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Like most Canadian men in their fifties, once-Correctional Officer Javert watched the weather report all the way through, paying full attention to every phrase. The first weekend of February 2006 was one the forecasters predicted would be the worst of the season. Javert woke up at six, shoveled the five centimetres that had gathered on his driveway overnight, had his first coffee, his bowl of cereal, and his cocktail of antidepressants, and drove twenty minutes (longer because of the snow) across Parc-Extension to where Jean Valjean lived, intending to get the majority of the shoveling done before the noise woke Valjean and he stumbled out in clothes he’d grown too thin for, insisting he could help.
But Valjean was already outside in the painfully-bright winter morning, the snow already starting to float down; not shoveling the driveway but warming up his sedan as he used a brush to take the snow off its roof and break the ice from the windows. He didn’t look up when Javert parked by the curb, despite how distinctive his beat-to-shit pickup truck was; Javert hadn’t lived on a reservation since he was seventeen, but he refused to buy shiny little cars meant for the cramped streets of Montréal no matter how much more practical they were for his life now. When Javert got out and came over to him, Valjean startled badly. Javert put a hand out to settle him, then tucked it in his jacket pocket instead, saying “Running from me or the feds?”
”Cosette’s flight was cancelled because of the storm,” Valjean said. His daughter was in Toronto with a friend right now, consulting her dead mother’s old diaries and trying to understand the woman who birthed her. “She’s going back to school soon, so she needs to pack, and the trains are booked, and they can’t rent a car, and they don’t have money for a hotel, and I need her safe and home. So I’m going to get her.”
”You’re going to drive six hours in a blizzard on your own to then drive six hours back in a blizzard?” Javert said. “Not a chance.”
“My daughter needs me,” Valjean said, scraping at the ice crusted on the windshield. “I’m going.”
“I know that. I’m coming with you.” Javert considered the sedan, which hadn’t been driven in months. “And we’re taking my truck — the space will help.”
“I don’t need you to do that. I don’t need your truck, either,” Valjean said, hunching into himself. He was darker-skinned Black, and bearded, so Javert couldn’t see his face flushing with discomfort, but Valjean certainly felt it on his own cheeks.
“You’ve left your car parked outside on your driveway for months while you were sick. It doesn’t work.” Saying Valjean had been sick was a euphemism borrowed from Cosette; Javert normally referred to Valjean’s attempt at a fast unto death as him ‘pulling a Gandhi,’ as if treating it roughly would make it less frightening for Javert to consider a world that did not hold Valjean. Valjean didn’t speak of his depression at all. “You can’t help your girl if you’re stranded on the side of the 401.”
Valjean nodded slowly. “What do you need to get? Toothbrush? Clothes? Call somebody?”
“I keep that stuff in a bag in the truck and the only person I talk to is you,” Javert said. “Let me use your washroom and we can go. Eat some breakfast.”
Valjean didn’t eat — he knew everyone wanted him to, but everything was terrible, his little girl was stuck somewhere else trying not to cry on the phone because she had no idea what to do, and he needed the sense of control that came with emptiness in his stomach. He got into the driver’s seat of the pickup truck and ghosted a hand over the gearshift.
Javert came out and hesitated. “You can drive stick?”
“Who can’t?” Valjean said; he had picked it up quite easily decades ago on the run, in a car he’d bought for two grand cash and dumped a week later, Cosette seven years old sleeping in the backseat clutching her new Barbie doll.
Javert shrugged and said, knowing it was a mistake but feeling his mouth run away from himself, “That’s hot.”
Valjean didn’t acknowledge that as he drove west out of Montréal towards Autoroute 40; he was dimly aware that Javert was in love with him, and even more dimly aware he in turn was in love with Javert. They hadn’t spoken about it. Both were quiet men, and given to worry, but it was the sense that there was no point to saying anything that stopped them. To go from a parole dodger and a Corrections Officer to friends was already ridiculous. To go from celibate near-senior citizens to lovers, gay men in the eyes of an unfriendly world instead of just the quiet of their thoughts? Inconceivable.
“I should have put my foot down and gone with her,” Valjean said. “Or I should have given in and let her go with a boy. I’d feel better then.”
“You’d feel better with Marius?” Javert said. “They’d come home to that idiot announcing they were engaged and that your girl would be becoming a housewife instead of a doctor. At least Éponine has a head on her shoulders.”
“And what if Éponine gets angry and leaves her alone? Cosette told me she was jealous that Cosette had gone to university,” Valjean worried. In truth, Éponine was in love with Cosette’s boyfriend, the aforementioned Marius. Cosette had told her father that so she could worry about her friendship issues without talking about Marius and making her father shut down; she’d been translating problems that would make him uncomfortable into ones he’d be willing to engage with since she was in sixth grade. “I know Cosette says they’re friends now, but they’ve only known each other a few months.”
