The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted

by Bridget Asher

  But despite my visits to the patisserie, I still had no desire to bake. I had no desire to make the cakes that I found so beautiful, so perfect. Normally I would have been inspired, especially since these desserts touched something deep inside of me, the memory of my mother in the kitchen when I finally had her back again. But, no. I only wanted to eat them, to delight in each bite, to be fed.

  Sometimes Charlotte and Abbot came with me on errands, but usually they wanted to stay behind. Abbot liked to watch the archaeologists squatting in the dig with their small delicate tools and brushes. Sometimes they became animated and shouted to each other. Their work was painstaking. They dug only a quarter of an inch at a time and then documented. At first Charlotte and I stood out there with him, but I became comfortable allowing Abbot to go out on his own, and the archaeologists got used to his dogged shadow and let him linger at the edges under an umbrella that he’d found in a large cupboard under the stairs.

  The dig was the footprint of a Gallo-Roman villa, and, not far from it, a tomb. The dig was about a five-minute walk from the back door, but the ground was flat, the mountain rising up beyond them, and so we could see Abbot’s small figure amid the larger ones.

  I could tell why Abbot was fascinated. They’d unearthed an ancient fountain, a system of aqueducts, a tiling pattern of small crosses, a hearth, one room after the next. And all of it had been lying there under the brush stripped by the fires of 1989, and then hidden by only about a foot of earth.

  Eventually, they showed Abbot the tools: trowels, brushes, dental picks, tape measures, line levels, screens for sifting. They talked to him about what they found, how things had been made, why the people had settled here, and why perhaps they’d left.

  The archaeologists were very serious workers. One was a thin, fair-haired but suntanned Brit who was lithe and spry, seemingly the one in charge of things. When they let loose at night, they were wild, as Julien had said. Day in and day out, though, they were reserved, digging away, awaiting something to celebrate, it seemed. They had a limited amount of time in the field. Most had to return to universities to teach in the fall, and they worked long hours. In the evenings, Abbot described how the archaeologists thought the people who’d lived in the villa cooked their food and took care of their babies.

  “They were real people,” he said.

  I wondered if it gave him perspective. If there was something about the fact that people live and die and leave things behind and centuries pass that was helping him with his father’s death and with the idea of life and death in general—or did it make life seem too fleeting? I wasn’t sure, but it seemed important to him, and so I let him spend time out there, perhaps figuring something out, something important. In any case, it seemed like it would do no good keeping him from it.

  Each time I took a break from painting the bedrooms, I kept an eye on him from my favorite spot in the lawn chair, absorbing the view of the mountain.

  And Charlotte kept an eye out for him from the wide window in Véronique’s kitchen. It turned out that Charlotte was quite good in the kitchen, better than the French teenager with legs like a colt, as Véronique had described her. Charlotte was efficient, patient, well organized. She followed Véronique’s curt instructions. It reminded me of being with my mother after she returned. I wondered if Charlotte, too, was drawn to Véronique and the moist steam of the kitchen because of some deep desire for an attentive, sure-handed mother. Véronique quietly praised Charlotte in my presence. “She asks the right questions,” she said. “She has smart hands that know what to do, when.”

  I didn’t ask Véronique anything more about my mother, the thief. I didn’t mention the box that had been found after the fire, the one she wanted me to return to my mother. How important could it be really, after all of these years? What difference would it make?

  Elysius and Daniel were on a yacht and hard to reach. I sent them short email updates, little things about the house renovations and expenditures. Charlotte checked in with her mom from time to time. She never brought up Adam Briskowitz to me, so I didn’t, either.

  By midafternoon, Charlotte, Abbot, and I were tired, and we often found each other again in the cool pockets of the house. We read the books that the bookshelves had to offer, a strange collection left behind by other visitors. They included things like a Hachette guide to Italy from 1956, published by the Touring Club Italiano, frail pages with small glued-in, brightly colored maps. It was an updated version of the first Hachette guide to Italy, from 1855, and it lured in new readers with this promise: “A certain number of modifications making the use of the guide more easy and adapting it to present-day conditions of travel have been introduced!” I loved the book, oddly enough—the antiquated language, the way it transported me through place and time.

