The girl who stopped hearts

(POV Iris)

I killed a man with my hand on his wrist, and I didn’t know I could.

Sixty seconds. Eighty. Ninety.

At ninety seconds, he stopped breathing.

This is how it starts.

Couronnes station. Ten forty-seven p.m. The headache is there. Same as every night.

I come up the west stairs. The steps smell like piss and the cologne of a guy who brushed past me on the train—plaid shirt, ring too big for his finger. I notice these things because my job is noticing the people who drink too much. At the café, a customer like that, I cut him off around midnight. I know how to talk to him. I know how to lay a hand on his forearm to bring him down.

I know.

The air is soft. It’s May. In Paris, in May, the sky forgets it’s supposed to be night. I walk up the boulevard. My bag is heavy on the right shoulder—a book I haven’t read, half a baguette from yesterday, my keys. I’m twenty-four, and I’m walking home on a Tuesday night thinking about nothing.

That’s when the woman screams.

She’s on my right, near the bench. Maybe seventy, cream coat, scarf. A guy has her purse and is pulling on it. The purse holds. The woman pulls back. The guy’s young—twenty-three, twenty-five, gray cap, jeans too big. I see this in two seconds. I also see that nobody stops. Three people walk past, looking somewhere else. A car brakes at the red light. The driver checks his radio.

Not tonight, I think. I don’t have the energy.

I step in anyway. My leg decides, not me. I know this move by heart—it’s what I do five times a week at the café when a customer holds onto a server’s arm too long. I come over, I lay my hand, I look the guy in the eye. All right. You let go. You let go and you walk out. It works nine times out of ten.

“Let go.”

The guy turns his head. His eyes are bright—not rage, something else. Maybe fever. Maybe coming down off something. He smells like alcohol and something more chemical. He says something I don’t listen to and pulls harder. The old woman stumbles.

I put my hand on his wrist.

I put my hand on his wrist so he’ll let go. Nothing else. That’s all I want. My fingers against his skin—he’s in a t-shirt, his skin is warm and a little damp, I feel the vein on the top of his wrist against my thumb. I think: all right, you stop now.

The guy freezes.

The guy freezes and makes a strange sound, a kind of hiccup, and his eyes change. It’s not fear. It’s not surprise. It’s something in between. Like he’s listening. Like he’s trying to understand a new instruction.

His hand lets go of the purse. The old woman steps back three paces, the bag against her chest, and she says “oh” in a voice that has lost its age.

The guy drops to his knees. His right hand goes to his collar. His mouth is open—not wide, just slightly parted, like he’s looking for his saliva. He’s trying to breathe. He manages. Barely. A drop of sweat slides from his temple.

I haven’t taken my hand off his wrist.

I take it off now. Too late, I think. I don’t know why I think too late, but that’s exactly what crosses my mind, and I’m not thinking it for him—I’m thinking it for me.

The guy collapses on his side. I count. I count because I don’t know what else to do.

Sixty. Eighty. Ninety.

At ninety seconds, he isn’t breathing.

Nobody around us screams. Nobody pulls out a phone. The old woman holds her bag against her chest and she looks at me—she looks at me like I’m a thing she doesn’t have a word for. Not grateful. Not afraid. Something between.

“Mademoiselle—”

I don’t answer. I walk. I walk fast. I don’t run. If I run, people look.

I make fifteen meters to the crosswalk. I cross on the green. I head up boulevard de Belleville on the opposite sidewalk—the one with the Tunisian pastry shop and the closed tobacconist. I turn right onto rue de Belleville. Three minutes later, I’m at my building. I’ve punched in the code without realizing. The door opens. I climb to the fourth floor.

Liane is on the couch.

Her feet are on the coffee table, laptop on her thighs, one earbud in. The drawing tablet is beside her. She’s working on something for a client who pays badly and changes his mind every two days. She looks up when I come in.

“You’re soaked,” she says.

I look at my t-shirt. I am soaked. I didn’t notice it had started raining.

“Quick shower at Couronnes,” I say.

