The Lost Carousel of Provence

by Juliet Blackwell

  Maëlle’s father is more cabinetmaker than sculptor, but this is by necessity rather than the limits of his talent. He is a frustrated artist, as is she. Her father had carved a gnome for each of his children; hers was soft and slick with the rubbing of her hands as she felt the crevices and hollows, following the curves and lines.

  Her brother, Erwann, was Maëlle’s closest friend and confidant as they grew up; he is the one who encouraged her to come to Angers. To learn to carve, to fight for what she wanted, no matter how absurd it might seem. Erwann had written her a sonnet titled “The Aspiring Apprentice of Angers.” She keeps it in her bag, rereading it on the train, drawing strength from the memory of whispering at night in their shared cot, confessing their dreams, their aspirations. Until they got too old to share a bed and she was sent to sleep with her sisters. Still, Erwann is her best friend; he is the one who understands.

  Her father’s gnome is the only sentimental item, besides Erwann’s poem, that Maëlle has brought with her to Angers. Besides those treasures, her bag holds only a single change of clothes, a work apron, a roll of her sketches, and one exquisitely carved rose wrapped in a scrap of pink silk. She sculpted it from a single piece of chestnut wood she had hauled, by herself, from the hill outside of town, near the cemetery where her mother was buried. Maëlle had worked on the rose for months, listening to Erwann cough at night, sometimes so hard that he spit up blood.

  Maëlle is sick, too. Sick to her soul of paying for the sin of being born a girl and growing into a woman. It makes her angry, and the anger gives her strength.

  “These are some of my projects,” Maëlle says as she displays her designs, smoothing the papers out as best she can on the dusty worktable. “But please believe me: I am far more talented in carving than in drawing.”

  Bayol glances at them, nods distractedly.

  Then she unwraps her pièce de résistance. Her rose—the petals delicate, the leaves complete with intricate veins, and all perfectly proportioned, down to the thorns.

  Monsieur Bayol sets down his hammer and chisel, extends his hand, and she places the rose on his open palm. He studies the workmanship, turning the flower to view it from all angles. He exchanges a glance with his apprentice, Léon, who has approached to see what Maëlle has brought.

  Léon’s only response is a shrug.

  “Please, messieurs, I beg you,” Maëlle says, looking from one man to the other. “I spent everything I have on the train ticket. I have nowhere else to go.”

  “You come to a strange city without resources?” Bayol frowns. “You have no family in the city of Angers?”

  She shakes her head. Maëlle had run away from home with nothing more than what she had tucked into her satchel. She had been so sure.

  “Then already you have proven you are a foolish girl,” says Bayol, handing the rose back to her and running his fingers over the section of feathers he had just been carving, examining the depth of the grooves.

  “I beg to differ,” Maëlle responds, desperate. “Would you say that if I were a man?”

  She jumps at a loud bark of laughter. Behind her, several other workers have gathered to listen in on their conversation.

  “But you are not a man, my child,” Monsieur Bayol says, sounding distracted. He picks up his gouging knife and cuts another tiny section of wood, blowing the debris away. “You are a girl. Surely I don’t have to explain the essential differences to you.”

  “Men are not accustomed to bravery in a woman,” Maëlle says, pleased with how calm her voice sounds, despite the pounding of her heart. Indignation fuels her confidence. “You mistake it for foolishness. We are entering a new century; are we not ready to embrace a new way of life?”

  Bayol straightens, placing a hand on his chicken and glancing behind her at Léon and the others. When he looks back at Maëlle, one side of his mustache lifts as he gives her a smile.

  Maëlle feels a sweet, liquid triumph flow through her veins.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  PRESENT DAY

  PARIS

  Cady

  The alienating, dehumanizing experience of international air travel, which most people complained about, was par for the course for Cady. She had been trained as a child to stand in line and wait, to shuffle silently through from one checkpoint to the next, losing herself in her thoughts.

