. "Tell him I'm on the toilet."

"There's no need to be unpleasant, Sagesse. Don't spend all day in there."

I made a rucking noise in my throat. "I'll be right along."

I heard her click back along the hall, and tried unsuccessfully to gauge the degree of her annoyance. I finished my braid, fiddled with my bangs, waited. I sat on the toilet and dribbled a little urine into the bowl to make true my assertion; flushed, washed my hands again, practicing my smile as I did so. I wiped the vanity with the red towel, folded it and hung it over the bath.

Then I ventured out, down the hall, past the dining room (from which I could see the pool, at last, empty of swimmers but for a little girl in flowered panties, kicking a yellow board, while her mother lounged on the patio—right about where the shot had struck—and watched), and into the crowded living room.

Zohra, who squatted on a pouffe nearest the archway, leaped up and sprang towards me, making an extravagant pantomime of hugging me as though she had not already done so. "Here she is, the weary schoolchild! Beautiful girl!" She hovered at my elbow, sprite-like, emitting a saltatory energy which unnerved not only me but also—I could tell without looking—the others.

"Kiss your grandfather—there he is!" Zohra pushed me towards him as though I might not have known him. She was not wholly unwise to do so: were he not sitting in my grandfather's chair, were he not the only male in the room besides my brother, my eyes might have skated over him.

He had never been a tall man, but now, even seated, he had shrunk. He perched upon the upholstery like a kinglet on an overgrown throne, as though his feet did not quite reach the ground, while his hands clasped the arms of the chair, splayed like little paws, as if they alone held him in place and kept him from sinking. Smaller (at least to my eye), he had also grown fatter—from the prison food, or my grandmother's biweekly offerings of cakes and chocolates, or from his antidepressant medication—and his face, formerly oval, was now round as a coin, a plump, benign face upon which his eyes, in their cushions, sat matte as licorice jujubes. His downy hair, sparse and formerly grey, was now white, a faint nimbus above his large-lobed ears. He moved to rise, but the effort was considerable—like a small boy scrabbling from a high stool, but without a boy's vigor—and I stepped forward to kiss him. A soaped smell rose up from him. His clothes—ones that had hung in his closet while he was away—tugged at him like someone else's, tight at the collar, slightly twisted over his belly. His belt, I noticed, was buckled at a hole looser than its former, scored and stretched one. I looked into his jujube eyes, wanting again the flash of recognition, the fiery glance. His lids, lizardlike in their slowness, closed once, twice, as if to wash the vagueness from his eyeballs, as if he were trying to resurface but could not. He patted my cheek—"I've missed you, little one"—and from his mouth strayed a cloud of briny, old-man's breath.

"I've missed you too."

The only sign that he was he (but who? the man I thought I had seen across a room? the man I had grown up fearing and skirting? the man of the family stories?) came from his papery hand, which he folded over mine when I leaned towards him, and held, almost desperately, when I straightened, so that I turned and crouched alongside his chair to face the room, my fingers still his prisoner.

I smiled (as I had practiced) at the assembly. Arrayed along the sofa to my grandfather's right sat my mother, smiling more brightly even than I; an imposing woman that I did not know, with a beetle brow and large, dark eyes, in her fifties, perhaps, with broad hands folded in her lap, and black, scarablike earrings that reminded me of the unfortunate creature I had lately squashed on the path. Beside her quivered Titine, wispy and prematurely wizened by her ailments, her pointed chin ticking like an unsteady barometer. At her knee, her silver oxygen tank rested on its trolley, festooned with plastic tubing, ready in case of need.