I Love You Too Much

by Alicia Drake

  I turned onto the rue d’Assas, past people seeking shelter from the snow under the roof of the bar on the corner. I saw red lights flashing ahead. There was the sound of sirens. People are always getting run over on the rue d’Assas. One time I saw a guy from our school lying in the middle of the road. He’d gotten hit by a van when he went to get lunch. But he didn’t die.

  I ran along the road to where she lived. There were police cars parked up all over the pavement and there was an ambulance sticking out of the doorway to her apartment building. Red-and-white tape ran from one side of her building to the other; it danced across the hood of the ambulance. It trembled in the wind.

  A metallic voice on a radio inside the police car said: “No more cars.”

  There were people gathered at the edge of the tape. I stared at the red hood of the ambulance and the headlights that lit up our bodies in the dark. It blocked the entrance to the apartment building, so I could not see beyond.

  “It’s an accident,” the woman beside me said.

  “Who is it?” I said to the policewoman standing at the front, the one who was guarding the tape.

  “We are responding to an emergency,” she said.

  “Is it Scarlett?” I said. “Is it Scarlett Lacasse?”

  I must have shouted that, because she looked at me strangely and she laid her hand on my forearm and I shouted out again. She said something into her radio and the onlookers took a step away from me. A snowflake fell on my cheek; it turned to water with my tears.

  “Just tell me,” I said.

  Then someone shouted from behind the ambulance, and the policewoman turned from me; she ran along the side of the ambulance into the courtyard. I waited until she had gone and then I ducked under the tape and squeezed myself between the ambulance and the wall on the opposite side.

  There were people in the courtyard, people and plants in pots and a parked car covered in white and there were huge crystal snowflakes spinning in the night air. There were emergency workers kneeling on the ground, making a circle, like they were playing some kind of children’s game on a blanket of snow. And in the center of the circle was Scarlett. I went toward her.

  My beautiful Scarlett, my friend, she was broken. Her right arm lay flung out behind her. She was wearing her unicorn sweater still, but it was stained and dark with blood. Her skin was grayish green and transparent, like she had drunk some kind of poison. There was a gape of white between her eyelids. She had a tube coming out of her nose and going into a clear plastic bag, and someone had wrapped a kind of white paper hood around the top of her head. It made me think of Saint Catherine lying in her glass box.

  I wanted to touch her. I wanted to tell her I was there.

  I stepped toward her. I caught my arm on a tree that was growing in a pot. I pulled myself clear.

  One of the emergency workers in the circle looked up and saw me standing there.

  “What are you doing?” he said. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “She’s my friend,” I said.

  I looked down at her face. She looked so cold. I couldn’t make her better.

  He stood up and came toward me. He had snowflakes caught up in his short gray hair. He called to someone, “Get this kid out of here.” The ambulance doors were open. I saw the empty stretcher inside. One of the ambulance men pushed past me to get into the driver’s seat.

  “Stand back,” a voice called out.

  I stepped back. I saw a policewoman holding a woman up by her armpits. I saw a dog spinning on a lead, trying to yank his head out of the collar, trying to break free.

  “How about we go somewhere and talk,” a soft voice said to me. It was a policewoman. She wore a high-visibility jacket with reflector bands that flashed silver in the dark. A man called out to her to come over. “Just give me a minute,” she told him. “You wait here,” she said to me. She touched my arm. She turned away.

  I looked back at Scarlett. They were lifting her body onto a stretcher.

  The ambulance was backing up and they were closing the main doors to the courtyard; if I didn’t leave now, I would be trapped inside. I would have to tell them what happened. I would have to tell them everything. I didn’t want to leave her all alone.

  I ran. I slipped between the doors as they were closing. I ducked under the red-and-white tape. A shower of snowflakes fell on me, melting and turning my shoulders wet. I blinked in the dark. I heard a voice cry out in the courtyard behind me. I heard a dog bark. I looked around and hesitated, unsure of what to do. And then I turned and ran back along the rue d’Assas.

