The Fortress

by Danielle Trussoni

  “What happened to you?” Hadrien asked, looking me over with care. He ran a finger over the fresh bruises on my arm and shoulder.

  “I think those are from falling down the stairs,” I replied. “The second time.”

  “One or two bruises, maybe,” he said. “Not this many.”

  I’d forgotten how bad I looked, with my dark circles and my thinning hair.

  Hadrien turned an arm over, inspecting the bruises more closely. “Is he hitting you?”

  “He’s attacking me with his thoughts,” I said, without stopping to think of just how crazy this would sound to a sane person like Hadrien. “He’s performing psychic attacks on me. All his hate is working into my body and eating me from the inside, like cancer.”

  He looked doubtful, then worried. “You need to see a doctor.”

  “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to recover from this.”

  “Of course you will,” he said. “But first we need to get you out of here.”

  “You told me you have an idea.” I was ready to hear his plan. I couldn’t think of anything that would work, and I’d been trying to figure it out for weeks.

  “Come on,” he said, taking my hand. “Let’s sit down.”

  We walked to a café and sat on the terrace, looking at Nîmes’s ancient Roman amphitheater, where we ordered two cafés au lait. “At first,” Hadrien said, “I thought I would come in there and escort you out, but that would have been difficult alone, and so I asked a few friends of mine if they would come with me, and they agreed, but then I realized it could get violent, and too scary for your kids. And so I began to think of other ways, ways that were not so…obvious.” He leaned over the table. “You said that he changed his behavior when your father was at the house?”

  I nodded. “He was still angry when Andy was there, but he tried to hide the worst of his behavior. He doesn’t want a confrontation, especially with another man.”

  “He wants to push you into signing the agreement, but he doesn’t want witnesses. He doesn’t want anyone to know that he’s bullying you.”

  “Well, it’s more complicated than that,” I said. “Since the separation Nico has said that her brother isn’t really her brother, and that she’s part of a family of vampires with special powers, and that she should live in Bulgaria because she’s going to have her own dog, flat-screen TV, and private patisserie. Alex hates being around us so much that he’s practically living in the attic. The stakes are higher than just my mental health.”

  “So what if you have someone else there, to witness what’s happening?”

  “Are you suggesting that you move in?” For a moment I imagined me, the kids, and my young Parisian boyfriend all living upstairs, guarded by our ferocious pug, Fly.

  “Not me,” he said, smiling his beautiful smile, the one that seemed to eclipse everything around him. “Someone else. Someone older, someone powerful and—most important—authoritative, so Nikolai feels that his behavior is being watched.”

  I turned the idea over in my mind. He was right. I could actually get through this with someone there to help shield me. If Andy —or someone like Andy—came to the house, Nikolai wouldn’t have the courage to be so aggressive. He might even call his parents, and they would swoop in and carry him away to Bulgaria. He might disappear. The kids and I would be free. The standoff would be over.

  “It’s a great idea,” I said, taking the last sip of my coffee. “But who?”

  —

  HADRIEN’S MOTHER, EVE, arrived on the next train. We walked back to the station to pick her up and found her waiting on the platform. Dressed in a classic jacket and pantsuit, her blond hair short and styled, Eve was sophisticated in the way I’d imagined all Frenchwomen were sophisticated. I tried to imagine her walking through our village, with her leather bag and her chic haircut, and I had to smile. She would stick out as much as, even more than, I did.

  “Bonjour,” she said, kissing her son and then me. She looked me over, her blue eyes narrowed, taking in her son’s new girlfriend. I tried to imagine what she saw: a sickly, bruised woman of thirty-eight with straw-dry hair and purple rings under her eyes. This was the woman who had stolen her beautiful son’s heart.

  Hadrien threw Eve’s small rolling suitcase into the back of my car, and we drove to the center of Nîmes, near the market, where we parked and went to a restaurant for lunch. Eve asked questions in rapid, elegant French: How did I come to live in France, and what was my background, and what was my profession, and how old were my children, and wasn’t it hard to be so far from the United States? I tried my best to explain everything that was happening, sketching the big picture in my imprecise French: bad marriage, angry husband, big old haunted house, can’t leave without my children.

  “This is what I propose,” Hadrien explained. Eve would accompany me home and stand witness. Nikolai, of course, would have no idea that Eve was Hadrien’s mother. He would think, when I brought Eve to the house, that she was just a friend visiting from Paris. I would tell him that she was a work acquaintance and that she was in the area and so I’d invited her to stay for a night or two. My French editor had done the same thing the summer before, so it was not outside the realm of possibility. If I looked at it from Nikolai’s point of view, I could see that bringing my boyfriend’s mother to our house would be an awful betrayal. It was sneaky and went against my original intentions of being dignified and cordial. But at that point I had no choice. My reserves of strength—mentally and physically—were gone. After what had happened in the stairwell, I was afraid of what would happen if our bitter holdout continued. For my own sanity, and for the safety of my children, I had to leave that house. And I wasn’t leaving without Alex and Nico. If bringing Eve into our feud would get me out of there, I was ready to give it a try. And besides, everything had been fair game for Nikolai—our friends, our kids, our money. It was time for me to take a stand.

