“I can leave next Friday,” I tell her. That gives me the week to get my head on straight.
“Next Friday?” she practically barks. “Blaise, you will come immediately. Get the first flight out. You know money is no expense.”
“I can’t just up and leave,” I tell her.
“You can. What are you doing there, anyway? You know I haven’t talked to you since it was your birthday, and that was only because I called you.”
Well, how incredibly gracious of you.
She goes on, “It’s for family, Blaise.”
I snort. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Mother, but since when have you ever given a shit about family, particularly that side?”
Silence fills the air. “I care,” she says after a moment. “Blaise . . . you have no idea what it’s like to be me, what I’ve gone through. What I’ve done.” She sniffs. “I can’t deal with this alone. Your father and your brother, they don’t understand. I need . . . I have to talk to you. Before the funeral. I need your support, you’re the only one who might even care a little about me.”
She sounds so small and broken that my stupid hardened heart softens just a bit. Fuck me, this is going to be a horrible week. I almost envy Aunt Eloise. She doesn’t have to deal with any of this shit, any of us, anymore.
“Okay,” I tell her. “I’ll get the first flight out.”
Questions hang on my lips: How is Seraphine doing? Is she okay? Is she alone?
But I press my lips firmly together.
I’ll find out soon enough.
Nothing had ever felt so wrong as landing at the Charles de Gaulle airport and seeing the gray, gloomy, and smog-filled landscape. Such a drastic change from the clarity and peace and quiet of the hills of Northern Thailand that my brain actually felt rattled. The long flight didn’t help either.
But if I thought that was bad, the moment the car pulls up the driveway of my parents’ house, that’s when I feel like I’m caught in a terrible dream.
“This is it?” the driver asks me when I make no indication I’m going to get out of the car.
“This is it,” I tell him and finally step out. He brings my suitcase out from the trunk—the same suitcase I’ve been living out of for years, the metallic exterior beaten and burnished by my many travels—and I take it, bringing it up to the house.
At first glance I notice that my mother’s car is here but no one else’s. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, though.
I knock on the door, and after a moment my mother answers.
I didn’t expect this. Usually she has a maid answer the door. And more than that, I don’t expect my mother to look so horrible. That’s a cruel thing for a son to think, but it’s true. Normally she’s on top of everything in regard to plastic surgery and other vanity treatments, but she just looks haggard and old.
Vulnerable, even.
“Blaise,” she says to me, holding out her arms. I should be glad she doesn’t have a drink in her hands for once, though when I give her an embrace and kiss her on the cheek, I can smell the booze on her like it’s perfume.
“Mother,” I tell her, stiffening as she holds me for longer than she normally does.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” she says, and when she pulls back, I notice the mascara smudges under her watery eyes. “You must have had such a long travel day. Here, here, come to the sitting room, and I’ll get you something to drink.”
“Water would be good,” I tell her as I pull the suitcase into the hall and shut the door. She walks off, a bit unsteadily, toward the kitchen. “Don’t you have someone to get that shit for you?” I call after her.
“I sent them into Paris to get some provisions,” she says.
I look around. Nothing in this place has changed, and it’s unsettling. Even more unsettling is the feeling that I never left. “And so I’m guessing Pascal and Father are out too?”
“Yes, but who knows where,” she says. “And frankly, who cares?”
I slowly walk across the marble floors of the hall to the parquet floors of the sitting room. Normally this room gets a lot of sun through the big glass doors, but a drizzle is starting to fall outside, making everything look dark. I can tell my mother must have been in here a lot today, because there are a few empty glasses out that are smeared with her lipstick.
When my mother comes back from the kitchen, she has a glass of water for me and another empty glass. She sets both down beside me and then sits on the adjacent love seat, leaning back and picking up a bottle of rare Scotch from behind the couch, one of my father’s prized possessions. She quickly pours herself a glass to the brim, her bracelets clanking against the glass, and then does the same for me.
I down half the water and then pick up the glass of Scotch, raising it toward her. “Are we celebrating something?”
She shakes her head quickly, and then, before I know what’s happening, she’s bursting into tears.
I can’t remember the last time I saw my mother cry.
Wait. Actually, I can.
Mallorca.
And some instinct deep in my gut is telling me that the past is here in this room.
“Mother,” I say gently, sitting up straighter. I’ve never had to comfort her before, so I don’t know what to do. When I was really young, I’d often find her drunk and crying in the corner of a room late at night, but if I ever approached, she’d scream at me to go away, like she was a wild animal nursing her wounds.
“I didn’t realize you and Eloise were so close,” I say, and this somehow makes her cry harder.
She shakes her head and then puts her face into her hands. “We weren’t. We weren’t close,” she mumbles and sobs. “Oh, Blaise, I need to get something off my chest. I need to tell you what I’ve done. It will eat me alive if I don’t.”
She’s not joking. That’s the look that she has. Not just haggard but like something dark, guilt or shame, has been eating her from the inside out, starting with her heart.