  Chapter Eighteen

  They took her away. They gathered her up and took her to where her grandparents lived. She would have hated that, to be buried in the middle of nowhere when all she wanted was Paris. She told me once that her grandparents’ village is so dull, even the cows get bored. That is what she said.

  I don’t know the name of the village where she is buried. But I know what the church looks like. I’ve seen churches like that in Brittany. They are small, hunched buildings made of dark granite where they hang Christ out in the rain, where they nail Him to a blackened cross.

  She would never have wanted her funeral there. She would have wanted it at the Chapelle de la Médaille Miraculeuse, where everything shimmers gold and blue, where the angels wrap you in their soft white wings and fly with you to heaven.

  César could have saved her if he’d been there, but the housekeeper had taken him out for a walk. The apartment was empty when she got home; she was all alone. Did she know I loved her? Did she drink her vodka and spritz her mouth with her blue and silver breath freshener and climb out onto the balustrade and think of me, the way I think of her, all the time?

  I lie in bed and read every message she sent me. I watch each video. I close my eyes and try to remember who she was. I try to imagine the photos she sent to Stéphane, the stuff she must have sent to Gabriel. I try to stop the jealousy that surges still. I keep thinking how, even though she bombarded us with all that information, those images, even though she put her life, her body, on our screens, none of us ever really knew Scarlett. I knew her real name, but what else did I know? That she bought her half bottles of vodka at the corner shop on the other side of the Jardin d’Observatoire, near where we watched the riot that time. I knew that, but I didn’t know how to help her.

  There were rumors at school. Bad rumors. People saying she’d still been alive in the ambulance, flailing around on the stretcher as they tried to pump her full of blood. Others said she was smashed to pieces, dead all over the courtyard. I said nothing. I gave nothing away.

  I try to imagine her in her coffin underground, just sleeping. I wonder if they buried her with her jangly bangles. Did they let her keep her phone? She would have wanted that; all her videos, her pandas from Japan, her photos. What happened to her nipples? I saw them once, beneath a top she wore, pink and hopeful. What happens to your nipples when you die, when they put you in a coffin?

  No one from school went to the funeral; the family didn’t want anyone to go. Guys from our year went and hung around outside school instead. Journalists came. They wanted to interview people who knew Scarlett. They didn’t stop me as I walked past the gates. I guess I probably didn’t look like the kind of guy who would have known her. They took photos of the girls sitting on the pavement crying. They stopped Stéphane and took a photo of him and Inès together; they were holding hands in the photo. Stéphane was wearing that black-and-white scarf with tassels that he thinks makes him look like a tough guy from the hood when we all know his dad is a real estate agent in Saint-Germain.

  Scarlett. You are lost to me now.

  After it happened, Maman took me to Megève. She rented a chalet there and we stayed for Christmas. We didn’t ski. Maman didn’t want to see anyone. She spent the week in her bedroom in the dark talking on the phone to her mother and Estelle. She got up to take me to a doctor, who gave me pills to stop the panic inside my chest that came in waves and made
me feel like a butterfly beating my wings against a window to get out.

  I took the pills with Coca-Cola in a glass and I lay on a white sofa in the chalet under a silvery fur rug and I watched the Disney Channel. I looked out the window at the mountains. I watched the figures traveling fast down the slopes. I watched the pink sunlight on the dark pines; I saw the light turn blue, then black. Cindy stayed with me, and Lou. Lou was there too.

  I haven’t seen Gabriel since Maman threw him out that day. Maman won’t let him come around and see Lou. For a while I wondered if I should tell the police about Scarlett and him, about the photos they took together. I didn’t know what I should say and what I should keep quiet about. I didn’t know how to talk about these things that I had seen without bringing them all crashing down on top of me, on top of them. So I said nothing. I keep it all inside my head and it plays there, over and over, a film noir that I cannot stop, even though I try.

