I’m thinking that the story will be told more from Emilie’s perspective as it develops. There will still be portions of the story told from her parents’ perspective- i think the parents will be more developed characters then they sometimes are in young adult fiction. There are some things these parents are trying to protect Emlie from, and from her perspective it makes the world seem shadowier and more mysterious. Gaelle (mum) just gets evasive and vague, but John (dad) becomes a very imaginative storyteller. He makes everything around them like a fairytale, and so Emilie sees the world like that for a while. The lion statues on the mountain flicker from the corner of her eyes and she imagines them stalking the paths at night with the moonlight on their cement hides.

Gaelle met John when she was twenty-five working as a secretary at a telemarketing firm. For one week he smiled at her in the mornings on his way into the cold, cubicled call center. Then, on Monday, he spent twenty minutes talking to her with his back to the clock and his eyes never leaving her face. Inside she twisted thinking she should tell him how late it was. Finally she said: “I’m sorry, but you have to go in, you’re going to be, I mean you’re already late.” And the phone on her desk started to ring. “It doesn’t matter” he said “This place, what they do here sucks, and I’m awful at it, I don’t think I’ll ever make money doing this.” He took a big breath and said “I quit last week.” The phone rang again and he blushed but didn’t look away. And neither did she, you know, when she said “Well. Then let’s not waste anymore time here. On y vas.” And they just walked out like that, laughing. John and Gaelle have a baby now. Even in this old world some things are brand new.

***

Gaelle walks up St. Laurent slowly despite the cold. The bakery where she works will only open in another twenty minutes. She’s not supposed to get there early, Miguel doesn’t allow loitering in front of his place. It is not good to draw attention. Of course, it is also unacceptable for her to be late. She has survived at this job for almost 3 years only because of her ability to understand the rules and subtle tensions packed inside the small hot room. When the door opens at the back of the bakery, the door half hidden by the giant ovens, she never lifts her eyes. She’s never glanced inside. She is entirely non-threatening. In fact, she’s pretty sure Miguel and his wife Helena think she’s slow.

Gaelle moves slowly because she’s clumsy, she tries to conserve her movements, to keep her hands close. In the bakery every surface is hard and hot and sharp beneath the fine layer of flour. The backs of her hands are traced with welts like hot crossed buns.

Behind the counter, Gaelle keeps her eyes low to watch for hot surfaces, but whenever the back door opens she can’t help but watch their feet. Lonely and desperate men driven to the secret depths, paying for papers to stay. This much Gaelle has pieced together. Their shoes are foreign, cheap, plastic, or else expensive, leather, foreign. They shuffle in surreptitiously, hoping to pass unseen, and Gaelle never makes them more nervous. On the way out they shuffle quickly. They know that they’re close to escaping into the safe streets of this young white country with legitimating things, but they also know that now they’ve betrayed the rules of the place. They’re holding proof. It’s always when they’re just out that Gaelle’s hands shake.

She approaches the bakery at exactly 11:59 shaking her head at the spare exterior. But when she reaches the front door she notices a small hand-written sign taped onto the inside of the glass. Inside, the counters are clean and the floor is dusty and white just as she left it late last night. The only thing different is so subtle that only someone who had worked there for years, watching quietly from under lowered eyelids, would see it. The huge oven on the back wall has been pulled over just two feet. Flour has been swept into the grooves in the floor. The oven might have sat there, covering the door for years.

There is a police car on the corner so she keeps walking, hoping that she’ll pass for a customer. She read the note: the bakery’s loyal customers thanked and wished the best. No word for their one employee. No warning, and no pay for the last two weeks. She keeps walking, unconsciously twisting open the burns on the backs of her hands. Not overly surprised by this sudden disappearance, she’s still stuck wondering where the money will come from.

In the dark of the back room where all escape routes have been sealed and the dust and flour have settled, a man is lying on the floor. A Miguel Gaelle would recognize if she ever saw him again, if anyone were ever going to see him again.

In the small, clean apartment two blocks over, on Jeanne Mance, Helena Vinovsky is carefully packing two matching suitcases. Her face is streaked and gaunt and tired, but her spine is straightening. She gave hundreds of desperate men the gift of a second chance, a new world, until the possibility of escape finally sank in. The forgery is my own skill, as were all the recipes. She tucks her train ticket into her purse and closes her suitcase. When she is far enough away she’ll mail the envelope that’s in her purse, pressed next to her new papers. She would not leave the poor, stupid French girl with nothing. She could be a good person without a gun to her head.

