Agathe's Summer

by Didier Pourquery

  Over the past few days she’s wanted to get up and walk, breathe in the air of Paris in the summer, experience normal evenings. And she does.

  In the photos from Sabine’s birthday party, she seems slightly preoccupied, tense. It’s her first time out of the hospital since May. What matters the most to her can be reduced to very few words this evening of July 17: she’s among friends, alive among others. Back where she belongs, in the outside world. “She’s very eager to resume a normal life,” Sabine notes in her daily update.

  July 2000: you begin the new millennium with a solo trip to the United States. You dream of becoming a reporter there. You want to spend a few days in Missouri, in Columbia, where I studied when I was barely older than you are now, to spend time with my American family. You met them during our 1997 trip. You saw Ava and Ross again, “Mom and Dad,” my adoptive American parents, when they came to Oléron in 1999, and you decided you would go visit your American “grandparents” in Columbia, Missouri, the year you turned sixteen. This was not open to discussion.

  Behind our backs you discussed it with Ava and “it all just happened,” you tell us one spring day in 2000. There’s a direct flight from Paris to St. Louis, TWA 819. St. Louis is a two-hour drive from Columbia. Your “grandparents” will come get you at Lambert Airport in St. Louis. A no-brainer, right?

  Departure in early July for around twenty days. You ask us to explain to Ava how to arrange for your kinesiotherapy sessions. As for the rest, you know how to handle it on your own, right? You’re an autonomous student from the self-governing high school. That year you’d spent crisscrossing the island with your friend Samantha, and going to rave parties. You practically ran the high school.

  In early June you have to undergo an intense antibiotic course that leaves you drained. Your bacteria is firmly ensconced by July. Who cares. You’ll have a stowaway on the plane with you when you cross the Atlantic.

  On July 3 at the huge Roissy Airport, you look timid. You cough a lot and are anxious, I can tell. But you wanted to go the US alone. There’s so much excitement in your eyes. You say: “It’s hard to go on a trip without anyone to share your feelings and discoveries with.” I watch you go through customs. It’s the first time you’re going so far away without us.

  The next day, July 4, I call you. You’re happy, all is fine, you’re going to watch the fireworks and are finding people even understand you when you speak, and you are more or less understanding what people are saying despite their midwestern accent. Your time there goes well. You meet Americans of all ages, you get a taste of the Midwest, take in a big gulp of middle America.

  You come home exhausted, coughing more than ever, with a huge grin on your thin face and a spark of triumph in your eyes.

  SATURDAY, JULY 21, 2007

  Tonight we’re having dinner in Montparnasse, on rue du Maine, between rue de la Gaîté and the train station, at La Moule en Folie, an old restaurant that has since closed down. Agathe is at the top of her game. Enthroned on the banquette, she dominates the conversation, delivers opinions on this and that and the other, just like in the good old days. Tonight Agathe-the-future-psychiatrist is on full display.

  At the end of dinner she and Clarisse start to attack Sabine. Her lack of self-confidence is infectious, they say. The atmosphere gets tense when I tell Clarisse she shouldn’t speak to her mother that way. Clarisse is going through a rebellious phase. Agathe springs to her sister’s defense, lumping me and Sabine into one common enemy: parents who lack self-confidence and can’t provide their struggling teenagers with a proper structure. Agathe’s famous “structure”: Alex sits there quietly, looking vaguely embarrassed.

  Agathe and Clarisse were raised following the methods of Françoise Dolto, the child psychoanalyst. Imbued with the teachings of the great pediatrician, we always spoke very directly to our daughters, from cradle to adolescence. Very early on we encouraged them to speak their minds. This openness applies to all topics. Except, perhaps, Agathe’s illness. Now I realize she always knew more than we did about it, and left us to our denial. It was easier for her that way. She could pursue her challenges without being slowed down by anxious or teary parents.

  But today, at the Moule en Folie, it’s a free-for-all and it’s not pretty.

  Agathe never holds back her criticism of me, so it’s nothing new. She’s been teasing me for reading The Joy of Being Oneself by Moussa Nabati.