  Abbot became interested in a field guide to birds called simply Les Oiseaux. It had no copyright date, but it was very old. It offered four pictures of birds per page, and occasionally a page was torn tidily in half as if a previous reader had ripped out a certain bird to paste into a scrapbook of his own sightings. This annoyed Abbot. “How am I supposed to know the birds that I don’t know I’m looking for?”

  I bought Abbot a notebook without any lines on it, and he would take it out with him to the archaeological dig and keep an eye out for birds. He told me that he wanted to find all the birds that weren’t in the book, the ones torn out.

  In the evenings, the swallows went mad, and for an hour or more they dashed wildly through the dusk, eating all of the insects they could. Abbot and I made a habit of watching the dizzy, mad spiraling and swooping together. The birds were noisy and shrill. We tried to count them. Abbot drew pictures of them in his book. Sometimes he would draw a picture of Henry, too, smack in the middle of the swallows as if he were here with us. It seemed more like realism to me than anything else—one brand of the truth.

  Later, we ate sumptuous meals that Charlotte helped Véronique prepare, sometimes joined by the archaeologists before they bustled back to Aix, or other guests, and sometimes not. The meals were as wild, dizzying, and mad as the swallows. I would often close my eyes while eating because I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t distracted, that I could taste it all.

  I tasted it all. But the physical labor of the yard work and the ambitious decision to put a fresh coat of paint in all of the bedrooms was keeping me fit. Did I go with my mother’s desire for clean white walls—her creams and ivories? No. What can I say? The house spoke to me, and I listened. I was going with deep blues, a ruby, a vibrant green. Was it a form of payback? Maybe a little. I decided to keep one bedroom white—only one.

  In the evenings, I told and sometimes retold Abbot and Charlotte the rest of the house stories. I told them about the Bath whites and about the massive fire that swept the mountain, scorching everything, but how the fires stopped just at the door the summer my mother came here alone.

  “Why did she come here alone?” Charlotte asked.

  “It’s a long story,” I said. It wasn’t mine to tell. “But she believes that the house performed a miracle for her.”

  “Like Auntie Elysius,” Abbot said. “The miracle that Uncle Daniel proposed.”

  “That’s a little overly dramatic,” Charlotte said. “Don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “The stories are what you make of them.”

  Later, after Abbot was in bed and Charlotte was listening to the radio that she’d moved from the parlor into her bedroom, I would sit in a lawn chair in the dark yard with only the light from the kitchen spilling from the windows and watch the mountain change its final colors of the day.

  And sometimes I thought about Julien. He was gone a week and counting. I wondered if he was going to come back at all.

  I missed him in a way that surprised me. I worried that I had a crush on him, and, if I did, what did that mean? This pretty simple possibility terrified me. I told myself it was natural. He was handsome. He had no trouble attracting women. I was a human bein
g, after all. What was a crush? Nothing. It didn’t have to mean anything at all.

  What would Henry think of my having a crush? He would think it was normal, too. I wondered what he thought of me here in the lawn chair, drinking wine, staring at a mountain. Did he have some larger worldview now, the kind afforded the dead?

  At night I got into the crisp white sheets on the stiff bed. One wall of the bedroom was blue, the others still the dingy white. The drop cloth and ladder borrowed from Véronique sat in one corner of the room. I fanned my body out like a star, my muscles stiff and sore. I remembered when I was a little girl and how, after my mother told us the stories of the house and all of the miracles, I would tell the stories to myself, whispering them into my cupped hands. I lifted my hands to my mouth, but all I could whisper now was “I’m here. I am. I’m here, now.” It felt suddenly like a prayer. I thought of Charlotte in the cathedrals, Notre-Dame and Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume. Maybe it was the only kind of prayer I could offer, and I did feel calmed by it, so much so that I curled up and drifted off.