  Paris, on the other hand, was terrifying. The foreign language, the unfamiliar streets—even the charming but minuscule Left Bank apartment she had rented, three stories up a winding stone staircase—knocked her off-balance and left her feeling even more out of place than she usually did.

  So she focused on the carousels.

  A month ago, and what seemed like a world away—when she was still in Oakland and planning this trip had been a theoretical exercise—Cady had researched Parisian carousels and composed her “must include” list. While Sebastian cooked dinner, Cady and Olivia had spread the map of Paris out on the kitchen table and pinpointed the locations of the historic machines, noting the nearest Métro stations. There were so many carousels to visit, in places with enticing, exotic-sounding names: Trocadéro, Montmartre, Jardin du Luxembourg, Forum des Halles, Bois de Vincennes, Jardin du Ranelagh, Musée des Arts Forains, Square des Batignolles.

  Now, as the days passed, Cady took immense pleasure in checking each carousel off her list, jotting down meticulous notes about date, time of day, weather, and the names and e-mail addresses of the parents of any children included in her photographs.

  The morning after she arrived Cady dragged herself out of bed before dawn to photograph the Trocadéro carousel. Styled in traditional wood and illustrated with Parisian scenes, with the orange and pink light of dawn reflected in the great water mirror of the Warsaw Fountain, it was the perfect place to photograph the Parisian sunrise.

  It seemed clichéd to include the Tour Eiffel carousel in a book of Parisian carousels, and yet how could she not? Cady headed to the corner of the Pont d’Iéna and Quai Branly, situated right below the twinkling lights of the Eiffel Tower. With its prancing white horses, the two-story carousel provided the ideal opportunity to take a classic shot of the Eiffel Tower—with a carousel in the foreground. She angled the camera to include some nearby palm trees, their fronds waving lackadaisically in the breeze.

  Next, she moved on to the carousel at the Hôtel de Ville, Paris’s town hall. The light in the evening created harsh shadows against the pretty tones of the panels painted with classical scenes. The ornate double-decker merry-go-round was similar to the one located at Trocadéro, so she made sure to catch the iconic hotel in the background.

  The small green-roofed carousel in the Jardin du Luxembourg claimed to be the oldest in Paris, dating back to 1879. The rather run-down, weathered animals, ridden by thousands of children for more than a century, were designed by the architect of the Paris Opera house, Charles Garnier. Its main attraction, Cady learned as she watched the machine go round, was the jeu de bagues, or game of rings: Children sitting on the outside horses used sticks to attempt to spear tin rings as they rode past. A wrinkled elderly man rapidly loaded rings into old wooden shanks in an intricate, practiced motion.

  Every day when Cady stopped for lunch at a bistro or brasserie near wherever she was shooting, she would try to engage the waiter in a discussion of carousels, but to a person they seemed hopelessly bored and uninterested in this American tourist and her quest.

  Far from being put off, Cady enjoyed their surliness. It seemed . . . authentic. It had always embarrassed her to go to her local grocery store in Oakland, where the poor cashier was forced to read her name on the receipt and say, “Thank you, Ms. Drake.” Even when it was delivered in a warm tone, the endearment wasn’t genuine; Cady found she preferred the Parisians’ slightly standoffish attitude.

  So Cady kept to herself, exploring the disconcertingly cobbled streets, figuring out how to buy groceries, hunting do
wn carousels, exchanging as few words as possible with parents when she asked their permission to photograph their children on the rides.

  But even as she watched the carousels whirl round and round, each one more charming than the last, Cady felt something shifting within her. Bit by bit, she was easing into the sense of anonymity she felt as she walked the streets of Paris. With each new stranger she met, stumbling through conversations in her clumsy French, she felt increasingly free to present a new face, a different aspect of herself.

