“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry about Patricia. I didn’t know it was your brother.…”
“I didn’t tell you,” he said.
“But you could have. This really boosts your miserable-ness quotient.”
“Do I win now?”
“No, the prize still goes to those in war-torn countries.”
“I’d let her go easily if it meant that I could always be a father. Not half the time. A real father.”
“But you are a real father,” I said. “I saw you with Frieda for five minutes and I knew that I was watching a father, a real father with his child. You get only half the time, but you get to be a father all the time.”
He looked at Abbot, who was being handed a paper lantern on a stick by the woman with the shiny dark hair. “Elysius and your mother are coming,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “And I still don’t know the truth.”
“Your mother didn’t tell you?”
“I know that she had an affair. My father knows, too. She’s a heart thief. I get it. But what did she really do? How bad was it?”
“We’re French,” he said. “We forgive people who fall in love even when they feel they shouldn’t.” He looked at me for a moment, and my heart started pounding in my chest. Then lightly, he raised his hand and let his fingers run down my arm to my hand. I wondered for a moment if he was going to kiss me and then he did—a soft kiss, his lips on mine, tender and sweet. It lingered. I closed my eyes. The world fell away around me. For a moment I felt like the kiss was the only thing holding me there, keeping me grounded. As if without him, I’d billow away like a loose paper lantern. It felt good to rely on someone else like this, to feel tethered. We weren’t ghosts in this moment. We were real. And then I opened my eyes and took a small step back. He slipped his hand in mine. His hand was big and warm and strong.
He nodded at the paper lanterns that the children were holding. “Do you remember this?”
“I do,” I said, barely breathing.
“It’s like they have caught glowing fish,” Julien said.
“It is,” I said, and I saw Abbot’s face now lit up in the golden glow of his lantern. He smiled at us and waved wildly. I quickly pulled my hand from Julien’s and waved back. Had Abbot seen us holding hands? Julien waved to Abbot, too. But Abbot stopped waving, gripped the stick of his lantern with both hands, and seemed to stare at us. His expression was hard to read.
I couldn’t say another word, and Julien didn’t seem to expect me to. Charlotte and Adam were sitting on a bench by the bocce pit, their heads tilted together under the dim streetlight. There was a breeze that flitted between us. Abbot fell in line with the other children, and they started winding up the narrow street, the lanterns swaying and bobbing in the dark.
lysius and my mother both called, together, taking turns with one cell phone. They were in emergency mode. They’d made their travel arrangements already. They were coming in late the next day from Jacksonville to Marseille. I jotted flight numbers and times.
“Do you want me to come and pick you up at the airport?”
“No,” my mother said. “Don’t leave Charlotte there alone.”
“She wouldn’t be alone,” I said. “In fact, she could come.”
“No need to have her on the road,” my mother said. “We’ll take a cab.”
“It’s a long ride. It’ll be expensive.”
Now it was my sister on the line. “It’s only euros,” she said, as if euros didn’t count as anything more than Monopoly money.
In fact, the more money Elysius and Daniel could spend on Charlotte, the more they could prove that they were still good parents. And they were good parents. They had their deficits, of course. We all do. But now they doubted themselves on the most basic level. They were shaken. Toward the end of the conversation, Elysius said, “Where did we go wrong?”
“You can’t see this as a personal failure,” I said. “That’s not what this is about.”
“Easy for you to say,” she said, which felt condescending. “We’ll be there tomorrow night. At least Mom and I get a trip to the South of France out of it all!”
“Right,” I said. This again wasn’t a bad thing to say. It just wasn’t the right thing.
“We’ll be there tomorrow night. Around eight or so, the way I figure it.”
“Wait, one more thing.” I wanted to ask her this while my mother wasn’t there, but at least I had my sister’s ear, even if briefly. “How does Mom seem to you these days?”
“How is anyone doing these days?” she said, exasperated. “She’s fine, considering. She’s a rock, per usual, I guess.” She leaned away from the phone. “Mom,” she said loudly, “how are you doing with all of this?”
