Theory of Remainders (23 page)

“Because if you aren’t,” she continued, “I’ve got stuff I gotta—”

“Melanie,” he interrupted. “I haven’t been entirely honest with you.”

There was a silence on the other end. He could imagine her sitting up straight, weighing his words.

“What do you mean?” she said, stretching the syllables with suspicion.

“You’re right. I am here in France because of something important. More important than I can describe. I’m sorry I had to interrupt our sessions for this, but that’s what happens sometimes. Reality gets in the way.”

There was a pause. He could tell his frankness had taken her off-balance.

“What is it, this important thing?”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you much about it.”

“Oh, I get it,” she said, her tone bouncing back. “It’s super-important, but not for delicate ears. Is that it? Well, that’s all very interesting, Doctor Adler, but—”

He made a snap decision. “It has to do with a thing that happened long ago. And now a chance I have to . . . to do something about it.”

Once again the line went quiet, and Philip tried to read the silence. Blind to her gestures and her expressions, he relied all the more heavily on sounds and their absence. He heard a shuffling on her side.

“To . . . fix it?” she said.

“Not quite. But to make it better. To make it . . .” He searched. “Bearable.”

There was a pause. “I see.”

That was as far as Philip was willing to go. These revelations were already pushing the limits of professional conduct. He backed into less threatening territory. He told Melanie a bit about Normandy, describing the countryside, the cows, the sea, the food—even giving her a rundown of the motley regulars in the
Tord-boyaux
, at one point eliciting a squeak that sounded suspiciously like a rusty laugh. He kept track of the topics, scribbling a list of key words down on a page of the diary.

And from there he asked about her own family’s vacations, and eventually Melanie uttered a cluster of tentative sentences. The sneer in her voice ebbed. There were still areas of resistance. When the conversation brushed up against her father, Melanie slowed down and veered away—only to return from some other angle. Philip was familiar with the dynamic: the will to communicate was knotted together with the need to censor, like two powerful animals yoked back to back, pulling in opposite directions.

As they neared the end of the hour, he knew he’d have just one chance to address the real topic. Speaking about her father directly would be pointless, but perhaps they could approach the problem by way of a symptom, by discussing the ways she hurt herself. He dreaded transitions such as this—those moments in sessions when he had to risk all the capital he’d built up.

“Before we finish,” he began, “do you mind if I bring up another topic?”

In an instant, the tension was back. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t want to play games with you, Melanie. We have work to do, you know. I thought we might talk about something else. Your eating, for example.”

She said nothing, and Philip jotted a note on his page.

“Or rather,” he continued, “your
not
eating.”

“I’ve already told you,” she bristled. “I’m
not
talking about that.”

He sighed. “I don’t mean to make things difficult. I really don’t. But we can’t avoid it forever.”

The line went quiet, but at least she didn’t hang up.

“I’m not judging,” he continued. “I’m just trying to understand. Why don’t you start by describing to me what your meal schedule is like? Are there specific foods you try to avoid?”

“It’s is none of your business. Don’t you
get
it? It doesn’t mean
anything
. You sound just like my dad.”

“Is it hard not to eat?”

“I’m just not
hungry
, okay? Why can’t people, like,
accept
that?”

“Are you still vomiting?”

She didn’t answer, which Philip took as a yes. He continued. “Do you have any idea why you worry so much about how you look?”

“I couldn’t care
less
how I look.”

“Is that why you dye your hair black? Why you buy all black clothes? Because it seems like you’re very concerned to show how much you don’t care.”

Even from thirty-five hundred miles away Philip could feel the electricity. He wrote down “importance of appearances” and underlined it twice.

“Tell me,” he continued, “do you have your black fingernail polish on today?”

“
Stop
it,” she snarled. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Why does this make you so angry?”

“I don’t eat because I don’t
want
to eat. What’s your
problem
with that?”

“But why don’t you want to eat? Everyone wants to eat.”

She snorted again. “Obviously
not
.”

“Well, then, if you don’t want to eat, what do you want?”

“I’m
not
talking about this anymore.”

“What do you want, Melanie?”

“I want to be
left alone
.”

“Melanie?”

“Go to hell! Go to fucking hell!”

Every word from the girl’s mouth pulsed with pain, but Philip knew he had to push. He was close to the abscess, and he pressed the blade. “Tell me what you want, Melanie.”

“What do I
want?
” she cried into the phone. “I want you to fuck off. I want you to stop calling me. I want . . . all these people . . . to stop wanting things from me!”

He heard her gasp on the other end. Was it for surprise at what she had said? Or simply a breath between stifled sobs? He was about to ask, when suddenly the line clicked. She was gone.

