Elodie and Heloise
Page 18
“Salut.”
Heloise took a seat across from her sister with a small packet of peanut butter crackers in her hand that she too must have bought from the vending machines in the cafeteria. They remained in a very awkward silence. It was the first time that they’d ever sat near each other like this in a long time and not started squabbling.
“What time did you get here last night?”
“Probably around 11. You already were asleep on Duncan when I came in.”
“Yeah..... I was at Rockin’ Coffee for an open mic night when Mom texted me. We both rushed over here to see Papa.”
“How was he?”
“He woke up for about thirty seconds and said my name before he went back to sleep. He really didn’t look so good. The doctors said he was pretty bad.”
“Yeah, Mom told me.....”
Back to silence. The two girls then ate their peanut butter crackers without another word to one another. Elodie was the first to get up from her seat and as she did, her sister got up as well.
They walked in silence down the hallway together toward their father’s room. As they entered their father’s room, Heloise broke away and rushed over to Francis. Before she made it to Papa’s bedside, Shannon, who was sitting in a chair next to Francis’s bed just as they walked in, stood up and hugged her daughter. She then let Heloise go and returned to her spot next to her husband.
Heloise went around the bed to Francis’s right side and stood above him, her eyes fixed on her father. Elodie had never seen her sister look so pained. Heloise’s eyes were big with worry and she stood awkwardly with her hands in her pockets, as if unsure of how to react. Shannon sat on Francis’ left side and continued watching over him with her hand in his, while Duncan finally woke up and looked around the room.
“Someone’s awake now,” Elodie pointed out.
Duncan gave her a small grin. “I’m going to go downstairs to the cafeteria and get something to eat. You want anything, Elodie?” he drowsily asked, stretching out his arms and giving one big yawn before standing up.
“No I’m good. Thanks.”
Silence fell over the room as Shannon, Elodie, and Heloise stood around their father’s bed. He was still sound asleep and showed no signs of waking up. His heart monitor was beeping at a very slow rate, even slower than last night.
Elodie pulled up a chair and sat next to her mother, watching both her father and Heloise. After what felt like twenty minutes, Francis opened his eyes again and looked around the room, smiling as he saw his wife and daughters gathered around him and watching him so intently.
“Mes filles,” he muttered weakly. “Shannon, Elodie, Heloise......”
All three of them hung onto his words, Heloise especially.
He regarded them with a soft look that was usually unbecoming of him. “I don’t know how long I am for this world....”
“Please please don’t say it like that....” Shannon whispered.
“But never forget that I love you all as much as ever. I could not have asked for a better family than the three of you.....” Despite the constant coughs and his weak voice, Francis continued on.
“What is most important in life is finding what makes you happy to make your life worthwhile. And I found my true happiness in life, which was sharing my life with you, Shannon..... Shannon, l’amour de ma vie, mon âme-sœur..... I have never loved anyone the way I have loved you. And you have given me two beautiful daughters who have done me proud. Elodie, Heloise..... Listen to your wise, French papa and find what makes you happiest in life. Find that spark that will turn to a flame. For you Elodie, it is your music. And you Heloise, ma chère, it is cooking.”
“Papa.....”
Heloise’s face paled and she averted her eyes from her father and everyone else in the room. He then let out such a forceful cough that it seemed to shake his entire body. Then he fell into silence again and lay back on the pillows.
“Please don’t stress yourself too much,” Shannon admonished.
“I have just one more thing to say.” Francis moved his head to face Heloise. “Heloise, I want you to look at me.”
She finally looked up and met her father’s gaze. Tears were coming down her face as her father spoke. “Heloise, I know you told me science would be more lucrative and you of course are already in school to study physics. But just know well, ma fille, that you need to do something with those culinary skills that I gave you. You are truly gifted and I do not want to see that go to waste. Especially because I will probably not be around to see it come to pass.”
Heloise burst into tears and buried her face in her hands. He continued with an even weaker voice. “I have lived my life well and I regret nothing. I hate to be taken so soon from you all..... but if God deems it so, then it must be so. Ainsi soit-il.”
Heloise’s face was frozen in shock as she lifted her head from her hands and regarded her father with an intense gaze. She reached across the bed and gave her father a very tearful hug, wrapping her arms around him as best as she could while her sister and mother looked on.
“Au revoir, Papa,” Elodie heard her murmur. “Je t’aime de tout mon âme. Je t’aime.”
“Je t’aime, Heloise. Elodie et Shannon, je vous aime tous les deux.”
With a broken sigh, Shannon squeezed Francis’s hand and let it go. Just as she did, the heart monitor slowed down even more. They watched the numbers drop at an accelerated rate until all they heard was one long beep and saw a large zero on the heart monitor. Almost immediately, nurses and doctors ran into the room, and Heloise and her family stepped off to the side. It was the most surreal moment of Heloise’s life, to watch her strong father finally give in and be surrounded by doctors trying in vain to help him as his heart monitor flatlined.
