My Grape Year: (The Grape Series #1)

by Laura Bradbury

  Franck led us along several dimly lit back streets.

  “How do you always know where you’re going?” I asked. “You never even look at a map.”

  “I walked a lot when I lived here,” he said. “Kilometres and kilometres every day. There was always a new adventure waiting.”

  We could hear the noise of the fire hall for several blocks before we arrived. The street echoed with the sounds of laughter and loud accordion music.

  People were spilling out of the courtyard of a large stone building. Strung across the courtyard in a haphazard fashion were strings of multi-colored lights. A wine stand was set up at the rear of the courtyard. Its menu was simple: a glass of red or white for the price of ten francs.

  People were already dancing, young and old, chic and bohemian. Franck ordered us each a glass of wine, which was served in plastic goblets. We sipped as we watched the festivities erupting around us. The night was warm, and tiny stars began to light up the sky like sparks. I put my empty glass back on the table, and Franck followed suit. He swept me into the middle of the dancers, and we lost ourselves in the accordion music. He spun me around and around until the revellers surrounding us became a blur, and I felt like a small part of a much greater whole. Nobody in the crowd hung back on the sidelines. If they had no one to dance with, they danced anyway and were soon swept up into the frenzy of celebration.

  We humans need this, I thought. We need to let go of the routine of our everyday lives and just celebrate the mere fact of being alive. The French were awfully gifted at that.

  Soon Franck took my hand and led me out of the mass of writhing dancers. We walked for about ten minutes, laughing and enjoying the site of the fellow revellers out in the streets before we ducked into the next fire station for another glass of wine, then into the whirlpool of another celebration.

  The night’s festivities stretched out from fire station to fire station, from neighborhood to neighborhood.

  At about five o’clock in the morning, the sky began to pale, to welcome a new day. The day I’d dreaded since I’d met Franck. The day I had to leave him.

  “I know a brasserie not too far from here that is open all night,” Franck said. “Should we go and rest our feet?” Mine were throbbing from all the dancing, so I agreed.

  In the brasserie, we huddled together on the leather seat. I inspected my blisters, which were impressive, we both agreed, and we snuggled as we waited for our order of two large cafés au lait with croissants and jam.

  The chime of a church bell rang six times.

  “That was the bell at Nôtre-Dame,” Franck said.

  Normally I would have loved that fact, but it only drove home that my time left with Franck was no longer measured in days, but in hours and minutes.

  “You’ve gone quiet,” Franck observed.

  I tore up my sugar wrapper into tiny, then tinier pieces. “I hope you can get to Canada quickly,” I said, finally, the other hundred things I wanted to say creating a dam for the tears in my throat.

  “We’ll be together soon,” Franck said, reaching over to still my hands. “I know it.”

  “How do you know it?”

  “This is too good for it just to stop.”

  I didn’t want to waste any of my last few hours with Franck by sleeping, but by the time we got back to his cousin’s apartment, we were both dead on our feet. We took a shower and then collapsed on the mattress on the floor. Our hands roamed over each other—memorizing.

  Franck found a Francis Cabrel tape amongst his cousin’s extensive music collection that was stored in one of the cupboards in the kitchen. He played it, and we listened to the words.

  Tu viendras longtemps marcher dans mes rêves

  Tu viendras toujours du côté

  Où le soleil se lève…

  “We have to leave for the airport in about two hours,” Franck said. “Let’s make this count.” The longing I knew I would feel once we were apart was already palpable. I couldn’t hold back my tears.

  We must have slept afterwards, because I woke to the sound of the alarm.

  He reached over me and pushed the button down, then rolled back and gathered me in his arms.

  “There is no easy way to do this,” he admitted. “It is going to be difficile. I’m just realizing now how much.” His hand smoothed my hair.

  I nodded against his chest. There were no words, in any language, to say goodbye to Franck. How was I supposed to say good-bye, to what I had discovered with him over these past few months? When I had yearned for my soul mate, I had somehow never considered that loving deeply could mean hurting just as acutely.

  He kissed me once more. “We have to go.”

  We left the apartment and made our way down the steps to the metro. Franck insisted on carrying the huge majority of my luggage—no small feat. Getting it through the turnstiles and over the barriers between the metro and the train station kept us distracted. When we did manage to get on a train, Franck guarded the luggage and pulled me tightly against him, guarding me too.

  Finally we got to the airport and checked me in, as well as my bags. I looked at my watch. We had half an hour until I had to go through the boarding gates. I thought of all the half hours I had wasted in my life with sleep and watching TV and waiting at the dentist’s office. Now every single minute of this half hour was like the most precious gift.

  We found a grubby café near the boarding gate; but it did serve, like most cafés in France, a decent espresso. We sipped ours slowly, holding tight to each other with our free hands.

  “We have to start working on getting you to Canada right away,” I said, caressing his thumb with mine.

  “That’s exactly what I’m planning on doing once I leave here,” Franck said. “As soon as your plane takes off I’m going to make an appointment at the Canadian embassy. Even though you won’t be here, physically beside me anymore, I won’t rest until I figure out a way for me to come to Montréal and for us to be together.”

  “It sounds almost too good to be true.”

  “It’s too good not to be true.”

  I stared at him, frantic to imprint every detail of his face on my heart. “You’re right.”

  Franck led me to the foot of one of the space-age tubes that would carry me up to the boarding gate. I remembered coming down on a similar one eleven months earlier, sweaty under my Ursus blazer and, after the aborted landing, disoriented, not understanding anything.

  A crackly voice came over the loudspeaker. I couldn’t make out much, but I did hear my flight number.

  “Do we really have to say good-bye?” I said, rooted to the spot. I wanted to stay with him longer, just a few seconds longer. Leaving him felt physically impossible.

