Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel (29 page)

“Where’s Alex?” I asked.

“I sent him back,” she said.

I stared at her.

“I told him to go back as fast as he could,” she went on. “That he should find Ralph, in any case. But who knows, maybe Julia’s there, too.”

I looked at her face, which was lit by the flashing red and yellow disco lights. It was still the same face that I had wanted to take in my hands before pressing my lips to hers, just a few minutes ago, but now what I saw in that face was above all the concerned mother. Concerned not about my daughter, but about her own son. I don’t know whether it occurred to me then
or only much later, but there was something about Alex’s story that didn’t make sense. The timing in particular. How long had he actually hung around there before deciding to sound the alarm? He had cried when he met us on the beach. But was he already crying, or did he start only when he caught sight of his mother?

“He could have helped us,” I said. “He could have pointed out someone here. Someone he saw Julia dancing with, for example. Something might have occurred to him all of a sudden.”

“I think he should be with his father right now. He’s completely confused, Marc. You saw how guilty he feels. Toward you.”

To be with his father, I thought, and almost burst out laughing. Indeed, maybe he was better off being with his father. His father could probably show him how to force girls down onto the sand if they put up a fight.

“Does he have good reason to feel guilty, Judith?” I asked, but right away I regretted having posed the question so directly. Even more, I regretted the accusing tone. I had failed to camouflage my doubts about Alex’s version of events, and that wasn’t good. Now his mother was forewarned. That would make it much harder to catch him telling a lie later on.

“Marc, please …” Judith said; she blinked her eyes. “Alex is still a child. He lost Julia. But you heard the way it went. Maybe it wouldn’t have happened to us that way. But Julia is the one who walked away first, not Alex.”

I looked at her. In my mind I counted to ten. I looked at the light from the disco lamps playing across her forehead, cheeks, and mouth. Was this woman simply stupid? Or was she in fact much smarter than I’d supposed? I had to watch what I said, but I could hardly contain myself.
You’re a woman,
too, you stupid cunt!
I felt like shouting.
You should know what can happen to women. A man has to protect a woman. Even if he’s only a child!

I took a deep breath. “You’re right,” I said. “We shouldn’t jump to conclusions.”

Fortunately, one always has the clichés. The clichés that toss us the life belt when we’re about to drown in troubled waters. I saw Judith’s face relax. She pulled out her cell phone and slid it open.

“Shall I try Ralph?” she said. “Ask if Alex is already there? So Ralph knows he’s on his way, in any case.”

Yes, do that, I thought. Call Ralph. He can tell you from experience that all women are whores. Then no one will need to feel guilty anymore. I looked past Judith’s head at the white, foamy waves curling and breaking against the beach. What I really felt like doing was leaving her here. Walking away without a word. But that would not be smart, I realized. For all sorts of reasons, that wouldn’t be smart.

“Call him,” I said. “While you’re doing that, I’ll go look down there.” I pointed toward the sea, to the place where the sand stopped and the rocks began. The rocks in the water itself were fairly low, running out dozens of yards into the sea, but close to the beach they rose quickly. Behind one of those tall rocks, a half-moon had just appeared.

And it was in the pale light of that moon that I now saw the little group of people. They were standing together a few hundred yards from us, half hidden by one of the rocky outcrops close to the waterline. Five or six of them. They were looking at something. At something on the ground. They were standing around something.

“Ralph?” Judith said. “Where are you?”

Someone left the little group and started running toward the beach club.

“What did you say? Where?” Judith stuck a finger in her ear and turned away from me. “What do you mean? Why aren’t you …?”

I didn’t hear the rest. I took a few giant steps at first, then I started running, too, toward the spot where the group had gathered, at the same time trying to cut off the man who was running toward the club: He was so close by then that I could see that it was indeed a man, a man in white three-quarter pants and a white T-shirt, wearing tennis shoes. Those are the kinds of details you remember later. By that time you already know that both the little group and the man in white have something to do with you—have
everything
to do with you.

What is it? I shouted in English. What’s happened?

An ambulance! the man shouted back breathlessly. We have to call an ambulance.

I’m a doctor, I said. For the second time that night.

Julia was lying in the wet sand between the rocks. The group parted when I knelt down beside her and felt her pulse. I laid my ear to her chest and spoke her name quietly. She was deathly still. Her face felt cold, but I could detect a weak pulse. Weak but regular.

I put my forearm behind her neck and raised her head slightly. It was only then that my gaze traveled down the rest of her body. I was her father, but I looked with a doctor’s eye. As a doctor I saw within those few seconds what had happened. The visible marks left no room for doubt. As a father, I won’t go into detail about the precise nature of those marks. Not even
so much because I swore an oath of confidentiality, but simply because of the right to privacy. My daughter’s privacy, that is.

So I’ll stick to presenting the thoughts that flashed through my mind at that moment.

The person who’s responsible for this is alive only in the biological sense, I thought. He’s walking around here somewhere right now, because that is what human organisms happen to do. Walk around. The heart pumps. The heart is a mindless force. As long as the heart keeps pumping blood, we keep moving. But one day it would stop. Better sooner than later. I, as a doctor, would see to that.

“Daddy …”

Julia blinked her eyes briefly, then closed them again.

“Julia.”

I shook her head gently, I laid my other hand against the back of it, against her hair. I dug my fingers into that hair and pressed her against my chest.

“Julia,” I said.

Caroline didn’t say anything. At least she didn’t say the things I’d been afraid she’d say. For God’s sake, how could you have let her go to that beach club by herself? Why didn’t you go looking for her right away? If you’d gone looking for her right away, this never would have happened!