  “It’s not very mature to be reading a book like that at your age.”

  She’s probably right. I try to explain that I’m trying to explore my “early infancy depression,” and to make peace with my own upbringing. She doesn’t want to hear about it.

  Even if you often tried to protect me, in a sort of constant and complicit tenderness, our relationship was defined by a sometimes brutal honesty.

  Mid-January 2003, at Foch, you’re coming out of intensive care, depressed, on edge, anxious about the future and the fact that they cut you off the morphine that you had depended on up till now. You ask me to change the subject. So I tell you about my work at Metro, what it’s like at a daily, the challenges, and also an initiative I’ve begun with Thierry Vermont, a visual artist, a project called Happython, a large compilation of messages from people about happiness. I feel this project creates optimism, as you’ve got hundreds of readers answering the simple question: “And you, what makes you happy?” You’re annoyed. You launch into an aggressive attack, in your voice all scratchy from the tubes:

  “Your work is all that matters to you, it’s all you have ever thought of, ever. When we were little, at night, you were never home. You exhaust yourself for your work, leave no space for anything else, and the older you get the worse it gets. How are you ever going to find someone who will want to live with you?”

  You are right but also wrong, unfair and on the mark at the same time. You want me to be available at all times, lighthearted and strong. That’s how you need me to be. You don’t accept any weakness on my part except when it concerns my health. My four heart attacks between 1998 and 2000 have created a bond between us. Even though I take care of myself, and came out of it okay, you worry about my heart. You are okay with worrying about this matter, but not about my state of mind.

  Early June 2001, you’re about to turn seventeen. It’s a few weeks after the separation and my departure from Oléron. You write to me.

  “It’s the first time on my birthday that I wish you were here, that you’re not longer with mom, with us at home. Mom tells me often that I should explain to you how the separation affects me and how I’m doing. But I don’t want to cause you any pain, I want to protect you. ( … ) When you were here it was different, I had a real bond with you. And you could impose a basic family structure. I know this isn’t fair to say this to you because I’m guilt-tripping you but there’s no point establishing a new father-daughter relationship based on lies or secrets. ( … ) You left so you could do what was right for you, so do it. Dad, I know what it’s like to feel like a sick person, to tell yourself your illness will kill you. I know what it’s like to be afraid of dying, I live it and it haunts me daily. ( … ) We’re not a family anymore and that is what is making me so unhappy. Now your turn to tell me how you are really doing.”

  To tell her how I’m doing. She knows very well how I’m doing: I’ve had four heart attacks, a heart that’s still weak, and depression always lurking. As for the rest of it, it’s just the way she is: she can go from the warmest tenderness, the most loving declarations, to the most aggressive pronouncements. Ever since, as a pre-teen, she began to suffer the continuous encroaching of the disease and the relentless burden of the treatments, she’s flipped back and forth between these two extremes. She can be unfair sometimes, but is also a very keen observer, and can dole out savage judgements with brutal lucidity. Then we just say “Come on Agathe, that’s a little extreme …” She was a little extreme because her life was that way too.

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 2, 2007

  On August
15 it’ll be her birthday. Where will we celebrate this year? She likes our walks in the Bois de Boulogne, so I call ahead to reserve a table at one of the chic restaurants in the park. We go to check the places out together: Le Chalet des îles? La Grande Cascade?

  “Woah, it looks pretty expensive.”

  It’s not like her, to look at the prices for this kind of occasion. It’s as if she is hesitant to reserve anything for August 15. We take a slow walk around the lake. Some rabbits jump across the lawn. It’s a lovely evening.

  Sabine, too, is thinking about the upcoming birthday and writes to friends:

  “There is a widening gap between what we live day-to-day with Agathe, the outings, her appetite in the evening, and the news on the medical front which is much less joyous. The bacteria is digging in, destroying everything in its path, while the antibiotics and other anti-inflammatories take it out on her kidneys ( … ) In exactly 10 days Agathe will turn 23: it’s a birthday we’re not sure how to mark. Would it be wiser to hold off on the celebrations till the end of August?”

