by Sarah Jio
“His name was Luc Jeanty.”
My eyes widen. “Jeanty as in Bistro Jeanty?”
“Yes,” she says. There’s commotion in the background. “I have so much to tell you, but I’m just stepping into class.”
“No problem,” I say. “Call me another time.”
“Okay, I will. Oh, and Caroline, your boyfriend, the chef, is really cute.”
My cheeks warm as I smile to myself. “He is, isn’t he?”
* * *
—
THE GALERIES LAFAYETTE is exquisite. With its domed ceiling and countless floors that all open onto an expanse at its center, it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen.
I think about Céline’s fiancé and his work with the Resistance as I wander the first floor through a maze of tables splayed with cosmetics and perfumes. Luc Jeanty. I wonder if he could have ever imagined that the Paris he’d fought for would be as beautiful as it is today. I wonder if he’d be pleased. But really, I wonder if he’d been reunited with the people he loved: Céline and her daughter.
Beside me, a very chic-looking woman in a fur vest selects a perfume bottle, maroon and clad in rhinestones, then spritzes her left wrist. I follow suit, then frown, gasping as an intense aroma stings my eyes. Musky and strong—not me at all.
I turn back to the escalators and head up to the first of many upper floors, stopping when I see a black dress on a mannequin in the distance. Short and fitted, with lace detailing around the bodice and a little ruffle at the hem. Simple, but elegant.
“May I try on that dress?” I ask a passing saleswoman, pointing to the mannequin.
“Your size, dear?”
I look down at my body, then up at her again. “I really don’t know.”
She smiles. “I’ll bring you a few to choose from.”
In the fitting room, I slip the first dress on over my head and cinch it at my hips, smoothing out the fabric. It’s snug, but not overly so. I smile at my reflection. Of all the bodies to wake up from a coma in, I suppose mine isn’t so bad. For the show, I’ll pull my hair into a tight bun, highlight my cheeks with a little blush. Red lipstick, definitely. And in this dress, I would look just right. Would Victor think so?
“I’ll take this one,” I say to the saleswoman outside.
I follow her to the counter. Behind her is a high-fashion display with two mannequins in fur and studded leather pants—not my style—with a TV screen playing a black-and-white American film from the sixties, perhaps early seventies. I freeze, unable to take my eyes off the TV screen. I…know this movie somehow. But this is not a passive memory, as Dr. Leroy described; this one is deeply seated. I can’t explain it, but it is integral to who I am.
The saleswoman’s lips are moving, but I don’t hear her voice. In fact, I don’t hear anything. I am too transfixed by the screen. Suddenly, the world around me comes to a screeching halt as the pieces of my life begin to come together. I feel them shifting in my brain, like the corners of a difficult jigsaw puzzle that give the entire image clarity. I blink back tears, looking up when I hear the saleswoman’s voice again.
“Mademoiselle?” she says. “Your card, please.”
“I, I’m…so sorry,” I stammer, reaching into my purse. I hand her my credit card, then look up at the screen again, where a glamorous blond woman cozies up to a handsome actor on a midcentury-modern sofa. They are drinking martinis. I know what will happen next. He’ll put a record on. Friends come to dinner. She finds out he’s having an affair with one of her friends. She shatters the soufflé in the kitchen. I know it! I know every detail! But unlike the collection of knowledge in my mind—song lyrics, random facts, how I can apparently list the U.S. states in alphabetical order—this is different. I know without a shadow of a doubt that this memory is deeply and inextricably connected to me.
“Mademoiselle?” It’s the saleswoman’s voice again, pulling me from the depths of my memory bank, which feels, somehow, like a locked vault I have only now been handed a key to.
“Your receipt.” She turns to the sales floor again, where a woman and her teenage daughter are trying to get her attention.
“Wait, Madame,” I say.
She turns around and I point to the TV screen. “That movie, that actor. The man. Do you happen to know who he is? I keep trying to place him, but…” I shake my head. “I can’t.”
