‘Had Bruce Roberts left by then?’
She thought for a moment. ‘No, he left right after her. You asking me that, it’s reminded me that I was surprised to see him stay so late. He’s not usually a party animal. I did wonder if he was sticking around to try it on with Kimo, or to keep an eye on his brother-in-law.’
‘Keep an eye on him?’
‘Yes, to see if Kimo was going up to Clément’s room.’
Joaquin thanked her.
‘Don’t hesitate if you have any more questions. You know, I liked Angel Roberts. I can’t believe a woman like her took her own life.’
Moralès picked up his file and went up to his room to grab his jacket and his holster.
His legs were aching, and it was painful to breathe, but Sébastien kept on running. He had woken up with the taste of another woman on his lips. The taste of adultery, he mused cynically, before correcting himself. No, a half-hearted nibble of freedom.
Leaving her place in the middle of the night, he had been reluctant to go back to the auberge. He hadn’t wanted to run into his father. So, he had got behind the wheel and driven out to the national park. Finding the barrier locked, he had turned around and parked off the main road in the waste-disposal area for motorhomes, where he had come to retrieve Joaquin’s car a few days earlier. He had taken his sleeping bag from the boot, found a space to stretch out on the backseat and dozed there uncomfortably until dawn.
When he heard the park rangers’ truck go by, he had hurried to get up. Not wanting to look like a ruffian who had spent the night sleeping in his car in a waste-disposal area at a national park, he had driven up to the barrier and told the park staff he had been waiting for the park to open to go fishing. The guy in the booth had barely given him a second glance. He himself looked like he’d just spent the night on his mum’s sofa.
Sébastien felt silly for having lied for no reason.
As he approached the turnoff for Grande-Grave, he slowed down, but didn’t go down into the parking area, towards the boat that belonged to the woman in the wedding dress, towards the wharf where the anglers might soon be setting up.
Instead, he continued straight on, feeling compelled to keep driving on the gravel road ahead, towards the tip of the park he knew wasn’t too far away.
What do we inherit from our parents? He couldn’t stop turning the question over in his mind. Some genetics were easily discernible: silky hair, perfect vision, broad shoulders, heart disease.
When he reached the end of the road at L’Anse-aux-Amérindiens – Indigenous Cove – he couldn’t bring himself to turn around and go back. He parked by the picnic area and got out of the car.
Other things weren’t so easy to see, like loyalty. But he was sure that kind of thing was hereditary. If Sébastien had loved and accepted Maude in spite of her whims, it was in obedience to a silent order, a sort of paternal injunction that dictated he should be submissive to his partner, like his father had been, in order to be a worthy Moralès son.
From the picnic area, he saw there was a path leading down to the water and along the shore. He set off at a jog, driven only by his own momentum, by what he had set in motion when he left Maude, drove away from Montreal, travelled all that distance along Highway 20, then further as it narrowed into Highway 132, had one drink too many, danced from bar to bar, tried his hand at fishing and slept with another woman.
He had prepared his arguments in anticipation of yesterday’s confrontation. Strong words about the power of a sense of belonging, and accusations too. That confrontation had to happen for him to be able to put the past behind him. He had been expecting his father to feel hurt, and also to acknowledge the truth in Sébastien’s revelations. But all Joaquin had said was that appearances can be deceiving, and he was deceived. But how could he have been mistaken? He was there all along, growing up in the family home. How many times had he heard his mother telling his father that such and such a word was pronounced such and such a way in Quebec French? She even used to tease Joaquin when he had difficulty wrapping his tongue around something.
As he ran through the brush, the ocean opened up before him, shining calm and bright beyond the shore, so near and yet so far-reaching, its surface only broken by the powerful breathing and graceful breaching of the whales offshore.
How did his father react? He used to laugh. They were happy together. Sébastien shook his head firmly. No, that was just a facade. Like with him and Maude, things were not what they seemed.
The further he ran, the closer he got to the end of the path. Before long he found himself at the Cap Gaspé lighthouse, at the very peak of the headland. His legs were aching, and his lungs were burning. A sign pointing to Land’s End beckoned him further still, down the cliff side, to the end of the world, it seemed.
His mind flashed to Maude, admitting she’d cheated on him. She was eighteen, and she’d kissed another guy at a party. He had laughed it off. And then? Flash forward to the ultrasound, twelve years later. You thought you were suffocating, but you weren’t. It was just a figment of your imagination. The white pixels of the image against the black background.
Sébastien set off down the steep staircase and continued along the boardwalk amidst the excited chattering of the songbirds and the cruel cries of the gulls.
He turned his focus to the last few days, to the fishing, and thought about the bass biting the hook. That flooded his mind with images of Kimo’s body and a feeling of relief or unease, he wasn’t sure which. He thought about the mackerel that had twisted and writhed at the end of his fishing line. I was fresh off the boat from a country of drug traffickers. That’s what his father had said.
Sébastien caught a glimpse of the sea emerging between the tree branches. There, off this point, was where they had pulled up the body of the drowned woman the other day. Sébastien could still see her floating there, her dress fanning out like coral around her. A bride in her wedding dress. And her husband, kneeling over her, paralysed by pain.
A sign proclaimed that Land’s End – the end of the world, if the sign in French were to be translated literally – was just a few steps further. He slowed his pace and stopped to catch his breath before he stepped onto the wooden viewing platform. Beads of sweat trickled into his eyes. He cast his gaze around the cliffs surrounding the crow’s nest of a lookout. Then he let his head become heavy and his hands hang down by his sides.
He allowed himself to be lulled by the gentle murmuring of the waves below as they lapped over the rocks that lurked just beneath the water’s surface. A sudden splash jolted him out of his trance. It sounded like the divers had when they went overboard to free the woman in the wedding dress. The coral bride. Did you too dream of the horizon? The vision of her came to him again. Her head held high, her arms wide open, before the endless ocean. Were you too a slave to an illusion? Did you follow orders that were never voiced?
He took a step out onto the lookout platform. And saw a seal cavorting in the water below. I never asked that of you. The early-morning light splintered on the swell like a golden carpet shimmering from the rising sun to the shore. Sébastien was astonished. This was like seeing something for the very first time. He had noticed the birds, the seals and the fish, he had watched the fishing line and he had admired the Percé Rock. But only now did he really see the sea and understand what Cyrille had meant.