“Girls have a code,” Javert said. “They’ll stick together.”
“She has so few people,” Valjean said, talking about something more now. “She’s so lonely.”
Of course, Valjean had made her that way, though Cosette would never admit that to his face. Javert knew, because she texted him daily asking for an update on Valjean’s health, that she thought of her father as fragile, now. Javert understood it; she’d come home from Dalhousie Medical School on her winter break to find her father had lost thirty pounds in four months. She’d begged him to go to the hospital. He’d refused; she’d threatened to call the police so that he’d be escorted to the ER, since she couldn’t physically force him herself. The ensuing revelation — her mother, her early years, their life on the run, Valjean’s past — had ended with him on his knees, begging her to let him die. Instead, she’d tracked Javert down. He’d been in his apartment sulking over Valjean, who had blocked his phone number once Javert’s antidepressants had kicked in and it was clear he probably wouldn’t attempt suicide again, and Cosette had knocked on his door, asking for his help.
She’d taken an Emergency Leave, which turned into a Personal Leave, three months off of med school without consulting Valjean, moved back in and nursed him, jaw set and ears shut against his mortification. Javert, on his own Medical Leave, which had turned into Compassionate Leave, had become her respite worker, taking Valjean to walk the perimeter of Parc Jarry so that the girl could have a few minutes where Valjean wasn’t desperately searching for resentment in her face.
Before she was due to head back to Halifax, Cosette had taken the train with her acquaintance Éponine (Valjean was a feminist but he was also Muslim, and he was not letting his daughter take a trip with her boyfriend) to Toronto, to learn about her mother. She called Valjean most nights, talking about the places she’d seen that her mother had seen years ago in the early 80s, when she was a Trinidadian international student at Centennial College hustling for her Permanent Resident status, falling in love with a Chinese international student at the University of Toronto to have fun and learn a little English before getting a job back home. In some ways, after two months of daily contact working to convince a man to live, Javert knew Cosette Fauchelevant better than her own father did. He knew the trip had been good for her.
When they crossed into Ontario and transferred onto the 401, Javert opened up the glove compartment, where he’d put a handful of CDs grabbed from Valjean’s house while he’d been going to the washroom. “What should I put on?”
“Are those mine?” Valjean said. “Well, ours. Mostly Cosette’s.”
“Cosette took her favourite CDs with her, didn’t she? The most recent thing here is Lauryn Hill.”
“Ms. Lauryn Hill,” Valjean corrected automatically. “Or so Cosette says.”
“You’re so uncomfortable right now!” Javert said, laughing despite himself. “It’s music, Valjean, it won’t kill you to admit you have a preference. Run DMC? You can’t tell me you don’t like hip-hop when you have a framed photo of Malcolm X in your bedroom.”
“You’re too focused on the fact that it’s framed,” Valjean said. Even if Javert had been the sort of person to be jealous of a long-dead civil rights leader (which he was slowly becoming concerned that he was, because Valjean made him an insane person), he knew Valjean didn't have it because he found Malcolm X sexy. The picture was there beside a picture of Cosette because Valjean had no photos of his own family. In his childhood apartment, his brother-in-law had tacked a newspaper article with that photo onto the fridge. As his photos of his sister and her children were lost to moves between houses and cells and cities, he had started putting this one up, instead. “We can find the classical music station on the radio. Something we’ll both tolerate.”
“Jesus, Valjean. Let yourself have something, and trust me that I won’t try taking it away from you,” Javert said.
Valjean looked at him, at the CDs in his hands, then away again at the road. The snow was starting to come down harder. Javert stored the CDs and re-did the two braids he wore now that he wasn’t working in a jail and could grow his hair out like he’d had as a little kid. Valjean kept looking over as he did. Javert said, mostly just for something to say, “Should I chop them off? Do they make me look more Native than I am?”
“You are Indigenous,” Valjean said, uncomfortable with being asked to give his opinion. “Did you pick up my A Tribe Called Quest CD? Would you mind if we put that on?”
“You know all my names, all the stories behind them,” Valjean said at noon, checking several times before he switched into the left lane to weave around a truck. The men were leaving the shield and heading closer to the lowlands, and the forest-topped small rock faces along the sides of the highway were turning into fertile land, stubborn farm-fields spreading out beside the four-lane highway. They passed a group of five or six horses clustered outside near a barn, covered in bright blankets against the cold and the wind. “But I don’t know yours.”
Javert shrugged. “My father part white, so his last name was white too. They weren’t married, but it made things easier before affirmative action so she gave it to me. A social worker gave me my first name. I don’t have any attachment to it.”
