by Ann Mah
Across the table, Heather’s shoulders drooped a fraction, before she reached out and began stacking dishes. “Honestly,” she said, “couldn’t that happen to any of us?”
Our days soon fell into a routine. In the mornings I accompanied Heather and the kids to their day camp and after we had dropped them off, she and I headed to the dump, located about fifteen miles outside of Beaune. Heather brought a box of homemade brownies for the manager with each load we delivered and he often helped us empty the truck, whisking away boxes and bags before we could clamber down from the cab. Our next stop was the local charity shop—always closed in the mornings—where we left our items by the back door and crept away feeling like criminals. And then we returned to the house and headed down to the cellar, where we continued sorting, bagging, and boxing. Around one o’clock, we took a short break for lunch—microwaved leftovers, which we usually ate hovering over the kitchen counter and looking at our cell phones—“Don’t tell my children,” Heather would mutter—and then returned to our task until it was time to pick up the kids.
At first, I had worried about spending so much time alone with Heather. I was afraid she’d be too curious about my life in San Francisco, that she’d ask too many awkward questions. Honestly, I was mostly embarrassed to admit that aside from work I didn’t have much of a life. The Test consumed most of my free time and disposable income—and I’d yet to meet a guy who didn’t resent playing second fiddle to my studies.
But to my surprise, Heather had been remarkably incurious—so uncharacteristically quiet I found myself wondering if I should start questioning her. Was she merely being discreet? Or was she distracted? She had a lot to juggle between the house, kids, and preparing for the upcoming vendanges. Still, sometimes I caught her staring into space, so lost in thought that even her bickering children couldn’t rouse her attention—and I couldn’t help but feel like she was hiding something.
After a week, we had opened dozens of boxes of books, sorting through outdated travel guides, multiple volumes of leather-bound French classics, and enough French-English/English-French dictionaries to outfit a convention of translators. We stared in mutual horror at an enormous oil painting of a pale young woman carrying a platter with the head of a bearded man upon it, face in pallor, eyes unseeing, bloody neck stump dripping to the ground. “Awful, right?” Heather had whispered. “It’s a copy—John the Baptist beheaded—used to hang in the dining room when we moved in. Apparently your great-grandmother was très croyante—extremely Catholic. Artistically it’s garbage, but . . . well, it’s not exactly the type of thing you just throw away.”
Most of the stuff we found, however, posed no dilemma. We made a bonfire from the stacks (and stacks and stacks) of newspapers, magazines, and obsolete bureaucratic forms copied in triplicate. We hauled away a bulky futon couch, permanently collapsed on one side, on which Heather and Nico had taken turns sleeping after Anna was born: “Makes me delirious just looking at it,” she said. A kitchen table that Heather had painted a bilious sage green: “Martha Stewart gone wrong. Very, very wrong.” A blond particleboard dresser with broken drawers that gaped like crooked teeth: “Ikea.”
We had unearthed a few useful bits of furniture, too—things more salvageable than valuable, but still practical: a small desk that needed refinishing, an armchair that Heather thought she might try to reupholster. Yet, despite all our careful hunting, we had not found anything else that could help us explain the mysterious H.M.C., the suitcase, or its contents.
“Hey!” Heather’s voice broke into my thoughts. “Remember this?” She brought over a stack of notebooks, the French kind, small and slim with graph paper pages and jewel-tone covers. I opened one and saw my own handwriting tumbling across the page: Côte de Beaune-Villages, 2004. Red berries, earth, mushrooms. Soft, round. Low acid, low tannins. I snapped the notebook shut.
“You remember our wine tasting club, don’t you? Or, should I say”—she shot me a sly look—“the nerd club?”
I managed a smile. “It seems to have made a lasting impression on you.”
“Are you kidding me? You guys would spend hours arguing about stuff like which red fruits you were actually tasting. Strawberries! No, redcurrants! No, strawberries! No, wild strawberries. I wanted to pour all the wines into one big cup and slug it.”
“I think you actually did do that.”
“Did I?” She smiled sweetly, and wandered back to her area of the cellar, leaving me clutching the stack of notebooks.
