The Day After Tomorrow

25

MICHELE KANARACK had never seen her husband as distant and cold.

He was sitting in his underwear, a worn T-shirt and American jockey shorts, looking out the kitchen window. It was ten minutes after nine in the evening. At seven o’clock he’d come home from work, taken off his clothes and immediately put them in the washer. The first thing he’d reached for after that was wine, but he stopped abruptly after drinking only half a glass. After that he’d asked for his dinner, had eaten in silence, and said nothing since.

Michele looked at him without knowing what to say. He’d been fired, she was sure of it. How or why, she had no idea. The last thing he’d told her was that he was going to Rouen with Monsieur Lebec to look over a possible site for a new bakery. Now, little more than twenty-four hours later, here he was, sitting in his underwear and staring out at the night.

The night, that was a thing Michele had inherited from her father. Forty-one when his daughter had been born, he’d been a Parisian auto mechanic when the German army overran the city. A member of the underground, he spent three hours every evening after work on the roof of their apartment building clandestinely watching and recording Nazi military traffic on the street below.

The war had been over for seventeen years when he’d brought four-year-old Michele back to the apartment house and up onto the roof to show her what he’d been doing during the occupation. The traffic on the street below magically became German tanks, half-tracks and motorcycles. The pedestrians, Nazi soldiers with rifles and machine guns. That Michele hadn’t understood the purpose behind his actions didn’t matter. What did matter was that in taking her to that building and leading her up to the roof in the darkness to show her how and what he had done, he had shared a secret and dangerous past with her. He had included her in something very personal and very special and, in remembering him, that was what counted.

Looking to her husband now, she wished he could be like her father. If the news was bad, it was bad. They loved each other, they were married, they were expecting a child. The darkness outside only made his distance more painful to understand.

Across the room the clothes washer stopped, its cycle finished. Immediately Henri got up, opened the washer door and pulled out his work clothes. Looking at them, he cursed out loud, then crossed the room to pull open a closet door angrily. A moment later he was stuffing the still-wet laundry inside a plastic garbage bag and sealing it with a plastic tie.

“What are you doing?” Michele asked.

Abruptly, he looked up. “I want you to go away,’ he said. “To your sister’s house in Marseilles. Take back your family name and tell everyone I’ve left you, that I’m a louse, and you have no idea where I’ve gone.”

“What are you saying?” Michele was flabbergasted.

“Do what I tell you. I want you to leave now. Tonight.”

“Henri, tell me what’s wrong, please.”

In answer, Kanarack threw down the garbage bag and went into the bedroom.

“Henri, please . . . Let me help . . . .” Suddenly she realized he meant it. She came into the room behind him scared half to death and stood in the doorway as he dug two battered suitcases from under the bed. He pushed them toward her.

“Take these,” he said. “You can fit enough into them.”

“No! I am your wife. What the hell is the matter? How can you say these things without explanation?”

Kanarack looked at her for a long moment. He wanted to say something but he didn’t know how. Then, from outside, an automobile horn sounded once, then twice. Michele’s eyes narrowed. Pushing past him, she went to the window. In the street below she could see Agnes Demblon’s white Citroën, its motor running, its exhaust drifting upward in the night air.

Henri looked at her. “I love you,” he said. “Now go to Marseilles. I will send money to you there.”

Michele pushed back from him. “You never went to Rouen. You were with her!”

Kanarack said nothing.

“Get the hell out of here, you bastard. Go to your goddamn Agnes Demblon.”

“It’s you who has to go,” he said.

“Why? She’s moving in?”

“If that’s what you want to hear. All right, yes, she’s moving in.”

“Then go to hell, for all time. Go to hell, you son of a bitch, and God damn you!”