It is likely given his age that Javert is a survivor either of residential schools or the foster system. They have never spoken about it before, in the way they talk around so much of their pasts. Valjean and Javert are men who live facing forwards and out, not in and behind themselves. Valjean presses, very aware he has never done so before. “And your name before the government gave you one? Did you have another?”
“Obviously,” Javert said, rolling his eyes. “I can’t say it, though.”
“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” Valjean said hurriedly, hunching in on himself. “I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”
“I mean I literally can’t, Valjean. If I could give you my name, of course I would.”
Valjean looked away from the road at him. Javert didn’t turn to look back. “Watch the road, Valjean, this part looks icy.”
“I’m watching,” Valjean said, and he looked forward again but took one hand off the wheel and rested it heavy and warm on Javert’s knee. Javert looked at the hand.
“You know I was born in jail. My grandmother raised me and named me, I grew up speaking Anishnaabemowiin but I lost it when they took me to foster. My grandmother got me back but then she died when I was twelve or so, and they put me out-of-province in a residential school. My mother went to a school her whole life, she couldn’t speak a word of the language — even if she had, I wouldn’t ask her for a damn thing, let alone lessons. I remember how my name sounded when my grandmother said it. I know when I try, I say it wrong. My tongue won’t do it.”
“You could learn now,” Valjean said. “Even if you only learn a little bit. I think Cosette intends to sign up for Chinese classes. There must be someone who teaches adults…”
“Who would?” Javert said. “It’s a dying language, and the closest thing we have to elders these days are dying bastards like me.”
“Neither of you are dying, hey?” Valjean said, stern. He shook Javert’s knee in a back-and-forth, to emphasize his point. “One of Cosette’s friends speaks fluent Mohawk; I’m sure there are young people who speak your language too and are spreading it between each other. And just like you said last month, you can’t die while I’m alive.”
“You sounded almost properly Québecois back there,” Javert said; they always spoke English together, and it was rare to hear Franco structures like ending sentences with “hey” from Valjean when he’d learned French in his middle age. Valjean shook his knee again. “I’m listening to you, I know. I’m not allowed to go until you do.”
“I wouldn’t say allowed is —” Valjean said, uncomfortable, but then cut himself off. “Exactly. I forbid you to die before I do. I’m in charge and I say neither of us are allowed to die.”
Heat grew and twisted in Javert’s gut, desire and discomfort and lust and helpless love all stirred and shaken like a child’s toy. He thought of the young man he had been, desperate for someone to take him in and tell him what to do. He wished then, desperately, that he had met Valjean fresh from the school, put himself under his hands and grown into a good man, a happy man. A man with clean hands.
Valjean took his hand off Javert’s knee to switch lanes, but he hesitated before putting it back and gave up, grabbing onto the steering wheel with tense shoulders. He had wanted to offer something, the same way that Javert had offered his name, and felt as if by asking for obedience he'd taken something, instead. The silence wasn’t awkward, but it was heavy. Valjean looked back and forth between the road and Javert. Javert looked out the window.
They stopped in a gas station outside Odessa. Valjean paid for gas, hunching into his coat so that the snowflake-spiked wind wouldn’t shoot down his collar. Javert disappeared into the Tim Horton’s and emerged a minute later, carrying two coffees in one large hand and a paper bag in the other. Valjean hurried over to grab one coffee, hot through the cardboard and his coat’s sleeve, stretched over his palm to protect his hands. Since his fast, he found he got cold too easily, the tips of his fingers barely warmer than the room he was in.
“The other’s yours,” Javert said, twisting his hand so Valjean would grab the correct one. “Milk, no sugar, and a bagel for each of us. They didn’t have a single vegetable so I bought orange juice instead.”
Valjean parked the car in the little lot so they could go to the filthy gas station washroom, pumping the last dregs of antibacterial pink soap out of the dispenser. When they made their way to the car Javert headed for the driver’s side, outpacing Valjean. “Snow’s coming down harder,” he says. “You can’t drive the whole way when it takes more concentration. Did you eat breakfast?”
“I meant to,” Valjean said, feeling strange. It was his turn to sit now, let Javert do the work while he ate his bagel under Javert’s pointed gaze. He unwrapped it, trying not to make crumbs or be too loud, as Javert stretched his arm to put his hand on the back of Valjean’s headrest, anchoring him as he backed up out of the parking spot. His two braids were caught under his coat. Valjean watched them twist with the motion of his head. The sight of him, the awareness of Javert’s arm behind him, the food he'd put in Valjean’s hands — the moment stuck to him like a spell.