The wine tasting club had been Jean-Luc’s idea, proposed after he discovered I had taken a wine class in Berkeley. “If you are in France,” he had exclaimed, “you MUST learn about French wine!” Heather was less enthusiastic but by that point she would have done anything to spend more time with Nico. No, no, she didn’t like like him—she had a boyfriend back at home. She just wanted to practice her French. (When, a few weeks later, my cousin whisked Heather to the standing section of the Opéra Garnier and pulled a split of Champagne from his coat pocket at intermission, I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for her clumsy old boyfriend left behind in Berkeley. He had never really stood a chance.)
We held the wine club meetings in my tiny attic room because I was the only one of us who lived alone—my host mother resided three floors below me in a rambling, bourgeois apartment; she rented out her former chambre de bonne, maid’s quarters, to supplement her meager widow’s income. The four of us would squash into the space, Heather and I perched on the bed, Jean-Luc and Nico on the terra-cotta tile floor. We drank out of cheap wineglasses and left the bottles of white to chill on the window ledge because they wouldn’t fit in the fridge. I arranged baguette slices and a wedge of Comté cheese on a small table, along with four plastic cups.
“For spitting?” Heather looked almost offended. “You’re joking, right?”
“We had them in my other class, and that’s what professionals use.”
“But that’s so— eww!” She scrunched up her face.
“Well, it’s there if you want it,” I said, as Jean-Luc popped the cork from a bottle of sauvignon blanc.
No one spat. Of course we didn’t. We began with small, considered sips offering up words like “flinty,” “mineral,” and “acidic.” As the evening progressed, the wine began flowing at an alarming pace and our descriptions—scribbled with unsteady hands in our notebooks—read like entries in a bad poetry contest.
“An apple tree bows over rushing river stones, the fruit kissed by Mediterranean lemon zest, tinged with a rough bitter bile,” Heather declaimed.
“Profound,” Nico said with a smile that was not completely ironic.
“What?” Heather was laughing. “What?”
I couldn’t resist an exaggerated sigh, and when I glanced at Jean-Luc, he wore a similar expression of exasperated amusement.
When Nico had first mentioned his friend Jean-Luc, I couldn’t help but suspect he was trying to set us up. But the more time the four of us spent together, the more I realized that Nico simply liked spending time with Jeel, as he called him. Jean-Luc had grown up on a neighboring vineyard, and I remembered him from my childhood visits to Burgundy because he was the only French kid who wasn’t too shy to try to speak to me in English. To my surprise, the goofy, skinny boy had become a confident young man, his brown hair verging on golden, eyes of the same tawny color with remarkable clear depths. They sparkled with relentless charm, those eyes, quick to twinkle at a joke or fill with empathy, suffused with unwavering warmth. My aunt Jeanne always said that everyone adored Jean-Luc—tiny babies, scratchy cats, the crotchety woman behind the counter at the boulangerie.
The wine club. We hardly had any idea what we were doing, but still it taught me so much. How to taste the flint and chalk that anchors the crisp charm of Champagne. The way the mistral wind can infuse a Côtes du Rhône with the scent of green peppers. How every wine tells a story—of a place, a person, a moment—a happy summer, a miserable summer, a confident winemaker, a worried on
e, or maybe someone in love. “The wine sleeps in the bottle, but still it is changing—evolving,” Jean-Luc had told us. “And when the cork is removed, it breathes again, and comes awake. Like a fairy tale. Un conte de fées.” His gaze held my own.
Was that how it began? With a look, a brush of my hair, a touch of his back. Later, when we were alone, his furious blush betrayed his faltering confidence: “Every time I see you, I feel like an idiot, Kat. You are just so . . . intimidating. With your perfect palate, and that precise way you have of expressing yourself, so funny and sharp . . . I never thought you’d notice me.” The sight of him so unexpectedly flustered made something inside me crack open. His lips touching mine, his cheeks rough on my face, the warmth of his body against my own, our clothes falling to a pile on the floor.
