Accusation (6 page)

None of this made any sense, which in itself was intriguing. She was tipped into the vertigo of whatever propelled him, this mystery and the beating of its wings. He was not proposing that they spend the weekend there together.

There is so much I need to do tomorrow, he said. He slung his juggler’s arms across his chest. I would like to get to Montreal as soon as I can. As if this semi-rational explanation was enough to overcome the preposterousness of proposing to drive through the night rather than his catching the first flight in the morning.

Did you ask Juliet? She needed to know this.

No. Juliet doesn’t have a car. Anyway, I don’t think she would do it.

Sara thought, That isn’t true. For some reason, he didn’t want Juliet to do it.

Surprise pushed away the last vestiges of the wine’s fuzziness. What she should do, what she could do, was offer to drive him to the airport — and if they left instantly maybe he’d catch the last flight after all, however much of a long shot it seemed. If not, he could spend the night at the airport, or she could drive him back to the airport first thing in the morning. Yet his offer of the larger, crazier adventure had an odd effect. It made her feel recognized, as if he’d seen into her own capacity for impetuous, even reckless behaviour.

For at other times, and in other parts of the world, she had not been one to hurry home at the end of the evening to put herself to bed before it got too late. No, she had kept herself awake or
asked
to be woken deep in the night by a phone call or a rap on the door and pulled on her underwear inside-out and bolted mugs of syrupy coffee or tossed back caffeine pills or cold medicine laced with speed before hunkering down in the broken-springed back seat of a van, a nylon headscarf tied about her head, pressed between the exhausted bodies of colleagues, fellow journalists, their translator, often all men, as a driver bore them out, out along the road to Najaf, through the slowly lifting dark.

Years before that, in the wake of the trial and her acquittal, she had on impulse bought a cheap plane ticket from Montreal to Paris, hours after handing in the final paper that would allow her to graduate. She had bundled clothes into an oversized knapsack and stuffed the rest of her possessions into cardboard boxes, stored them under the bed in the spare room of Norbert McKibben, world-famous political scientist and department chair, in whose house she’d spent those last two months holed up, eating meals made by Norbert’s kindly wife, Maureen, after she’d bolted from Juliet’s apartment.

On her first day in Paris, she’d met some Gitane-smoking young Parisians in a café in the Marais. Late the next night, she huddled with them around a manhole cover while one young man pried the metal lid open with a crowbar, before the Parisians stubbed out their cigarettes and, one by one, took hold of the supports of a ladder and climbed into the descending tunnel’s mouth. She’d been the last to grab hold of the side rails and reach one foot below another onto the rungs, tugged by the promise of a trip through the catacombs and the chance to throw herself toward something riskily new, once the girl on the ladder ahead of her leaped into the dark toward the dank base of the tunnel, shouting, Sautez!

On a whim, she had written a piece on the catacomb-walkers and their traipsing and partygoing in the underground tunnels of Paris, and sold it as a freelancer to a New York newspaper. Days later, still gleeful, she’d stepped out of the communal shower in her Paris hostel to hear someone say in English that a nuclear power plant had exploded in the Ukraine and a radioactive cloud was blowing west across Europe. A Lebanese journalist, met at another café, said, Go to Beirut, and gave her the name of a fixer and of a small, cheap West Beirut hotel close to the one where all the journalists stayed. She’d decided maybe it made sense to get out of Europe, and thought, Why not Beirut? Two weeks later, she was stepping off the boardwalk onto the Beirut beach, stones pressing against the soles of her feet as she walked toward the sea.

And here was this man, the electric heft of his body felt across the space between them. She had no desire to go back to her empty house, to face, again, the fact that neither David nor her parents had called. She lived a life that left her free, if she wished, to take off in the middle of the night without consulting anyone. On the other hand, she had no desire to sleep with this man. It was her birthday, if only for half an hour more, which made any decision feel numinous. Returning to Montreal, which she did very occasionally for work, would be proof that what had happened to her there — the accusation, the trial, the collapse of her life with Graham — had lost whatever hold it once had on her.

Okay, she said. Let’s do it. Do you need to go back inside? I’ll get my car. It’s a white Toyota Camry, and I’ll pull up at the back of the lot — Sara pointed, beyond the tent, to the exit lane that led past where the looming, decommissioned battleship was docked.

I have a bag I must get, Raymond Renaud said. And presumably he would have to say goodbye to people. Thank you so much for this.

He left her side, loping toward the tent, relief making him buoyant.

Exhilaration knocked at the top of her head. She could not now go back inside to find Juliet. If Juliet had left while Sara’s back was turned, surely Raymond would have seen her and called out. She could not say goodnight to Juliet and tell her what she was about to do. Nor did she want Juliet to see her driving off with Raymond Renaud. If Raymond told Juliet that he and she were going to drive to Montreal, that was his business. Sara didn’t think he would. She did not want to admit that her own decision had anything to do with Juliet, her complicated feelings toward Juliet, a desire, now, to snatch something from her. She was stepping toward mystery, the lake breeze quickening in the threads of her shirt. Most immediately, she had to make it to her car, get Raymond into her car and the two of them away from this place without being seen.

Sara leaned across to unlatch the manual lock on the back door of her car. With a murmur of greeting, Raymond Renaud swung a nylon bag from his shoulder and tossed it amid the sun-stained newspapers, snow scraper, sandals, handbag, the pool of her pashmina on the back seat, then ducked into the front passenger seat, jerking the seat backward until his legs fit. She stalled the car, trying not to look out for Juliet, and had to restart the engine, considered making a quick detour west to her house, which wasn’t far, to change her clothes and use the bathroom, but rejected the idea.

Do you need to stop by your hotel?

I am checked out.

