Theory of Remainders (38 page)

“Am I?” Philip stepped toward him. “I know about you and Hervé,” he announced.

Confusion spread over Roger’s face, followed by a wave of understanding. He blanched.

“I’ve put it together,” Philip continued. “All of it. The roses. The guilt. Why you and Élisabeth arrived separately that night.”

Now confusion returned. “What night?”

“Spare me!” he spat, turning now to focus on the cavity in the ravine. His daughter was the one who needed him now. He’d deal with Roger later. Brushing aside loose earth, he got a clearer view of the ladder of ribs, bowed upward. The sternum appeared to be intact. There was the clavicle. Many of the bones, no longer tethered by soft tissue, had come apart, but their position was clear enough. He saw the scapula, followed by the humerus, leading to the radius and ulna of the forearm. Through the front of the thorax, he made out the curved line of vertebrae embedded in the dirt.

And then his knees gave way and the great tightness in his chest loosened. His breath came heaving back. Something was wrong. Everything.

“What is it?” Roger said.

He struggled. “It’s . . . not her.” He turned and stared as his brother-in-law.

Roger shook his head. “You don’t need to do this yourself, Philip,” he murmured. The tone was patronizing. “We can call for help.”

“I mean it. It’s not Sophie.”

“What?” Roger was dumfounded. “How can you say that? How could you know.”

“The arm.” His voice had regained its force. “Her right arm. Don’t you see?”

“See what?”

“It’s not broken.”

It was the skiing accident, the three months Sophie’s arm spent in a cast. Inside this cavity of dirt Philip had seen the bone, and it was smooth. It had never suffered a break.

Philip let Roger do the digging. He himself felt drained as never before. During the partial excavation of the bones, he forced himself into the role of a medical professional, confirming his conclusion. The skeleton was far too large to be Sophie’s. It was male. And he was pretty sure the bones were too old. Then they found the metal buttons and, finally, a squarish tag made of tin, perforated so the bottom half could be snapped off, a text stamped into it: DESPLANCHES RAYMOND 1939.

A different child, lost to other parents of another era.

It was what Bécot had been telling Philip all along. Artifacts from the war—shells, mines, and bodies—kept coming to the surface, even now. Who knew what scene had played itself out on Le Mont de l’If some sixty-five years ago? After what skirmish had this French soldier dug himself into the loose ground of the gully, or what shell had buried him here? Did it happen at the time of the German advance, during the occupation, or in the midst of their retreat?

They touched as little as possible. Roger tied three sticks together to form a tripod marker at the edge of the embankment. They would leave the job of collecting these remains to another authority. Their job was simply to point the way.

Roger took the wheel for the return to Yvetot, and Philip leaned his head against the window, glad for the deepening twilight. While resting his eyes, he murmured an apology to Roger. What had he been thinking? Everywhere he turned he’d seen things that weren’t there.

Roger shifted into higher gear. As they reached cruising speed and the engine thrummed, he began his own soft-spoken explanation. Philip had nothing to be sorry for. To the contrary, he was right. On the night of Sophie’s death, Roger had not been with Élisabeth.

“Then where?”

He darted a glance at Philip. “Hervé’s clinic. A medical workup. Let’s just say there was a problem.” He shifted in his seat. “You know. The seed wouldn’t take.”

“You mean . . . ?”

“Yes, that’s right,” he muttered. “I sowed, but there was no harvest. A pitiful count, if you want to know. Hervé was doing the whole workup—sleep disorders and all. He’s very thorough. Still makes me come in for an annual checkup. Just had one the other day. I hate those visits, but I think Hervé enjoys giving me the results. Says I could just as well join the priesthood.”

Philip draped his hand over his brow. What a fool he’d been. It all made sense. The shame of Roger’s infertility, the loss of the chance at fatherhood, the discord with Élisabeth, the yearly visits—all leading to carousing and philandering, the way a dying oak casts out one last profusion of acorns. In the midst of it all, Sophie had become the stand-in for a daughter Roger never had.

“Yes, I should have told you,” Roger continued. “It was stupid. Embarrassing, if you prefer. You can check with Élisabeth.” He hesitated. “You can even check with Hervé if you need to.”

Yes, he could check. But it was just ordinary enough to be true. Which meant that Philip had missed the mark in almost every imaginable way. Now he saw how his mind’s ability to trick him was inexhaustible. He’d prided himself on his ability to differentiate signs from things, to detect subtle rhythms in speech, to recognize meaningful tics. But Yvetot had bested him. This town was nothing more than a giant Rorschach test, and each blot of ink morphed into fantastical creatures of his own making. So much for objectivity. Science is just passion dressed in a lab coat.

Worst of all was the return of doubt. For fifteen years he had known the fact of Sophie’s death, and yet, without the presence of a body and despite everything reason told him, some spark of hope had lingered, fueling an ember that could smolder for days or weeks before flaring up into the blinding certainty that the universe had got it wrong. For an instant he would believe that the error had been fixed, the world trued up, and Sophie was about to prance around a corner, eternally the same. Then the flash would subside, plunging him into darkness once more, leaving only ardent cinders.

For a few moments in that fold of earth on Le Mont de l’If, he’d experienced a new sensation. Neither hope nor despair. Mere relief. And the instant he realized his error, the spark had reignited.

