Nothing is Lost

NOTHING IS LOST
 PROLOGUE
 That’s it, you’ve found him. There he is. He’s walking with his hands stuck deep in his pockets and his eyes down, as if he instinctively feels the threat. He isn’t safe here, and he knows it. He should never have set foot in this town again. He isn’t at home. It’s a matter of territory. A matter of revenge and memory.
 The two of you are walking behind him, side by side, staring at the back of his neck. On your lips, a question you can’t bring yourselves to utter. What do we do now? You don’t know. You haven’t thought about it. 
 You’ve found him, that’s all. 
 He walks to the main door that leads out onto the street and leaves the hospital enclosure. You wait a few seconds and join a group of visitors so that you can get behind him, hoods pulled down over your heads so that they can’t identify you later in the footage from the security camera over the entrance to the grounds. 
 There he is, at the other end of the path. You walk faster to keep up with him. What now? He’s bound to notice that you’re tailing him. You aren’t professionals, you aren’t cops. He knows your faces. And you wonder once again if he wakes up in the night thinking about you, about him and what he did to him, the thing that nobody has ever made right. 
 Face facts: you aren’t dispensers of justice. Give up. You don’t have any weapons, any protection, you have nothing, you are nothing, that’s why things are the way they are.
 I beg you. Give up. The fire is out, and that’s it. People have forgotten. Nobody will help you. Nobody will forgive you. 
 It’s already been fifteen years. It’s too late. You should have done something at the time. But you were too young. Too angry. The people who could have done something preferred to play by the rules. How can you blame them? 
 You know it won’t bring him back. So what are you looking to do? Balance the scales?
 Turn back. If you refuse to play the game they’ll make you pay a hundred times over. They’re allowed to cheat but you aren’t, and nobody ever said it was fair. 
 He gets on the bus. So do you.
 Night closes over you. 
 1
 A few months earlier
 
 I saw it yesterday afternoon when we parked near the hospital. Graffiti sprayed in red on the wall of a factory that already had thousands of other images. It showed the face of a teenager, and the words JUSTICE FOR SAÏD.
 Obviously, it struck me as weird. I knew that graffiti well. It had been all over the walls in my neighborhood when I was little, but time has done its work, they’ve demolished the high-rises, and the memories along with them. 
 By the next day they’d repainted the wall white. The other graffiti didn’t matter, but they couldn’t let that one resurface. 
 I almost told Zé when we passed it. Our eyes met and I saw the shadows in his. I preferred to keep silent.
 We were going to see Gabrielle and he didn’t care about anything else, especially not the face of a boy who died fifteen years ago. 
 
 * * *
 
 The hospital bed.
 Gabrielle, pale-faced, a needle in the hollow of her elbow, bandages around her wrists. Her breathing slow and deep. Shutters half closed to keep out the gloom of an October Wednesday. Outside, it’s cold. Inside, the hospital is well heated. 
 Gabrielle, her eyes wide open. She’s been staring up at the ceiling for days now. 
 Zé sitting at the foot of the bed, a book in his hand. Lamartine’s Méditations poétiques. They don’t talk. They don’t look at each other. No expression on their faces, nothing but a great emptiness. Hence the bandages, the drip, the hospital.
 A nurse comes in. Forty-something. Lines around her eyes. A small scar at the base of her neck. She doesn’t take any notice of Zé, she’s used to his studious presence. She goes straight to the bed. She greets Gabrielle with a somewhat insincere, slightly curt “hello.” She’s tired, it’s obvious. Neither of them look at her. She removes the needle, dabs at the tiny orifice in the crook of the elbow with a sterile compress, and sticks a Band-Aid over it. She gets ready to leave the room without uttering another word. It isn’t that she’s doing her job badly. The hushed atmosphere of this place is contagious.
 But then she sees me and gives a start. 
 “What . . .”
 This reaction tears Zé from his reading. He turns to her, then to me, as if he’d forgotten my presence.
 “Who is this child?” she asks, recovering. 
 “He’s nothing,” the visitor replies (thank you very much). “Just my ward.”
 “Your ward?”
 She looks at us in turn, trying to figure out if it’s a joke, given the difference in our ages.
 “This department is out of bounds to anyone under the age of fifteen, monsieur.”
 “Fine, are you going to pay for a babysitter? Because I can’t. Be a good girl and piss off, this is a family reunion.” 
 She looks him up and down. I feel her anger rising. Lots of little bits of anger accumulated in all these years spent trying to find a fragile balance between ethics, humanity, and the bitterness and stress of the job. Every humiliation probably reminds her of all the others. Zé has already turned away from her and plunged back into the Méditations. Zé’s a real bastard when he wants to be. He isn’t even reading. He knows Lamartine by heart. 
 Gradually, the tension in the nurse’s shoulders relaxes. She’ll crack some other day. It won’t be long now, I think. Maybe she’ll just