Javert switched the gear into drive and sped up through the on-ramp, snow thick and malleable and paper-bag brown with dirt, to merge them onto the highway. Once they were at speed, though, he reached over the gear to grab Valjean’s free hand by the wrist. He pulled it onto his own knee again. Under Valjean’s palm, the muscle was tense. He took his hand off Javert’s knee and pulled one of his graphite-gray braids out of his coat. He put his bagel down on the dash, leaned his far hand on Javert’s knee, and reached around and behind him to pull the other braid out. Javert stayed very still, looking at the road. “Thank you,” he said quietly.
“You like your hair longer, so why does it matter how it looks to other people?” Valjean said, unwrapping Javert’s bagel and pulling out a quarter of it to put in Javert’s hand. “Here, eat.”
“I don’t like haircuts. They’re a waste of money.” He finished the piece of bagel in a few efficient bites, then said, cheeks still full of food, “And I missed it whenever they took it from me. Coffee?”
Valjean passed it to him, making sure he had it securely before letting go, their hands overlapping. “It’s hot.”
Javert nodded as if he didn’t need the reminder, despite the fact that the tip of his tongue was continually burnt from drinking coffee too quickly. When he took a sip, it was scalding — he quickly pushed it back into Valjean’s hands before he flinched and slopped it all over himself. Valjean laughed. He said, “Every time.”
“Quiet,” Javert grumbled. “I’m focusing on the road, you’ll distract me and I’ll kill us both. Check the radio?”
Valjean flipped it on — static on most of his pre-sets, this far from Montréal, but he fiddled with the dial and found an AM radio station talking gridiron football. The Montréal Alouettes were, apparently, playing the Winnipeg Blue Bombers tonight. Javert said, “This works.”
“I didn’t know you watched football,” Valjean said, handing him another piece of bagel.
“I started last year during the lockout,” Javert said. The previous hockey season had been cancelled, the players all on strike. The whole city of Montréal had felt it; without their beloved run-down Habs, what was there to make small talk about? “Spent a lot of time in bed while I was healing, and eventually I ran out of old games on VCR.”
“Do you like it?” Valjean said, turning up the radio a little bit.
“Not as much as hockey. Bullshit sport; ‘let’s run across this massive field so that the camera never knows what to focus on, hey?’ Are you eating or just feeding me?”
“Playing it is better,” Valjean said. He took a bite of his own bagel, considering whether he wanted to speak. “I played it in high school. I was a running back.”
“You grew up in Detroit,” Javert said. “They build football fields in the city?”
“In the States, they build football fields everywhere,” Valjean said. He chose the word they, when another man might have said we; an American by birth, childhood, and incarceration, he had left the country for the first time in his middle age. Valjean did not consider himself an American anymore, though he felt a certain loyalty towards Detroit, but he didn’t consider himself to be a Canadian, either.
“What’s a running back?” Javert asked; he knew, but he wanted to hear Valjean explain it, coaxing out some of the past they never spoke about.
“I tackled people so they wouldn’t hurt the quarterback.”
“Sounds boring.”
“I loved it. I was good, too. I was a strong kid, and fast. For a little while we thought I could go to college on a football scholarship; my sister wanted me to become a mechanic. I wanted to do something else, but of course neither happened.”
“You got hurt, or they chose someone else?”
“I got locked up.”
Valjean, at seventeen, had left his apartment early in the morning for football practice and, while on his way to his high school, decided to rob a convenience store. His sister’s kids were hungry; he was frightened they would tell someone they were hungry, and then Children’s Aid would take them away. He’d barged in as the owner was flipping the sign in the morning, had smashed the cash register with his football helmet to grab a handful of twenties, and had been caught bare minutes later. They had tried him as an adult. Fifteen years imprisonment for armed robbery (his football helmet counted, they said) and obstruction of justice, plus delayed parole due to fights and bad behavior once inside. Javert had read his file. He had known the age Valjean was when he first stepped foot in prison. But that was the first time he imagined it; Valjean, pimpled, trying to grow a sad little beard, robbing a convenience store in his high school jersey, never in his life playing football again.
“I’m sorry you didn’t go to college,” Javert said. Valjean shrugged. He handed Javert his coffee again, then put his hand on Javert’s knee. “You don’t watch it now, though. Football.”
Valjean shook his head. “I don’t have the time. And if I have the time, I should spend it otherwise.”
“Like doing what?”
Valjean laughed. “Like watching the Pistons. I’m telling you, Javert, this year is ours again. We’ve got the best record in the league, and as long as we keep our heads against the Spurs —“
“You just won a final a couple years ago, didn’t you ever learn to be grateful for what you have?” Javert said. He paid no attention to basketball, since he refused to support an American team or endorse the city that had created the Toronto Maple Leafs.