***

The white noise of the world is throbbing louder these days. There’s a new war on, like a new product on the shelves. It’s being pushed on every channel and denounced on every street corner, and it’s making people do crazy things. War is declared and it’s like something gets unleashed. Guilt hangs low over our heads, daily life is a series of startling contrasts and reminders. Digital footage of missile fire and burning lakes of oil are followed by commercials for bathroom tissue that will make women love you, cars that will empower you, exotic destinations that will give you back your youth.

In the days that follow the end of diplomacy Gaelle watches the news with horror, she cries at the right times in the broadcast and is moved by the bombastic speeches in spite of her self. There’s a draft coming from the window above her head and she begins to feel as though her house is a collage of plaster and plywood holding out against the whole sweating, heaving world. She pictures landmasses colliding, mountain ranges shooting up from the ocean, cities burning. The cold air runs down her neck and she turns to meet the eyes she feels burning into the fragile safety of her living room. All the hungry, angry people of the world are right there black and blank against the glass. A war draws a line through a question, makes a person like Gaelle think the word hate, splits us into self and Other, and puts an end to certain middles tones: greys and blues and subtle pragmatic solutions.

***

John’s job gets more difficult when political tension mounts, and now there’s a war. The kids at the education and employment center are angry. They voted unanimously to shift their efforts away from the usual session project and toward a series of pieces to enliven the anti-war. The staff at the center is supportive but worried. The changes may defy the conditions of their government funding and, worst case scenario, threaten the future of the program. The small group of staff members, already overworked and underpaid, has begun working on a plan. Thus far the plan involves everyone being in at least two places at once, but that’s what they’re going to try and work out tonight.

Gaelle is home in the evenings since the bakery went under, so at least they won’t have to pay another sitter. Money’s getting freaking tight. John’s had a lot of experience surviving, and he knows Gaelle can talk her way into some job that will ease the pressure off for a bit, but Emilie’s face hangs in front of his eyes and he feels his insides twisting and green with worry. When it was just his own life swinging by a wire, dumpster diving for dinner, then it was all an adventure; a gamble that only threatened this person he hardly cared about. But since he met Gaelle everything’s begun to carry a new weight in his mind. Through her sometimes he thinks he can see people’s feelings and the reasons for their actions, and she started right away to make him see that there might be a good side to responsibility.

And when the kid was born it all became real. His tie to the world was suddenly as solid as baby Emilie. Over the course of these two years he’s become a real person, an adult no less. When he holds his girl he feels the weight of everything that’s wrong with the world that he wants to fix and everything good he wants to give. Every day Emilie gets older, and thinking about that John feels the surge and twist in his belly again, and the soft dry pain in his side that’s come to accompany most of his thoughts. Gaelle says, “Suck it up, babe, that’s the pain of parenthood” and he tries to remember that she’s in it with him, but sometimes that almost makes it worse. There’s so much to lose.

***

An hour or so later, from the kitchen where she and Emilie are eating bananas and yogurt Gaelle can hear the scuffle, bump and jangle at the door as John muddles with his ring of keys and maneuvers his way into the narrow front hall.
“Allo halloo!” she sings down the hallway while releasing the squirming sticky kid from her booster seat.
“Dad! Hey! Hey! Dad! Banana and lift me up please!” Emilie commands and narrates- these are her two main tactics these days. Gaelle smiles and shakes her head a bit.

Gaelle washed some of the dishes from dinner listening to their prattle and thinking about the job she’d managed to get that day. It was a good one compared to the bakery: she’d spend her days in quiet order shelving books and files in the McGill law library, and she’d even get a bit of a raise from the change.
But still, it makes Gaelle exhausted. Being with other people, even people she likes, makes her uneasy. The effort of social performance seems to weigh heavier on her now that she’s found the people with whom happiness is effortless.

The easiest way to get to the new job is through the park, over the side of the green hill that Montrealers fondly call the mountain, past the monument, through the campus, and down Penfield and then Peel. When she walks past the monument these days- even now, four years later- her legs tremble and she walks rigidly keeping her thighs and insides tight together.

