“I remembered him from the tunnel,” Carole said, still sounding shaken, so Stevie changed the subject to distract her, and asked about Matthieu.
“Did the mystery man shed any further light on your affair?” Stevie was still curious about him.
“Yes. I remembered a lot of it myself. I remembered the boy with the knife too,” she said, going back to the attack. “He was in the cab next to me in the tunnel, and he ran away. The suicide bombers must have told him he was going to die. Apparently, he wasn't ready for the seventy-seven virgins he was going to get in Heaven.”
“No, he would rather have killed you. Christ, I can't wait till we get home.”
“Me too,” Carole said with a sigh. “This has been one hell of a trip. I think I got my answers though. If I ever get my memory back, and can learn how to use a computer again, I think I'm ready to write the book. I'll have to add something about all this. It's too good not to use.”
“You think maybe you could do a cookbook next time, or a children's book? I don't like the research you've been doing for this book.”
But the answers she'd gotten about Jason and Matthieu were what she had needed for herself. She knew that now. And better yet, she had heard it from them, instead of guessing and figuring it out on her own.
“What are you hearing from Alan?” Carole asked as they chatted and she started to unwind. It was nice to have someone to talk to late at night. She missed that with Sean. She was starting to remember now, just little bits. Stevie telling her things about him had brought some of it back.
“He says he misses me,” Stevie answered her. “He's antsy for me to come home. He says he's pining for my cooking. He must have lost his memory too. What's to miss? Chinese takeout, or deli food? I haven't cooked a decent meal for him in four years.”
“I don't blame him. I missed you today too.”
“I'll be there tomorrow. And I'm sleeping there tomorrow night.”
“No one's coming after me,” Carole said reassuringly. “All the other guys blew themselves up.” And they damn near blew her up too. “There's no one left.”
“I don't care. I'd rather be there with you.”
“I'd rather be at the Ritz,” Carole laughed, “than at the Pitié Salpêtrière. Hands down. You've got much better room service there.”
“Never mind,” Stevie said firmly. “I'm moving in. And fuck them if they don't like it. If they can't even keep a security guard on your door through lunch time, you need a watchdog over there.”
“I think Matthieu took care of that. They looked scared to death of him. And there are about a million guards in the hall tonight.”
“He scares me too,” Stevie said honestly. “He looks like a tough guy.”
“He is.” Carole remembered that about him. “But he wasn't with me. He was married. He just wouldn't leave his wife. We talked about it today. We lived together for two and a half years. He wouldn't divorce her, so I left.”
“I got into one of those once. They're hard to win. Most people don't. I never did it again. Alan may be an asshole at times, but at least he's mine.”
“Yeah, I guess it took me a while with Matthieu to figure that out. He told me he was leaving her when we met, that his marriage was over, and had been for ten years.”
“They always say bullshit like that. The only one who doesn't know about it is their wife. They never leave.”
“He stayed married to her till last year. He said I was right to go.”
“Apparently. And he divorced her now?” Stevie sounded surprised. At his age, no one got divorced. Especially in France.
“No, she died. He stayed with her till the bitter end. Forty-six years. Of a supposedly loveless marriage. What's the point in that?”
“Habit. Laziness. Chickenshit. God knows why people stay.”
“His daughter died when I was living with him. And then his wife threatened suicide. There was an endless string of excuses, some of them even valid, though most of them not, until I finally gave up. He was married to her, and to France.”
“Sounds like you didn't have a chance.”
“No, I didn't. He says that now too. He sure didn't say it then.” She didn't tell Stevie about the baby she'd lost, but she was going to talk to Anthony about it sometime, in case he remembered it. He had never said anything to her, but it had been obvious, in the hospital when they met, how much he had hated Matthieu in the end. Even her children had felt betrayed. It had left a lasting impression on her son, whatever the details.
“You looked miserable when we came back to pack up the house.”
“I was.”
“You seem to be remembering a lot of stuff,” Stevie commented. Carole had come far in the past few days. The boy with the knife had jogged her memory too.
“I am. Little by little, stuff is coming back. Feelings more than events.”
“That's a start.” Mike Appelsohn had helped her too, except for his interview with the press, which had set the boy with the knife after her. “I hope they send you back to the hotel soon.” Stevie was deeply worried about the potential risk to her from remaining terrorists. But now, so were the police.
“So do I.”
They said goodnight then and hung up, and Carole lay in bed for a long time, thinking how lucky she was, how blessed to have her children, how miraculous her survival had been, and how fortunate she was to have Stevie as a friend. She tried not to let herself think of Matthieu, or the boy who had come to kill her with the terrifying knife. She lay in bed with her eyes closed, taking deep breaths. But no matter what she did, she kept seeing the boy with the knife in her head, and then her mind would race to the safety and protection of Matthieu. It was as though all these years later, he was still a place of refuge and peace, and would keep her safe from harm. She didn't want to believe that, but somewhere locked away in the memory of her heart, she still did. She could almost feel his arms around her as she drifted off to sleep at last.
Chapter 13
The police came to take a report from Carole the next day. The boy they'd taken into custody was from Syria, and he was seventeen years old. He was a member of a fundamentalist group that had been responsible for three recent terrorist attacks, two in France and one in Spain. Other than that they knew very little about him, and Carole was the only person who could link him to the bombing in the tunnel. Although much of her memory was still fuzzy about it, as well as details of her own life, she distinctly remembered seeing him in the car next to her, as her cab had sat stuck in traffic underground. It had all come back to her when she saw his face in her room at the Pitié Salpêtrière. His eyes had riveted her as he lunged at her with the long, curved blade.
The police questioned her for nearly three hours, and showed her photographs of a dozen men. She recognized none of them, only the young man who had entered her room and tried to kill her. One of the photographs vaguely reminded her of the driver of the car next to her, but she hadn't paid as much attention to him as the boy in the backseat, and she couldn't be as sure. She had no doubt whatsoever about the boy who had attacked her, she remembered clearly his mournful face as he stared at her from the backseat. His attack had brought it all clearly into her mind again. The images were very sharp.
Other memories were returning too. Often they were out of sequence and made no sense to her. She could see her father's barn in her mind's eye, and she remembered milking the cows as though it were yesterday. She could hear her father's laughter, but no amount of concentration could help her recall his face. The meeting with Mike Appelsohn in New Orleans when he discovered her was a blank to her, but she recalled the screen test now, and working on her first movie. She had woken up thinking of it that day, but meeting Jason and her early days with him had vanished into thin air. She remembered their wedding day and the apartment in New York where they'd lived after they were married, and she had a vague memory of Anthony's birth, but nothing of Chloe's, the movies she'd made, or the Oscars she won, and she still had very little memory of Sean.