She turns to the TV screen, scrunching her nose quizzically.
“Isn’t that the American actor…Wes Williams?” She watches for a moment longer, then nods. “Yes, definitely him.”
I stare at the man on the screen, watching as he lights a cigarette, flashing a smile that oozes charm.
She looks at me like I may as well be from Mars. “I thought every American knew Wes Williams.”
As she walks to the other customers, I stare at the screen a moment longer. The thing is, I do know him. I know him in the very cells of my body. Wes Williams is my…father.
I close my eyes, again hearing the sound of the breeze rustling through palm trees, the wind chimes making their haunting clanging sound. This time, I am young, not more than seven. I am running around the lawn in the backyard of a home in California. San Diego. It’s the same home as in my prior visions, but years earlier.
Beside the pool, a beautiful woman reads a magazine in a chaise longue. I run to her and wedge myself into the small space to her left.
“Mommy,” I say, fingering the gold bracelet on her wrist. “When is Daddy coming home?”
She takes off her large sunglasses; I can see that she’s been crying. “I don’t know, dear one,” she tells me. “But soon, I hope.”
Time skips forward. And suddenly I am ten, maybe eleven, in corduroy pants and a turtleneck. I’m licking a Popsicle on the lawn outside. I hear shouting in the kitchen. A man’s voice. A woman crying. A glass breaks.
“Wes, stop! Please stop!”
I run inside and watch my mother on her knees, begging my father not to leave. “I’m sick,” she says. “You can’t leave me. I…won’t know what to do. Think of Caroline. Wes, don’t do this to us!”
At once, they both notice me.
“Darling,” my mother says, standing up, collecting herself as best she can. “Your father and I were just having a…disagreement.”
“That’s right, kitten,” my father says, walking toward me. He’s older than my mother, by at least fifteen years. He pats my shoulder, then lights a cigarette. “Why don’t you go run along and play.”
“Mama,” I say, rushing to her. “Are you really…sick?”
“Oh, I’m fine, honey,” she says. “Nothing that the doctor can’t give me medicine for.”
I look at my father, then at my mother, and I know that while my life hasn’t exactly been normal, it will now never be the same.
I burst into tears. The breakup shatters my world; so does my mother’s cancer. A miserable slideshow of images—IV tubes, endless pill bottles, hospital beds—flash through my mind. And then I’m a teenager, standing beside my father at my mother’s funeral. There’s a large mound of dirt to the right, and two men are lowering her coffin into the ground. I’m holding a red rose in my hand, and I toss it on top of the coffin as it makes its descent.
My father and I stand there a long while before I turn to him and ask, “Do you think she’ll be happy in heaven?”
“Sure, kid,” he says, lighting a cigarette. “Hey, I’ve been meaning to tell you that I have to be away for a few weeks. Filming a new project in Utah.” I nod. “There’s someone who’ll be coming to look after you. Her name is Julia.”
Julia. The name reverberates in my ears. “Julia is great,” he says. I notice the sparkle in his eyes. “I think you’ll find her to be an awful lot of fun. And, who knows, maybe she’ll be able to live with us on a permanent basis.”
The dirt hasn’t even settled on my mother’s grave
, and my father is already talking about another woman. I look out the window of his 1977 Porsche and cry all the way home.
“Excuse me,” a woman says, brushing past me, jarring me back to the present, where I’m standing between racks of women’s dresses at the Galeries Lafayette. I feel dizzy, nauseous.
The fog is finally lifting, and as it does, my world comes into focus.
I know who I am.
My mind is so busy, processing so many things, that I’m hardly aware of my journey back to the rue Cler. I float into the elevator, materializing in my apartment like a ghost. Every bone in my body is struck with a deep exhaustion, and my eyelids are heavy as I find my way to my bedroom and let my head fall on the pillow. My brain, it seems, can no longer handle the weight of my memories, downloading with such intensity. I close my eyes. Sleep is my only escape.