“In life, yes. In my life, I’ve been given so much — grace, prosperity, love. I need nothing else. But in sports? Never. I need the Pistons to murder Miami again,” Valjean said, smiling with his whole face. Valjean’s social smiles were common, but his genuine smiles were not. Javert heard it in his voice, and looked away from the road at him. It dimmed under Javert’s gaze, and Valjean offered him his coffee again. Javert took it and took a sip now that it was cooler. He looked back at the road and the snowflakes coming down harder, white wind and white ground and white sky like the world outside the two of them had dissolved into static.
Just past Kingston, they went back to their old faithful conversation topic: with Javert leaving Correctional Services Canada, what would he do next? Staying, even staying and trying to improve the system, wasn’t an option. Javert had spent most of his life in federal prisons, worked his way up from the young guard who escorted difficult prisoners to solitary confinement to one of the officers who ordered it, because it was the typical punishment and he’d never thought more deeply about it. Then in June a man named Lamarque had committed suicide after one hundred and fifty six consecutive days of solitary, in a cell the size of Javert’s pickup truck’s bed lit twenty-four hours a day. He went months without speaking to another person before he slit his wrists. No guards got to the cell in time — because they had stored him in a cell too far out of the way. His kid cousin Enjolras had formed a protest for justice, that protest had turned into a riot, Javert had been mixed up in it and found Valjean. His options were to put those young people — and Valjean — in the prisons that made men kill themselves, or take away his ability to tell anyone. He’d chosen the latter, failed, talked to Valjean while he lay in bed with a shattered femur because there wasn’t any hockey to watch, fallen in love with him again. He wanted to live again, which he was vaguely realizing he hadn’t genuinely wanted in years, but he couldn’t go back to the CSC.
“We both know I’ll end up middle-management of some security company,” Javert said, grimacing at the thought of spending the rest of his life telling young Punjabi immigrants desperate to become Permanent Residents to stand somewhere and stare at a wall. “God, I’ve always worked public service before. Is a private company going to ask me to care about profit margins?”
“If you do well in the company, then yes,” said Valjean. “When I had the factory they were always worrying about those.”
“I hate this,” Javert said, meaning the constant overbearing work of having now developed his own set of morals. He switched lanes to pass an 18-wheeler with a little too much aggression. “I could drive a truck better than this idiot. Should I do that?”
“I think they’re harder to drive than you anticipate,” Valjean said, taking the last sip of his now-cold coffee. “And I’d have no one to talk to if you were always gone.”
Javert rolled his eyes at that so that he wouldn’t smile. “I could do the Border Services Agency. They always need officers in the big airports. I don’t want to make any decisions that hurt anybody, though. I’ve done that enough.”
“Nothing will ever be perfectly free of any difficult decisions,” Valjean said, a little frustrated. “If you drove a truck and saw a girl who you thought was getting trafficked, you’d report it, hey? And if you were wrong but he was carrying drugs, you’d have sent a man to jail who maybe never did anything but get an addiction. Or if you were right but didn’t say anything, that girl would be suffering. You live in the world, man, and you can’t hide from it and pretend that you don’t or call me every time you have to consider the ethical impacts of anything!”
Silence for a minute. Valjean said, mortified, “I’m so sorry, that was cruel of me. I’m sorry.”
Javert shrugged. “I’m stupid about this. I’ve never tried doing it before, being good on my own instead of listening to someone in power and trusting that listening would make me good. But I’m not fragile. Say what you want to me. I want to hear what you have to say.”
Valjean raised his empty coffee cup to his mouth and pretended to take a long swallow. “I think Border Services sounds like a good idea.”
“Maybe,” Javert said. “I’m running out of savings, anyways — Jean Valjean, if you offer to fund me one more time I’ll crash this truck and kill us both.”
Valjean closed his mouth. “I’d prefer you didn’t commit a murder suicide until Cosette is back in Montréal. It could be our weekend plan.”
His Blackberry rang then. Javert laughed. “She heard you. She’s calling to scold you.”
But Cosette’s voice is high and tight with anxiety. “Baba, I’m sorry to bother you again, but the airport is saying we should get a hotel since none of us are leaving today, but I don’t know where to get a hotel and my cell is going to die soon so I know we can’t stay in the airport all night again. They say there are some beside the airport but I don’t know if those ones are really expensive or maybe not safe? I know you always say that you can get two of quality, cheapness, and convenience, but —”
“Hey, honey, you’re alright,” Valjean said, voice calm and his own stomach churning. “I’m in the car right now. We’re not far from the airport, we’re going to get you and Éponine. Just find something to eat and sit tight, hey?”
“You’re driving? Baba, it’s not safe, your car is terrible and the roads are worse! How close are you? Just turn around, we’ll be alright, I promise!”
“Two hours until we’re there,” Javert said, voice pitched a little loud so that Cosette could hear on the other side of the phone. “Maybe three. We’re making shit time.”
