Beautiful Secret

by Dana Faletti

  “Life is messy, bella. Marriage. Commitment. Horrible sloppy messes, they are,” Nana said. “And you, love, have some hard decisions to make. Just like I did a long time ago.”

  Nana’s words echoed in the quiet, bleeding all over Tate with a truth she couldn’t quite put her finger on. She could feel it, though. Like a promise deep in her gut, it tickled her with possibility.

  She sprung from the bed and went to the windows. Winding them wide open, she sucked the afternoon air into her lungs.

  “I told you my story not to make you feel sorry for me, Tati, but to teach you something.”

  Even as Tate hungered for more words, more conversation, she resented the scratchy, sick sound of Nana’s voice, the way that the cancer muddled her beautifully musical broken English.

  “Loving the wrong man can destroy a life. To love someone is a choice. Choose wisely, my bella, because you have the luxury of making this decision for yourself.” Nana paused then, seeming to want a response that Tate just could not give.

  “Honor my last wish. Find the family that was never lost to me. Although I didn’t get the chance to lay eyes on them after I came to America, I’ve loved them always from afar. Even in their absence, I’ve loved them, just as I love you.”

  Tate nodded, tears searing a silent promise into her cheeks.

  Nana closed her eyes.

  “I’ve spoken to Luisa, so she’ll be expecting you,” Nana whispered. “The woman loves a good scandal. She may tell you all the secrets I never dared to speak.”

  Nana Maria opened her eyes again and winked at Tate.

  Two days later, she died.

  Chapter 1

  Tate

  Late July

  Tate squinted through tired eyes at the archaic stone structures along the left bank of the river Seine. Here she was in the most romantic city in the world with centuries old sights to take in, a mammoth’s share of culture at her feet, and all she wanted to do was get on with this river tour. The flight from New York to Paris had kicked her ass, and she hadn’t anticipated this jet lag. Glancing at her phone, which had automatically set itself to Paris time, she calculated six hours backward. It was four in the morning back home, and her brain just wasn’t buying this late-morning croissant and espresso business. She peeked again at the phone, wondering numbly if she’d missed a call.

  As if Nathan were going to call her, right? Because placing an ocean plus thousands of miles between them would suddenly make her husband care about her the way that he used to.

  Tate shoved away the thoughts of her broken marriage and focused on the promise of what lay ahead. She’d traveled here to honor Nana’s dying wish, but she had to admit, she welcomed the freedom a change of scenery offered. For a few weeks, she’d be free from Nathan and free from the constant reminder of Nana’s death. Here, she could focus on the early days of Nana’s life instead.

  In mere hours, she’d be in Revin, the provincial town where her aunt Luisa, the woman who’d been Nana Maria’s best friend, waited for her. Modern-day Paris was a sight, but Tate was here for an excursion down memory lane, a glimpse into Nana’s past from the point of view of someone who’d been there for all of it. Zia Luisa was going to accompany her to Southern Italy, where she would have the chance to stand within the convent at Nicotera, in the very place of her father’s birth. Tate’s fingers itched with hot anticipation.

  Trying desperately to stare straight ahead at the spires of Notre-Dame Cathedral, Tate’s eyes began to blur.

  Was that gargoyle giving her the finger?

  She rested her head in her hands, painfully aware that she was the only one on the boat tour who wasn’t paying attention. Still, if she could only close her eyes…just for a moment.

  Suddenly, a hand was on her shoulder. Fancy French words wrenched her awake.

  “Mademoiselle, s’il vous plaît, le tour est fini.” The tour is finished.

  Tate opened her eyes to a smug-looking little man with a skinny mustache. He seemed to be judging her for taking a snooze along the Seine. She couldn’t blame him. She was sort of judging herself for that, too.

  She ran fingernails through snaggles of her auburn hair and wiped a stray string of drool from the side of her mouth. How sophisticated.

  Before she could worry about whether or not she’d been snoring during her little nap, the memory of a dream broke into her consciousness.