Chapter Nineteen
Heloise heard the sad strums of her sister’s guitar through the walls of the house as she chopped the tomatoes on the cutting board in the kitchen. Just behind her in the living room her mother was watching a random movie on television, her face stony and unmoving since that night. Heloise tried not to think about it too much, instead trying to concentrate on the delicious meal she was preparing for the family.
In front of her on the counter were two large bowls and one small bowl. One was filled with chopped eggplant sitting in about five inches of water, a trick that her father had taught her so that the eggplant would not brown as quickly before cooking. The other bowl was filled with diced zucchini, sweet peppers, and squash, adding some color to the otherwise dully lit kitchen. The small bowl contained freshly sliced basil and parsley leaves, filling the room with an intoxicating aroma. All that was left to dice were the yellow onions sitting to the right of her cutting board.
Heloise knew her father wouldn’t exactly have approved of his daughter making ratatouille in the fall. After all, ratatouille was supposed to be a summer dish. “Vegetables always taste better when they are in season. Tomatoes in the winter do not taste nearly as good,” he would admonish her. In spite of that, Heloise wanted nothing more than to prepare her father’s favorite dish for the family.
She quickly chopped the onion and glanced at the large sauté pan sitting over the largest burner on the stove. Dropping the onions and some chopped garlic into the pan, she was greeted with the sound of onions and garlic coming together in the olive oil, hissing with the sound of hot oil. She quickly stirred the onions around, making sure the onions and garlic were coated as they should be.
It’s almost like she could hear his voice right behind her as she cooked, his warm, confident voice as he would watch her cooking, offering advice every so often but letting his daughter do most of the cooking. The onions should be translucent, like you can see right through them. You will know as soon as you see it.
While the onions cooked, Heloise drained the bowl of eggplant and continued stirring in the pan. Sure enough, about five minutes later, the onions gave off a caramelized glow in the pan. It was time for the rest of the ingredients. In we
nt the eggplant, which had only turned slightly brown in the last few minutes that it wasn’t submerged in water, and the colorful bits of thyme from their kitchen garden just outside the back door. Soon went in all the other ingredients, a colorful mixture of yellow, green, purple, and red in the pan bringing up their individual smells.
The intoxicating smell of her meal in progress almost brought Heloise to tears as she stirred all the ingredients together and watched it cook in the pan. In the days since her father’s death, during which they’d held the funeral as quickly as possible, Heloise threw herself into cooking and being in the kitchen, using recipes and tips from her father. As soon as they got home from her father’s funeral the previous day, Heloise went into the kitchen and made some food for her family, a delicious veal ossobuco that included veal shanks that Papa had left in the fridge for a potential meal. It was a difficult meal to make, one that Heloise and Francis had only ever made several times before, but it was ultimately a rewarding experience. The meal had so many components that came together that she found she could lose herself in the preparation process, and thus did not have to think too hard about how painful it felt for her to wake up that morning and not be greeted with a bise from her Papa.
On the first time they made ossobuco, Heloise was surprised to discover that Francis was adept at making Italian food as well. She was thirteen at the time and had been cooking regularly in the kitchen with him since she was at least eight years old, when her parents deemed her mature enough to learn how to hold a knife properly and not poke anyone’s eye out or chop off her own fingers. Heloise was daunted by the sheer amount of ingredients in the recipe as they sat on the counter waiting to be used. Rosemary, thyme, cloves, large one-pound veal shanks, vegetable oil, carrots, onions, celery, tomato paste, chicken stock, oh the list went on. Her eyes grew large just looking at the ingredients.
“And all of this is going together in ONE dish?” she had asked incredulously in French. “But how are we going to keep track of them? Are you sure we can do this? I’m only thirteen!”
“Ah yes, you may only be thirteen, ma fille,” her father began in French, sharpening his knives over the sink as Heloise walked over to the onions and began to peel them, “but I know you can do it. Besides, we are going to make it together. You forget that. And do not forget this. You have made ratatouille and coq au vin. And I think coq au vin is much harder than this. Which we will not do together until you are older.” He placed a knife on the clean cutting board in front of his daughter as she continued peeling onions, the odor reaching her nose and making her want to cry.
“I thought you were French, Papa,” Heloise queried, picking up the knife and chopping the onion on the cutting board as her father began dicing a carrot into tiny cubes.
“Ah but I am not completely French,” he responded, thinly cutting the carrots on the other end of the cutting board, to the left of his daughter. They continued speaking in French to one another. “My mother was Italian. Papa was French of course, but Maman? No, she was Italian. You see, her family came from Milan in northern Italy. When I would visit my Italian grandparents, therefore your great-grandparents, we would have this with risotto every Sunday night. Magnifique, vraiment magnifique. Every visit was filled with absolutely delicious food. I might even like Italian food almost as much as French cuisine. But do not tell anyone I said that.” He punctuated that last thought with a wink, making his daughter giggle.
“It smells wonderful, Heloise.”
She looked over to see her sister standing against the counter to Heloise’s right, her arms crossed over her ribcage and lost in thought. Elodie had been unusually quiet since their father’s death, instead spending most of her time in the study room playing her guitar. Her sister’s music was often a soft accompaniment to Heloise’s cooking, light strums of dissonant and minor chords emanating through the walls between the study room and the kitchen as she sang along in her booming contralto voice.
