Free The Other Story by Tatiana De Rosnay Page A

that could ride the crest of the waves like a surfboard. Théodore Duhamel sailed his Hobie Cat audaciously, to such an extent that even his phlegmatic wife gasped with fright when the sleek boat was nearly overturned by a powerful shore break.
    Whenever Nicolas endeavored to describe his father to journalists, it was the memory of him sailing his Hobie Cat that he wished to convey, his wet suit, his cigar clamped between his teeth, his hair streaming behind him, waving to his son and wife as he drifted by. “There goes your man,” he heard his mother’s friends say. “Oh, look at him, Emma. What a prince!” And Nicolas would wave back, breathless with pride. The boat darted close to the shore, riding in on the wave like a surfer, then carelessly and effortlessly turned back at the very last moment, swooping high over the foam, black sail swinging over and swelling up again.
    The Hobie Cat washed up with the tide near Hendaye two days after the disappearance, its mast smashed and its sail torn. But his father’s body was never found. It had been a muggy, humid August day in 1993. The waves were no bigger than usual. Théodore Duhamel told his wife he was sailing down to Guéthary to see his surfer friends. If the wind was strong, as it was that day, it usually took him under one hour from the Port des Pêcheurs, where he kept his boat. Nicolas did not see his father leave (that morning, he was at his tennis lesson), but when he got back at lunch, he did glimpse the small pointed sail as it appeared behind the Gothic peak of the Villa Belza. He knew his father could not possibly see him at such a distance, but he waved to him all the same. He had wanted to go to Guéthary with his father, but Emma refused, because of the tennis lesson. She became flustered when she had to pay for lessons that her son did not attend. If Nicolas had gone sailing with his father, would he have prevented his death? Would they both have died? Those questions still haunted Nicolas, eighteen years later.
    Nicolas remembers the harrowed look on his mother’s face when she finally called the surfer friends in Guéthary as the sun was setting. Théodore had “been and gone,” chirped his laid-back pal from California, Murphy. “I’m worried,” she admitted. Nicolas was only eleven, but he felt a gnawing in his gut. Then she said softly, “I’m going to have to call the police.” He could not bear hearing what his mother had to say to the police, so he left the room and went to stand on the balcony, where his father had stood that very morning. He put his feet where his father had put his, and placed his hands on the railing, exactly where his father had placed his hands. He watched the darkness of the night sweep up into the sky and the slow, steady beam from the lighthouse shine through the black, and he was afraid, more afraid than he had ever been in his life, ten times more afraid than when the plane was hit by lightning. His mother came out and cradled him in her arms. He dared not look at her face. He stared out at the immensity of the sea and thought of his father somewhere out there, and he started to cry.
    The minutes slipped by, endless and dreadful. The night came, and people started to turn up. He was given something to drink, and someone made a meal. The apartment was soon packed with friends, and he was cuddled, kissed, cajoled, but it did not make him feel any better, and he watched his mother’s face become paler as the night inched along. He finally fell asleep, exhausted, on the corner of the sofa while people continued to talk, drink, and smoke, and when he awoke, bleary-eyed, at dawn, his mother was crying in the bathroom, and he knew his father had still not been found.
    “When there is no corpse,” he told the journalists, “no coffin, no undertaker, no grave, no Mass, no obituary, it is hard to accept that someone is dead. When the Hobie Cat was found, we all longed for the body to be, as well. But it never was.