Was that when we fell in love? With long walks through narrow streets, and conversations whispered deep into the night, talking about our favorite books and music, and whether unfortified dessert wines were delicious or disgusting. All those heartfelt conversations—about my parents’ divorce and their new marriages, and his family’s vineyards, and the parcels of land he hoped to add one day—drawing us close, so close it sometimes felt like we had never been apart.
It was just a study abroad romance. It was merely a dreamy interlude. We were both too young to start a relationship that would last forever. But waking up one morning, his smooth and muscular body next to my own, I realized that I had never been so happy in my life. I’d had other boyfriends before Jean-Luc, but for the first time, I felt like someone saw me—not just the pretty waitress, or mediocre French major, or the lonely teen whose parents had left her too often to her own devices—but the real me. For the first time, I had fallen completely and headily in love.
And then, somehow, it was ruined.
The wine notebooks had grown damp in my hand. My left foot had fallen asleep. Across the cellar, Heather unfurled a garbage sack, shaking it so that the thin plastic snapped and billowed like a sail. I struggled to my feet, found an empty box, and placed the wine notebooks inside. It had been a long time ago. Ten years. But I could still hear his voice, whispering to me in the dark hours of the night. I could still feel his arms around me, pulling me close . . .
I grabbed a pile of moth-eaten sweaters and threw them over the notebooks, closing the flaps of the box so that it looked like all the others, ready for tomorrow’s trip to the town dump. Then I pulled another carton toward me.
When I opened the new box my heartbeat returned to its normal rhythm. Smashed Christmas ornaments. Crumbling paper chains. Strings of lights ending in plugs that could easily spark an electrical fire. Chuck. I reached for the next box: more books. I glanced at the first one, a French textbook. Leafing through . . . the periodic table, ah, a French chemistry textbook. Chuck. The rest of the books were also in French, all of them from the schoolroom: history, mathematics, biology, yet another battered copy of The Count of Monte Cristo. Chuck. Near the bottom of the box, a thick stack of notebooks with dark brown cardboard covers— cahiers d’exercises filled with grammar exercises copied in a painstaking copperplate. I flipped through the first one before setting it aside with the others. Chuck.
At the bottom of the box, my fingers touched another book, large and flat. No, it was a brown leather folder, its cover embossed with a design of fleur-de-lis, and inside was some sort of document, the paper yellowed with age. A branch of pine needles bordered one side, overlaid with several official seals, and the top read: “Lycée de jeunes filles à Beaune.” My eyes skimmed the script, silently translating the words:
Republic of France
DIPLOMA OF SECONDARY STUDIES
3 JULY 1940
Presented to Mademoiselle Hélène Marie Charpin
I gasped. “Hélène!”
Heather’s head appeared above a stack of boxes. “You okay?” she called.
“Look! Lycée de jeunes filles!” I gabbled. “H.M.C.” I waved the folder in the air. “Hélène Marie Charpin.”
“Wait, what? Hold on. I’m coming over there.” Heather wove her way through the mess and took the document from me. “Hélène Marie Charpin. Born in Meursault on 12 September 1921.” She touched the words with her index finger.
“She must be the girl in the photograph! The suitcase must have belonged to her. But . . .” I frowned. “Who was she? If her last name is Charpin, how is she related to us?”
Beside me, Heather sucked in a sharp breath. “Look.” She pointed at the line above. “This diploma was awarded in July 1940. That was right after the Occupation started.”
“Could she have died during World War II? Is that why we’ve never heard of her?”
“I guess . . . maybe? But why would she have disappeared?”
“Didn’t Nico say the other night that great-grandfather Edouard died during the war? Maybe it’s all connected.”
She shrugged. “Maybe?” Her hands fumbled with the diploma as she attempted to slip it back into its folder.
“Nico said his dad would know, right? I wish we could just ask him.” But even as I mentioned Uncle Philippe, I was remembering a rainy summer afternoon, long ago when we were little, maybe six or seven, and Nico snuck into his father’s office to borrow a pair of scissors. As kids we weren’t allowed in there, and when his father caught him, the punishment had been swift: several sharp smacks on the bottom. Nico had shrugged it off and said it didn’t really hurt. But I never forgot the sight of Uncle Philippe’s white-lipped face, furious that he had been disobeyed. “Although, I suppose he’s never been very, uh, approachable.”
