97,196 Words by Emmanuel Carrère

Author:Emmanuel Carrère
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

4

In 1997 Julie met a certain Paul, with whom she and her two children moved to Stockton, a working-class city ninety or so miles from San Francisco. Darcy saw less and less of her. Darcy wanted to believe that Julie had pretty much put her nightmare behind her and settled into the life of a suburban housewife, and that although this life wasn’t enviable, it was far preferable to the utter desolation of the Tenderloin. One night Darcy got a panic-stricken phone call: Julie was at the hospital after a miscarriage, and the police had come to tell her that Paul had been arrested after abusing little Tommy. At first Julie had refused to believe them. They showed her the report, together with photos: bruises, cuts, his face covered with vomit. When she got out of the hospital, Paul was in prison and the two children were in foster care. She had the right to go see them, but not to have them back for now. Not for now, okay, but when? That wasn’t clear. The counselors were noncommittal. She knew she was only making things worse by calling them assholes and shitheads, but she couldn’t help it. Alone in Stockton, she lost her footing, started to be afraid she was going mad, and for the first time she started to harass Darcy, calling her up in the middle of the night and threatening to commit suicide. She would have liked Darcy to adopt Rachel and Tommy. Exasperated, Darcy finally said that if they’d taken the kids away, it was Julie’s fault. “Fuck you,” Julie said, and hung up. If Julie hadn’t gotten back in contact, Darcy thinks she wouldn’t have run after her: she’d become too hard to manage. But after a week of sulking Julie called Darcy up again and shared her latest concern: she didn’t know where Jack was. The last time she’d seen him was a couple of months ago, and he wasn’t doing so well at all. Darcy called the hospitals, activated her network of doctors and social workers, and found Jack in a nursing home, in the end stage of AIDS. The bus from Stockton to San Francisco, where the home was located, cost twenty dollars, which Julie didn’t have, so Darcy paid for her to visit him a couple of times. He had some pictures on his bedside table Darcy had taken of the children and poignantly begged to see Rachel, but Julie couldn’t bring herself to tell him that Tommy and Rachel had been taken from her. She avoided talking about it, said Rachel was at school and that she’d come the next time. Jack died without seeing his daughter again—the only gift, he said, that life had given him.

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