“You can tell me,” I say. Against my better judgment, I slam back my glass of Scotch, feeling the burn, then slowly get up and sit next to her on the love seat, putting my hand on her shoulder and giving it a squeeze.
She flinches at the contact and looks up at me with tears running down her face. “You are the good son, Blaise. You know that. If I tell you, you’ll have leverage against me forever. I have to know that you won’t use it against me. I have to know that I can trust you. You can’t tell your brother or your father. This is just between us.” She swallows. “Please promise me that.”
Jesus. Now she’s freaking me out.
I nod. “Okay. I promise. I won’t tell a soul.”
She presses her lips together and nods softly, trying to suppress another sob. “Good. Thank you,” she says in a quiet voice. With shaking hands, she finishes her drink and then pours herself another. I wait patiently for her confession.
“Blaise,” she says after a moment, staring down at the amber liquid. “Years ago, I made a mistake. A big mistake. And at the time I was never ashamed of it, because your father deserved it. He deserved it and so much more, and he still does.” A resolute look comes across her brow. “No, he still does deserve it. But Eloise . . . she never did. And I never got to tell her that I was sorry.”
My stomach starts to churn. I have a feeling I don’t want her to continue. I don’t want to be in charge of keeping my mother’s secrets, something that she’s done. It’s a burden more than anything.
“I had an affair with Ludovic.” She says it so softly and with such finality that it takes me a moment to really hear her.
“You . . . what?”
Ludovic? My mother slept with Uncle Ludovic?
She nods, her chin trembling. “It’s true. Long ago.”
“When?”
“When you were a teenager,” she says. “That long ago.”
“For how long?”
“Years.”
“Years!” I yell, getting to my feet. “Years . . . Mot
her, you . . . how could you do that? How could you do that to Eloise, to Father . . . my God.”
I can’t even begin to deal with this. I sit back down, feeling faint, my head in my hands. “Uncle Luddie. He would never do that to her. How could he? He was the good one.”
She lets out a caustic snort. “There is no good side, Blaise. Don’t you see? Your father and your brother are just worse than most.” I notice she’s left herself out of the running.
“I can’t believe it.”
She looks at me sharply. “I assume that’s meant for your uncle and not for me?”
“I can’t believe either of you.” I sigh and reach across for the Scotch, pouring myself another glass. I need this. “So does Father know?”
“Oh, come on, we would know if he knew.”
“I don’t know. He does like to store things away for future blackmailing.” I pause. “In Mallorca. You got drunk and fell down and ran off with Luddie. I heard you. You said to him that he knows.”
“You heard that?” She looks startled.
I shrug, swirling the Scotch around in the glass. “I didn’t know what I heard. I assumed you did something wrong, but not this.”
“Well, I thought he knew. He had said something to me that night that made me think he knew. Basically called me a whore. I could have sworn he knew right there and then. But nothing ever came of it. I thought that he would have divorced me or done something awful to his brother, but nothing happened.”
“That still doesn’t mean that he doesn’t know,” I tell her. “But for your sake, let’s forget about that. Let’s just forget about everything. It’s done.”
“Don’t you see? I can’t forget. And Eloise knew.”
“How did she know?”
“Because your uncle is an idiot and he confessed. Said he couldn’t keep it to himself. He thought he was being the bigger man, but he shouldn’t have burdened her with that.”
“When did he tell her?”
“A year ago.”
“And had you seen Eloise after that?”
She shakes her head, and a tear spills out. “I did everything I could to avoid her. And now . . . I wish I had reached out. I wish I had told her how sorry I was. Now she’s dead, Blaise. She’s dead and she died knowing what I did, and I never got the chance to make amends.”
Now I completely understand why my mother seems to have aged before my eyes. This secret would have weighed a lot on her heart.
And now, I suppose, it has to weigh on mine.
“You think less of me,” she says.
“To be honest, Mother, I never thought very much of you.”
She flinches, her eyes turning from soft to hard. A look—a mother—I know too well. “I suppose I deserve that.”
“I hate to say it, but you probably deserve all the guilt and shame too,” I point out.
“Blaise, you have a wicked tongue,” she scolds me, looking aghast. “Though what should I expect? I raised you. You have my wicked blood, as well as your father’s, running through your veins. And yet I can tell that you think you’re better than us. Better than me.”
Oh, how quickly this has changed, as it always does with alcohol.
I stand up and stare down at her. “I came here because you asked me to. I let you unload your burdens on me. But I don’t have to listen to this. I am free to leave and never look back.”
Her face crumples in an instant, and I’m having a hard time believing it’s real. That is, until the tears start to flow again and she collapses across the love seat, sobbing into the pillows.
I run a hand through my hair, trying to figure out what to do. The best course of action would be to leave, forget the funeral. I’m sure that side of the family wouldn’t care if I were there or not; I haven’t talked to them in years.
And Seraphine?
I swallow at the sound of her name in my head.
“Blaise, you can’t leave me,” Mother says through her muffled cries. “Don’t you understand? I have no one. I can’t trust your father, I can’t trust Pascal.” She sobs and sobs and then finally pushes herself up onto her elbows. “It’s you and only you. I don’t know what will happen to me if you leave. I need someone good around me. Someone better. I need you to help me. There’s no way out of this.”
