Read Online The Last Life by Claire Messud - Free Book Online Page B

get my mom."
    "Where'd he go?"
    "Where can he go? They'll get him. We all saw him. Jesus fuck."
    "He's insane. He'll go to jail for this."
    "I'm bleeding."
    "It's a scratch, Thierry. Cécile, can you walk? Where are her clothes? Where are my clothes? We can't take her naked."
    "We shouldn't take her anywhere. Wait for the ambulance."
    "Don't be ridiculous. This is crazy. I can't believe this is happening."
    "Should we wash her off?"
    "In the pool? Don't be sick. Cécile, Cécile sweetie, talk to me. Can you walk as far as the driveway, for the ambulance?"
    "Who's going to tell her parents?"
    "Fuck her parents. Where are they?"
    "In the hotel, you nit. Stop blubbering."
    "I think I'd better go to hospital too."
    "Whatever—look, I can't believe this. My God."
    And then the sound of Marie-Jo's mother, out of breath, almost hysterical, and close behind other voices, men's and women's, huge flashlights jerking and swinging and a dawning like daybreak overhead as they inspected Cécile's blood-dripped back under the glare.
    "There's no bullet hole. The bullet's not in her," said a man, someone's father. "For God's sake, get her parents."
    I crept away, skirting the paths, ducking in the undergrowth at the sound of footsteps, hidden behind an oleander bush by the gate as the ambulance careened past, all red lights and honking. Once on the road, I ran. I sped the half-mile as though invisible, as though I or it weren't there at all, as though I were guilty, with Thibaud's spit tasting now like blood in my mouth, and a voice pounding in my head with every footfall, "It didn't happen. It didn't happen. This never happened. It didn't happen."
    And in the door, and up the stairs, and first I crawled under my bed and cried, and then I stood up and took off my clothes and went into my bathroom and brushed my teeth furiously without running the water (it didn't happen, it didn't happen), and I put on my nightgown and lay in bed staring out at the sinking moon, willing it all away, pretending I was asleep. But the lemony smell of Thibaud's skin was on my skin; and when my mother woke me the next morning (softly, softly, things were that bad), I knew it was all true.

Part Two

1
    The Hotel Bellevue was my grandfather's house built on rock. It hadn't always been there, hadn't been handed to him, in its ice-cream-colored glory, with its sculpted pathways and meticulous flora, all eyes to the sea in front of it. He had chosen the land in the late 1950s, already a man fully grown and fighting failure. It was scrubby terrain then, a naked clifftop on an unfashionable part of the coastline, with only a military barracks and a fort nearby, and a few isolated villas buried behind cypress trees further along the road.
    He, too, was nothing, or so he later maintained, a man in the first flush of middle age whose early promise had been distracted and sapped—by his mother, by the war, then by his wife and children. When he stood on the clifftop and imagined his hotel there, he was turning the page on a thousand disappointments and turning his back on the country he loved. (This is only a manner of speaking, of course, because he set himself, and his future, to face his past: from his hotel, had his vision been God-like, he would have been able to peer over the rolling Mediterranean and, when his eye again found land, it would have been on the shores he had so recently left behind, where his son (my father) and daughter and wife and cousins remained. It would have been—would still be, if any of us could see so far—on Algeria.)
    My grandfather's father was a baker, his mother a teacher, both of them born on the far-flung soil of what was then only newly France. My grandfather was born there, too, in 1917, the youngest of four children, although for many years I was told they were only three. Raised in Blida—a town I long imagined as dusty and forsaken, though it is in fact famously lush—he grew up largely fatherless,