Theory of Remainders (11 page)

Philip watched from a distance as the plane began its violent acceleration down the runway, the nose lifting into the air.

At a payphone in the terminal, he punched in a number.

“It’s me,” he said when it picked up.

“Philip?” came Roger’s stunned voice from the other end of the line. “Shouldn’t you be over the English Channel right about now? Are they allowing phone calls from thirty thousand feet?”

“I couldn’t do it,” he said.

“Do what?”

“I’m sorry about last night.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“And you were right about Margaux. She does remind me of Sophie.”

“Me too.”

“I’m coming back.”

Roger was all attention. “Really?”

“Just for a day or two.”

“Yes, of course. Just a couple of days.”

“I don’t know what good it will do.”

“Nor do I. But we’ll find out.”

“So,” Philip concluded, “it looks like you get to have it your way after all.”

“
My way
,” Roger breathed. “It so happens that’s just the way I like it.”

Six

Those first days he’d had the excuse of jet lag and the shock of rediscovery, but the time for maudlin overreaction was past. If he was going to stay in Yvetot, he might as well do things properly, and that would mean going back to the beginning and laying it all out as clearly as he could.

No one knew better than Philip how the mind darns over holes, stitching together the torn fabric of memory. Remembrances are always fictions. But that doesn’t make recollection a bad place to start. Quite the contrary.

He spread out his cache of photographs on the writing desk in the room at La Cauchoise, where Monsieur Bécot had begrudgingly checked him back in. These were the shots he’d borrowed from the album at home: Sophie perched on her bicycle in one, gripping her tennis racket in another, then carrying her skis or holding up her arm in the cast. There was the trick photo with the two Sophies face-to-face. Viewing these images was a painful pleasure, one he ordinarily wouldn’t have allowed himself. But if he wanted to make headway, he’d need to spend some time in this underworld, nudging old ghosts.

It had started on a Saturday at the end of her eighth-grade year. They were already late, Anne-Madeleine having expected them in Yvetot the night before, where Sophie was to spend the week. While Yvonne slaved over a conference paper on one of Petrarch’s sonnets, Philip lobbied for them to light out for the countryside. Yvonne wasn’t ready, wasn’t even sure she could go, and this led to a tiff. She told him to go without her, while he insisted she could work from her mother’s home. Right then and there, in the heat of the argument, they nearly canceled the whole expedition. But the end of June in the city was hot and humid, the countryside beckoned, and Philip had prodded and wheedled. Sophie teamed up with her father in tacit conspiracy, moping ostentatiously. This fresh-faced, spring-loaded girl, newly emancipated from school, needed room to run.

Later on he would torture himself with variants of that day. What if they had argued an hour longer? If they had delayed for another day? If a cool breeze had kicked up across the capital, making the countryside less seductive? But the facts were the facts. They had agreed on a revised plan. Yvonne would set aside her conference paper for one day. They would drive out and stay in Yvetot overnight, then return home, leaving their daughter behind.

During the drive, Sophie rode in the back, her feet up on the seat, her nose in a book. He remembered which one: the second volume of
The Lord of the Rings,
in French translation. Sam was her favorite character.

Under a thin gauze of clouds they pulled into the drive of Yvonne’s childhood home, and Anne-Madeleine, aging but still spry, appeared on the stone steps. Kisses and greetings all around. Anne-Madeleine took Sophie’s backpack, faking a groan at its weight, and the two of them headed off for the hideaway bedroom on the third floor. Philip and Yvonne snuck a bite in the kitchen, then walked under the lindens to stretch their road-weary legs. Yvonne took his hand, glad to be there despite her earlier resistance. That evening Roger showed up with Élisabeth on his arm, boisterous as ever, and at dinner while the wine flowed he’d gotten them all roaring with laughter, especially his favorite niece, Sophie, who reveled in her uncle’s madcap stories, and who knew how to return the volleys of his wit, which Roger received with a caricature of indignation.

Throughout the evening Yvonne and Philip let themselves forget about hospitals and patients and literature. Who cared about conference papers? How could they have squabbled like that? During a gale of laughter Yvonne had pressed his foot with hers under the table, and a look in her eyes had made him eager for the hour when the guests would leave.

The next morning they rose late, breakfasting on jam and bread in the kitchen, washing it down with bowls of dark coffee. Yvonne was preoccupied once again with her work, holing up in the living room with her notes. Philip lent Anne-Madeleine a hand with hedge-trimming in the garden. Sophie had run off to the neighbors, searching for the twins she often saw during the summer, making her plans for this week in the countryside. They had a light lunch—a
salade niçoise
, he recalled—and then early in the afternoon he and Yvonne returned their bags to the car. He kissed his daughter on the cheek. She graced a poor joke of his with a laugh. And then they were off. In the mirror of the car he saw her wave as they rolled over the crackling gravel of the drive.

That was the image that stuck in his mind—Sophie’s reflection in the rear-view mirror, her hand in the air.

Not that night but the following one, after a long day at the hospital, while Philip was deep in sleep, the phone rang at one o’clock in the morning, jolting them awake. He experienced the sudden pinching that accompanies wrong-time phone calls, a clutching in the heart. Anne-Madeleine’s voice came over the line, strained and urgent. Even before he made out her words he understood the intonation.