I stare at her for a moment. She looks absolutely pitiful, reaching for the Scotch, the Scotch she will surely drown in. She’s never shown any love or need for me for my whole life, and suddenly she’s acting as if I’m the golden boy, the good son, the one who will absolve her of her sins.
I can’t do that.
And yet I also know, in the darkest, deepest part of me, that I can’t leave her like this. I hate that. I hate that I’m better than them. If I weren’t, I would go. I would shun her and turn away from her as she has always done with me, and I would leave her to a life of alcoholism and an early death.
But I don’t want that on my shoulders either.
And that small, sad part of me, the one that yearned for recognition and love and respect when growing up, that part is happy that she needs me. She finally needs me.
“What do you want from me?” I ask wearily, sitting back down in the armchair. I swear I feel it tighten around me, like a mouth that wants to swallow me whole.
She wipes her tears on her sleeve and slams back the Scotch. After she seems to regain her breath and some control, she says, “I just need you to stay with me for a while. Just a few months. I know you have a life in Thailand or wherever, but you also have a name and a duty here. A family legacy. Stay in Paris. You can work for the company.”
I let out a sour laugh. “I am not working for the company.”
“Fine,” she says. “Don’t work for them. Do whatever. But it would be good for you. To become who you are supposed to be. This could be your opportunity to start over. Don’t you want to make us proud?”
I give her a steady look. “Does it look like I do?”
She nods. “I know you. Deep down inside, all you wanted was your father’s affection. You wanted to be Pascal. You wanted him to respect you. This would do all of that. That’s why you left, isn’t it? Because you didn’t feel worthy or wanted? But you can change that, Blaise.”
I wave my hand at her dismissively, my throat choked up with anger that she’s saying that. I don’t even want to think about what she’s saying. “You can think what you want,” I tell her sharply. “I’ll stay because you asked, and because, for some reason, I still believe in honoring my mother. But I won’t stay long, and I won’t be your shoulder to cry on when you find it convenient. I’ll help you through this, and then I’m gone. And I don’t plan on coming back.”
She gives me a gracious smile over her Scotch.
God, I hope I have the spine to leave this place in the end.
Saturday rolls around. It’s been raining all week, and today is no exception.
The funeral is at a cemetery just outside the city lines of Paris, where my grandparents are buried. Everyone is huddled under black umbrellas, the rain pouring off the edges; everyone’s shoes are wet.
I stand beside Pascal, my mother, and my father. There is no chatter today, no murmurs, even though the place is packed with people, some I’m sure are even tourists, braving the weather to see who might be attracting such a crowd. Eloise wasn’t a true Dumont, but she was well known and well loved in both Paris and in the fashion community for all her charity work and for being a lovely human being in general.
“Oh dear,” my mother whispers in my ear, grabbing my hand.
I turn to see Ludovic, Olivier, and Renaud approaching, looking absolutely devastated. Suddenly I feel the deepest shame on my mother’s behalf, and I don’t know what to do if Ludovic looks my way.
But he doesn’t. He is inconsolable, and I know that this must weigh so heavily on his heart too. I can only pray that he and his wife were able to get things right before she died, that there was still love between them.
However, as much as I f
eel for my uncle—even for my cousins, who are staggering with their loss—Seraphine steals my attention.
She’s coming up behind them, her arm linked with that of a man I don’t recognize.
I feel jealousy swirl through me, but more than that, I feel my own sense of guilt. I haven’t seen or talked to Seraphine in years. Even though she’s overcome with grief, she still looks as beautiful as I remember, and I wish that things between us had ended differently. We were both so much younger and naive, and I really ruined the fragile thread that connected us. Even if fear hadn’t driven me from her, I could have stayed friends somehow. I could have handled it better.
I could have been someone to her.
Now she has someone.
Let her be, I think to myself. She doesn’t belong to you.
And yet as she takes her seat beside her brothers, she looks over at me, and her eyes meet mine.
In that one glance I see our entire relationship. I see shock and then fear and then love and then hate.
But she leaves me with hate.
“Who is that with Seraphine?” I whisper to my mother, even though I can see Pascal give me a curious glance out of my periphery.
“That’s her boyfriend, Cyril,” she says with a lowered voice, her eyes darting over to them. “He’s with the United Nations. Bit of an odd duck, if you ask me. But they seem very serious. Wouldn’t be surprised if they get married.”
The word married burns into me like a lit cigarette.
I look back at Cyril, taking in his ill-fitting suit and glasses. He seems older than her, and boring. Stuffy. Safe. The complete opposite of Seraphine. What could she even see in him?
“Not the kind of person you’d expect her to end up with, is it?” Pascal asks. I bring my eyes to his, and there’s that damn smug smile on his face, like he’s been able to see into my thoughts.
I shrug, slipping on a mask. “I don’t know her enough to make that assumption.”
“But you will,” Pascal says. “Once you start working for us. You’ll be working alongside her every single day.”
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