  She couldn’t have been sleeping for more than twenty minutes, and yet it had been so vivid. A forest of lush green leaves. Heavy summer air, tinged with humidity. She could still feel tiny bubbles of sweat on her forearms, hear the slosh of water rushing in the distance. And there had been a man—an almost faceless man with a French accent and water-blue eyes.

  “You are very beautiful,” he’d said to her. She’d barely been able to breathe, her entire being was so swept up in deep, heady desire, so stark and raw. In the dream, time and space were irrelevant. There was only him and the sensation of being needed more than air, being wanted above all things.

  Suddenly aware of the heat that had radiated into the center of her body at the memory of the dream, her hands went to her face to suffocate the fire lighting her cheeks. She recalled the words the man in the dream had spoken to her.

  You are very beautiful.

  That was cheesier than the melty crust on a crock of French onion soup. Paris was apparently trying to supply her with a romantic rendezvous whether or not she chose to sleep through its sights. She glanced up once more at the attendant, who was waiting for her to reach an acceptable level of consciousness and get the hell off his boat.

  “Merci, monsieur.” She smiled sweetly and allowed him to lead her to the exit of the petit bateau. “Au revoir,” she said as she disembarked. The five years of French she’d studied in high school and college were actually becoming useful. She was finding that she could at least communicate with the locals if they spoke slowly. And, for as often as she’d heard people complain about the French being rude to Americans, the natives had been quite amicable to her when she attempted to speak their language, patient, even.

  “Tatiana?”

  The voice sounded like champagne bubbling up from its flute, a celebration.

  She followed the sound to its source: a small, squat late-forty-something woman dressed in long linen pants, a light blue chemise, and pointy boot shoes. A fashionable scarf in muted grays and beiges adorned her neck, of course. Even though it was at least eighty degrees already this morning, the entire Parisian nation was wearing scarves. Tate must have missed the memo. She was in jeans and a Gap T-shirt. She groped self-consciously at her bare neck as she approached the woman who had called her by name.

  “Colette?”

  “Yes, yes, come, Tatiana!” Her cousin Colette, Zia Luisa’s daughter, had promised to meet her at the airport but had texted her shortly after her plane had landed at Charles de Gaulle. Tate had been in the customs line around 6:00 a.m. Paris time when Colette’s text beeped through.

  I have a little problem with the petrol, Tatiana. I will arrive for you but late. Can you do some seeing of the sights and then I get you later in the morning?

  Seriously? “Seeing of the sights?”

  Yes, Colette. How will I find you? I don’t know the city at all.

  I think it’s good you take a petit bateau tour of the Seine. It is very premium. You take the 9:00 tour and I will find you at the finish.

  What the hell was “premium?” Expensive? Nice? Petit bateau was a little boat ride. She’d gotten that much, at least. What could she even text back?

  Okay.

  She’d been grateful for her French training when she’d asked a rental car attendant for directions to the Seine tour and for help on how to store her luggage at Charles de Gaulle Airport for the morning. Now, here she was face-to-face with Colette, a cousin she’d met once when she was a young child but could hardly remember.

  “Tatiana, it is hard for me to believe it.” Colette embraced her, kissing her f
irst on one cheek and then the other, then repeating the process.

  Why didn’t Tate remember about the four kisses? She’d thought it was two.

  “When I last see you, you were so small.” Colette leaned back then, to take a good look, it seemed, her entire round face pink and smiling. She looked like a jolly little elf, her eyes sparkling mischievously at the corners. “I am so sorry to find you late.”

  “No, no, Colette, it’s okay!” Tate shook her head in protest at her cousin’s apology, letting her original frustration evaporate as she held on to the robust little woman’s hand. “I appreciate that you drove all this way to pick me up.”

  “Oh, it is no problem at all, my cousin. I am working yesterday at the university, and my apartment at Reims is only ninety minutes’ drive from Paris. It is nothing.” She paused and glanced behind her then. “How about we go over to Café Eiffel for a coffee and cigarette, eh? Then we get your bags from the aéroport. Is it okay for you?”