“Was that Javert? Baba, my cell is almost dead!”
“Yes,” Valjean said. “We’ll be there by five, alright? Where should we pick you up?”
“I don’t know, this place is so big, uh, Terminal… Éponine, how many terminals are there?”
“Cosette, honey, if your cell phone doesn’t have much you need to —” Valjean started to say when he heard a beeping over the line. “Three, Cosette! Three, I’ll see you there.”
The call dropped. Valjean pressed redial, then pressed it again. His hands were shaking. Javert said, “Valjean, d’accord? The call dropped?”
Javert reached over and put his palm on the back of Valjean’s neck. Valjean startled badly, but Javert held on. “She won’t leave if she knows you’re coming. It’s a big airport, but we’ll find her. She might have even heard you saying three.”
Valjean nodded, not looking at him. He had done frightening things in his life. He had nearly drowned, been strangled, and had breathed easily with a knife against his throat. He was sure, at the moment, that he had never been as afraid as he was now. “Valjean, what do you need? What can I do?”
“I can’t do anything,” Valjean said, biting down hard on his tongue for the bright spark of pain to focus him. He laid his hands down flat on the dashboard and pushed, to stop them from shaking.
Javert kept driving, trying not to look at Valjean and embarrass him. He had never been afraid of Valjean, never thought of Valjean as someone violent, but the way he was tense now was like an animal caught in a trap. Javert’s instincts, honed and refined from decades of victimization and then victimizing in his turn, told him not to turn away. Any second now, the alarms in the back of Javert’s head told him, Valjean would start lashing out at whatever he could.
Well, let him, Javert decided. Javert wasn’t good, but he was tough. Valjean would never hurt him on purpose, and anything he said or did by accident Javert would take. He pulled into the right lane, and ten or fifteen minutes later onto the shoulder, once he found a scant spot where the snowbanks had been disrupted. He put the truck in park, got out the driver’s seat to cars honking — fucking Ontarians — and went around to the passenger’s, shivering despite himself at the wind burning his nostrils when he inhaled. When he opened the passenger’s side, Valjean was staring up at him open-mouthed. Javert shrugged. “You’ll feel better if you drive. You’ll feel like you’re doing something. Hurry up and switch with me, Valjean, it’s fucking cold.”
Valjean got up and crossed to the other side, got in as Javert took his spot, knocking his boots against the side so he didn’t drag snow into the car, his back to Valjean in the driver’s seat. Looking at his braids over the hunch of his back, the knob of his neck vulnerable, in his old fleece because he’d abandoned his winter jacket in the backseat, Valjean loved him so much it made him dizzy. Valjean sat down, buckled his seatbelt, and said, “Are you in?”
Javert slammed the door shut firmly. He grabbed Valjean by the back of the neck again. “Better?”
“Thank you,” Valjean said, checked his blind spot, and merged them onto the highway.
They stayed on the highway as long as possible to avoid Toronto traffic, but it found its way onto the 401 with them as the storm somehow got still worse. They were driving 40 km/h when they should have been going 100. It was 4:30, seven hours of driving in the snow, ninety minutes longer than it should have taken. Javert was hungry, and snappish with it. Valjean was white-knuckled, constantly re-checking his blind spots, so anxious in his body that his brain had started searching for rationalisation behind it. It kept trying to convince him that someone around them was going to see them, and be overcome with hatred, and ram his car into them, killing them both.
“Jesus, I hate Toronto,” Javert said yet again. “Fucking evil city, evil people.”
“I know,” Valjean said. He turned the radio on, then off again. “You’ve said so.”
“You know how bad a place has to be for me to hate it more than anywhere else I’ve ever been? The res I grew up on currently has one of the highest suicide rates in the country because of how much people hate being there. I lived in America for years, for Christ’s sake. But Toronto —”
“We’ve run into each other on both sides of the border. Are you a double citizen?” Valjean said, seizing on the conversation topic.
“Border rights,” Javert reminded him. Valjean shrugged in incomprehension. “I have treaty rights to cross without a passport and to work anywhere in America. Show my status card to prove my blood quantum, and they let me through. Sorry, I forget sometimes that we’ve known each other so long but we’ve only known each other well for a little while. We’ve never crossed the border together — have you, since you left America?”
“Never,” Valjean said. He remembered Javert, earlier, trying to give Valjean his name. “Left prison and was homeless. I didn’t want to go to the charities — most of them were Christian religious, and didn’t like that I’d been born Christian and converted. I wasn’t very Muslim back then, but I didn’t like pretending I wasn’t. I kept crossing state borders trying to find somewhere they’d give me work. I ended up in New Jersey, met the imam I told you about. He gave me my new start, gave me my soul back. I needed to stay new, go somewhere I was less angry at. I was further north than south so I went to Canada. Ended up outside of Ottawa and stayed there until I met you again.”