  About a week after she arrived Cady had been sitting at an outdoor café, savoring an extravagant meal served by an efficient but unfriendly waiter, looking out at the bustling plaza in front of the Panthéon, when it dawned on her that Olivia had been right. Cady was starting to feel . . . if not happy, at least sort of comfortable. Somehow her usual manner, which people in friendly California described as overly forward and abrupt, seemed to fit in here. Or maybe it was simply that since she was someplace foreign and didn’t understand all the language or customs, she allowed them to flow over her instead of trying to fathom every little thing.

  And every night when she retreated to her tiny apartment, Cady opened the mystery box she had found inside Gus. She reread the handwritten note, stroking the silky braid of hair, studying the wooden rose and the photograph of the woman who had loved, or who had been loved. Or both.

  Souviens-toi de moi.

  Somehow it seemed like an answer to a question she had never known quite how to ask.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  2001

  OAKLAND

  Cady, Age 13

  Her childhood wasn’t all bad. Cady had vague, watercolor memories of being held in the lap of a woman who smelled like talcum powder and almond-scented hand lotion, overlaid with the slight sourness of old milk. She could still recall the warmth of the woman’s skin and the reassuring thudding of her heart. Strong, plump arms encircling her like a loving shackle that would never let her go.

  Or there was Ms. Greta, who had a deep, kind voice and an easy laugh, who kept a canister of red-hot candies that she would dole out like vitamins, making the kids giggle when she’d say, “Line up for your vitamins, now, kids, and eat ’em all up.”

  But every time Cady started to relax, to learn how things worked, to develop a fondness for someone, she’d be yanked out and placed in another situation. That’s what the social workers called the succession of houses and apartments she was assigned to: “situations.” A series of foster homes, then a string of group homes, moved from one to the next for reasons that made no sense to her; all she understood was that according to the Powers That Be, she was hard to fit.

  Cady learned not to get too attached to anything or anyone, to carry anything that mattered to her on her person at all times, and to keep two big black Hefty garbage bags—her “foster kid suitcases”—ready to go.

  As she grew, Cady would note the changes in her body when she looked in the mirror, searching her features for a hint of where she’d come from. She imagined her father’s eyes in her own straightforward espresso brown gaze; she wondered if she might have inherited her mother’s strong jawline, her stubborn chin. Did she look like anyone in this world? What would it be like to share a family resemblance with parents and siblings, grandparents, cousins?

  What would it be like to belong?

  Once Cady hit adolescence, she graduated to a group home, to the roster of yet another overworked social worker, this one more focused on keeping her wards out of prison than on finding them permanent homes and families.

  The other kids taunted Cady with possible origin stories: claiming she had been abandoned at a fire station, or that her father had died in prison after denying paternity, or that she had been taken away from a drug-addled mother. All Cady knew for sure was that there had been a legal issue regarding paternity when she was very young, which was why she hadn’t been adoptable as an infant. There were no immediate relatives and no way to trace family.

  The file is sealed, the subject is closed.

  A kind librarian once helped her to look up her last name: Drake. It turned out to be a relatively common surname, so it didn’t provide any clues as to her people. But the librarian read that it might have derived from the word dragon.

  Cady liked that. When the anger arose inside her, she imagined it as her inner dragon, a scaly, ugly thing that surged up from her gut, swelling with rage at the unfairness of it all. She would watch with vicious envy as harried parents picked their kids up from school, imagining her classmates going home to mothers and fathers and nannies, their bedrooms decorated with pink flowers and soft white coverlets, rooms fit for the princesses their parents believed them to be.

  Cady’s only friend at the group home was a girl named Jonquilla, after the jonquil, a kind of tiny daffodil. She went by Jon—some of the kids tried to call her Daffy behind her back, but she beat up the biggest boy and that was that.

  Cady recognized in Jonquilla a kindred soul: a fiery, discontented creature. She was drawn to Jon’s fury, her confident righteousness. Soon they were a pair; Cady stopped hanging out with the younger kids, instead choosing to skip school and pilfer candy from Abdella’s Liquor Store on the corner.

  One day Cady and Jonquilla walked past a shop Cady had never seen before. Metallic gold letters spelled out its name in a bold arc on the glass.