***

Gaelle is in the library quietly pushing a trolly full of books and files and briefs. She has reshelved from 10 to 7 every day this week and all the skin on her body is dry and white and her knuckles are lined with fine cracks filled with blood. The head librarian said she was lucky her hands broke on their backs and not in the palms like the last girl. They really couldn’t keep someone who bled on the books.

Despite their caustic book-lady humour Gaelle is happy at the job. It’s so quiet here she can go the whole day without speaking to anyone. In the twisting aisles of journals and case histories she is responsible for order. The system makes sense to her. She stayed quiet during her training, and then on her first shift just did the job well, keeping her head down until the librarian squad stopped watching. She felt herself fade into the clockwork life of the law library and knew she had the job. Now that she’s got it mastered she’s free to let her mind wander. To distract herself once it starts getting dark she thinks up all the easy jokes, the silly and surreal things you could do to a library. A shelver could invent a new system- do a whole rack in order of colour before anyone noticed. Or you could switch all the place cards marking the end of each row. You could leave strange muddy shoes on the solemnly guarded upholstery, or spread a picnic beneath the “No Food in the Library! Bugs Love Books!” or fill a trolly with luggage and walk around recklessly leaving bags unattended. Gaelle’s noticed that library people seem to share a precise and grammatical sense of humour.

She checked her watch to turn her face from the line of desks. 6 o’clock. The exhaustion of the end of the day pressed down on her suddenly, and the tome she was lifting to its place threatened to tumble back. She wouldn’t have the energy for her panicked sprint through the park. Stupid, she thought, it’s been four years; he is not still there, lying in wait. And you’re older now, rounder, less of a target.

But it was cold like this, and dark, and it had happened in that same place that sits fat between work and home and I can’t be blamed for being scared! Anger flared up around her head but there was no one to aim it at. The flourescent lights made the shelves and quiet seem to wave and eek in on her, breathing heavily over her. She’d pace the stacks for eight hours a day trying to look away from the thing that pushed against the back of her mind. And she could do it too, until about 6, when the windows were dark and her calves ached. Now her hands shook and her eyes were wet and heavy from what had been laughter a second ago, and she began going through her pockets. She thought: if I happen to have change and I’m tired and it’s the end of the week then it’s ok.

She knew John wouldn’t care. He’d like to use their last penny to hire a limo to speed her back, just because he likes to have her around. It was up to her to watch herself and not let old worries drag at her family’s pockets.

She pushed the empty cart up against the counter a little too hard because her hands were shaking. The librarian looked up sharply, ready to shush violently, but her face softened when she saw who it was. She said “Tired eh? It takes a week to get used to a new job. The quiet can get under your skin. I used to work in a children’s library, total chaos. This is better. Have a nice weekend.” Gaelle breathed in and out, pulled her purse from beneath the counter and found a toonie in her change. She pushed her hair off her face, and smiled calmly and said, “Yes, I am tired. Next week will be better. This week I take the bus home. Bonne soiree.”

***

This morning the kids only came in to the center to announce that they wouldn’t be staying. They had to be in the streets, there wasn’t time for research or even to construct some sort of symbol, masks or props. They were upset and they wanted to be swallowed up and justified by fellow feeling.

At the demonstration John watched them. All around him people were high on group excitement, high on self-righteous and well-justified anger, even a little high on the sharp thrill of winter wind. They would walk, and smile at the loudest individuals, and raise their eyebrows at the most insulting placards until they turned a corner and saw the size of the crowd and they shook themselves, ashamed of their detachment, confusion and boredom. They grabbed hold of the simple rhythm of the chant that surged towards them through the crowd until their hearts shook and their voices cracked and their fists pumped in perfect passionate time. And even John felt swept up in it until he saw how the protesters’ faces started to twist with anger and even a vague, directionless, and gleeful hate; and he thought he could sense the push and slur of senselessness around him.

John left the rally before lunchtime, he allowed himself to be detached from his group and bumped and jostled toward the edges of the herd. Then, instead of returning to work to shuffle through paperwork, he turned up through the McGill gates and headed toward Parc avenue. Emilie was with Brenda Mei at or around her apartment on L’Esplanade. He would steal some time, an afternoon with his gal, and save them the babysitting money.