Liane raises one eyebrow. She has the most expressive eyebrow in Belleville. She knows I’m lying, she just doesn’t know about what. She waits a second, then shrugs and lowers her eyes back to her tablet.

“Rice in the oven. Help yourself.”

“Thanks.”

I cross the living room. I pass in front of her. I’m careful not to brush against her. It’s the first time in my life I’m careful not to brush against Liane. I close the bathroom door behind me.

I throw up in the sink.

Not much—I have nothing in my stomach, I hadn’t eaten. It’s mostly bile. I cough. I rinse. I rinse three times. I wipe my mouth with a towel. I look in the mirror.

I don’t look like a girl who just killed someone.

That’s what scares me most. Not the dead man. Not the old woman. Not what I felt under my fingers. It’s looking at myself in the mirror and seeing Iris Bonnard, manager at Le Tangui, twenty-four, black hair just above the shoulders, comma-shaped scar on the left cheek, a little pale but otherwise—normal.

I run a hand through my hair. I see my right hand. I look at it for a long time.

I’ve never had hands this cold.

I leave the bathroom. Liane hasn’t moved. She’s put her earbuds back in both ears. Good. I go to my room. I close the door. I sit on the edge of the bed.

I open my phone, pull up Le Parisien. No notifications. I scroll the news feed. Nothing. I type Couronnes in the search bar. Nothing in the last hour.

I tell myself I imagined it. I tell myself that for a full thirty seconds. I work to believe it. I tell myself: it’s the headache, it’s May, it’s the fatigue, I haven’t slept right in two weeks, the guy had a stroke, I panicked, I miscounted, that’s all.

I tell myself that until I notice my right hand is cold. Frozen. Like it isn’t mine.

I press it to my cheek. The cold passes into the cheek. I’m making my own face cold with my own hand.

I take the hand away.

I’m twenty-four. I have an unfinished master’s in sociology I dropped because I needed to pay rent. I’ve managed a café in Belleville for eight months and I do it well. Two serious relationships, three less so. My mother hasn’t called me in three years. My father died when I was six. My childhood best friend was named Maïa Lefranc and she died in a fire when I was nine, in the apartment two floors above my grandmother’s, on rue Piat. I don’t like thinking about Maïa and I almost never do. I’ve had headaches since I was fifteen.

There. That’s my life.

I’m Iris Bonnard, and I just killed a man by putting my hand on his wrist.

I get up. I go to the window. The street is quiet. A guy taking out the trash. A girl laughing into her phone ten meters down. None of them know that in ten minutes, or an hour, or three days, they’re probably coming for me.

I draw the curtain.

I lie down. I let the hallway light bleed under the door. Liane puts on her show in the living room. I hear a woman’s voice speaking English. Liane always watches with the original soundtrack.

I close my eyes.

I can’t sleep, but I’m not afraid. That’s the strangest thing—I’m not afraid. My head hurts, my right hand is cold, there’s a dead man in my head, and I’m not afraid. I’m so calm I want to slap myself just to check that I still feel something.

I lift my right hand toward my cheek. I’m going to slap myself. I stop a centimeter away from my own skin.

If I touch myself, what happens?

I let the hand drop.

At one a.m., I’m asleep. At two, I’m still asleep. At three, I don’t even hear the first impact on the front door—it’s Liane screaming that wakes me.

I get up. I go into the hallway. Liane is in pajamas, hands in the air, in front of six men in black with short assault rifles. A seventh is filming. An eighth is checking the windows. Someone shouts “Bonnard Iris, on the ground, on the ground now!” and I lie down on the tiles, because that’s what you do when men in black with guns shout at you.

The floor is cold. I put my cheek against it. I see Liane past the closest pair of boots. She is white. Her mouth is wide open. She doesn’t know what’s happening. Nobody is going to tell her. Not yet.

Someone cuffs me—metal, not plastic, the serious set. Someone else hoods me. The hood smells like new fabric and something chemical. I don’t breathe too fast. I’m Iris Bonnard. I’m calm.

I’m so calm I can hear myself counting.

Sixty. Eighty. Ninety.

At ninety seconds, I’m in the van, and I still haven’t cried.