And you’re absolutely sure you need to do this? There was a gas station at the corner of Strachan and King; no, the one at Bathurst and Lakeshore was closer.

Exhaustion seemed to press him into the seat cushions, his hands stretched taut across his thighs. He looked at her with an exhausted intimacy. Yes, he said. And then: Can we get a cup of good coffee?

Sara had to laugh. Coffee, but I don’t know about good.

There had been a lot of late-night travel in her childhood, by train, across Europe, since her father, despite his career in Foreign Affairs, hated to fly. The strained, bleached light of a nighttime train carriage: she was six or seven, maybe on the train between Moscow and Leningrad as it was then, her parents asleep on the banquette across from her, holding hands, her mother’s head resting on her father’s shoulder, and she had needed to pee and wanted them to wake, wanted her mother to wake, but her mother didn’t, and there was desolation at this, at their love that excluded her, and also defiance, and she had stood and walked down the shaking train carriage by herself, past the huge one-eyed woman whose eye flickered open, the enormous man who smelled of sausage and whose head was wrapped in a scarf, the man with the nubs of horns poking out of his head who reached out a red hand and whispered something leering in Russian, crooking his finger and beckoning to her.

In the Esso station at the foot of Bathurst Street, Sara waited for Raymond Renaud to shift past the celebrity magazines to the cashier, the heat from her coffee moving out through the cup into her hand, a packet of cashews and another of beef jerky caught in the crook of her arm, and when he didn’t move, she cleared her throat, and he started, as if he’d lost track of who she was and where he was.

Back in the car, he was silent as he set his coffee cup into the cup holder at the base of the dashboard. He had given up on charm, it seemed, and the withdrawn weight of him beside her made her fear she’d made a terrible mistake.

She tried asking, When did you learn to juggle?

Long ago. It was very accidental, all of this. He stared out through the windshield as they left the cave of Lakeshore Boulevard and sped up the expressway on-ramp. It would be almost morning by now in Addis Ababa.

When did you arrive? she asked him.

Here? Yesterday.

Were you pleased with how things went tonight?

He shot her a look as if either he didn’t wish to be disturbed or found her questions inane. Probably the last thing he wanted was to talk about the circus, and she had no desire to interrogate him, only to engage in some far more basic form of interaction, to fend off the miasma of his exhaustion. Up the Don Valley Parkway they sped, through the cavernous ravine, not all that far from the house, on the east side of the ravine, where David Ross would be lying in bed beside his wife. When Sara switched on the radio, raving jazz poured out. She’d already lost the feeling of complicity that had catapulted her toward driving, that reminded her of urgent road trips embarked upon in the past with fellow journalists, that camaraderie. Being this silent man’s chauffeur for six hours she would not be able to take.

As they neared the ramp to the eastbound 401, Raymond Renaud turned to her. Juliet said she met you in Montreal.

When did she say that? What she really wanted to know was if he’d told Juliet about the trip. And, at whatever point he and Juliet had spoken, how had Juliet described their shared past and, possibly, her own tangled history in Montreal?

I don’t remember, he said, and as Sara aimed the car into the 401’s express lanes, Do you think she’s a good filmmaker?

So this was what he wanted to know. She’s worked in television for years. I’m sure she’ll do a good job with the film.

Really she had no idea what kind of filmmaker Juliet was. You’re from Montreal, she said. I read that somewhere. You grew up there?

In Saint-Henri.

Which as far as she could remember was rough and working class and white and at one end of the island.

You were born there.

Not in Saint-Henri. We came there when I was seven. My uncle lived there. Before that, I was living for a year with my mother in Côte d’Ivoire. My father didn’t come. He stayed with my uncle.

Your mother’s from Côte d’Ivoire?

His face made a quick spasm: of course he recognized the racialized nature of this question. My mother’s from Haiti, Port-au-Prince. My father, from Rimouski. A hint of his former charm returned, or showmanship: his bright grin. That was not the usual thing in Saint-Henri, I will tell you. I was not the usual thing. But you learn, you survive. By now I am used to being not the usual thing. You?

Born in Ottawa, spent some time in Europe.

Where?

First Moscow. My father was posted to the embassy. As a secretary. Then Berlin. Later, briefly, Brussels and Kiev. You’ve been to Haiti?

Never.

She told him she’d gone for a week to Port-au-Prince after Aristide was returned to power. Nights up the hill at the Montana, the hotel where all the journalists and UN workers stayed, and where rats as big as beavers had scuttled across the lawns, and fires had burned on other hillsides and the ak-ak-ak of gunfire was loud enough that she’d dosed herself to sleep with extra-strength Nytol. She didn’t say that; she said, I went out with a couple of UN peacekeepers a lot of the time, and my translator, to talk to people about how they felt after the election.

He nodded.

Beyond Scarborough, then the Rouge Valley, the pale blank slate of sound bafflers rose up beside them, cutting them off from row upon row of swollen, immodest homes, all but their limitless grey peaks. Every time she passed out of the city along this highway, more good earth had turned into surging, self-replicating piles of brick. She would gun the accelerator and speed past the desolate ranks, weaving around the transport trucks, aiming for the stretches of highway beyond Ajax and Whitby where the lake appeared, on the right, glinting like a body freed from the confines of shirt or dress.

Maybe he, too, needed to feel himself in motion, to travel through this landscape rather than fly over it. This could not be his only reason for wanting to drive. She was aware of his lips, the wide bridge of his nose, the sleeve of his jacket, a hand’s breadth from her arm. There was a wall in him, and beyond it some darker turmoil pushing up. He did not have to move for his restlessness to churn the air, swell, flood out through his limbs, fill the car, and press against her.

Why are you in such a hurry to get back to Addis?