  A carousel horse painted in bright red, blue, and yellow stood in the display window, its prancing legs positioned as though it had just alit. It had gold gilding on its saddle, and its silver mane glittered in the afternoon sun.

  “Hey, check this out,” Cady said to Jon. “Do you remember the Tilden Park merry-go-round? Did you ever do Prospective Parents Day there as a kid?”

  “Coupla times,” said Jon. “It was lame.”

  “I like this horse, though. Do you remember the sea creature at Tilden?”

  Jon rolled her eyes. “I dunno. I guess. I thought merry-go-rounds were cool when I was, like, five. Wanna go down to the park, see if we can score something?”

  “Maybe . . . but want to check this place out first?” asked Cady. “What’s it called?”

  “Maxine’s Treasures. Can’t you read?”

  Beyond the carousel horse Cady spotted a mishmash of oil paintings and wooden furniture, gold-framed mirrors and strange dolls and an old-fashioned record player. She longed to go in, but hesitated. Shop owners had a way of knowing that kids her age who were out and about during school hours were up to no good. Still . . .

  Cady’s gaze lingered on the fascinating jumble of items crowding the store.

  “C’mon, Drake,” Jon urged.

  Cady followed her friend, but couldn’t stop wondering: Where had all those things come from? Who had they belonged to? What were their stories?

  * * *

  • • •

  A week later, the clerk at Abdella’s Liquor Store caught Jon red-handed with a family-sized bag of M&M’s down her pants.

  Cady ran.

  Two blocks away, she dashed down an alley and rounded the corner, only to realize she was in front of Maxine’s Treasures.

  Fearing that someone from the liquor store might be on her tail, Cady ducked into the store. A bell tinkled over the door.

  Sitting behind the register was an old woman who nodded to Cady as she walked in. Her head was capped by a stiff-looking helmet of salt-and-pepper hair. Probably a wig, Cady thought meanly, wondering what the woman would look like if Cady snatched it off her ugly head.

  Cady smiled to herself, thinking she would make Jon laugh with that story.

  Her stomach clenched. She hoped Jon didn’t land in juvie—what would Cady do without her only friend? Also, Jon was going to be mad at her for running—she’d probably get beaten when she went back. But Cady had told her the family-sized bag was too big not to be noticed.

  Cady tried to act casual as
she looked around Maxine’s Treasures, as though it was typical for her to stroll through narrow aisles crowded with bureaus and side tables, rusty tools and chess sets and carved painted panels. Her gaze fell upon an old magician’s chest, complete with magic wand and a deck of tarot cards.

  Where did these things come from? Everything seemed to vibrate with secret stories, with hidden histories.

  “All these things belonged to someone once?” Cady asked the old woman from the other side of the store.

  No answer.

  “Hey, lady?” Cady tried again, raising her voice. “Didn’t you hear me?”

  “Of course I heard you.” The woman flipped a page of her magazine and, still not looking up, added, “But when addressing your elders, you preface your statement with, ‘Excuse me, ma’am.’”

  Cady stared at her for a long moment, enraged on the one hand, intrigued on the other. With an internal eye roll, she channeled a phrase she’d overheard when the group home social worker insisted on watching the entire season of some stupid BBC program from England:

  “Excuse me, ma’am. I wonder if you could be so kind as to inform me whether these items are all hand-me-downs?”

  Maxine smiled and met her eyes. “What’s your name, child?”

  “Cady. Cady Drake.”

  “Nice to meet you, Cady. I’m Maxine. In answer to your question: Yes, these items once belonged to someone, or to several someones over the years.”

  “Where’d you get them?”

  “You’d be amazed at what people throw away. Perfectly good things,” Maxine said. Without changing her tone, she asked, “What you running from, Cady?”

  “Nothing,” Cady said. Why did people always assume she was a crook? Did she have “No one wants me but the police” stamped on her forehead? “A while ago you had a carved horse in your window, like from a merry-go-round.”