Free Wonder by Dominique Fortier Page A

wallpaper.
    A rare luxury, the three had supper in the hotel restaurant, an immense dining room that had a dozen huge chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, where liveried waiters snaked their way through the tables carrying plates covered with silver domes. Most tables were occupied by circus people. The few other diners looked with stupefaction first at Jemma, who walked with the help of two canes, then at Ilsa, the bottom part of her face modestly covered with a scarf but the abundant growth on her chin still visible; and at Qui and Quan, who each surveyed the room from his own side. As for Baptiste, he was still stunned to see how much attention was being paid to him in the midst of so many more spectacular Phenomena. The people of the fine city of San Francisco were not however in the habit of welcoming dark-skinned people in hotel dining rooms, and the whispers that had greeted Jemma’s arrival were transformed into noisy comments when he took his seat with Elie and Alice and laid his black hand on the young woman’s white arm.
    “I didn’t think it was this kind of establishment,” remarked a long-faced woman to his left, who started to get up but stopped when Hector entered the room with a martial tread, running his conqueror’s eyes over the guests.
    The soup was tepid, the roast beef overcooked, and in general the dishes lacked salt, but Elie, unaccustomed to such a feast, devoured everything put in front of him,while Alice was careful to pick up her fork delicately in her right hand once she’d cut her meat with her knife and to dab her lips with her starched serviette after each mouthful. Baptiste could see the husband of the angular woman – who was now twisting her neck to get a look at Bailey at the other end of the hall – out of the corner of his eye. He thought the man looked like Louis XVIII but couldn’t remember where he might have seen the face of the French monarch.
    Back in their room, the cake was waiting for them, sitting prominently on the dressing table, a dozen slender candles stuck into the white icing. Delighted, Elie turned towards Alice and in a voice that held both reproach and relief, exclaimed:
    “I thought you’d forgotten!”
    Her only reply was to tousle his hair. He grabbed the knife beside the plates but she stopped him from cutting into the cake right away.
    “It’s you who forgot something,” she reminded him softly as she took a small box wrapped in white paper from her purse. “First, you have to blow out the candles.”
    He seized the box and opened it cautiously: inside, on a cushion of sky-blue satin, lay a heavy, finely worked silver lighter with, in the middle of some complicated arabesques, a stylized
E
and
C
intertwined.
    “They’re your initials now,” she explained, while Elie turned the object over in his fingers, fiddling with the cover which opened and closed with a snap, making the roller, its circumference marked with minute grooves, spin until a spark shot up and then a bluish flame. He lit the candles one by one. She urged him:
    “Make a wish.”
    He looked around at the warm, rich, golden room, his mother and Baptiste smiling, and he knew that all he wanted was for things to go on as they were at this moment. He closed his eyes, breathed, opened his eyes: the twelve flames were out, the blackened wicks of the candles now gave off only some weak smoke. The
twelve
flames.
    “There was one too many!” he exclaimed, alarmed, reaching for the offending candle. “Does that mean my wish won’t come true?”
    Alice and Baptiste had a good laugh.
    “No,” his mother reassured him. “On the contrary, it means that your wish will be good for two years.”
    But Elie, unconvinced, looked hard at both of them, sensing a lie.
    “I’ve got something for you too,” said Baptiste, thrusting his arm under the bed and taking out a long, wide box wrapped in newspaper, which the boy tore eagerly, revealing a cardboard carton with a coloured illustration of a