  Cindy still lives upstairs in her maid’s room. She’s planning on moving to Canada next year, because if she goes to Canada and works there as a nanny, then in five years her children and her husband can come and live with her. They’ll get real visas that mean they can stay there forever. Her kids will be thirteen and fifteen by the time that happens, but Cindy doesn’t seem bothered by that. She’s doing interviews on Skype in her room upstairs. She showed me photos of one of the families; they look nice. They have two children, a boy and a girl, and in the photo they are standing by a lake laughing. They have big white smiles and wide-open faces. There are tall green trees on the edge of the lake, and the sky is vast and blue behind them.

  She hasn’t told Maman that she is going. She says to me: “Thank God, Paul, I will find a way back to my children.”

  I don’t know what Maman will do without Cindy. I don’t know what I’ll do.

  Maman still has her business. She travels a lot. She’s got a new trainer and he says he’s going to make her body even hotter. That’s what he says to her when she is doing her sit-ups on the living-room floor. “Ten more makes you a winner, Séverine.”

  I see Maman looking at her face in the mirror when we get into the elevator to go up to our floor. She leans forward and pulls at her eyebrows. She frowns at what she sees. She’s planning on getting her breasts done. She discussed it with Estelle last Saturday when she came by for coffee. Estelle says it’s the best remedy she knows of for depression. She gave her the name of her surgeon in Neuilly and she told Maman she should go at least three sizes bigger.

  “Listen, ma belle, at our age we need every weapon we can get.”

  I never told Maman about my father, about what I saw. I didn’t think she could take any more. But sometimes I look at her face and the sadness there and I get the feeling she knows anyway. It’s like she knows, but she’s decided not to admit it; she’s decided to carry on as if none of it ever happened, as if my dad never did it with men, as if Gabriel never took the photos, as if she’d never grabbed Scarlett by the throat, as if Scarlett hadn’t died. Maybe she figures the greatest risk would be for her to show her wounds.

  She’s tough, Maman. She keeps going. Like my grandmother. She tells everyone that at last she feels free, that she is too lucky to have Lou.

  “It’s like a rebirth,” she says, “to be a young mother again. Besides, I have Paul.”

  At night she spends a lot of time on the Internet buying handbags and clothes, stuff for Lou and me, cushions for the house, that kind of thing.

  My dad did special therapy after the divorce came through in February. He told me it was therapy for sex addiction and that he is over that now, that it was a phase of his life when he was searching for meaning and now he’s found it. That’s what he told me. He said he was grateful I never told my mother, that it meant that we could start fresh together, wipe the slate clean.

  “Thanks to you, Paul, I can salvage my life,” he said.

  He’s got a new girlfriend. She doesn’t know what my dad was doing before she came along. At least, she doesn’t act like she knows. She’s called Marine and she is like no one I have ever seen him with before. It turns out she’s an old girlfriend of his, someone he went out with when he was in high school, when he was about my age. That will be my age next year. It was my grandmother who got them together again over lunch at their tennis club, when she was worried about my father’s depression.

  Marine is super-classic 16ème arrondissement. She used to live in Singapore with her husband, but they got divorced and she came back to Paris with her twin boys, who are a year older than me. They go to my dad’s old school in the 16ème. Marine has high cheekbones and she is elegant with no makeup. My grandmother says it’s a sign of breeding. On her little finger she wears a gold signet ring that has a dark green crest with a tree on it. My grandmother talks to Marine like she is made of glass; she says, “Of course, Marine, but only if it suits you to come and see us in July?”

  In February my grandfather found out he had cancer. They cut it out of him and now he spends his time sitting in his armchair in Neuilly reading Le Figaro until he falls asleep. The cancer made him shrink. He looks grateful when we go to see him. “You’ve grown, Paul,” he says when I walk into the room. He is gray and tired and when I kiss his cheek, his skin is thin against mine. My father bought him a juicer and now they sit together in the sunlight by the window and discuss nutrition and talk about whole grains as if my grandfather is training for a triathlon.