  “Sure,” Tate replied, although what she really wanted was to get her bags and get to Revin, the small village in the Ardennes of northeastern France where Zia Luisa lived with her husband, Zio Nino. Tate couldn’t wait to lay eyes on the woman who had been there for Nana Maria at the most difficult moments of her life. Until Tate met her, Luisa would remain a character from a spellbinding story.

  Colette led Tate away from the Cathedral, past the famous bronze statue of Charlemagne on his horse, and into a bustling brasserie. She ordered two coffees and offered Tate a cigarette.

  “No, thanks.” Tate held up her hand. “I don’t smoke.”

  “Ah, it is better for you, no? Fume is no good, I think, but I cannot quit yet.” Colette set free a throaty laugh, her cigarette jutting from her lips, waiting to be lit. “When I am very old, maybe then I give it up.”

  Tate tried to think of something to say to that but couldn’t. Her parents had smoked from the time they were thirteen years old. She couldn’t help but blame a tireless worship of tobacco and nicotine for their untimely fates. A familiar cold lump of loss lodged itself in the back of her throat, reminding her of all that she was running from. She’d be damned if she’d flown halfway across the globe just to let her grief catch up to her here. This trip was for forgetting heartbreak and finding answers. Tate bit her lip and forced a half-smile at Colette.

  “Ah, I’m so sorry, Tatiana. So stupid of me.” Colette’s gray-blue eyes implored Tate’s dark ones as she ran a cigarette-free hand through waves of boy-cut mousy brown hair. Pursing her lips and clicking her tongue, Colette looked away. “We all feel horrible about your parents. It is a tragedy, no? One in January and another in March. And then your grandmother. We are all sick over this, Tatiana.” Colette shook her head and put out her cigarette. Tate watched as her cousin downed a demitasse of coffee as if it were a shot of Jäger.

  She raised her eyebrows at Colette, who was, once again, smiling rainbows at her.

  Vast array of emotions in a few short sentences, Tate thought. She had no idea how to react to this mysteriously likable woman. What other quirks could she be hiding inside those wrinkled sleeves?

  “Okay,” Colette said, placing the tiny, empty coffee cup on the high mahogany table. “We go?”

  “Okay,” Tate repeated. She finished her coffee and followed her cousin out of the bar and into the square.

  * * *

  The clink of glasses was background noise to raucous laughter and seemingly unreasonable yelling across a narrow wooden table that stretched the length of the basement kitchen. Dying embers were all that remained inside the brick oven that had both overheated the house and birthed the most delicious pizzas Tate had ever tasted. The oven itself had released less smoke than all of the burned-out cigarettes piled in glass ashtrays around the house.

  Smoking and scarves—French for Dummies should devote an entire chapter to each one of them.

  All of the cigarette smoke in the world couldn’t mask the thick aromas of wine and perfectly bittersweet Camembert that mingled on Tate’s tongue. The smoke really wasn’t bothering her at all. Maybe she was a little drunk. Maybe she was too tired to care.

  “Tatiana, you speak French better after a few glasses of vino, yes?” Zia Luisa’s son, Maxime, joked with her, his deeply tanned face bright red with sweat, his taut, fat belly quaking with laughter and too much pizza.

  She teased back in French with the little energy she had. “Je parle anglais, Maxime. Peut-être tu me comprends plus bien quand tu es soul.” Maybe you just understand my English better when you are drunk, cousin. She smirked into his almost black eyes and winked at his wife, Chanson, who gently chuckled back.

  “No, I don’t understand much English. Only Colette and Michel, my son, speak English.” Luisa’s Maxime spat the words in French as if it were a crime to speak in Tate’s native tongue. She laughed, unoffended, and rubbed her sleepy eyes.

  This family of hers—what a surprise they all were.

  She’d known them for mere hours and yet she felt more at home in Luisa’s three-story French provincial row home than she did in her own sprawling contemporary in Pittsburgh. Maybe it was the tangible warmth of their welcome. Perhaps it ran deeper than that. Her great-uncle Nino was the closest thing she had left to a grandfather and Luisa a grandmother. It was all so surreal, and her jet-lagged brain just wasn’t functioning at one hundred percent.

  At that moment, the door to the mud room swung open into the kitchen, ushering in a shockingly warm waft of air and a few flies.

