Three Strong Women Read Online Free Page B

Lucie had given up fastening their seat belts and Norah said nothing, furious with Jakob for seeking always to cast her in the role of a killjoy or a villain, but also disgusted with herself for being, she felt, a coward, unworthy.
    She’d felt like heaving the car against a bus, just to show him that fastening seat belts wasn’t pointless, but he knew that, didn’t he?
    That wasn’t the issue. What was she doing? What did she want from this man who was hanging on her back with his adorable child in tow? What did she want from this man with the soft, pale eyes, who’d sunk his painless little claws in her flanks so that no matter what she did she couldn’t shake him off?
    That’s what she could not, dare not, explain to her mother or her sister or her few remaining friends: the sheer ordinariness of such incidents, the narrowness of her concerns, the emptiness of such a life beneath the appearance of fullness that—such was the terrible power of enchantment wielded by Jakob and his daughter—so easily deceived mother, sister, and friends.
    Norah’s father stopped in front of one of the cells that lined the corridor.
    He opened the door carefully and immediately stood back.
    “You’ll be sleeping here,” he said.
    Gesturing toward the far end of the corridor, he added—as if Norah had shown a slight hesitation about this particular assignment—“There’re no longer any beds in the other rooms.”
    Norah switched on the ceiling light.
    The walls were covered with posters of basketball players.
    “Sony’s room?” she mumbled.
    Her father nodded.
    He was breathing more audibly, with his mouth wide open, his back against the wall.
    “What are the girls called?” asked Norah.
    He shrugged, pretending to think.
    She laughed, slightly shocked.
    “Don’t you remember?” she asked.
    “Their mother chose their names, rather strange names, I can never remember them,” he replied, laughing too, but mirthlessly.
    To her great surprise she sensed in him an air of desperation.
    “What do they do during the day, when their mother isn’t there?”
    “They stay in their room,” he said abruptly.
    “All day?”
    “They have all they need. They don’t lack for anything. That girl takes good care of them.”
    Norah then wanted to ask why he’d summoned her.
    But though she knew her father well enough to be aware that it couldn’t have been for the simple pleasure of seeing her after so long and that he must be after something from her in particular, he seemed at that moment so old and vulnerable that she refrained from asking the question. When he’s ready, he’ll let me know, she said to herself, but she couldn’t help telling him, “I can only stay a few days.”
    She thought of Jakob and the two overexcited girls, and her stomach tightened.
    “Ah no,” he said, agitated all of a sudden, “you must stay a lot longer, it’s absolutely essential! Well, see you tomorrow.”
    Slipping into the corridor, he trotted away, his flip-flops clacking on the concrete, his fat hips wiggling under the thin fabric of his trousers.
    With him went the bittersweet smell of rotting flowers, of flowers in full bloom crushed under an indifferent foot or bitterly trampled, and when she removed her dress to go to sleep she took particular care to spread it out on Sony’s bed so that the yellow flowers embroidered on the green cotton cloth remained fresh and distinct to the eye and bore no resemblance to the poinciana’s wilting flowers and the guilty, sad smell left in her father’s wake.
    She found her backpack at the foot of the bed.
    She sat in her nightgown on her brother’s bed. It was covered with a sheet bearing the insignias of American basketball teams. She cast a pained look at the small chest of drawers covered withdusty knickknacks, the child’s desk with its low top, the basketballs piled up in a corner, most of them burst or deflated.
    She recognized every object, every poster, every piece of