* * *
—
WHEN I OPEN my eyes, hours may have passed, or maybe only minutes, but I am jarred from slumber by the phone ringing in the kitchen. Startled, I jump out of bed and run to catch it on the fourth ring.
“Ms. Williams?” It’s an American man, whose voice I don’t recognize.
“Yes,” I say, disoriented.
“Please,” he continues. “I need to speak to you. It’s about a highly sensitive matter.”
“Okay,” I say, cautiously.
“My name is Edward Stern,” he continues. “I work with a firm in Los Angeles that represents your late father Wes Williams’s estate. I understand that you became estranged from him in your teen years, which is why you might have missed this.”
“Missed what?” I ask.
“I’m getting to that,” he says. “Now, when your parents split up, he signed over the deed of the home in San Diego to your mother, and when she died, she left that to you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Bear with me. I’m getting to my point. At the time of your father’s death, eight years ago, the will we had on file didn’t mention anything about him having a daughter.”
“I guess that’s not much of a surprise,” I say with a sniff, my mind awash in memories from my childhood, many of them sad ones. “Fatherhood wasn’t high on his priority list. Womanizing, on the other hand, was.”
“And that’s just it,” he continues. “Without next of kin to locate, the bulk of his estate, after fees were paid out, went into a trust, where it remains now. Money just sitting there, with no one to claim it.” He clears his throat. “You knew your father had passed, correct?”
“Yeah,” I say, more shards of recovered memories hitting me like shrapnel. “I saw it on the cover of People magazine.”
“As I’m sure you know, your father fell into severe dementia in his later years.”
I feel a lump in my throat, and I swallow hard. Perhaps that’s why he never reached out. “I actually…didn’t know.”
“Anyway, all this to say, after his death, a lot of women came forward claiming they deserved shares of the Williams estate. It was an absolute circus. But in all of it, one woman, Julia Benson, had the strongest claim.”
Julia. “Oh, I remember her,” I say. “She came to ‘take care of me’ after my mother died, which boiled down to her throwing away all of my mother’s things and then convincing my father to send me to boarding school.”
“Well,” he continues, “Ms. Benson came forward with a copy of what seemed like a legitimate will. It appeared to be signed by Mr. Williams, and it left his entire estate to her.”
“I’ve never expected anything from my father, and I never will, but that woman…” I shake my head, remembering the way she had mocked one of my mother’s dresses while cleaning out her closet. “She shouldn’t get a penny.”
“That’s just the thing,” he says. “She’s not going to. The will fails to stand up legally, as it isn’t notarized, nor does it contain signatures from witnesses, but it led us to you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ms. Benson’s forged will includes an entire clause about you, specifically stating that your father wished to cut you out of any potential inheritance. Now, it doesn’t matter what she claims your father wanted; the point is, in her falsified documents, she revealed the rightful heir to Wes Williams’s estate, and that person is you.”
“Me?”
“You’re an awfully hard person to find, you know. No Facebook. Nothing of significance online. When we finally realized you were in Paris, I hired a private investigator to find you.”
“That explains the phone calls,” I say. “I knew someone was following me.”
“We didn’t mean to frighten you,” he says. “We only wanted to find you. Anyway, I’ll have all the paperwork couriered to you this week. We’ll need you to sign, and after my team in New York makes the final authorization, I can present you with a check. That could take a week, maybe a little more.” He pauses for a moment. “Your father was a very successful actor. Some forty films to his name, is that right?”
“You’d know better than me,” I say.
“You’re inheriting a significant amount of money. It’s none of my business, but if I were you, I’d seek out a financial advisor you trust and get this money wisely invested. I’d also be careful about who you tell. There’s a certain type of man who preys on women with money.”
I nod, feeling a chill come over me.
“Well,” he says, “I’m glad we were finally able to connect. And I certainly don’t want to upset you, but the private investigator we hired, well, he…” His voice trails off. “I know you had an accident and all, and I’m not sure how to say this.”
