Her eyes brimmed over now. She cried. I had to look away.

“With the boat,” I said. “We’re going to the ocean. When the rain comes. When the canal fills up.”

Then she laughed. She sat down, right there on the ground. She was so much shorter than me. The tears vanished. Only her laughter was there. A laughter without warmth. Maybe that was how she laughed before at people like me, on vacation in Provence, wearing her silk dresses.

And I knew why she was laughing. A helpless young whippersnapper, with a child in tow, a boat on land. I was lacking everything, even a plan.

Just as suddenly as she’d begun laughing, she stopped.

She stood up. It was an effort, because she was so thin, but she tried to conceal it. Then, without saying another word, she turned her back on me and walked back to the suitcase on the bank of the canal. But she didn’t pick it up. Just climbed down into the canal. Passed the boat and kept walking.

“Marguerite?” Lou called.

She didn’t answer.

“Where are you going?”

Then Marguerite turned to face me.

“To the ocean. I’m walking to the ocean.”

And then she kept going. Her back was so small and narrow between the concrete walls. But she held her head high. She staggered slightly, the dried sludge whirling up around her feet as she walked. Soon she would be gone and the dust would settle.

But her suitcase remained where it was on the bank. Her suitcase, the only thing she had.

I grabbed it and ran after her.

She turned around, questioningly, a tiny glint of hope in her eyes.

“Here,” I said.

But the hope was extinguished immediately. “What shall I do with it?”

All the same, she took hold of the handle and started pulling it behind her. The small wheels dug down into the dry ground, but she kept dragging it anyway. Pulled and pulled, filling the air behind her with dust.

It will be the last I will see, I thought, the last I will see of her, her back in the canal, the dust, the suitcase. The last sound will be that of suitcase wheels against congealed mud. This is what she looks like when she walks. And just this sound, nothing else. No words, screams, tears.

But I had forgotten about Lou. She was there, because she had come down from the boat without my noticing it and had seen what I’d seen.

Now she filled the air with her sounds, her words, her screams, her tears. Yet again she howled in my arms, yet again she protested against my decisions. And this time there was no stopping her.

“You can’t leave, Marguerite! She can’t leave, Daddy! She has to stay here with us!”

Everything inside me came to a halt and everything began. At long last, I listened to my child.