“Fine!” she said. “We’re all doing fine!”
wasn’t doing fine. That night as I lay down in bed and tried to be calm and still, my heart felt concussive. I would see Julien in my mind’s eye, and he would turn to me again. I would feel his lips on mine, his fingers run down the length of my arm, the warmth of his hand around mine. I would see the glowing paper lanterns in the background and then Abbot’s strange gaze. Was I falling for Julien? Why him? Why now? Unlike Jack Nixon, he was complicated and therefore not perfect. Put us together and the baggage, our emotional steamer trunks, multiplied exponentially. He was the wrong choice, wasn’t he?
If I was falling for Julien—beyond logic and reason and sensible thought—could Abbot sense it? I’d told Charlotte that this was how we were wired. Was Julien right when we drank wine near the fountain and talked that night? Were we ghosts and, in the moment of that kiss, were we real? If Abbot had seen us, what had he thought of it? Julien meant a lot to him, and I was pretty sure that Abbot meant a lot to Julien. He was teaching Abbot how to play soccer, to nurture a bird, to sing the French national anthem. Abbot had looked to him to see if it was safe to shake Adam’s hand. And, most of all, they had their lost fathers in common.
But was Julien truly interested in me? He’d had a very bad day. He’d seen his ex-wife with his brother. He’d seen his daughter for a brief moment, and then she was taken away. Was he really interested in me or did he simply desire distraction?
I pulled the crisp white sheet to my chest and rolled over, staring out the open window. I loved Henry. I always would love Henry. Was it fair then to show affection for someone else, knowing that I would never be able to give all of my love to them, that it would always be only a portion?
Then I would see Julien piggybacking his daughter, her cheek pressed to his back, the way he looked at her over his shoulder. I would see Julien’s face in my mind, the lanterns all around, and he would say, “We’re French. We forgive people who fall in love even when they feel they shouldn’t.”
he next day, I busied myself getting ready for Elysius and my mother’s arrival. Elysius and my mother would share the fourth bedroom, the only one not yet painted, where there were two single beds. I changed the linens, cleaned the kitchen as well as I could—it still had the feel of a charred hull—and put fresh flowers in vases. I took a jaunt to the Cocci, the patisserie-boulangerie, the vegetable stand off the highway. I went in to Trets, stopped at a pet shop, and bought three fat koi. They sat in the backseat in large, shiny plastic bags, fluttering their wings.
Once I was back home, I picked up the heavy bags and set them next to the fountain and then I found Charlotte making crepes with Adam and Abbot on the hot plate set up on the kitchen table. She’d also made whipped crème fraîche and mixed it with local peaches and sugar, freezing it all into ice cream. Abbot was in heaven.
When everyone had finished their crepes and peach ice cream, we went out into the front yard. Abbot brought the bird in the box and set it in the shade beside the house. He had his notebook, too, and sat it on the stone lip of the fountain. Adam helped me lift each of three large bags with the koi inside of them and, one by one, we set them loose, with a gush of water, into the fountain. Abbot ran his hands across the surfac
e of the water, making ripples. The fish pulsed their fins, flicked their tails.
“They’re happy in here,” Abbot said.
“Contented,” Charlotte said.
“It’s not a bad place to end up,” Adam said.
“I’d live in this fish pond if it were an option,” Charlotte said.
“Me, too,” I said.
Abbot had found an abandoned soccer ball in the Dumonteils’ house and Julien had told him he could keep it. He’d kicked it in a bush and was digging it out now. That’s when Abbot announced that he wanted to set the swallow free.
“Why now?” Adam asked. “If you don’t mind my probing.”
“The fish like the fountain. They get to swim around. It’s better than the pet store, and yesterday, everybody was talking about the Bastilles, which were prisons,” Abbot said, “and I think of the box as a hospital, but it could be a prison, if you look at it like a bird.” He pulled the ball out of the bushes and stood up with it propped under his arm.
