Theory of Remainders (25 page)

“That’s quite good,” Roger concurred. “Say, I’d suggest that you make the English rather complicated.”

“Of course. Then we’ll find a place to type it up.”

“Nonsense. In France an official letter must be handwritten. Typing is too impersonal. And I suggest you use that nearly indecipherable hand of yours.”

“Unintelligibility equals authority?”

“Don’t you find?”

So Philip wrote out an elaborately phrased and hieroglyphically scrawled request for the records pertaining to Édouard Morin. “What do you think?” he said, showing off his handiwork.

Roger’s brow furrowed deeply as he tried and failed to read it. “Excellent. But are you sure you want to circulate counterfeit documents?”

“But it’s not a counterfeit—not quite. It’s a letter written by me, signed by me and for my benefit. They don’t need to know that I am both the doctor and the concerned party. Of course our friends up in Stairway A won’t know that, and we won’t go out of our way to point it out. All we need is to persuade the woman at the desk.”

Roger rubbed his jaw. “Probably. But the bureaucracy is a complicated machine. You never know who might take a closer look at it. Say, be sure to make your signature large and florid. That always makes a good impression.”

At a photocopy shop down the street Philip took scissors to one of his business cards, cutting it into fragments which he scotch-taped onto a sheet of paper, approximating the layout of letterhead. After a test, he slipped the handwritten letter into the paper tray, printing the mock letterhead over the request. Even Roger had to admit that it looked professional.

“But something’s missing,” Roger mused. “Would you happen to have any American currency?” Philip produced a fifty from his wallet. “Nothing smaller?” Roger asked him. “Such a waste.”

He took scissors to the bill, cutting out the seal of the Department of Treasury, gluing the tiny emblem onto the letter beneath Philip’s signature. “Such fine paper they use for American bills,” he said with admiration. “It feels so official.” He held the sheet up to the light, frowning like an artist considering finishing touches. Then he borrowed the rubber address stamp from the proprietor of the shop, and punched it over the seal and signature, twisting it slightly to smudge the lettering.

“Nothing is official in France without a stamp,” he said.

The words “
TechnoCopie—Rue des Bons Enfants—Rouen
” would be legible to anyone looking closely. Which meant: no one.

A little before two o’clock they trotted down the steps of the
Palais de Justice
with an enormous packet of photocopies supplied by a less fierce, more compliant woman at the Bureau of Records. As they departed, the sour harpy of the morning crossed their path in the other direction, returning from lunch. Her icy stare followed them as they rushed ahead, and they didn’t turn back.

To celebrate this documentary triumph, Roger dragged Philip off to a bar where he downed one Belgian beer after another, Philip accompanying him with tonic water. The more Roger drank, the more he spoke about Élisabeth, insisting that he was not going to let her interfere with his bachelor lifestyle—a lifestyle that served him well, thank you very much, and that needed no fixing, especially not at the hands of a woman who had booted him out of her own life several times, which showed how poorly qualified she was to give advice. How could anyone expect him to live with a woman like that? He could take care of himself, couldn’t he? Each question came like another card at the top of a teetering structure.

“Is it really me you’re trying to convince?” Philip asked.

And the house of cards collapsed. Roger stared into his glass.

“What is it you really want?” Philip asked.

“I only wish I knew.” He took a deep breath. “All my problems come down to women. Think of it: if I hadn’t run off to shag Élisabeth that night, your daughter would still be alive.”

There it was. That old chestnut. “Of course,” Philip replied. “Just like me: if I’d not returned to Paris. Or hadn’t brought her out to Anne-Madeleine’s in the first place. Or had taught her to stay at home with dolls and tea parties. We can play the what-if game all day, but don’t think you can win at it. It’s a contest everyone loses.”

Roger hung his head. “You know what? I saw Élisabeth the other evening, and for a little while I remembered—vaguely, mind you—why it is we got married. But the next morning, not so much. That’s how it goes, back and forth. Again and again. It’s dragged on like this for years now. All in all, I find it terribly distressing.”

Philip fingered the edge of the file from the courthouse, as thick as a dictionary. “Well, at least there aren’t any children involved.”

“Of course there aren’t.”

His combative tone gave Philip pause. “Do you wish there were?”

He harrumphed. “You know what? I’m done talking about this.”

“Ignoring problems won’t make them go away.”

“Could have fooled me,” Roger shot back. “It seems to have worked pretty well for you over the past fifteen years.”

Philip absorbed the blow. He’d touched a nerve, and now he let a long silence hang between them as Roger’s shoulders rounded.

His head bowed, Roger rasped out a question. “Hypothetical. Say a man walks into your office one day. Tells you he hates his life. Wants to begin anew. What advice do you give him?”

Philip paused, trying to catch his brother-in-law’s eye. “Well,” he began, “I’d tell him to start with something small. Something he knows he can handle. Once he has mastered that, he should add one more thing. And then one more. That would be it. Start small, and make one change at a time.”

Roger stared blankly at the table, nodding.

Philip left him to sober up in the city center while he hiked the steep hill into the neighborhood where Yvonne and Hervé lived. By the time he reached the two-story brick house, he’d broken into a sweat, and he stood to cool off, not wanting to appear as desperate as he felt. After all, he had no backup plan if Yvonne refused him. Only she had the language skills, and only she understood the context. No one else came close.

