She’d forgotten her gloves and her hands were freezing, so she stopped at Starbucks to warm herself up. When the barista called her name and handed her the vanilla latte she’d ordered, she turned round to see there were no free tables. She spotted a seat in the corner, opposite a woman with a baby, and made her way over.
‘Do you mind if I sit here?’ Sandrine asked.
‘Not at all.’
Sandrine sat down. The baby was pulling on a tuft of his mother’s long brown hair, which spilled out from under her glittery bobble hat. He was giggling and gurgling at noises and grimaces that his mother made. The game amused him for a few minutes before he began to whimper. Holding her baby in one arm, his mother opened a cavernous baby changing bag with difficulty and brought out some mineral water, a baby bottle and a transparent plastic container with milk powder in it. Then she tried to unscrew the cap of the bottle of water with one hand.
‘Can I help you?’ Sandrine asked, expecting the woman to talk her through making up the formula. To Sandrine’s surprise, the woman stood up and thrust her son at Sandrine while she got everything ready for the feed.
Sandrine cooed at the baby, soothing him. It had been several years since she’d held a baby. He wasn’t tiny, but she was careful to support his head anyway. He looked at Sandrine with wide eyes and she thought he was about to cry, but instead his mouth opened, forming a large “O”. Then his mother reached out to take him back. Sandrine watched as she sat back down and the baby latched on to the teat of the bottle, guzzling hungrily.
‘Thank you,’ the woman said, shooting a grateful smile at Sandrine. ‘That was very kind of you.’
‘You’re welcome.’
‘A lot of people think bottle-feeding makes you a bad mother. They say mothers who breastfeed bond better with their babies.’
Sandrine nodded, hoping she wasn’t trying to strike up a conversation. Sandrine had breastfed both Antoine and Maxime, but there was a lot more to motherhood than choosing between formula or maternal milk. She used to think she wasn’t doing a bad job as a mum, but she was no longer so sure. She wanted to be a good mother to Maxime but her younger son seemed estranged from her now.
As she watched the mother with her baby boy, a memory from twenty years ago erupted into Sandrine’s mind: holding Antoine, her miracle baby, for the first time, seconds after he was born.
She and Sam had tried for a baby for so long. And just when they thought it might never happen, Sandrine finally got pregnant. At the seven-month scan, they asked if their baby was a boy or a girl. But the gynaecologist shook her head and wouldn’t answer the question. That was when they realized something was wrong. Their baby girl, Léa, had no heartbeat.
Sandrine had been inconsolable and Sam had been so supportive, even as he grieved himself. One night, six or seven weeks after they’d lost Léa, he held Sandrine in his arms and they made love. Sam was gentle, as if afraid she would break. She cried when it was over.
Her period hadn’t returned since the pregnancy and so she was nearly four months gone by the time she realized.
‘Women are quite fertile immediately after giving birth,’ her gynaecologist said.
It took her another fortnight to pluck up the courage to tell Sam. She was surprised he hadn’t noticed – her bump was getting prominent by then.
They were terrified. They didn’t dare to dream or hope. They didn’t make plans, but the baby’s room had already been decorated – for Léa. And so Antoine came along. Two days after his due date. Their miracle baby. A heavy, healthy baby boy.
Sandrine didn’t want to tempt fate again, but after a while she became anxious. What if something happened to Antoine? What if he got sick? What if she lost him? Her irrational fear that one day she might no longer be a mother grew stronger than her fear of having another miscarriage or stillbirth so she stopped taking the pill to see if anything would come of it. Something did. Maxime. She thought of her boys as her two princes, but never as the heir and the spare. She loved them both equally. But the fear she’d had of losing Antoine, which diminished gradually as the years went by, turned out to be founded in the end.
The media rarely mentioned it now. It was yesterday’s news. But that didn’t make it go away. Like everyone else in France, and the rest of the world, Sandrine had seen those images broadcast over and over again on the television. They continued, even now, to play on a loop in her head like a film she couldn’t turn off.
She’d added a sequence over time, the product of her imagination, based on survivors’ accounts. It showed what had happened inside the arena. There was no real footage of that. There had been no cameras. People filming the concert with their mobile phones had stopped when the first rounds rang out. The film in Sandrine’s head paused on the same frame every time, at the exact point where, in Sandrine’s mind, her son had lost his life. One second alive. The next dead. In a heartbeat. In the blink of an eye. In the squeeze of a trigger.
An invisible hand clutched Sandrine’s throat and she couldn’t breathe.
The woman stared from across the table. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked, startling Sandrine out of her reverie.
Standing up on shaky legs, Sandrine grabbed her coat and handbag. ‘Goodbye. Have a nice day,’ she said automatically, her voice sounding unfamiliar, even to her ears.
The cold air hit her like a slap to the face as she stepped outside. She walked up the avenue, back the way she’d come. In the window of an estate agency, she caught sight of a slim woman, stooping at the neck like a question mark so that her shoulder-length lank brown hair fell over her face. It took Sandrine a moment to realize that this elderly woman, who was still clinging to her forties, was her own reflection. Forcing herself to stand tall, she peered into the window.
Unsurprisingly, there were no signs in the window of the estate agency for the winter sales. Almost two weeks into January, and the Meilleurs Voeux! stickers, wishing everyone a happy new year, hadn’t been taken down yet. Underneath it, glossy photos showed expensive flats for sale or for rent in the city centre. Sandrine gazed at them. She couldn’t afford to buy a flat in the city centre, and wouldn’t want to live here anyway. She liked the anonymity here, but she didn’t care much for the bustle and noise. She longed to go back to Brittany, to be near her parents, by the sea.
Then a thought burst into her mind. Why didn’t they move? What was stopping them? They could easily sell up here and buy a house near her mum and dad. Get away from it all. Sam could set up his business there easily enough. He’d come with her, wouldn’t he? Would she go if he didn’t?
But even if Sam did get on board, there was Maxime to consider, not that they saw much of him these days. He slept over at friends’ places most nights now, during the week, coming home once in a while to dump his dirty washing and pick up clean clothes. She’d failed one son; she couldn’t abandon the other.
Chances were, though, Maxime wouldn’t be living with them much longer. He planned to move to Marseille after his baccalauréat exams this summer. She would talk to Sam about this idea, sound him out. The more she thought about it, the more convinced she became that this was what they needed. A new home. A fresh start.
Sam was still at work when she got home. She made her way into Antoine’s bedroom. She’d cleaned it after his death, as though he were coming back any day and she wanted to welcome him home. She hadn’t washed the bedclothes, though. She climbed into his bed, pulling the quilt over her mouth and nose, and breathing him in. She often did this when she found herself alone in the house, but as the months went by his scent had faded and the covers smelt only of her perfume now.