Chapter 2
Five Years
You’re picking up where you left off.
On the Tuesday they gave me a CT scan, and on the Wednesday an MRI. In between, a neurologist with short-cropped grey hair, Dr Collard, came and sat at the foot of my bed with the images on a tablet, and showed them to me like holiday photos.
“Here,” she said, putting her finger on a paler patch, “and here. Some small contusions. A bit of swelling at the start, which has gone down. That's why we put you to sleep, to let the brain settle quietly. Honestly, it's modest.”
“Modest,” I repeated.
My voice was coming back. It still scraped, it still cracked on the long vowels, but it was coming back.
“Modest compared with what you're telling me,” Dr Collard clarified. “Five years is a lot. We'll talk about it again. Don't worry for now.”
She said “we'll talk about it again” with a little crease at the corner of her mouth. In my line of work, you learn to sort those creases. There's the one the judge makes when he doesn't believe the defendant, the one the lawyer makes when he doesn't believe his client, the one the witness makes when he doesn't believe his own sentence at the very moment he's saying it. Hers was the crease of a doctor who has no opinion yet and is making a note of it.
I did what is expected of someone coming out of an eight-day coma. I mixed up the care assistants' names. I asked the time twice. I slept a lot, and when I wasn't sleeping I looked at the window, behind which there was nothing but trees and a corner of car park, and the trees were starting to turn yellow.
They told me my life.
Antoine started, on the Tuesday afternoon, sitting on the plastic chair with his forearms on his thighs. He spoke slowly, searching for his words, stopping in the middle of sentences to check on my face that he could go on. He didn't ask me a single question. He just told it, in order, like reading the blurb on the back of a book.
We had met in Namur, at the Fêtes de Wallonie, in September 2021. We had married in June the following year, in Wépion, where he grew strawberries, like his father and his grandfather. I had come to live with him, in the long stone farmhouse above the greenhouses. I had kept my job at the courts. He got up at five, I got up at seven. We had a kitchen with a big oak table that had belonged to his grandmother. We had no children. We had no dog.
“No dog,” I said.
“You didn't want one,” he said. “Because of the greenhouses. We'd have had to keep an eye on it.”
He had switched to “tu”, the familiar form, without warning, between two sentences, and he didn't remark on it. Neither did I.
I listened. I've spent ten years listening to people tell their version of events, and I know there's no such thing as an innocent account: there's what people say, the order they say it in, and what they step over. Antoine told it well, with few words. He stepped over whole months. He went from the wedding to “and then, well” with nothing in between, the way you cross a room without turning on the light.
“And then, well,” he repeated.
He looked at his hands.
Lucie arrived on the Tuesday evening, in a tracksuit, her hair still wet from the gym shower, and burst into tears before she was through the door. She dropped her bag on the floor, said “Inès” in a choking voice, and threw herself on me so hard that the nurse on duty shouted “Mind the cannula!” from the corridor.
“Sorry,” said Lucie, without letting go. “Sorry, sorry. I'm being careful. I'm being super careful. Oh my God, you look awful.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“No, but really. You look like you've gone twelve rounds with a fridge.”
She was laughing and crying at the same time, and wiping her nose on the sleeve of her tracksuit the way she did when she was eight. My little sister. Thirty, PE teacher in Profondeville, unable to lie without it showing, unable to keep quiet, unable to keep a pot plant alive for more than three weeks.
“You do know who I am, at least?” she said, sniffing. “Tell me you know who I am, or I'll make a scene.”
“You're Lucie.”
She burst into sobs, of relief this time.
“She knows who I am,” she said to Antoine, who was standing by the window. “She knows who I am.”
“She's known you for thirty years,” said Antoine. “She's known me for five.”
He said it without bitterness, in the tone in which you remark that it's raining. Lucie stopped crying. She looked at him, then at me, and she had an odd expression, a mixture of pity and something harder, that I couldn't place straight away.
The nurse's name was Maud. She was on duty on the Tuesday morning, when they took me down for the scan. On the Tuesday evening, when Lucie arrived, she was still there, in jeans, her bag on her shoulder, her shift long over. She was on duty on the Wednesday morning, when they took out my catheter, and she found a way to drop by again in the afternoon, when they sat me on the edge of the bed to try getting me on my feet.