Before Heather could respond, the cellar door flew open and Nico came bounding down the stairs.
“Nico, hey! You’ll never guess what we found . . .,” I started to say, but when I caught sight of his face, the words died on my lips. His eyes were dark and wide against flushed skin, and his breath emerged in gasps, as if he had been running.
“They’re back,” he said to his wife, and she jumped like a spooked horse.
“I thought we had another week!” she cried.
Nico shrugged. “Juan texted him the lab results. Papa doesn’t want to wait another day.” He took a deep breath, crossing his arms tight against his body. Heather began to chew the inside of her lip.
“What’s going on?” I said, with growing alarm. “Is something wrong?”
They exchanged a glance, and turned toward me in unison. “No, no, don’t worry. It is nothing,” Nico said. “It’s just . . . les vendanges.” He forced a smile. “The grapes are ready to be picked—so we will begin harvesting tomorrow.”
“But is everything okay?” I pressed him. “You guys seem—”
“I’ve got to go to the grocery store!” Heather broke in. “How many for lunch tomorrow? Eighteen?”
“Better count for twenty,” Nico said.
She nodded and started up the stairs, patting her pockets for the car keys.
“I need to start sorting the equipment. Buckets, secateurs . . .,” Nico muttered under his breath, following her.
A few seconds later, they were gone, leaving me alone in the half-lit cellar, my questions hovering like stirred dust and then settling down again, unanswered.
Meursault, Burgundy
12 SEPTEMBRE 1939
Cher journal,
I wonder if that sounds as silly in English as I think it does in French. “Dear diary . . .” Do other girls really write that sort of thing?
Well, I am not sure how to begin this journal, so I will start with the facts, like a proper scientist. My name is Hélène Charpin and today I am eighteen years old. I live in Meursault, a village in the Côte d’Or region of Burgundy. Papa says our family has been making wine here ever since the Duc de Bourgogne first planted chardonnay grapes on the slopes, which was at least five hundred years ago. Then again, Papa has been known to exaggerate a bit of history if it means selling an extra cask or two. Just a few weeks ago, he even told an American importer that Thomas Jefferson had broug
ht our family’s wine to Les États-Unis! “C’est vrai!” he said. “Les Gouttes d’Or was Jefferson’s favorite white Burgundy.” I’m not sure if the man believed him, but he added an extra three tuns to the order and Papa gave me a wink. After the man left, hopping in his motorcar and rattling off to another domaine, Papa threw an arm around my shoulders. “Léna, you are my lucky charm!” he exclaimed.
That was last month, August. Now that we’ve started the harvest, Papa’s smiles have been less frequent. True, it’s been a dismal summer, but I don’t think any of us realized how wet or cold until they started collecting the grapes a few days ago. Half the crop is unripe, hard and green, the other half destroyed by grey rot. Papa and the other men were sorting fruit late into the night, trying desperately to make some sort of vintage from it. Last night, Albert fell asleep in the cuverie, and when I carried him back to the house, I was shocked to see snow dusting the courtyard. Since when does snow fall in mid-September?
I didn’t tell Papa—it seems so morbid—but I fear that the bad harvest is an omen. For weeks, no one has talked about anything except France’s declaration of war. Everyone is jumpy, waiting for something to happen. We’re required to bring our gas masks to school and I dread turning on the radio. Papa jokes that the tense atmosphere is at least good for wine sales, but his face turns ashen whenever he opens the newspaper. How can he not worry, when he lived through La Grande Guerre that killed his two brothers and left him an only child? Thank goodness Benoît and Albert are far too little to fight.
Given the tense atmosphere, I thought everyone had forgotten my birthday today, but I was wrong. Before dinner, Papa found me at the rabbit hutch, slipping compost scraps into the cages.
“Joyeux anniversaire, ma choupinette.” He placed a satin pouch in my hand. Inside, I found a string of pearls, as small and white as a baby’s teeth. “They belonged to your maman,” he said, which explains why Madame hadn’t gotten her hooks into them, like all the other bits of family jewelry.