  Next month my father is moving out of his apartment near Le Bon Marché and he and Marine are moving into a big family apartment by the Trocadéro that overlooks the Eiffel Tower. Her sons will live with them too. My father got rid of the Porsche at the beginning of the summer because they couldn’t all fit in it. He bought a navy-blue Mercedes sedan instead. He drives the boys and Marine to the tennis club in it. That’s where they go every weekend, to the tennis club where my grandparents and my aunt and my uncle and my cousins go because Marine’s twins play great tennis. They have a ranking that’s better than my cousins’.

  Every week I go to the Chapelle de la Médaille Miraculeuse and I wait for her to come. I wait with all the others. I hold my medallion in my hand and I rub the hearts to keep them warm. I light a candle in a red glass and watch it flicker there with the others. I say a prayer and then I go and sit on the pew where we sat together that time. I sit and wait. I listen to the hum of the Métro vibrating through the chapel and I pray to the Virgin, soft and white, with diamonds that shoot in beams from her sacred hands.

  I thought I saw her once. I turned around in my pew and the chapel door was open and I thought I saw her hair against the sunlight, lit up as if she were on fire. I ran to the door and called out her name. I reached my hand into the long empty courtyard.

  I go to school. I take my pills. They block you off and shut you down so you don’t feel anything. But the pain is still there. It is a darkness that covers me, like an eclipse of the sun. It bangs up against the sides of me. It is a deadweight hanging from my ankles.

  Last week I went to see the orthodontist and he said to me, “You look in a bad way, Paul.”

  I said nothing. He had a metal mirror on a long stick stuck in the back of my mouth at the time, so it was difficult to reply.

  “I went through a tough patch when I was young,” he said. He was wearing special wraparound yellow protector glasses and I could see his eyes close up, staring down at me, sorrowful brown eyes floating above mine.

  “You learn to live with it. That is what happens, Paul. You keep going. You work hard. The scar hardens over.” He was fiddling with my brace and a piece of gunk flew off through the air. “You become an orthodontist.” He laughed when he said that, but his face was sad still.

  Sometimes on the weekends I go with Lou to the Jardin du Luxembourg. Mostly Cindy comes with us, but not today because she is picking up Maman’s dry cleaning. I push Lou along the rue d’Assas in her buggy; she can walk now, but she doesn’t like walking far.

  When we get in
to the jardin I show her the beehives and I tell her how the bees go into their houses to make honey. We cross the dalle where I used to hang out when I was little. The sun is out and the mothers are sunbathing. The guys have taken off their shirts to play basketball and the mothers sit and watch their naked black chests through half-closed eyes.

  I push her across to the ponies and we stand in the queue and wait. I pay the pony man with the staring eye, but I won’t let him kiss Lou as he puts her in the little green carriage. I walk along beside the carriage and the ponies walk ahead. The earth smells of horse piss and all the hedgerows are green. We turn around by the trees and come back to the benches where the parents wait. I reach in and take Lou out of the carriage.

  After the ponies, Lou sits back down in her buggy and she says, “Spider-Man,” or she says a word as near to Spider-Man as she can get. She is pointing to the playground. It is called Le Poussin Vert, but Lou and I call it the Spider-Man park. It has climbing frames and roundabouts, zip wires and trains to play on.

  “Okay, Lou, we’ll go.”

  I pay the man at the ticket box and he stamps my hand with a picture of a little chick and he stamps Lou’s plump hand and we pass through the metal turnstile and I buy a Coca-Cola lollipop for Lou and a strawberry one for me.

  We go and sit in the sandpit. That’s what Lou likes best, sitting in the sandpit and filling up a plastic bucket with sand or chewing on her red plastic starfish. Sometimes we go on the roundabout, but sometimes that’s too scary. Today we just sit in the sand. I clean her nose for her and she says, “Gâteau, gâteau.”

  “Okay, Lou, but this is your last one.” I hand her the vanilla Prince Lu she loves. I make little crescent-shaped piles of sand and I tell her they are croissants. Every time I finish a croissant, Lou bashes it down with her plastic spade.