“Gently,” said Maud. “I've got you. Lean on me.”
I leaned on her. She smelled of orange blossom. Her hands were rough around the nails, and she had a small burn on the back of her left hand, an old burn, round, like one from an oven.
“You're here a lot,” I said.
“We're short-staffed,” she said. “And we like to keep the same patients. It's simpler for everyone.”
She helped me take three steps to the window and three steps back. She put me back to bed. She pulled up the sheet. She put the call button within reach of my right hand, and as she left she laid two fingers on my wrist, just for a second, over the pulse.
I didn't move.
Chief Inspector Benali came on the Wednesday, late in the afternoon. She knocked, then waited to be answered, which surprised me: police officers knock, but they don't wait. She came in with a plastic cup of machine coffee in one hand and a leather briefcase under her arm.
Forty-five, a navy trouser suit, black hair pulled back, very matte lipstick. The voice of a smoker who no longer smoked. The kind of officer you pass in the great hall of the courthouse, in the second-floor corridors, sitting opposite you in interviews where a Dutchman or an Italian needs someone to say “I wasn't there” in the right language.
“Nadia Benali,” she said. “Federal Judicial Police. We've met a dozen times at the courts, Mrs Delvaux.”
“I'm sorry,” I said.
“Don't be. I never remember the interpreters. That's the whole point: when you do your job well, nobody sees you.”
She smiled. She pulled up the plastic chair, sat down, put the cup on the overbed table and the briefcase on her knees. Antoine had gone to get a sandwich. Lucie had gone back to teach a class.
She told me about the accident in the tone of a police report, because that's what it was. Saturday the 19th of September, shortly before midnight. The N92, between Wépion and Profondeville, on the bend that runs along the golf course. My Clio, rammed from behind by another vehicle, which hadn't stopped. The crash barrier torn away. The car down the bank, on the towpath, in the trees by the river. Two metres from the Meuse.
“Hit-and-run,” she said. “For now. The prosecutor's office has appointed an investigating judge, that's why you've got me rather than the local police. It wasn't a minor bump, Mrs Delvaux. Someone pushed you.”
I looked at my hands on the sheet.
“I've got nothing in my head,” I said. “Nothing from that night.”
“I know. The doctors warned me. That's not why I'm here.”
She opened her briefcase, took out a notebook and leafed through it.
“We found a suitcase in your boot. A large suitcase, and a holdall on the back seat.”
The door opened. Antoine came back with a triangle sandwich in cellophane that he clearly had no intention of eating. He heard the word “suitcase”. He stopped in the middle of the room.
“You were going to your sister's,” he said. “For the weekend.”
Benali turned towards him, slowly, like someone opening a window to see which way the wind is blowing.
“For the weekend,” she repeated.
“She was going to Lucie's. In Profondeville. She often went.”
“With a large suitcase.”
“She always takes too much.”
Benali made a note. Then she turned to me.
“And of the road, Mrs Delvaux, there's really nothing left?”
“Headlights,” I said. “Headlights, nothing else.”
Antoine didn't move. Benali made a note of that too. She didn't add anything.
That evening, when Lucie came back with a pot of stewed apple and a magazine, I asked her where I'd been going that Saturday. I asked her in my gravel voice, and Lucie answered without looking at me, opening the pot of stewed apple with the concentration of a bomb-disposal expert.
“To mine. You were coming for the weekend. We were going to make crêpes.”
They were both saying the same thing. It wasn't the whole truth. I listened to them say it, one after the other, in the same words, and I didn't correct anything.
Benali came back the next morning, very early, before I'd been washed, before Antoine arrived. She stayed on her feet this time. She had no coffee.
“I forgot one thing,” she said.
She forgot nothing; I understood that from the way she closed the door behind her.
“The emergency services were alerted at eleven fifty-two. A call to 112. It was made from your phone, Mrs Delvaux.”
She let a moment pass.
“By a woman. She gave the location, said you were breathing, and hung up without giving her name. When the fire brigade arrived, there was nobody there. And your phone has disappeared.”