Syndrome E

60

They had caught the last flight out that evening, destination: Paris. Since the plane wasn’t entirely full, they could sit next to each other. Her forehead flattened against the window, Lucie watched Montreal turn into a great luminous vessel that gradually let itself be swallowed by the shadows of night. A city that she’d only come to know by its darkest side.

Then came the endless black of the ocean, that unknowable mass that quivers with life and holds our fate in its undulating belly.

Next to her, Sharko had put on his sleeping mask and curled up in his seat. His head was nodding, and he could finally let himself go. They might have taken the eight hours of travel to talk, tell each other about their lives, their pasts, get to know each other better, but they both knew that they understood each other best in silence.

Lucie looked with sorrow and desire at that square jaw, that face that had lived through so much. With the back of her hand she lightly brushed the stubble on his cheek and remembered that their relationship was born in the very heart of their own sufferings. There was hope. Deep down, she wanted to convince herself there was hope, that all scorched earth eventually started yielding grain again, one summer or other. The man must have been through the worst life had to offer; day after day, he must have tried to roll a ball of life that eroded more and more with each new incursion into Evil. But Lucie wanted to try. Try to give him back a tenth, a hundredth of what he had lost; she wanted to be there when things weren’t going well, and also when they were. She wanted him to hug her twins to his heart and, when he buried his face in their hair, perhaps think of his own child. She wanted to be with him, period.

She pulled back her hand, parted her lips just slightly to whisper all that to him, even though he was sleeping, because she now knew that a part of his brain would hear it, and that her words would register somewhere in the back of his mind. But no sound emerged from her mouth.

And so she leaned over and simply planted a kiss on his cheek.

Maybe that was how love began.