They reached the southern end of Yvetot, and soon they were outside the hotel.

Roger offered to stay, to get them something to eat, but he didn’t argue when Philip declined. He said he’d swing by the police station on his way out of town to report what they’d found. And he’d call Philip in the morning.

Philip held himself together as he climbed the steps to the hotel, managing a silent nod to Monsieur Bécot as he picked up his key. Upstairs he didn’t bother flicking on the light, but once the door was locked, he released a long, wheezing breath. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he dropped his head into his hands, staring into the darkness at his feet.

His throat ached with a thirst that water could not quench.

As though obeying a greater force, he leaned forward from the end of the bed and opened the door to the minibar. The pale light illuminated his face. Inside, a squadron of metal-capped bottles stood like midget troops, ready for action. He reached in. Hell, he’d earned it. No one could say otherwise. He twisted off the top and eyed the golden liquid.

His cell phone rang. There was no one in Yvetot he wanted to talk to, and his first impulse was to let it go. But he recognized the number. Good old Jonas! Just what he needed. A voice from home, a few words from someone who understood him. He put the untouched bottle down on the nightstand and answered the call.

“Jonas,” he cried. “I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear you.”

“Yes, me too,” Jonas replied, his voice flat. “I’m sorry to call you like this. Do you have a minute?”

The tone put Philip on his guard.

“I need to talk to you,” Jonas continued. “It’s about Melanie Patterson.”

When he entered the
Tord-boyaux
it was nearly midnight. The crowd was larger than during the day, though some of the patrons at the bar were the same, including the tweed-capped man Roger had identified as the mayor. Clusters of mostly male drinkers occupied three other tables. The room smelled of stale beer and smoke.

Silence rippled across the room as he came through, group after group going quiet. Philip felt the eyes upon him, but he didn’t care. Let them do their worst. He ignored them all and stalked to the back, planting himself on a chair in the corner. When the
patronne
lumbered over, he didn’t even hesitate.

“
Je voudrais un whiskey
,” he said. Then he called her back and modified the order. He’d take the whole bottle.

The
patronne
didn’t flinch. Who knows? Perhaps in Yvetot customers regularly ordered three-quarters of a liter of alcohol and drank themselves into a coma. That appealed to him. A coma sounded just about right.

At least Melanie had not succeeded. In the hotel room Philip had needed to steady himself on the bed while Jonas described how it happened. He’d been so shaken that it took a moment for the words to catch up with him, for him to realize she hadn’t actually killed herself. During that prolonged instant, before he’d understood the crucial fact of Melanie’s survival, he’d closed his eyes and felt himself in a free fall. He couldn’t face losing another one.

A broad cross-cut through the left wrist. Not vertical—although that may have been sheer ignorance on her part. And Melanie was a quick learner.

As he drank, glass after glass, he felt himself begin to fade. The scotch made him translucent, almost transparent in this crowd. Heads that had turned to follow his arrival gradually rotated back to their original position. A few whispered comments sounded, a chair screeched against the tile floor, a call went out for another
demi
. Soon the café was alive with chatter. In the back, beyond the perimeter of animation, Philip slowly worked his way through his potion of forgetfulness.

He eyed the amber liquid in his glass, holding the tartness of each gulp in his mouth before swallowing. Then he let it burn.

They’d been making such progress. Just the other night they’d had their most honest conversation ever. They had moved forward. In his memory Philip replayed fragments of the conversation, holding words up to the light of his mind to see what he had missed, seeking the subtle inflections that might have hinted at what was imminent. Every utterance now seemed to carry a darker lining.
I still have stuff to do before I’m done
, she’d said. Done with what? And what else? Sometimes, she’d said, he didn’t listen right. Sometimes he missed what was important. Not everything is fixable.

It was all there, and he hadn’t heard. Melanie had been craving his help, and he’d failed her.

This on top of everything else. Morin. Le Mont de l’If. Bones. Yvonne.

It had been a fool’s errand, this return to Yvetot. That night in Boston two weeks ago when the phone rang, Yvonne’s voice had stirred something that slumbered inside him. It was like the rousing of a giant in a fairy tale, where the lumbering creature sets on a rampage, crushing everything in its path, stopping only when its appetite has been sated. But this giant was insatiable. It hungered for something it couldn’t have.

He should never have answered that call. He should never have opened his eyes. What had Bécot said when he first arrived at La Cauchoise?
Ne réveillez pas le chat qui dort
. Let a sleeping cat lie. There he’d been in his apartment in Boston, old Edith curled up and purring at his side. And he’d let the cat stir.

He left the café at closing time, turning toward the hotel. Then came a stretch he would remember less clearly. At some point he staggered across the square, passing by shops, the bakery. His left knee hurt. He may have taken a fall or two. Yvetot was unsteady, listing. The pavement shifted under his feet, and so he sat for a while on the bench in front of city hall, by the war monument. He’d seen this sculpture a hundred times. A thousand. Mounted on a massive stone pedestal it showed a soldier of vast proportions, a helmeted colossus striding forward, wrapped in a greatcoat, his eyes lifted to the sky. And now Philip saw for the very first time that in his arms, the soldier cradled a small, limp body. Of all the possible representations of France’s bloodiest war, someone had selected a scene of rescue.