“I didn’t remember that you were Muslim in prison,” Javert said — that same point he’d made earlier, that he passed Valjean’s angry thirty-five year old face in the halls every day for years but hadn’t spoken to him until Javert had processed his release. “I thought you converted after you met the imam.”
“I did it for Ramadan,” Valjean said. “Islam always been popular in prison, but I didn’t even know what it was when I first got in, when some of the other guys spent a month sitting during lunch not eating. But I did it my second year. They said where I could go and what I could eat and who I could speak to, but they couldn’t make me eat. I still had that choice. God and prayer came later. At first I just wanted to control something about my life.”
“I heard they’re trying to re-open the mosque you built,” Javert said. When they’d met for the second time, both living in the same neighbourhood on the outskirts of Ottawa, the mosque had been new — modest in size, but sparkling clean, in between a new mandir and gurdwara because Valjean had thought everyone living in his community had the right to worship somewhere. “We could go see it sometime.”
“I don’t want to take Cosette back through Gatineau,” Valjean said. He didn’t want to go back to Ottawa, either, to see the places where he’d once succeeded and helped people, once he left and couldn’t help them anymore. “Wouldn’t that be strange for you? You weren’t happy there.”
“I was fine there, Valjean, that’s just what my face looks like,” Javert said, rolling his eyes. He’d been freshly back in Canada, in training for the Ontario Provincial Police but finding the lectures on the importance of community work and de-escalation miserable (especially because he was taught one thing in training and saw no one actually practicing it on the streets). After the disaster that his posting in Valjean’s neighbourhood had been, he’d used his head injury as an excuse to drop out, then went to Corrections, where he only had to worry about controlling the criminals instead of protecting the innocents, and everything had rules instead of judgement calls. “I had a place to live and food.”
“You were always glaring at everyone, even before you recognized me.”
“Valjean, are you dumb? I wasn’t glaring at everyone, I was gaping at you because I was in love with you and trying to cover it up by glaring at everyone. Watch the road, Valjean!”
Valjean hit the brakes hard before they rear-ended the car in front, yelping as they slid through the slippery snow-dirt. “You can’t say something like that and then tell me to watch the road!”
“Something obvious and pre-established?”
“Well, right now, but then —”
“I fell in love with you then, ignored it for nearly two decades, and then found you again now. I didn’t start feeling this way six months ago. I’m fifty-five, who falls in love with someone new at fifty-five?”
“I’m sixty-three,” Valjean said, then lost his courage before he said that he himself was falling in love for the first time now, especially with the knowledge that Javert had been in love with him since 1987.
Javert waited for him to finish whatever he had been about to say. When nothing else came, he rolled his eyes and said, “I’m aware how old you are. Get us into the right lane soon. We’re nearly there.”
Toronto Pearson International Airport was so large it had multiple highway exits, a spiralling series of bridges and ramps to take cars to the right terminal. Valjean headed to Three with his stomach clenching. It was a mess of people waiting to be picked up and arguing over taxis, a place that ferried tens of thousands of people a day having ground to an ugly halt. Valjean said, “Look for pink. She’ll be wearing her winter jacket. What if we can’t find her?”
Javert put his hand on Valjean’s knee. “Well, Valjean, I was willing to drive seven hours with you to the worst city in the world for your girl, but if it takes longer than ten minutes to find her I’m going to insist we turn around immediately and abandon her here. Don’t be ridiculous, Valjean. We keep looking until we do find her.”
Valjean kept scanning the crowds, but he picked up Javert’s hand and kissed his fingers, then his knuckles. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for coming with me.”
“I’m here,” Javert said, trying to ignore his heart hammering and his body buzzing, his fingers hypersensitive to the bristles of Valjean’s beard. He looked at Valjean, then quickly back at the crowds before he made proper eye contact. The snow made it hard to distinguish individual faces. He couldn’t just let Valjean kiss his hand and not say anything back. What if the girls were inside, away from the cold — would Cosette recognize his truck? He opened his mouth to say something, to be a man and tell Valjean he loved him, but then — “There, Valjean, is that them?”
Sure enough, outside exposed to the wind by one of the numbered concrete poles that served as a landmark, a girl in a pastel pink puffer coat was in the distance of Terminal Three, with a smaller figure in a jean jacket hunched into her side. Javert honked the horn so that they’d both glance up at the noise. The second Valjean saw her straighten, recognized the movement of his daughter’s spine and neck, saw her find where the noise of the truck was coming from and start hurrying her friend and their duffle bags in their direction, he let out a wordless sound of relief. “Yes, yes, it is.”