That was the moment his life started to tip, beginning its long tumble into a void whose very existence he had never suspected.

Then came the night drive back to Yvetot, racing on the country roads, with Yvonne shrunken in the other seat. The roar of the engine. The faint squeal of tires on the curves. Their arrival. Anne-Madeleine, huddled on the sofa, anguished, crying.

Sophie had last been seen in the late afternoon when she wandered off toward the park, a soccer ball under her arm. Anne-Madeleine hadn’t missed her until dinner, at which point she’d scouted out the streets, asked the neighbors, going further and further afield. By ten o’clock she’d called the police—who now wanted to talk to Philip.

Had he been with Yvonne all day? Was there anyone who could vouch for his whereabouts? Rage had flared inside Philip as he realized the nature of their questions. At the same time, his professional self understood. Statistically, yes, it would be a relative, a male relative. They had to ask. He gave them the information they needed.

Next came the updates about the search. Officers described the neighborhood sweep. Rouen had been alerted.

Philip listened to it all in a daze. Less than twenty-four hours earlier he had kissed his daughter on the cheek; now, at three a.m. he heard the police debate the merits of dredging the river. He felt sure there’d been a mistake, a miscommunication. Sophie would walk through the back door at any moment. She’d be found lounging in an attic room, lost in a book and deaf to the clomp of boots and the rumble of male voices below. His mind played tricks, generating one totally implausible—but arguably possible—explanation after another. The father trumped the psychiatrist, denying the fact of his own denial.

Around four a.m. Flora and Pierre showed up. Élisabeth had already arrived. Yvonne did most of the talking with the police. It was easier for her, he told himself, because of the language. He recalled Roger’s arrival as the first fingers of dawn showed in the east.

And while they waited, time was becalmed. The sail of the minutes couldn’t find the wind, the hours foundered on the rocks.

Then, late the next morning, one more police car rolled up, the gravel crunching, the sound of it somber. There was the look on the face of the captain, the first mention of Édouard Morin, the awkward, bug-eyed adolescent from a few blocks away, a boy Philip had actually met, had spoken with—
and had already begun to diagnose.
No, he was not autistic, as people used to whisper. The aloofness, the quirks of speech, the obsessive behaviors—the symptoms all pointed to something on the schizophrenia spectrum. Schizoid. That had been Philip’s conclusion. Months earlier he’d announced this to Anne-Madeleine, to Yvonne. The boy needed care, treatment.

They’d shrugged it off. It wasn’t for them to say. They didn’t want to meddle in another family. It wasn’t the French way.

For want of meddling, his daughter had died.

Of all things it was the father, Olivier Morin, just a little older than Philip himself, who turned his son in. Having grown suspicious after hearing about the girl’s disappearance, the father had pressed the boy for answers. Édouard couldn’t account for crucial hours, and bit by bit spatters of information came out.

Philip knew that a schizophrenic’s world can be as tightly sealed as an oyster’s shell. Édouard’s confession consisted of short, staccato answers, sketching the events incompletely, like dots on a page that hinted at an image.

What mattered the most was what Morin wouldn’t say, what even his father couldn’t tear out of him: where it had happened. Or more precisely:
where she was
.

Don’t worry, the police had said. They would find the body. And they tried. Days passed while they searched the house, the yard, the park, the sheds, the dumpsters. A diver was lowered into an old well. Dogs were brought in. Strings of volunteers stalked through woodlands and fields. There was no shortage of possible clues. After all, the woods were full of trails and footprints, litter and shreds of fabric. But one by one they led to nothing. Days turned into weeks. There were limits to how far one could search, and to how long people could care. Meanwhile the legal proceedings were underway, full of evaluations and reports, also headed nowhere.

Philip had trudged through those weeks, then months, as if in a trance, tortured by the suspicion that he could have done something, nagged by the intuition that he’d brought it all upon himself, that this was his punishment. For running away from the States. For turning his back on his past. For daring to start something new.

And then came the night, months later, when Yvonne finally uttered the words that had been gathering like a storm, ones she could no longer contain, and that represented the beginning of their end.
You can’t change what happened
, she said.
You need to pull yourself together
.

Certainly she’d meant these words to be an outstretched hand, a lifeline. After all, she’d been through hell herself. But the fact that Yvonne could utter these words after only eight months, made her seem like a stranger.

As evidence, recollections are awkward and unreliable. Memory is the twin of imagination. However, as with lies, the sags and bulges of remembrance often show the general contours of the truth. As a psychiatrist it was Philip’s job to peer under covers and masks, and to tap at the walls and floors of his patients’ stories in order to locate the secret cavities and false bottoms.

To equip himself for his work he stopped at the supermarket just off the square. The abundance of purple-veined lettuce, meaty mushrooms, and misshapen quince fruits contrasted with the sparseness of the school supplies, now out of season. Unable to locate a single spiraled tablet, Philip settled for a girl’s diary, a slender volume of pleasant heft, with a cheap leather cover dyed cornflower blue and sporting the imprint of a dragonfly. The binding was simple, but it opened easily and the ruled pages would lie flat. The diary’s daintiness clashed with the task he needed it for, but it would have to do.

From the hotel he called Jonas that afternoon to let him know he’d be staying in France for a few more days. “Just to wrap things up,” he said.