His first impulse was to call her back, but he doubted she would answer, and it could make him look too keen, putting her in control. The smart play would be to give her a day or two to cool down and collect her thoughts. Then they could speak again.

Her complaint of
all these people
meant just one person, he was sure. They were approaching the wound. Melanie herself would have recognized this by now. It was a delicate and dangerous stage, and Philip would need to give their next conversation a great deal of thought.

Thirteen

The next morning he folded himself back in the Smart Car and headed for the countryside, hoping the fresh air and the curves would stir his thoughts. Asphalt widened and narrowed, linking villages that sat like beads on a rosary. Sunshine glinted on the slate roofs and burned off the fog in the fields. Pastures alternated with lush groves. The land about him was happy with life.

Returning by way of the Fécamp road, he once again traversed Ypreville, pausing at the complex intersection by the town hall—the road toward Yvetot weaving around the corner, while arrows to Toqueville and Sorquainville angled right and left. The last name stirred his memory, and he realized that Sorquainville was one of the towns mentioned by Morin when he spoke of the German roadblocks.

He took the turn, heading eastward on a ribbon of asphalt that rose into fields as flat as water. A broad pasture extended on his right, a herd of white cattle lounging in the sun. To the left lay a field of sorghum. He passed a stone cross at an ancient intersection, and as the road wore even thinner, he found a smattering of stunted houses clustered around the remains of a church. Here he brought the car to a full stop and climbed out.

Sorquainville was nothing but a juncture of family farms, a hamlet owing its existence to an intersection, the roads leading almost nowhere. In the direction from which he’d come, Philip saw the distant rooftops of Ypreville. In the other he made out a line of trees. A cow lowed in the distance. Chickens clucked. Somewhere a dog barked.

As he stood on the gravel before the pitched steps of the locked church, he had to wonder. A German roadblock on the road to Sorquainville? The destination wasn’t worthy of blockading. It was barely a dot on the map, a nearly nonexistent plot of turf located on the brink of habitable space. He found it impossible to imagine Sorquainville having any military importance at all.

Back at the hotel, Monsieur Bécot was on the phone at the reception desk, visibly worked up, speaking too fast for Philip to understand. When he hung up the phone, he turned to his American guest, his enthusiasm for once overwhelming his prudence.

“It has happened again, Monsieur Adler,” he cried out in English.

“What do you mean?”

“Another
oh-bus
.” When Philip still didn’t understand, Bécot gestured with both hands, as if presenting an invisible ball. “You remember? An
obus
. A shell left over from the war. You didn’t believe me when I told you how many pieces still come out of the dirt. And yet, here is another one. I say they are like souvenirs. This time it was in Duclin’s field, just a few kilometers away. The old boy went over it with his tractor. He is in the hospital now!”

Philip squinted. “You mean it actually went off?”

“Oh yes,” Bécot replied. “That is Normandy for you. They say we have another forty years of . . . what do you say?
Surprises
. They wait for us, and one by one we find them.”

Bécot was prattling on and Philip nodded vaguely, his thoughts already adrift. Yes, that’s the way it would happen, he told himself. Fifty years from now, in some farmer’s field or in the excavation for a foundation, Sophie’s remains would turn up. No one would understand. There’d be some shrugging of shoulders as the bones were exhumed, and then they’d be carted off to a common grave.

He turned back to the desk. “Monsieur Bécot, I need to pick your brain.”

“This story,” Bécot said, still smiling to himself. “It will be in the newspaper. You wait and see.”

Philip leaned in. “I’ve just returned from a drive, Monsieur Bécot.”

“That’s very good, Monsieur, but I am telling you that—”

“On the way back, I took a little detour. I stopped at Sorquainville.”

“Sorquainville?” Bécot drew back, a perplexed look on his face. “Why would you go to Sorquainville. Nothing is there.” He reassessed. “Not unless you wish to buy a chicken from Monsieur Jouvet.”

“I have a question for you about that town. Back in the war, when the Germans arrived, I understand they put up roadblocks.”

Bécot blinked at Philip. “Well, yes,” he said. “That was at the beginning. When the phantoms arrived.”

“The what?”

“Général Rommel, with his
Panzers
. The people called them
la division fantôme
—ghosts—because they moved so fast, no one knew where they were. The Germans, they did what you describe. They closed roads to keep French soldiers from getting to the coast.”

“Do you happen to know where those roadblocks were located? For instance, would there have been one on the road to Sorquainville?”

Bécot gave a sour look. “But
what
road to Sorquainville? Monsieur Adler, there is no road to Sorquainville from Yvetot. You must go through . . .” He checked his internal coordinates. “Through Ypreville,” he said. “Or from the other side.”

“I see.”