They pulled up in the first curbside spot they could. Valjean put the car in park and opened the door, letting it idle, as he hurried forward. Cosette crashed into him, and he lifted her physically off the ground, despite the fact that he was a senior citizen with an eating disorder and Cosette was not a small woman. They’d spent the previous night in the airport, and she smelled strongly of sweat, like back when she’d played soccer in middle school. Valjean kissed her hard on the forehead, his stomach finally unclenching. Javert got out of the truck as well, cracked his back, and stretched his hamstrings. “I can put your bags in the back.”
“I can hold onto mine,” Éponine said. She was a scrawny girl with short straight hair, the ends badly bleached, often mistaken for Filipina because she was mixed Latina and Southeast Asian. Her jean jacket was too thin for the weather. She didn’t complain, but she was shivering. It made the links of her thick imitation-gold chain clack against each other with an ugly plasticky sound. “Officer.”
“Kid,” Javert said. They had known each other since 1990, when Éponine had been eight and her parents had gone to jail for the first time. Their foster mother would drive her and her two younger siblings to one at a time, then wait in the car as Éponine led them into the visiting area. Her sister Azelma cuddled with the relevant parent, crying about how much she missed them. Her brother Gavroche would run around the perimeter until he fell on clumsy eighteen-month-old legs, then pick himself back up again. Éponine sat sullenly at the table and counted the dots in the asbestos tiles of the ceiling. “Have a nice vacation?”
“I spent a lot of time patting Cosette on the back as she cried. Then a storm came in. I’ve spent thirty hours in this fucking airport. Best vacation ever!” she said, throwing on a manic smile for the last sentence before letting her face fall back into its scowl.
“Sounds like it,” Javert said, then, “Hey, Cosette.”
Cosette detangled herself from her father, and came over to him, saying, “I can’t thank you enough.”
Javert shrugged, and wished he had grabbed his jacket out of the car if they were going to be standing for all this time. He was only wearing his fleece, and he was cold. Cosette, a round-faced pretty girl who looked more Black than Chinese, beamed at him as she discreetly took off a pair of big hoop earrings her father would disapprove of once he stopped being happy his daughter was here and started his perpetual worrying cycle again. “I said I’d look out for your dad. It’s cold out here, I’m getting back in the car.”
“Wait,” Cosette said, then stepped forward to shake his hand. “I’m very grateful.”
“It’s fine,” Javert said, embarrassed, going around to the driver’s side where the car was still idling. Valjean climbed back into the passenger’s seat, Cosette in the back, sliding over to the left so that Éponine could get in behind her. Valjean looked over his shoulder at her to smile at her, so glad that she was here and safe.
Éponine didn’t get in. Cosette said, cheerfully, “All good, girl?”
“Just to clarify, I’m not checking your truck out to be racist or whatever, it’s just that this is the nastiest-ass vehicle I ever seen in my life,” Éponine said to Javert through the door, deliberately baiting to see what would happen. On one hand, this was Cosette’s father and Cosette’s father’s man, which meant they were probably trustworthy. On the other, Éponine was the sort of girl who took taxis with her switchblade held tight in one hand shoved into her pocket, ready at any moment to start slashing should the driver try anything.
”That’s alright,” Javert said, folding his arms as he watched her inspect a little dent on the passenger’s door. “When I say I don’t want you driving this truck because you’ll steal it or crash it, I’m not being racist either.”
Éponine stopped kicking packed slush out from behind the front tire to look at him, eyebrows up. Cosette said, despairingly, “Can you both behave?”
But Éponine let out a bark of a laugh, sharp and crooked-toothed. “I like how you tried to work stereotypes from each race in there,” she said. “For the record, though, the can’t drive thing is for Cosette’s people, not Viets.”
Javert shrugged. “You’re all the same to me.”
”Javert!” Valjean exclaimed, as Éponine cackled and got into the car without hesitation, having, in her mind, proven to the men who would be in control of her body for the next day that she was independent and tough and that nothing could faze her.
“We’re all buckled,” Cosette says. “Can we please get the fuck out of this airport?”
Valjean laughed — he’d never been able to convince Cosette to stop swearing like a sailor, even when she was in the third grade. Perhaps even especially in the third grade, since he’d laughed at it every time knowing he shouldn’t. Valjean had been low one day (although he would have said ‘preoccupied’) when he’d been her parent for about four months. Cosette had given him a hug, a clumsy kiss on the cheek, and said, “Would you like me to say ‘motherfucker’ right now?”
“Of course, honey, let’s get you girls home.” He looked at Javert, in the driver’s seat, and put his hand on Javert’s knee. They were both quiet men, and they understood each other. Valjean didn’t have to say anything. Javert shifted the gear, checked his blindspot, and started to drive.