  Sensing that I had doubts, Hadrien switched to English, a language Eve couldn’t understand. “What is it?” he asked. “Is something wrong?”

  “Does your mom know the mess she’s getting involved in?” I said. “We’re on the verge of killing each other in there. I don’t think she realizes how tense it is.”

  “I explained everything this morning,” he said. “She understands.”

  “I doubt that,” I said. “It is seriously horrible at my house.”

  “Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?” Eve asked.

  “Ce n’est rien, Maman,” Hadrien replied. He turned back to me and said in English. “You don’t understand. She wants to help you. She went through a bad divorce before she met my father. My older brother is actually my half brother, and she had to work out custody problems with his father. She understands how hard this is; she sees a lot of herself in your situation. When I told her what was happening, she felt very strongly that she needed to help you.”

  “Français, s’il vous plait,” Eve said. “Est-ce qu’il y a un problème?”

  “Are you sure you want to get involved in this?” I asked Eve, switching back to French.

  She looked at me a long moment and said, “I am doing this for you, but I am doing this most of all for my son. He called me late last night and said, ‘Can you buy a train ticket to Nîmes for the morning? I need your help.’ He had mentioned you to his father and me a month ago. I knew he was involved with you, but now—after he asked for my help—I see he loves you, and real love is a rare and precious thing. It is something we must fight for. You’re in a bad situation. Bon. It can happen to the best people. Let me help get you out of it.”

  Eve used the vous form of “you,” meaning “both of you.” She wanted to help Hadrien and me, together.

  I didn’t know how it was that I deserved her help, but I knew right then and there that Eve was a tough woman, a queen ready to fight. Her help was a gift, one that came to me from the ether, and I must accept it. As she finished her dessert and asked for the check, I couldn’t help but wonder if I woul
d be strong enough to do what Eve was doing now. In the future, when Alex or Nico needed me, would I be brave enough to go in fighting? Would I evolve from a bumbling princess to a powerful queen? I hoped so.

  “This is the plan that Hadrien worked out,” she said as we walked out to the car. “I will come with you to the children’s school at five o’clock.”

  “He’ll be there,” I said, realizing even as I said it that I was making a fist, clenching my teeth. My whole body had gone tense at the thought of seeing Nikolai.

  “Bon,” she replied. “You will introduce me to him. You tell him that I am an editor friend from Paris. This is not a lie. I am an editor, and I do live in Paris, and we are now friends. I will say that I wanted to see your home and to spend some time with you. All true. Then we go back to the house, where at some point in the evening I will invite you and the children to come with me to Paris for the weekend.”

  “Nikolai will never let me go to Paris for the weekend,” I said. “Not with both kids.”

  “I will make the invitation in front of your husband,” Eve said. “And you will accept the invitation in front of your husband. It will be a fait accompli. We will buy the train tickets online, and it will be settled. He will have no choice but to allow you to leave, or to argue with me about it.”

  “And if he doesn’t let me leave with Alex and Nico?”

  “I will suggest that we call the police, as it is surely illegal to hold a woman and her children captive in her own house.”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, although I knew two things: Nikolai hated the gendarmerie, and he lost his bluster in front of a witness.

  “I can be very persuasive,” she said. “I think he will agree to my invitation.”

  Hadrien leaned back in his chair. “It’s our Trojan horse. You bring a harmless editor into your home, but she is not harmless—she is actually the weapon who will help you win the war.”

  —

  I WAS HESITANT about introducing Eve to my children, as it meant giving them the same half-truths about her identity I would be giving Nikolai, but I was absolutely certain that they should have no contact with Hadrien. Whatever he was to me at that point—lover, savior, reality check, knight in shining armor—it wasn’t the right time to introduce him to my kids. I wouldn’t have been able to explain who he was or what he was doing in our lives, and I didn’t want to lie to them. Someday they would know Hadrien, but not now, not yet. They weren’t old enough to understand what had happened. They couldn’t fathom that Hadrien was like a lighthouse: He had not caused the storm, but once I found him, I could finally see how to steer out of it. And so we dropped him off at a hotel in Sommières while Eve and I went to the kids’ school together.

  It was a party of four waiting for Nico and Alex at the school in Sommières: Nikolai and Sveti, Eve and I. Although it was warm and sunny, the flowers blooming and the wind mild, Nikolai wore all black—black trench coat, black boots, black jeans, and his black porkpie hat. A rush of adrenaline spiked through my system upon seeing him. It was an animal reaction now, an instinct, what a cat must feel upon seeing a dog. I couldn’t help it. Fear lived in my muscles, in my skeleton, in my spine. When I saw him, I saw the bat hovering over me in my sleep, gliding down slowly, slowly onto my face, the soft wings brushing my cheeks, the teeth against my neck. I saw his pale, ghostly face behind the Paris-Lyon glass. I wanted to go back to the car and drive away.

  “That is your husband?” Eve whispered in my ear.

  “He comes every afternoon, to pick up our daughter.”

  “And your son?” Eve said, a dark look crossing her features. “He comes for him, too?”