“Like I used to be claustrophobic. You know, scared of closets and tight spaces,” Charlotte said. “But now I’m the closet and the baby is the one in the tight space. And I’d never really asked myself before what claustrophobia is like from the closet’s perspective.”
“Or agoraphobia from the wide open field’s perspective,” I said.
“Or hydrophobia from the water’s perspective,” Adam said.
“Or parenthood-a-phobia from the parents’ perspective,” Charlotte said.
“The question is, Abbot, are you ready?” Adam asked.
He put down the ball, looked at his notebook sitting beside the fountain, and then at the box with the bird shifting in it by the house. “I guess so.”
“Sometimes it isn’t a question,” Charlotte said. “Sometimes you just have to be ready, and that’s that.”
“You’re lucky you get to ask yourself if you are ready,” Adam said.
“Is this really about you being pregnant and all?” Abbot said.
Adam nodded. “Right now, everything’s about being pregnant. Where are you going to let the bird go from?”
bbot and I took a walk after lunch to find the highest, most accessible spot in the area—the perfect locale for pitching a swallow. Abbot decided that it was the roof of the Dumonteils’ house.
“You’re not clambering around on a roof,” I said.
“But it’s perfect,” he said, fiddling with the spiral of his notebook, which he had with him, as usual. “We could wear safety gear.”
“Like parachutes?” I said. “No, it’s not happening.”
“What about up there?” Abbot asked, pointing to a balcony off of one of the Dumonteils’ second-floor bedrooms.
I didn’t want to ask Véronique for access to one of her balconies so that we could pitch a hobbled sparrow off it. I didn’t want to walk up to the Dumonteils’ house at all. I realized that I was ducking Julien. In hopes of what? That Elysius and my mother would arrive, and their noise and urgent energy would distract me for long enough that I’d be able to have the right amount of distance? I wanted distance from Julien, urgent energy, and lots of noise. These were things that my mother and sister could provide. I’d never seen it as a positive before. “Well,” I said, “I think that room probably belongs to a guest, and so we really can’t—”
“It’s Véronique’s room,” Abbot said. “Charlotte and I once played hide-and-seek and I went upstairs and hid under the bed.”
I was startled by this confession. It wasn’t that I thought what Abbot had done was so terrible; it was more that I’d had no idea he’d done it. He could have gone anywhere. What if he’d decided to hide in an old refrigerator? What if he’d decided to hide in a washer-dryer? What if he’d wandered into some twisted pervert’s room? Where had I been during this game of hide-and-seek? “Abbot,” I said. “You should pay better attention to the rules.” But as soon as I said it, I realized that I hadn’t set any rules. I was really scolding myself. I should have been paying better attention.
“It was fine,” he said. “Charlotte found me right away. I sing when I’m alone, because I can’t whistle, and so I’m always really easy to find.”
“Why do you sing when you’re alone?”
“So I don’t feel like I’m alone,” he said. “Dad taught me that.”
“Oh,” I said.
“I want everyone to be there when I throw the swallow,” he said.
This alarmed me. I imagined the public spectacle, everyone watching as Abbot threw the bird and it plummeted, wings fluttering awkwardly. “No,” I said. “Let’s just do this privately. Just me and you.”
“But that wouldn’t be fair!” he said. “Everyone helped.”
“Yes, but still, I think it’s better if we just do it together,” I said.
“I don’t want anyone to miss it, though!” His expression was grave. He was attached to the bird. He’d been tending to it all this time. I didn’t want to be dismissive of the importance of this for him.
“Okay,” I said. “Maybe when everyone is already gathering together for dinner?” I asked.
“Okay,” he said. “That’s good because he’ll see the other birds flying and he’ll remember by watching them.”
“You know, Abbot, that there’s a good chance that no matter how well you’ve taken care of the swallow, he might not ever be able to fly again.”
“Yes.”
“But you also know it’s best for him to try to fly. It’s no life for a bird in a box.”
“I know,” Abbot said. “He’s a migratory bird. He’s got to migrate.”