  Zia Luisa stood and began piling cheese and dry sausage onto a plate with some bread.

  “Merci, Mami,” said the five o’clock shadowed man who joined them at the table. He took a seat directly across from Tate, and she yawned.

  “Ca va, Michel?” Zio asked him. “Le shop?” How are you? How was the shop?

  Ah, so this was Michel, Zia Luisa’s grandson, who ran the family-owned appliance store in town.

  The man nodded to his grandfather, his gaze trained on the plate in front of him and the baguette from which he was tearing a chunk.

  “Michel, ta cousine americaine, Tatiana,” Zia Luisa said.

  Tate’s mouth was full when Luisa introduced her, and Michel was still busy adding things to his dish. He didn’t look at her right away.

  “I hear you speak English,” Tate said to him before taking a sip of wine to wash down the morsel of cheese she probably shouldn’t have eaten.

  “A little bit,” he said, a muted smile lifting his pink-cheeked profile.

  As he turned to face her directly, slow motion and silence seeped from the ceiling and walls. Electricity charged the air in the amber-lit room. Fingers of flame crawled from Tate’s neck to her eyelashes, leaving a trail of heat on her skin, and she gasped, breathing burning red wine into her lungs. A fit of coughing erupted from her chest.

  Michel quickly stood and leaned over the table, hoisting her up by the shoulders and holding onto her.

  “Are you okay?” he asked her in English, and she didn’t know what to say, didn’t even recognize her own language for a split second.

  She was completely lost. Not in translation or fatigue or in shock at the instant family she’d inherited in the space of a minute. No, she was lost in the sea of blue that was Michel’s eyes.

  The same faceless eyes she’d seen hours earlier in her dream along the river Seine.

  What the hell was in that cheese?

  Suddenly hyper-aware of his hands on her, she found a grain of composure and stood back.

  “I’m okay,” she said, swallowing, then finally looking away. She willed an innocently exhausted smile to land upon her lips, then faced the rest of her family, addressing a slant-eyed and perhaps suspicious Colette.

  “Trop de vin,” Tate lied, blaming the wine. She needed rest. Whatever tricks her mind was playing could surely be nipped by a few good hours of sleep.

  These once-strangers surrounding her, begging for her adrenaline to last a little longer, for a few more
laughs—they had to understand her fatigue, right? She didn’t want to be rude.

  “Il faut que je dors, je pense,” she said, and Zia Luisa immediately started toward her, understanding her need for sleep almost before she’d finished uttering the words.

  “Viens, cherie.” Come, dear.

  Tate wished a hurried good night to her cousins and Zio Nino and followed the short, stout woman toward a dark stairwell in the far corridor of the kitchen. Before turning the corner behind her great-aunt’s head of thinning black curls, she stole one last glance at Michel.

  He was studying her with needy eyes. Needy for what, she couldn’t say. An explanation as to why she’d gone still at the sight of his baby blues? What was he thinking of the crazy American woman at his dinner table?

  Looking at him instead of where she was going, Tate walked right into the wall next to the stairs with a resounding thud.

  “Sorry,” she sputtered.

  Lowering her head into her hands more from embarrassment than from the throbbing pain in her temple, she stood there for a moment. “Jesus,” she muttered under her breath, but then gave up her injured pride.

  She stood stock-still and raised her head, staring Michel straight in the eyes.

  His face, which just moments before had been somber and confused, broke into a slow grin. Sunshine spilled from him onto her as if they were the only two people in the room, and she couldn’t help but laugh at herself right along with him until her shoulders shook and she was spent.

  “Bonne nuit, cousine,” he said, his gaze never dropping from her face.

  “Good night,” she replied, and followed Zia Luisa up the back stairs.

  When her body was finally tucked beneath the soft cotton sheets in the guest room, Tate closed her eyes, afraid that she’d see Michel’s image taunting her from behind them. Instead, Nana Maria’s face swam into view, and all of the amped-up anxiety over her attraction to Michel just melted away. Peace settled over her, and she knew she’d made the right decision to honor her grandmother’s wishes and come to Europe.