  “No, he leaves Alex to me,” I said. “I come here to get Alex. Nikolai is only interested in Nico now.”

  “Le pauvre,” Eve said, biting her lip, and for the first time that afternoon I saw some reflection of her own divorce in her actions, the memories of her own traumatic split resurfacing.

  Nikolai stared a moment, trying to place Eve. We walked up to him, and I introduced them in French, telling Nikolai that Eve was an editor from Paris. Eve looked him over, as if assessing a particularly inelegant sentence, not quite sure how to correct him. They kissed on each cheek, in the French style, although it was clear that Nikolai wanted to have nothing to do with her.

  “Editor from Paris?” Nikolai said to me in English, looking at first confused, then suspicious. “You never mentioned an editor named Eve before.”

  “Maybe not,” I said, shifting my weight from one foot to the other, feeling like an insecure teenager. “But she’s in the area, and I suggested she stay with us. It’s just one night. She’ll leave tomorrow.”

  As Eve had pointed out, none of this was false. Yet of course it wasn’t exactly true either.

  “Thank you for having me at your home,” Eve said in French, and Nikolai—who would not meet her gaze, who was wary of this outsider coming into our personal hell—only nodded, his eyes on the school door, as if Eve and I were not there at all.

  —

  NICO BOUNDED OUT of the school, her backpack hanging from her shoulder, her long brown hair tied in a loose braid. When she saw our small group, she stopped short, surprised, looked from one parent to the other, unsure of what to do. Until then I’d tried to avoid conflict by letting Nikolai pick Nico up from school. The last thing I had wanted was to have a tug-of-war over our daughter in the schoolyard. But now we were both there, waiting, and Nico was faced with a choice—did she go with her mother or her father? Where were her loyalties? What did we expect of her? Eve, perhaps sensing this, stepped in front of Nikolai and me and greeted Nico with a big warm, “Bonjour, mademoiselle! You must be Nico! I’ve heard so much about you.”

  From that moment on, Eve was in charge. She maneuvered around Nikolai, talking merrily as she steered Nico toward my car. With a crisp wave, she told Nikolai we would see him back at the house, and when he tried to object, she ignored him. I found Alex and waved him over. He climbed into the backseat next to Nico, and suddenly I was with both my children again, the three of us together, outside the blue iron gate of La Commanderie. I hadn’t expected to feel such an intense emotional response, but tears came to my eyes as I fastened my seat belt. I felt a rush of hope. It had been weeks since Nico and Alex and I had been together outside the fortress wall. It had been weeks of tension and fear and nightmares. But we were together now, in my car with the radio on, the light pouring through the windows. It felt like seeing the sun after weeks of rain, or eating a huge meal after a long fast. My children were both there, in the backseat of my car, together with me again. Eve would invite us to Paris, and we would leave Aubais. We would get through this dark fairy tale. We would arrive on the other side of the forest, happy and whole. The future opened up suddenly, like an endless ocean glittering under the Languedoc sun.

  —

  I TOOK THE long way back to Aubais, driving slowly over country roads, rolling past vineyards and olive groves, the sky bright and cloudless. We stopped by a farm stand, and I bought two huge bags of cherries, black and sweet, to take home for le goûter. I took deep breaths of fresh air, the oxygen tingling in my lungs like hope. For the first time in weeks, I could breathe. I hadn’t felt the sun in ages. I’d been inside the dark stone walls of the fortress for so long that I’d forgotten the outside world, the bursting, fecund beauty of the south of France.

  Nikolai was already in the courtyard when we returned. He’d set up his chessboard on the table under the micocoulier tree and was going through his moves. A bottle of wine and some wineglasses sat nearby. I led Eve and the kids upstairs, where I sat Alex and Nico down at the table for our daily ritual of unpacking the backpacks, reading Le Petit Quotidien, doing homework and having le goûter. Eve pulled up a chair and sat between Alex and Nico, helping Alex with his impossible verb conjugations and Nico with her math. After washing the cherries and putting them in a bowl on the table, I opened the windows that gave over the courtyard, letting in sunshine and wa
rm air. From where we sat, we could see Nikolai, phone in one hand and chess pieces in the other.

  Stepping away from the kitchen, I checked my phone. Hadrien had sent me a text message. He was still at the hotel in Sommières and wanted to know what was happening. I replied, WE’RE HOME. EVERYTHING IS FINE SO FAR.

  He texted back, BE STRONG.

  Suddenly the landline telephone rang. Nico jumped up and answered.

  “Yessss,” she said, turning her big brown eyes toward Alex and me. Someone said something on the other end, and she hung up. “That was Daddy,” she said. “He wants to talk to me.”

  “You’re doing your homework now,” I objected. “He can talk to you later.”

  “He told me to come now,” she said, ignoring what I’d told her and running out of the room. “I’ll be right back.”

  I glanced out the window and saw Nikolai staring up at us.

  “Finished!” Alex exclaimed, pushing his notebooks back into his bag. “I’m going to the attic.”

  “Take your Petit Quotidien!” I said, and he grabbed the newspaper as he ran out of the room.