“Right,” I said, really realizing this for the first time. “And when you pitch him off the roof, he might not fly. He might simply fall to the ground. He might die.”
“Yes,” he said. “I know that.” He stared up into my face, squinting into the sun. “I don’t have any other choice. It’s like this. That’s what the French say. C’est comme ça!” And his accent was startlingly good. Impeccable, really.
“Right,” I said. “C’est comme ça.”
hoped that the bird would cause distractions, too. This was awful, but it was the truth. I knew I’d have to see Julien, but maybe amid the confusion of the bird’s flying or falling to its death, we’d both forget that he’d kissed me. Suddenly, I wondered if I’d just imagined it all. Was the moment already evaporating? I hoped it was, and I was holding on to it at the same time.
I walked into the Dumonteils’ house warily. “Véronique?” I called softly.
The kitchen was empty.
I walked back to the hall, down the long runner. The dining room was empty, too. I turned and dipped into the parlor.
There was Julien, standing by a wide window, one hand pressed to the sunny pane, just as he’d had his hand on the window of the car before his brother pulled out of the driveway with his wife and daughter. He’d abandoned his laptop. It sat on the coffee table, its screen staring out blankly into the room. I was struck by the back of his neck, the curve of his jaw, his sunlit hand. My chest ached. It had been a long time since I’d felt an ache other than grief. But I didn’t know what to call this ache. I refused to call it love, but it was something exquisite and exquisitely tinged with regret. Longing? That feeling my mother knew so well? I wanted to hear Henry’s voice, calling me in to shore. Too far, too far. Julien must have sensed me there. He turned around.
“Abbot wants to pitch the swallow today,” I said, fiddling the hem of my T-shirt. “He’s ready. He wants to throw it from the balcony off your mother’s bedroom.”
Julien cocked his head. “Yes,” he said as if coming out of a dream. “The swallow. Abbot wants to throw it from my mother’s balony?”
I nodded. “Look,” I said, lowering my voice, stepping into the sunlit room filled with golden drifting dust motes. It seemed as if they were suspended like small lost planets. I, too, felt like I’d lost my orbit. That had been my advice to Briskowitz: Keep orbiting. “Yesterday was a hard da
y for you. I know it was.”
“Yes?” he whispered back, walking to me.
“And so if, you know, you didn’t mean to …”
He walked up closer. “We’re whispering?” he said. I could smell his aftershave. “Someone might hear us? Chuchote,” he said. “Whisper.” He bent his head down, almost touching his forehead to mine.
“I was saying,” I said.
“You were whispering,” he whispered, his lips brushing my ear.
“Yes,” I whispered, “I was whispering that I know you might not really be feeling like yourself, and I’m not, either, here, you know. Not really because I’m far away from all of the burdens of my life.” I was thinking of all the things that held me in place, that created my sense of gravity, my orbit. Where was I? “And, well, I still have real responsibilities and—” I really had no idea where I was going with this. I wanted to say that it was too complicated, that I was just a bunny, after all.
He lifted his head and looked at me, surprised. Then he lowered his head again and whispered into my ear, “I don’t want to go back.”
“Back?”
“You want to go back, to return to the moment before I kissed you, before I held your hand?”
This made it real. He had kissed me. He’d held my hand. He’d done it on purpose and he was standing by it. I paused there for a moment, frozen. I didn’t want to move. I couldn’t move. I closed my eyes, slowly. I thought he might disappear. This is what it’s like to be close, I thought to myself. This is what it’s like to almost lean on someone else. I knew that I could have tilted forward. I could have rested my head on his chest. I could have listened to his heart, and he would have let me. He’d have held me up.
“I want to go back,” I whispered. I opened my eyes. I felt breathless and stepped away from him and turned to the hall quickly, almost recklessly. I stopped at the doorway and looked at him over my shoulder. “Do you think it would be okay for Abbot to pitch the swallow off your mother’s balcony?”
The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted Page 25