Three Strong Women Read Online Free PDF

bathroom.
    But it was her father’s room. It was empty, and the double bed had not been slept in. Something about the stillness of the air and of everything else made her think that the room was no longer used.
    She followed the corridor to the living room and groped her way through it.
    The front door was not locked.
    Hugging her toiletries bag to her chest and feeling her nightgown rubbing against the back of her knees, she went outside. With her bare feet on the warm cement she felt herself trampling on the invisible flowers that had fallen from the poinciana. She dared at last to look up at the tree, in the vain hope of seeing nothing there, of not discerning in the crisscross of branches the pale shape, the cold luminescence of her father’s hunched body. She thought she could hear, coming from the shadows, loud, painful breathing, desolate panting, and even stifled sobs and little groans of distress.
    Overcome with emotion, she wanted to call out to him.
    But what word could she use to address him?
    She’d never been comfortable saying “Daddy,” and couldn’t imagine using his first name, which she barely knew.
    Her urge to call out to him remained stuck in her throat.
    For a long while she watched him rocking very slightly above her head. She couldn’t see his face, but she recognized, gripping the biggest branch, his old plastic flip-flops.
    The body of her father, this broken man, shone palely.
    What a bad omen!
    She wanted to run away from this funereal house as quickly as possible, but she felt that, having agreed to return to it and having managed to locate the tree her father was perching in, she was now too deeply committed to be able to abandon him and go back home.
    She returned to Sony’s room, having given up on the idea of trying to find the bathroom, so fearful was she now of opening a door on a scene or situation that would cause her to feel more guilty.
    Sitting on Sony’s bed again, she toyed with her cell phone, deep in thought.
    Should she try again to call home, at the risk of waking the children if they’d gotten back from the movies?
    Or go to sleep with the guilty feeling of having done nothing to avert a potential catastrophe?
    She’d have liked to hear Lucie’s voice again.
    A hideous thought went through her mind, so fleeting that she forgot the exact form it took, but long enough for her to feel the full horror of it: Might she never hear her daughter’s voice again?
    And what if, in hastening to her father’s side, she’d unwittingly chosen between two camps, two possible ways of life, the one inevitably excluding the other, and between two forms of commitment fiercely jealous of each other?
    Without further ado she dialed the number of the apartment, and then, since no one picked up, the number of Jakob’s cell phone, also in vain.
    Having slept little and badly, she got up at dawn, slipped on her green dress and sandals, and went in search of the bathroom, which was, in fact, next door to Sony’s room.
    She went back to the little girls’ room.
    She gently opened the door.
    The young woman was still asleep. The two little girls were awake and sitting up in bed. Their perfectly identical pairs of eyes were wide open, gazing sternly at Norah.
    She smiled at them, murmuring from a distance the tender things she habitually said to Lucie.
    The little girls frowned.
    One of them spat at her. The thin spittle dribbled onto the sheet.
    The other began to imitate her, puffing out her cheeks.
    Norah shut the door, not offended, but unsettled.
    She wondered if she should be doing something for these little waifs, and in what capacity—as a half sister, a kind of mother, an adult morally responsible for every child one came across?
    She once again felt her heart bursting with impotent rage at that thoughtless man who after so many failures couldn’t wait to marry again and produce more children who meant nothing to him, a man whose capacity for love and for showing consideration to