  And I dreamed of Henry. These were unlike my dreams at home, where I always realized that his death was some kind of bureaucratic mistake, a clerical mix-up. Here, he was standing by a window, his hands lightly caked with dirt from gardening. He was wearing an old long-sleeved shirt. He unbuttoned the buttons at the wrists, one-handed. Just this small, delicate, intimate gesture—that was all that the dream allowed.

  And then the bedroom filled with light, and it was morning again. And I missed him—an ache that I carried through the day.

  Do you see Abbot in the fields? I would find myself asking him in my mind.

  Can you believe this clear air?

  I wish I could slip this into your mouth so you could taste it.

  The days gathered a quiet rhythm.

  In fact, I had a chorus running through my head—C’est comme ça—which was to say not only “It’s like this” but also, in my mind, I believed It’s like this and this is the way it is and will be … except I was wrong.

  ow was I wrong? There were things I didn’t know, and they would collide.

  I didn’t really know Adam Briskowitz or the definition of the phrase to get Briskowitzed.

  Véronique had the box that belonged to my mother. She had it on her bedside table and was waiting for the right moment to give it to me. I didn’t know what it contained or how the contents would affect me.

  Abbot was going to find an injured swallow and that bird—perhaps more than anything else—would change our lives.

  This is how it began.

  A few days later, a little more than halfway through our six-week stay, Julien reappeared.

  One evening, as the golden light was taking hold of the cool dry air, Abbot and I were beside the vineyard near the archaeological dig, watching the swallows in their nightly feeding frenzy. Abbot had his sketchpad out and was drawing swirling flight patterns. In this picture, his father was trying to flap his arms like the swallows. It was a funny picture and Abbot had worked very hard on it, even remembering a small scar on Henry’s knee, an old baseball scar where Henry had been cleated in college. I noticed the injured swallow hopping near the grapevines, but I didn’t want to draw attention to it. I wasn’t looking for life lessons by way of injured swallows. Abbot had had enough life lessons for a child his age. Why not lessons in the flight patterns of birds, or, better yet, artistic impressions of the flight patterns of birds?

  But, of course, Abbot saw the bird himself. “Look,” he said, squatting down and waddling toward it.

  The bird was hobbled, its left wing buckled.

  “We have to take care of it,” Abbot said.

  “No,” I said. “It’s a bird. Its instincts will kick in and it will know how to take care of itself.”

  Abbot ignored me. “We need a box,” he said. “There’s one in the cupboard under the stairs. I’ll go get it. You watch the bird.”

  “I’ll go get it,” I said, and I marched off.

  When I came back, carrying the box, Julien had driven up, turned off the car, and gotten down on one knee next to Abbot, studying the bird intensely. He was wearing a white shirt without a tie and gray suit pants. The suit jacket was lying over the front seat of the convertible.

  “How is it that the car doesn’t become a swimming pool?” I asked.

  “I take the train,” he said, standing up, “and park the car in a friend’s garage in Aix. You love this car, don’t you?”

  “I might,” I said.

  He negotiated around the box and kissed both of my cheeks. “Hello,” he said. His lips were soft and quick. He smelled sweet and strong—some kind of wonderful aftershave.

  “I’ll never get used to that,” I said.

  “To what?”

  “The cheek kissing,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said, and then he held out his hand. “You prefer this?”

  I shook his hand, which was strong and warm. “No,” I said. “The cheek kissing is fine. It just always surprises me.”

  “We have a plan!” Abbot said.

  “You do?” I said.

  “Julien says you can’t just set a swallow loose. They can’t fly up. You have to get it back to health and then pitch it off someplace high, like a roof,” Abbot explained.

  “Really?” I said. This seemed like a recipe for disaster. “You throw the injured bird off some kind of precipice?”

  Julien nodded. “If it flies, it flies.”

  “And if it doesn’t fly?”

  “Then it doesn’t.”

  “Great!” I said, and then lowered my voice. “So a boy gets to watch the bird he’s nurtured plummet to its death?”