When the doorbell went unanswered, his shoulders lightened. A reprieve. He checked his watch. It wasn’t even four o’clock yet, and chances were good she was still at the university. She used to prefer her classes early, but perhaps her habits had changed? Any one of a thousand things might have delayed her. Still, if he waited long enough, she was bound to turn up. He walked around to the metal gate for the backyard, which he found unlocked. Lime green grass, primly mowed, carpeted the yard, while on the trellises along the south the roses had started to bloom. The gardens displayed the abundance of early summer, thriving on warmth and humidity.

He took a seat at the patio table, settling in to begin the courthouse file while he waited. The girth of the packet both daunted and promised: surely, in the ocean of those hundreds of pages, something useful would bob to the surface.

He set out the diary and pulled out Yvonne’s ballpoint pen, ready to record his thoughts. There were administrative filings of all sorts, but the heart of the matter lay in the police statements, the helter-skelter collection of evidence and testimony, closer in time to the events themselves, making these pages especially precious. Compared to the carefully edited legalese of the later documents, these were the subconscious of the case, churning in their uncensored disarray.

Everything began with the original missing person report filed in Yvetot after Anne-Madeleine’s call, late on that July night—at an hour when, as they would later discover, Sophie already lay dead. Somewhere. These first sheets captured the messiness of the original panic: when she’d last been seen, when Anne-Madeleine first grew worried, where she had looked. The police notes listed what Sophie had been wearing—and the simple mention of his daughter’s lavender T-shirt triggered a surge of memories, images of closets and dressers, laundry and messy bedrooms. Philip smelled now the peach-scented shampoo she’d used all that year.

There was the handwritten chronology, with items crossed out and corrected, reconstructing Sophie’s last known hours. Then came the list of people she knew in town. The whereabouts of all the family members—Roger and Élisabeth in Yvetot, Flora and Pierre in Rouen, Évelyne and Sylvain already living in the south. And then the lists of friends and neighbors, the broadening circle of all those who knew Sophie, who might have had their eye on her.
Who?
That had been the question of the first hours, and every name had rung with guilt.

The printed words began to dance before Philip’s eyes, and he turned from the pages to anchor himself in the present. But Yvonne’s middle-class backyard offered no haven, filled as it was with the telltale traces of family life. A rusted bucket sat in the flower bed, a pair of dirty gloves draped over the side; under the hedge lay a partly deflated soccer ball; the lawn mower stood ready to serve, its electric cord trailing off like a long tail; three empty glasses waited patiently on a tray by the back door. These mute signs of domesticity pitched about him like buoys on a rough sea, and plunged him into a froth of memories: the Aubert home in Yvetot, with the police milling about in the entryway; Anne-Madeleine crying; Yvonne sitting with him in the stillness of the living room; the arrival of Élisabeth, Roger joining them later; the phone ringing and not ringing; the thoughts of Sophie before, during, and after. And, last of all, that old sensation of slipping back into the dark waters of his own imagination, now strangely troubled. Something was amiss—out of place or out of sequence—and he couldn’t put his finger on it.

“Can I help you?” came a voice in French. He spun around in his chair to see a girl with long, dark hair standing at the gate. It was Margaux. Yvonne would be furious. How stupid of him not to realize that she might appear first!

“Terribly sorry,” he stammered, rising to his feet. “I shouldn’t have come into your yard like this. I hope I didn’t startle you.”

“Yes, a bit,” she said tentatively.

“My apologies. Let me introduce myself. I—”

“I know who you are. We met at that dinner. At
Mamie’s
house.”

“That’s right.”

“You’re the American.
Maman
’s first husband.”

He nodded, unable to turn his eyes from her. “My name is Philip. Philip Adler.”

Margaux walked into the yard, dropping her school backpack on the ground. She pulled out a chair from the other side of the table and slid onto it. “So, you’re my . . .” She scrunched her brow. “My stepfather? No, that’s not right, is it?”

“No.”

“Father-in-law?” She frowned. “That’s not it, either.”

Perhaps in some language there was a word for the father of your dead half-sister, but Philip couldn’t find it in French. “I’m . . . nothing . . . that is, I don’t think there’s a term for it.”

Margaux looked unsatisfied with this hole in language. Then she sighed and accepted it. Looking around, she scanned the garden. “Have you seen Rodolphe?”

“Who?”

“Our cat,” she explained. “He’s usually in the garden. But he stayed out all night, and I was worried about him.”

“No. No sign of him, I’m afraid.”

She turned back to him. “You’re here for Mother, aren’t you?”

“That’s right. Do you expect her home soon?”

She shrugged. “Perhaps? It’s hard to know for sure. Sometimes she gets home quite late. She has all these meetings.”

Philip’s mind raced. This was a mistake. He shouldn’t be talking to Margaux. He shouldn’t have come at all. He rose to his feet. “I’ll stop by another time.” He started scooping his papers into their folder. “I don’t mean to be in the way. If you could just mention to your mother that—”

“Tell me,” Margaux interrupted. “Do I look very much like her?”

He froze. “I’m sorry?”

She cocked her head. “Like Sophie. Do you think I look like her?”

Philip tried to swallow and failed.