  As we stroll around the lake Agathe recalls last year’s birthday, when she turned twenty-two, and we had a party on the Seine. She’d like this party to be as carefree and successful as last year’s, but she doesn’t launch into the details the way she usually would.

  In the spring of 2006 you’d said to me: “This year I want a cool birthday party that people will remember. Like in a restaurant or on a boat, on the Seine. After all, it may be my last birthday.”

  As usual, I protested and then we changed the subject, quickly, too quickly probably. On August 7 you experienced pain in the upper chest and went to the emergency room at Foch. You so hoped the transplant would happen soon. You were depressed. They admitted you for a few days. It was there, on August 10, in tears, that you launched into a very harsh reprimand, as if you had to settle a score. I had planned a weekend with Juliette, so I left Paris, and then on the 15th we celebrated your birthday.

  You know, my love, I carry in my mind the images of all your birthday parties all the way back to the first one in Gironde in 1985. The whole family was there and we were all dressed in white, like in a movie. You were standing up in your high chair, facing the cake.

  Every 15th of August we would get together, sometimes in Gironde, sometimes in Charente-Maritime. We never said it out loud, but every year that passed was a victory.

  Later, of course, the parties were different. They gradually slipped into normalcy.

  In 1996 you blew out the candles on your cake in a restaurant in an inn in the Pyrénées, during a family outing. It was a raspberry tart covered in tons of whipped cream. The whole restaurant began to sing to you. Your mother and sisters were laughing at how surprised you were: You liked being the center of attention but only within the confines of your immediate family.

  In 1997 we celebrated your birthday in a small town in Kansas during our trip to the US. Was it in Fort Scott or the Ottawa or Lawrence Holiday Inn? It was a chocolate cake and you forbade us from singing in the restaurant.

  In 1999 in Oléron your birthday was strange. You’d just completed a home hospital stay that had worn you out. Émilie had come and you’d gone out to celebrate among sisters. You went to a nightclub, the big revelation of your fifteenth year. The hearty birthday lunch began around 3 p.m., as we had to wait for you to recover from the night out.

  In 2003, eight months after your transplant, we were vacationing in a farmhouse in Normandy. Normandy to you, the Parisian, is a blurry concept, and it’s far from Oléron. I have photos of you on the Étretat beach, scowling. There isn’t even any sand on this beach, just tricky heaps of stones. You can’t get to the water’s edge without flip-flops. Absurd.

  That year, on the day you turned nineteen, as you sat in front of a huge seafood platter that came straight from the market in Fauville-en-Caux, you explain to us that you’ve decided to revert to the adolescence you never had. You’d gained a renewed sense of freedom since the December transplant.

  You passed your entrance exams to Psycho Prat with flying colors on May 24, four months after you got out of the hospital. Your lung capacity, measured each month, is good. After the seafood platter we play a long game of Canasta as the champagne flows. I lose, as usual. You and Clarisse think it’s hilarious and make fun of your “poor old dad” who will evidently never learn to be good at cards. Two card-slapping and joint-smoking adolescents. Your second adolescence is that too. You take your immunosuppressants as indicated, but you also allow yourself some weed from time to time.

  My birthday falls on May 31 and that year, 2007, Agathe was disappointed that we hadn’t had a proper celebration. She insists that all birthdays be properly marked. It’s her obsession with passing time, with the years won.

  On August 2, after our slow evening stroll in the Bois de Boulogne, we gather at a restaurant in the Marais, on a little square. Agathe is exhausted, and spends her time between each course throwing up in the bathroom, but she insists that we all be together. She’s decided that we’ll celebrate my birthday in her room at Foch. The girls have presents to give me they didn’t give me in the spring. In May, when she could hardly walk, Agathe had insisted on going shopping for my present with Émilie and Clarisse. She wanted to find the perfect gift, and buy it herself.

  Three months later, she’s obsessed with the party and insists we pick a date for “Dad’s birthday.” We settle on the next Tuesday, August 7. “There’s no rush,” I tell her, “between now and then you’ll be able to get some rest.”