  It must have dawned on him that this might not be the best thing for a little boy with a dead father. He looked a little shaken. “Ah,” Julien said. “This is what we have always done for injured birds. Sometimes they fly.”

  “Great.”

  “We can at least try to help it!” Abbot said. “I mean, if we don’t, it’ll just die or get eaten by a cat or something.” Abbot looked back and forth between Julien and me.

  I sighed. “Fine,” I said, putting the box on the ground. “Who’s going to pick up the bird and put it in the box?”

  “I will,” Julien said. “I used to do this when I was a child sometimes.” He walked up to the bird very calmly, leaned over it, and then in one quick motion, he folded his hands around it, the wings pressed to the body, and set it in the box.

  We all stared at the bird in the box. It shuffled around, its claws scratching the cardboard.

  “We’ll have to feed it dead flies,” Abbot said. “And get a little bowl of water.”

  “No,” Julien said. “We have to just give it a few hours to rest, and then we have to get it to the air.”

  “But it needs to be taken care of first. It’s not ready,” Abbot said. “Look at it. We have to take care of it.”

  “Let him take care of it,” I said to Julien.

  “Okay,” Julien said, taking a step back.

  The sight of the three of us standing over the box drew the attention of Charlotte and Véronique, who must have seen us from the kitchen window. They emerged from the house.

  “What is it?” Véronique called, limping toward us.

  “A swallow!” Abbot yelled. “An injured swallow!”

  “The swallows,” Véronique said. She and Charlotte walked over and peered into the box. “How many injured swallows did you have as a boy?”

  Julien shrugged. “I wanted to be a doctor.”

  “Did they all live?” Abbot asked.

  “Some lived and some didn’t.”

  “This is life,” Véronique said. “We accept it.”

  I had no tolerance for this kind of easy talk about the acceptance of death. Abbot was on his knees, his face looming too close to the bird. “Sit back, Abbot,” I said. “That bird will peck your eyes out.”

  We were all locked together in this frozen moment. No one spoke.r />
  What broke our attention was a taxi, rumbling down the long driveway. It stopped fifty feet from us. We could see through the windshield the commotion of someone paying the driver over the front seat. The trunk popped open.

  “A guest,” Véronique said. “This person has not made a reservation.”

  The driver stepped out and pulled a suitcase from the trunk—a very old-fashioned suitcase, tartan plaid with a zipper and no wheels. And then a young man climbed out from the back door. He was short and thin, tan. He was wearing dark jeans, faded at the hips, and a black band T-shirt too far away to read and slightly hemmed in by a suit jacket. His hair was massive—curly and frizzy—and it would have given the impression of a wolf man except that it seemed purposefully wild and all of his other details, including a pair of oversized glasses with thick black frames and clip-on shades, the kind my father used to wear, were self-consciously artsy. And wolf men are so rarely self-consciously artsy. He must have tipped the cabbie pretty handsomely, because the man looked down at the cash and gave him a hug that knocked him off balance for a moment.

  “That’s no guest,” Charlotte said with some disgust but also a hint of admiration. “That’s Adam Briskowitz.”

  risky?” I said. “I thought he was only going to write a letter.”

  “You gave him our address?” Charlotte said accusatorially. “You?”

  “I really thought he was only writing a letter, a lovelorn apology,” I said. “You know, like he was being old fashioned and romantic.”

  “Arriving from America in person is old fashioned and romantic,” Julien said with a pretty clear understanding of the situation. “It would be better only if he’d taken a ship.”

  “Is he staying the night?” Véronique asked.

  As the taxi drove off, Adam Briskowitz walked up and stood there in front of us, holding his plaid suitcase by its plastic handle. Now he was close enough for me to read the T-shirt—vintage Otis Redding, of all things. He was wearing Top-Siders, tan leather with white laces, a little dusty from the road, no socks. He smiled at all of us and then pointed at Abbot, who was sitting cross-legged on the ground next to the box. The bird rustled. Adam flipped up the plastic shades attached to his glasses and said, “What have you got in there, scout?”