“What?”
“Well, that man, Victor, you’ve been spending time with…”
My eyes widen. “Victor? What about Victor?”
“It’s just that you should know that…”
“Know what?”
“Listen, I only mean to say that…I don’t think he’s exactly who you think he is.”
I shake my head. “Are you telling me not to trust him?”
“I’ve overstepped my bounds,” he says abruptly. “I’m sorry. It’s your life, and you’ll sort it all out. Best of luck, Ms. Williams. Truly.”
I stare out my kitchen window, my mind reeling, my heart racing. None of this feels real, and yet somehow it is.
* * *
—
“YOU LOOK AWFULLY pale,” Margot says, studying my face as she walks into the apartment sometime later. “Are you sick? I heard the flu is going around.”
I shrug. “Just a lot on my mind.”
“Please,” she says, reaching for a plate. “Let me make you something to eat.”
I shake my head. “Thanks, but I’m not hungry.”
“Well, you have to eat, or else you’ll—”
“Can you do me a favor?” I say, interrupting her.
“Of course, anything.”
“Can you call the restaurant and tell Victor that I’m not coming in tonight? He’s expecting me for dinner at eight, and I…I just can’t make it.”
“But don’t you think you’ll feel better in a few hours? Maybe after you lie down for a bit? Victor will be—”
“Please, just call him for me,” I say with an exhausted sigh. “I just can’t. I can’t.”
“Okay,” she says softly. “I will.”
I walk to my bedroom and close the door, sinking into my bed without bothering to change my clothes or wash my face. My phone buzzes on the bedside table, but I don’t answer it or look at the texts. I know it’s Victor, but I can’t bear to face him just yet. Right now, I can’t bear to face anything.
CHAPTER 18
CÉLINE
He’s come back. I leap to my feet and place my hand on the door, opening it slowly so as not to wake Cosi, then slipping into the dark hallway. I see him in the di
stance, taking off his coat. He’s a large man, and not just in height; his limbs are long and muscular. And in the darkness, with only the light of the moon filtering through the windows, he looks bigger and more frightening than ever.
I don’t want to face him. I don’t want to imagine what he might do to me. But I do not want any of it to happen where Cosi is. Therefore, I must walk into the lion’s den.
“Hello,” I mutter. My hands tremble so violently I have to clasp them together to steady them.
He doesn’t seem to hear me, so I say it again, a bit louder: “Hello.”
This time he turns around. He sees me. I am in the center of the den now, and he walks toward me with precision. He is the predator, and I am the prey.
“Here you are, so eager to see me,” he says, running his heavy hand along my cheek, down my neck, along the side of my left breast and then down to my waist, where he grabs me and pulls me closer to him. He reeks of cigarettes and alcohol. “I thought I’d have to wake you up in your bed tonight. That might have been fun. Imagine your surprise to find my body pressed against yours, my hands touching you in places—”
I gasp in terror as he thrusts his hand between my legs, plastering his lips on my face like leeches.
“You like that, don’t you?” he says, amused, fumbling with the buttons on the bodice of my dress. His patience gives way after a few seconds and he rips the top half of my dress open, sending the buttons flying. I hear one hit the hardwood floor and roll to a stop. He tears my undergarments off, too, revealing my bare breasts, before taking a step back.
“No,” he says. “Not here. Not the first time. We’ll go to my bedroom.”
He lifts me into his arms as if I’m a mere feather and carries me, like an animal he’s slain in a hunting expedition, to the first door on the right. He tosses me onto his bed. I blink back tears as he places his hands on me, then close my eyes and…pretend.
At once, I am no longer in the lion’s den—I’m sipping tea in the countryside far, far away. Cosi is picking wildflowers while I read a letter from my king. Luc is coming home soon. “Give my love to our princess,” he writes. “I miss you both terribly.”