  Franck shook his head. “Au revoir means ‘until I see you again.’ But we can use something else. À bientôt.”

  “Until soon.”

  Franck nodded and swallowed hard. I touched his lips with mine. “Je t’aime. Always know that. No matter what happens…even if we never see each other again.” That thought made despair clutch at my heart.

  Franck kissed me back. “You can remind me yourself in a few months when I arrive in Montréal.” He steered me to the entrance of the tube. He gave me one last kiss and pushed me on it. “I won’t stop watching until I can’t see you anymore,” he said. “Never doubt that I love you.”

  The flat escalator moved underneath my feet, dragging me away from him. There he stood, straight and tall, with his eyes watery; but also with that twitch to his lips. I knew he was trying to convince me not to be so sad, that we would be together again soon.

  I’m not sure exactly how I found my departure gate. Tears streamed down my face, unchecked.

  I was the last one to board the flight from Paris to London. My seat was beside an English-looking businessman in a tailored suit, who stared at my tear-stained face with terrified eyes. I didn’t care. I listened to the Francis Cabrel tape Franck had bought me for my Walkman, and sobbed.

&n
bsp; The plane began to back away from the gate almost immediately. I stared out the window at the receding circular terminal of the Charles de Gaulle airport. Franck was inside there somewhere. In a matter of minutes, I would no longer be in the same country as my soul mate.

  Francis Cabrel began to sing “L’encre de tes yeux,” the same song we’d listened to after getting back to the apartment that morning. “Je n’avais pas vu que tu portais de chaînes. A trop vouloir te regarder j’en oubliais les miennes.”

  The engines roared, then my plane hurtled down the runway. The wheels left France and I was in the sky once again, untethered, flying towards an unknowable future.

  I pressed my forehead against the cool plexiglass of the oval window. I felt as though if I just looked hard enough, I would see Franck on the rapidly shrinking ground beneath me. My tape ended and I could only hear the noise of the airplane as it climbed higher in the sky.

  So much had happened in the space of one year. I was a completely different person than that eager to please seventeen-year-old who’d stumbled off the plane in Paris. I had sampled everything from snails to pig’s feet, I now spoke French fluently, and I’d found true love. I also learned that an unavoidable consequence of listening to my soul was making some people unhappy. Maybe one day I would make up with the Beaupres, but for the moment I had to accept that the person I now was and the person they needed me to be were irreconcilable. Life was infinitely more complex than it had been eleven months earlier, but it was also infinitely richer.

  The pilot’s voice crackled through the speaker. “If you look to the left side of the aircraft, you’ll enjoy a stunning view of the Eiffel Tower.”

  There it was, piercing the summer sky with all its symbolic glory. To an imaginary soundtrack of accordians that only I could hear, I daydreamed about Franck and me living together in Paris—walking along the Seine, drinking stiff espressos served on zinc counters, taking classes at the Sorbonne…Hope rushed through me. Franck was right. This thing we had was too good for it to just end. We would have to continue fighting for it, for us, but wasn’t that a privilege?

  He held part of my heart with him in France, and I would safeguard part of his until we saw each other again.

  La Fin

  Books by Laura Bradbury

  Grape Series

  My Grape Escape

  My Grape Village

  My Grape Year

  Other Writings:

  Philosophy of Preschoolers

  Merci

  It seems that the more books I write, the more people I have to thank. First of all, gros bisous to Franck who still tolerates that I write about him and our life together (but I’m relieved that he has no interest in actually reading my ‘Grape’ books).

  A massive merci to all my wonderful readers who have embraced my memoirs, transformed them into bestsellers, and are an unflagging source of encouragement on my good and bad writing days.

  Thank you Eileen Cook for an insightful content edit, comme d’habitude and to Karen Dyer (author of the smash hit Finding Fraser) and Lisa Kosleski for their fantastic beta-reads. A huge hug and fist-bump to Pamela Patchet for being my ideal reader and a constant source of brilliant and shrewd input. I couldn’t write or put together any of these books without knowing that she is there, cheering me on.

  Mary-Ellen Reid did the most thorough copy-edit I have ever been privileged to witness (although truth be told I almost keeled over when I realized I needed to make close to 10,000 changes). The polish of My Grape Year is largely due to her eagle eye and meticulous attention to detail.

  Rebecca Sky has once again created a stunning cover and I have Krystal Kenney to thank for taking the cover photo in Paris and perfectly converting the image stuck in my mind into reality. My genius of a friend Nicole Smith who founded the incredible company Flytographer (www.flytographer.com) set me up with Krystal. Merci Nicole!

  Thank you to my family and all my friends in Victoria, France, and elsewhere around the globe who always have my back and are a constant source of inspiration for me.

  As always, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the PSC community at PSC Partners Seeking a Cure who help me get through the bad days with this rare auto-immune liver / bile duct disease and cheer me on during the good times. As always I keep the memory of Sandi Pearlman and Phillip Burke close to my heart and I try to follow their example of making every one of my days a source of good. To that end, 10% of all after-tax royalties of everything I write are donated to PSC Partners Seeking a Cure for much-needed research. http://www.pscpartners.org/ .

  I urge everyone to sign up to be an organ donor and to support an opt-out system in their country. The current organ donation system in Canada and the United States is broken. People die every day waiting for potentially life-saving organ transplants. Also, all PSCers out there need to sign up for our patient registry and help speed up much-needed research to find a cure for this currently incurable disease. Here is the link: https://pscpartners.patientcrossroads.org/ .

  Last of all, thank you to my Bevy – Charlotte, Camille, and Clémentine for just being their wonderful selves. Every day I can be around to parent them is a lucky day. I know all three of my daughters will be heroes in their own fairytales and I can’t wait to watch them unfold.