  As for me, I want to spend the weekend at the beach. I need fresh air. I need time to think too, because it’s been decided, I’m returning to Libération at the end of August. I need a break to think about it all in peace. Agathe insists I go. Sabine will be in Oléron too, the next week. We all make our little plans and we keep our calendars full for the days ahead.

  That August 2 Agathe left the restaurant in the Marais doubled over in nausea. She threw up once more in the gutter on rue Caron.

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Dad, plus it was such a great restaurant, I just can’t take it, it’s the morphine.”

  I took her back to Foch. She collapsed, wrecked with exhaustion.

  TUESDAY, AUGUST 7–FRIDAY, AUGUST 10, 2007

  When I get back from the weekend at the beach on Tuesday the 7th, there’s a message from Agathe on my answering machine. “I’m so sorry, Dad, but I don’t think we can celebrate your birthday tonight, I’m too tired and feeling down, I’m so sorry, I’m so …”

  She doesn’t finish her sentence.

  The weather is humid tonight, stormy. Sabine and I go to Foch. We find her on oxygen. She had a high fever overnight. She feels pain all over. They increase the morphine.

  Agathe doesn’t speak very much. She falls asleep, too tired to talk. Her temperature is still high, but in her current state any drugs to lower it would be harmful. A doctor stops by. He tells us that she won’t get out for a few days. Sabine tries to remain cheerful, grounded, practical.

  I’m in shock. Ever since her message this morning I’ve have a bad feeling about it all. The morphine, of course, but also something else. I keep replaying her unfinished sentence in my mind.

  We sit at the foot of her bed while she sleeps, waiting for news. She has an X-ray. An intern tells us that the abscess in her lungs is at least ten centimeters in diameter. Then Marc, her doctor, comes to see us. The abscess is growing, expanding up towards her trachea, while her left lung is three-quarters blocked and her bronchial tube is ruptured. Most likely she’ll have a sudden hemorrhage, or a rupture of the pulmonary artery, or she’ll suffer respiratory failure.

  Agathe wakes from time to time.

  “It’s a shame we had to cancel your birthday, Dad. Too bad because there were some really nice presents, you …”

  We go home to get some rest. We have no idea when “it” could happen. Alex spends the night at her side. Sabine mentions shortening her trip to Bordeaux, where she has an urg
ent meeting, to a round-trip in one day. I do whatever I can too, to try to go on with life, or more like to try to hold on to life. Our routine, no matter how exhausting, cannot change. The train, Foch, meals, work—even work. Work makes me feel like everything could get back to normal.

  The next morning, Wednesday, August 8, I’m at Libération in a meeting about the new makeover of the paper. I share my opinions, I speak, I listen, I’m in the moment …

  As soon as my meeting is over I call Agathe. She goes on a rant, I don’t catch it all. She says I should tell Sabine not to go to Bordeaux, to stay in Paris, that I have no idea that … and then her voice goes silent. I race to Foch.

  In the train to Suresnes I get a text:

  “Sorry I said that on the phone don’t call mom I’ll be fine. I love you pops.”

  When I get there she’s delirious. She says things that don’t make sense, begins sentences and doesn’t finish them. The morphine, and too much carbon dioxide in her brain. She would like to sleep but can’t breathe. Every breath wakes her up. The abscess is growing, spreading up to her neck and pressing on the trachea. They stop doing tests on her; it would be too uncomfortable. She complains of pain in the soles of her feet, in the palms of her hands. They give her fresh linens to comfort her a bit. She can’t see clearly; I read her her texts. I call Sabine and tell her to come back from Bordeaux immediately.

  Agathe is resting on her back, her mouth wide open. From her throat comes the sound of a body under assault. From time to time she wakes up and moves her painful hands. Despite our desire to touch her, to caress her, we can’t even hold her hand as it hurts too much. Her body is all pain. Each time she gasps too much for air she wakes up. The room is almost silent. You can hear the bubbling of the oxygen tank and the light rasp of her breathing. She seems to relax finally … but then awakes abruptly because of the pain in her feet.