Lear's Shadow by Claire Holden Rothman

Author:Claire Holden Rothman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: 2018-07-09T16:00:00+00:00

13.

TEENAGE BOYS WERE PLAYING soccer on the field in Westmount Park. The shirtless players ran back and forth tirelessly, hooting and laughing in the sunshine. Normally Bea would have stopped and watched for the sheer pleasure of it. Not today. She’d stayed longer than expected with Cara, and now she had to hurry to make it to work on time.

The weather was dry and clear. The humidity that had plagued the city for weeks had finally lifted. Bea was following the footpath that ran along the southern edge of the field when Jack DeVries pedalled by on his mountain bike. Seeing her, he stopped.

“Hey, riot girl,” he said.

Bea didn’t know what to say to that.

Jack laughed and fished his phone from his shorts pocket. He was a good-looking young man with a flashy smile. “You’re on YouTube. Racking up the views.”

He whipped off his aviator shades and squinted at the phone, swiping screens with his thumb while he balanced the bike between his legs. He found what he was looking for and held the phone up for Bea, shading it with one hand so she could see.

There she was, standing with Didier and Gen-vie on Notre-Dame as they raised their fists in solidarity. She looked awful. Her scar, glaringly white on her sun-flushed face, rose from the worried line of her lip and disappeared up her nostril. Her nose looked more skewed than usual. Was this what she had become? A tense, crooked creature with a crack in the middle of her face? She’d never liked photographs of herself; video was a thousand times worse. She looked thinner than she’d thought. And older. Gen-vie’s smooth, youthful features made for a painful comparison.

“You know Gen-vie Roy?”

Bea nodded. She had to make an effort to look up from the phone. “Didier is my brother-in-law.”

Jack’s mouth opened in surprise. “Gen-vie is your sister?”

“No, no,” Bea said. She explained that Gen-vie was Didier’s employee at Crudivore, the restaurant that Didier owned with her sister, Cara.

Jack looked at her blankly. “O-kay,” he said, pausing on the second syllable as if he still didn’t understand. “But you’re in with that crowd. You’re a casserole.”

Bea wanted to tell him that it was more complicated than that. Or simpler. She’d just been babysitting.

But Jack had already taken back his phone and was swiping again. “You saw this one, right?” He held up a photo of a girl in alpine gear hanging from a rope, rappelling down the angel statue on Park Avenue. The photo must have been taken at night, because both the statue and the girl’s face were obscured by shadow. The girl’s sexy pirate body was, however, unmistakable.

“It was in all the papers a couple of weeks ago, here and in Europe,” he continued, oblivious to Bea’s dismay. “She’s the face of the printemps érable.”

Only you couldn’t see her face. Bea squinted at the little screen. At the statue’s base another shadowed figure caught her eye. It was a middle-aged man, gazing upward as he secured the girl’s ropes.

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