Brenda was a total god-send of a baby-sitter. She was in her early thirties. She’d moved to Montreal from Manila seven years ago. She spoke English and French but she still managed to teach all the kids some Philippino. From her first day with Brenda, Emilie had been smitten. She loved her long black hair and her shelves full of glass figurines and her gift of new words. Brenda lived with her ancient aunt in a beautiful apartment that cost them hardly anything.

As John walked away from the low thunder of the crowd his troubled stoop unclenched a bit and his surroundings pushed themselves into view. Rows and rows of funky, brightly painted apartments cover this city. People who had held onto their leases in the Plateau area from the time before its trendy boom were the luckiest victims of Montreal’s erratic real estate market. Brenda’s aunt Su had found the place ten years ago through friends in her night class, and she’d settled into the neighborhood, found a job in a local restaurant, ended up buying it out and managing it even into her grey and lurking, secretly smiling, old age.

Brenda had begun by baby-sitting the neighbors’ children when she first arrived. After a while she organized the front rooms of the house to meet semi-professional standards, and had been one of the first few recipients of government financing for 5 dollar a day daycare. Gaelle and Emilie had met her and her gaggle of kids in the park one sunny afternoon. Emilie was just a little bit of a thing at the time, but she’d already begun to shape language into her own thing.

A smile crosses John’s face quickly as he catches a memory of the kid as a baby. Gaelle said that when Em heard Brenda and her aunt’s dialect her face lit up. The polylinguists were fast friends in a matter of minutes and when Gaelle got her job at the bakery a month later Brenda had agreed to make a little room in her brood for Em’s afternoons.

And John was certainly thankful for the smile she brought to his girl’s face and for the relief finding her had been to Gaelle. But he could never totally shake an irrational resentment. She got to spend hours with their kid. Period, and that’s enough let me tell you. He could never believe Em was perfectly safe or happy with her.

He crossed the field and climbed the steps and there was Brenda sitting on a bench by the swings chatting with a woman rocking a baby carriage and a man swinging a red plastic shovel. Across the park six kids were bumbling about in their snowsuits. They sort of looked like they were trying to build something out of snow, but they were mostly getting stuck in the foot high powder; or falling over and rolling around for a bit, their arms too short to be useful. John spotted Emilie sprawled out by the jungle gym wriggling around on her back. Oh the little useless bugs, what would they do without us, he chuckled as he hustled over to her rescue. He stood at her feet, grabbed the padding around her shoulders and yanked her up out of the snow, surprised as always by how light she was.

“Hey! Dad! Qu’est ce que tu fait! Surprise! Hi! How come t’est la Dad?” She said flipping from startled to delighted. She wavered in her boots for a second then leaned her head against his leg. “Can we have lunch Dad? Je ne veux pas du Macaroni but Brenda says yes.” And she lifted her arms as much as she could in her down filled restraints and he picked her up, settled her on his hip, and crunched over to Brenda. He was half listening to Em’s story about a snow house when he realized that Brenda still hadn’t noticed his presence. A strange man had walked into the park and picked up one of the kids and she wasn’t even looking in his direction. He was shocked and appalled and self-righteous. He was about to say something sharp when Brenda turned and smiled and nodded without missing a beat, as though she’d seen him there all along, and said “Salut le papa d’Emilie, did you get the afternoon off? I know one little girl that must be relieved. I don’t think she was looking forward to my lunch menu today. Do you think Dad will let you have Balony?” Emilie wrapped her arms around his neck and said, very seriously “I always always like food my dad makes. Say Bonjour Brenda, Mahal Kita, we’re going home now.”

She lay her head down on his shoulder with a regal and tragic gaze across the park and all its pitiable occupants: people that didn’t live in her house or have dad’s that came and surprised them at lunchtime. John felt a giddy rush to his head. He never got over her strange little acts of love. Yes! He felt like cheering. She loves me the most of anyone in this whole park! Out loud he said “Yep, I’ll take miss picky home and make her anything she likes. I’m a softy for a girl in a purple snow suit.”

And all the frantic evil of the world just seemed like it was going to be ok. They would live a long and happy life in this same way: day by fearful, stressful, awesome day. He and Gaelle would slowly show each other their secrets and help each other to grow up, while mostly pulling off a convincing show of normalcy for their little lady.

For one second, heady with the happiness of a two year old’s love, he towered above the street and the park and everything was safe and fine.