No, she didn’t say anything as I lifted Julia from the backseat of the car and carried her up to the summer house. All she did was bury her face in her hands—only for a moment, two seconds at most. Then she pulled herself together and went back to being her daughter’s mother. She caressed Julia’s hair and whispered sweet things to her.

But even later on, she never said those other things. You sometimes hear that the first minutes and hours are crucial when there’s a tragedy in the family. Those first minutes and hours determine whether the bonds are strong enough to survive the tragedy. A person who starts making accusations can
cause irreparable damage. I was familiar with the statistics. Divorce was more the rule than the exception. You’d think that a tragedy would bring people closer together. That the bond would be strengthened by shared grief. But that’s not the case. A lot of people actually want to forget the grief. And it’s that other person who keeps reminding them of it.

I can’t blame the people who choose to forget. And I don’t mean to claim higher moral ground for us simply because we did draw closer together. I wouldn’t even dare to claim that we
chose
to do that. It’s just the way it went.

We were standing at the foot of the steps to the summer house. I still had Julia in my arms. There was a moment of hesitation. Did I really want to carry my daughter up there? To put her down on the couch in the living room? Where everyone could see her? But Ralph and Judith’s bedroom or her mother’s or the boys’ didn’t seem like good options, either. Better, then, to go to our tent. I knew what I wanted more than anything else. I wanted to hide my daughter from the eyes of others. I wanted to be alone with her. With us. I wanted her to be alone with us.

At that same moment Emmanuelle came out of the house. She appeared in the doorway of the ground-floor apartment and waved us over.

“Come,” she said. “Come here.”

First I had carried Julia to the beach club. There I had a brief moment of doubt about what was best. Judith suggested we call an ambulance, but I cut her short. No ambulance, I said decidedly. I thought about the flashing lights, about the people crowding around the gurney as it was slid into the back.
About the siren. About the inevitable destination: a hospital. At the hospital, other people would see to my daughter. Helpful nurses. Doctors. I was a doctor myself. I had been the first to assess the situation. I had posed the only correct diagnosis. There was no need for others to pose that same diagnosis all over again.

Then Judith suggested that she get the car and that I stay with Julia. I have to admit, she reacted efficiently. She kept it together, as they say. To be honest, I was almost expecting her to lose control. But she remained dead calm. She didn’t try to argue with me. Okay, she said, if that’s what you want, that’s how we’ll do it. She tried to lay a hand on Julia’s forehead, but when I turned away from her, she didn’t try again. I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. People had already come over and were standing around us. I was enraged by the way they looked at my daughter. Too many people had looked at her already. I’m a doctor, I said. So please keep moving. Everything is under control.

No, I told Judith. We’re getting out of here. I’ll carry her.

And that’s how it went. As I walked, Julia lost consciousness again. I shook her awake. She had to stay awake. At the first beach we found Alex, Thomas, and Lisa. No trace of Ralph or Stanley. Given the circumstances, I remained fairly levelheaded. I kept an eye out for Alex’s reaction. He looked at Julia only quickly, then looked away. He didn’t come any closer. Looking back on it, I suppose my body language was clear as a bell. I was like an animal that growls when an intruder tries to approach its young. No, I corrected myself, not
like
an animal. An animal.

The crucial thing now was Lisa. I saw her face as she
came running up to us. “Julia doesn’t feel well at all,” I said quickly, before she could ask. “Come on, we’re going back to the house.”

Thomas danced around us a few times, yelling “Soccer! Soccer!” until Judith grabbed him roughly by the arm and yanked on it so hard that he fell onto the sand. I saw the tears in his eyes, but Judith pulled him up just as roughly by both wrists. “Just act normal, Thomas,” she said. “Get moving!”

And that is how we walked to the car. Me, carrying Julia in my arms, and right behind us Judith, who was holding Lisa’s hand, followed by Alex and a moping Thomas. On the way back from the other beach club, Judith had told me that Ralph was already at the summer house, he had taken their car. Stanley was nowhere to be found.

“My God, what happened to your car?” Judith asked. She pointed at the front bumper, which was hanging loose on one side. The chrome ring around the left headlight was dented and broken in one place, the glass was shattered.
Go to the garage tomorrow morning and have them fix it
, Stanley had said to me just a few hours ago, here at this same spot.
I’ll pay for the whole thing; it was worth every penny
.

“We took that dark road up there,” I said. “I think we must have swiped a tree.”

Judith asked no further. She held open the back door so I could lay Julia on the seat. Then she crawled in beside my daughter and took Julia’s head gently into her lap. Sliding up a little toward the middle, she waved to Alex to get in. She told Thomas and Lisa to sit together up front.

“But that’s not allowed!” Thomas said. “That’s against the law!”

“Thomas …” Judith said—and that was enough; his arms crossed angrily over his chest, he moved in beside Lisa in the passenger seat.

Before I started the car, I called Caroline.

“Don’t get upset,” I said quietly. “It’s not really all that bad.” It really was all that bad, but I didn’t want anyone to panic before we got there. At the same time, I did my best to speak so quietly that Julia couldn’t hear me. “No one has been hurt,” I said. That, too, was a lie.

“I’m on my way now,” I said, and hung up.

Emmanuelle straightened the quilt on the twin bed and fluffed up the pillows. As I lowered Julia onto it, Emmanuelle went into the bathroom and came back a minute later with a towel and water in a porcelain bowl. She sat down on the other side of the bed, close to the head end, moistened one corner of the towel, and held it gently to Julia’s forehead.

“Voilà,”
she said. Then she looked at me. “Do you know what happened? Do you know who …?” I shook my head. Only then, when I looked straight at her, did I realize that she wasn’t wearing her sunglasses. For the first time since we’d arrived. For the first time I was looking into her eyes.