Spectacle(47)

Nathalie thumbed through some sweaters and, seeing nothing, pushed them back.

This search was far less thrilling and worthwhile than she had expected. Maybe that was the problem—expectations. Simply wanting the answer to an old and probably irrelevant question to assuage her desire to know about Tante didn’t mean the world was going to comply.

She moved to the last place worth exploring: the desk. An inkwell, a small stack of books, and a paperweight lay atop it. Stanley jumped on the desk, weaving around the books to sniff the inkwell.

The first drawer turned up nothing but a ruler, some nails, and a hammer. The second drawer was noisy and took an eternity to open. It was strewn with scraps of paper and a folded-up page of Le Petit Journal. Just as Nathalie picked it up, Stanley leapt off the desk, knocking two books onto the floor.

The sofa jostled on the wooden floor, ever so softly.

She put the books back onto the stack, shooing Stanley out of the room to no avail.

Maman’s cough burst in from the living room.

Nathalie extinguished the lamp. Maman’s back would be to the bedroom, but if she stood up, she’d see the glow.

The floor creaked, distinctly, as it only did when bearing human weight slat after slat.

Oh no, no no no …

The noisy drawer was still open. Nathalie shoved the newspaper inside the front of her dress and pressed up against the drawer.

“What are you doing?”

She turned. Her mother held a lamp that threw just enough light to reveal a scowl.

“Nothing,” Nathalie said, willing her voice not to crack. “Stanley came in here and I followed him.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t the other way around?”

“I’m going to bed and I wanted to take him with me, that’s all.”

Maman placed the lamp on her nightstand and folded her arms. “Was he in that drawer you just closed?”

Nathalie watched Stanley saunter out of the room. “He knocked some books off the desk. The drawer was open a little and I pushed it in.”

The lie swelled like a lump of dough, pushing at the walls of her stomach.

“We’ll talk in the morning. Bonne nuit, Nathalie,” Maman said, her usual warm tone traded for ice.

She wished her mother a sheepish good night in return and went to her bedroom. She pulled out the newspaper—one sheet, pages nine and ten from April 27, 1869—and began reading.

“Marriage Announcements.” Her parents were married April 24 that year. She read through the notices and spotted her parents’ names on the list.

She’d never seen a newspaper so old. Beside the marriage announcements were birth announcements and obituaries. An advertisement for Café Maxime spread across the top of the page. The other side had two stories, one about an upcoming parliamentary election that was so dull she stopped reading after the fourth sentence. The other was continued from page two, with the headline “Effects Uncertain”:

… has denied that the experiments are correlated with insanity. “I’ve brought magic into the world,” said Dr. Henard, “not lunacy.”

Still, Dr. Henard does not deny that many patients who have successfully undergone the blood transfusion have observed side effects over time. “I’m not at liberty to discuss individual cases, but there do appear to be treatment results that were not anticipated.”

Although Henard offers no further comment, the Tremblay family remains adamant. “My wife was a good woman, a good wife,” M. Tremblay said, shaking his head. “I’ve lost her to madness, just like the other four families who lost someone to the asylum after these experiments. And I have to wonder, what happens to my children if I’m next?” Tremblay shakes his head again. “Henard promised us that we’d ‘gain insight.’ Maybe in his mind insight is just another word for devastation.”

Or, as we see it, sorrow.



Nathalie dropped the newspaper. It floated onto the ground with a quiet rustle.

Insight.

The parallel was too much. Too uncanny. Too everything to be a coincidence.

She didn’t know much about Dr. Henard’s experiments, only what she’d heard from some schoolmates who claimed to have a relative who’d been a patient. Henard had found a way to impart seemingly magical abilities—clairvoyance, mind reading, superhuman strength—through blood transfusions. Then terrible consequences had come to light; people lost their powers over time, some died as a result of transfusions, some became physically ill. He’d fallen out of favor and, as far as Nathalie knew, disappeared from public consciousness over a decade ago. Few people talked about “that fraud Henard” anymore.

Nathalie had never before heard of a connection between the treatments and insanity.

Aunt Brigitte claimed to see events in her dreams that became real, or so she thought, and was judged to be insane as a result. Had Tante been one of his patients?

Nathalie sat on the bed as another thought seized her. The visions, the memory loss …

She shook her head; those things couldn’t be related. She’d never gotten a medical procedure, not that she could remember.

That. She. Could.

Remember.





21


Nathalie arranged and rearranged the questions she had for Maman, writing them out in her journal before bed. Then she did something else that, she now decided, she should have done in the first place.