“Of course, I wouldn’t expect anything less of you,” Elodie added with a small smile. “You always were the cook in the family, next to Papa of course.”
Heloise nodded in acknowledgment, continuing to stir the ingredients together in the pan. She was in the final stages of cooking the ratatouille for dinner. As soon as the tomatoes and other herbs were soft in the pan from cooking, she knew her cooking was done.
“Hey, if you could do a favor for me....”
“Sure, what can I do?”
“If you could get out the fresh baguette I got at the store today and slice it up. Or you could just break it up with your fingers, it doesn’t really matter....”
“No problem.”
Elodie walked over to the long, wrapped bread sitting at the far end of the counter and began breaking the bread into pieces with her fingers, placing them in a small, clean bowl from the cabinet. A meal without bread is like a day without sun. So her father said. Heloise turned off the stove and gave the stew a few more stirs before tapping the wooden spoon on the side of the pan to get any excess stew off of it. She then turned off the stove and let the stew cool before consuming it.
“I don’t think I ever told you this, but I’m really proud of you, Heloise.”
Heloise placed the bowls she’d used for her produce into the sink to be cleaned and glanced up at her sister. “Of what?”
“For all the cooking you’ve done for us with Papa. He’s really taught you well. I always liked that Papa was.... such a good cook. You know? He cooked such wonderful food for us. And I don’t think I’ve really ever appreciated that until now.”
Heloise felt herself tearing up a little at her sister’s statements.
“I mean, if you think about it, I don’t think any of the kids we went to school with knew what ratatouille or what a croque monsieur even were. But guess what we would have for our school lunches.” She suddenly threw her head back and smiled. “Do you know how many times my friends would ask to swap lunches with me because they wanted my lunch instead?”
Heloise chuckled. She too had similar experiences with her friends. She glanced over at her sister and couldn’t help but smile a little.
“You know, I can’t even remember the last time that we ever talked like this. Without fighting or simply ignoring each other.”
“I told you a while ago that people can change. And I’ve been through a lot of changes this year that have transformed me for the better. While I’m standing here in front of you.... I just want to say that I’m sorry for the way I treated you. For telling you I was tired of being ugly and nerdy like you, for telling you that you ought to change, and most of all.... for telling you I was ashamed to have you as a sister. Especially since we were such best friends growing up. You didn’t deserve the way I treated you. Yeah I got popular like I wanted, but look at all the people I stepped on to get there. And I couldn’t be myself either. I wasn’t really happy. And I finally realized that this year. I’m not expecting us to be best friends again, or even friends for that matter, but I just wanted you to know that. And if you don’t want to forgive me, then I’d understand. I was a total bitch after all.”
Without another word, Heloise ran to her sister and wrapped her arms around Elodie. In the arms of her sister, Heloise let out her pent-up rage and sadness, sometimes forming her hands into fists to punch the air as she soaked her sister’s shoulders. It was the culmination of dealing with her father’s death and then finally getting an apology for the way Elodie had treated her. Even Elodie started crying in her arms.
Eventually, they let go and regarded one another quietly, their faces streaked with tears. Elodie broke the ice and said, “Here, why don't you go take a seat at the dining room table while I bring the food over? I'll take care of it."
"You don't have to do that.”
"No no, Heloise. I want to help you. You're very upset and.... I want to help." She gazed into her sister's eye with a look of gratitude and walked up to the kitchen counter.
"Th-thank you."
Elodie opened the cabinets, placed three marbled Mikasa bowls on the counter and with a large spoon from a drawer, became spooning out ratatouille for everyone. She then put a few slices of bread on the side of each bowl.
All Heloise could do was stumble over to the dining room table. She pulled back a chair and sat down with a sigh, tears still coming out of her eyes. She'd been holding everything in and knew it would have to come out eventually. She buried her face in her hands and hoped to God that the headache she'd gotten from crying so hard would go away soon.
"À table!" Elodie called from the kitchen to their mother. Heloise lifted her head up and saw her sister walking toward the dining room with one bowl of ratatouille and bread in each hand. Shannon walked into the kitchen and grabbed the other bowl as Elodie placed a bowl in front of Heloise.
"Oh I forgot the spoons!"
Shannon sat down at the head of the table as Elodie rushed back to the kitchen for cutlery. Their mother's face was still stony and unmoving and Heloise was sure that she saw dried tears on her mother's face.
Elodie came back to the table and took a seat next to her sister on Heloise's right. As she sat down, the two of them locked eyes.
The three women at first ate in complete silence. No one was really sure of what to say. Finally, Elodie broke the silence. Ever since Francis died, Heloise had grown accustomed to this kind of quiet in the house.
"This was always my favorite meal that Papa would cook. I love how he was always so passionate about food and life in general."
Shannon nodded as she took a large spoonful of stew into her mouth. "That's part of why I fell in love with him. He knew what he wanted and he would go for it."
"I wouldn't be such an accomplished cook if it weren’t for him," Heloise interjected. "He was the one who always encouraged us to go for what we loved."