I decide to say exactly what I feel. I don’t need his approval to go find Kali, but I want him to know my intentions and that he can’t just send me away by telling me she’s gone.
“I came to Cassis to make sure Kali was okay since she left the States without much warning. I was hoping to see her and speak to her. I care very much for her,” I admit honestly. However, by the look on his face, it’s clear he doesn’t care much for my honesty. He turns to face me before he will most likely close the door in my face, sporting the look of death.
He tilts his head to the side and smirks. “You are a bit confused. I don’t believe you care for Kali because you haven’t had the pleasure of knowing her.” He walks inside, and to my surprise leaves the door open.
I follow him without an invitation. Infuriated at his dismissive assessment of my feelings towards Kali. I know how I feel—I care about her more than he knows. I can’t stop dreaming or thinking about her. She isn’t just some girl; she’s important to me and I need to talk to her.
Inside the house, I feel as if I’m nine years old instead of thirty-nine and about to tell the principal why I kissed a girl in the playground. He proceeds deeper into his impressive home, silently choosing a chair overlooking the lush vineyard and the blue sea. He takes a wine glass from the side table and motions for me to sit on a chair across from him.
“My daughter wasn’t herself when she returned from America a few months ago. I’m not
stupide
, I didn’t expect her not to change, and after all, I never even dreamed she would come back here after meeting her grand-mama. You always know when your kids change. I had a feeling she was running away from something, or in this case,
someone
. She mentioned you, when she had no choice,” he adds reluctantly.
A tiny smile of hope finds residence on my lips, a smile that I should probably wipe off, but I can’t because I just heard him say that Kali mentioned me. I try my hardest to school my features and look serious, but it’s impossible.
“Sir, I have things I need to tell her. She doesn’t know everything, yet. I need to make things right and tell Kali that I love her.” The words fall effortlessly from my mouth because they’re the truth.
I’ve never said out loud that I love her, but I feel exultant in unburdening my feelings and uttering them to her father.
His eyes enlarge as he makes an animated, shocked expression and then starts laughing at me—a full-blown, loud, need-to-put-the-glass-down, body-shaking kind of laugh. I hold my breath because if he tells me I’m too late and she’s with someone else, or that he doesn’t want someone like me for his daughter, I may have a heart attack and start crying like the nine-year-old boy he makes me feel.
“I, too, would like another chance to tell Kali that I love her, but I don’t think she can hear me,” he states, no longer laughing.
I’m beyond puzzled at his reply. I’m at a total loss of how to answer him back. Why can’t she hear him, does he not have her number?
“Godfrey.” He calls me by the name Joella once did with certainty. “Kali is dead.”
Wait, I don’t understand, she’s dead? As in not alive … no, she can’t be dead!
“Dead?”
When those words resonate and echo in my head, I feel as if someone pressed a button to stop my heart and eject all the air out of my body. Saliva goes down the wrong pipe and my attempt to breathe quickly morphs into violent choking. Tears run down my face as I cough for air and for someone, anyone, to make him take back his words. I’m now ready to wake up and for this bad dream to end. It can’t be that everything I love gets taken away from me.
He looks away from me and I have no doubt he will continue to rip my life apart with more words. He gets up and walks over to a table covered with fruits and beverages expertly arranged. He pours water into a tall glass in what feels like slow motion. He approaches and hands me the glass, but I refuse; I want to choke to death, I don’t need his water.
“Kali, my beautiful wife … she died in a car crash close to fourteen years ago, on the same day that was also her birthday. I thought she didn’t come home because she was upset with me for pretending to forget her birthday that morning. We had a big surprise for her but she never knew. She was the daughter of the legendary Joella Gitanos of Providence, Rhode Island—you may have heard of her,” he says with a lascivious smile. “My friend, a local fisherman, the same one I’d buy fish from, found her car at the bottom of the sea. She was covered in water, just like her mère predicted and wrote. But it’s not Kali you came here for … it’s our daughter, Sarah, that I believe you claim to love,” he says, finishing me off for good.
No, no, this can’t be right. I must’ve choked to death and now I’m hearing things.
“What did you say her name was?” I need to make sure this is real life. I refuse to believe my head; it’s deceived me before.
“Her name is Sarah LeBlanc. She was named after her mama’s and grand-mama’s favorite saint, Sarah La Kali, to help keep her safe. Sarah La Kali is the patron saint of the gypsies; she’s the black Madonna. I remember my wife would sometimes call our baby ‘La Kali’ when she was a little girl.” His words and tears come out at the same time when he recalls his wife.
Sometimes in life, everything stops. Everything you thought you knew becomes illuminated and retold in a different light. This man has just ruined me with a few sentences, and simultaneously set my entire existence back on its axis, stopping it from spinning out of control.
Sarah?
Sarah?
Sarah?
It takes me a few minutes to reteach myself how to breathe and speak again. Oxygen is reaching my brain at über slow speed because life will never be the same after this moment.
“Why did she tell me her name was Kali? Why didn’t she just say her real name?” I question him with misplaced anger, as if he knows or is at fault for his daughter keeping her real name away from me.
He blinks away the tears. “You’ll have to ask her. She mentioned to me that Joella frequently addressed her as Kali in the last few years. She was old; she may have imagined that Sarah was her lost daughter, Kali. Sarah does look very much like her beautiful mama once did. The eyes, the hair…” He closes his eyes, traveling back in time.
I don’t have a choice but to accept his explanation and scream inwardly at everything unfolding before me.
“I’m sorry about your wife. Your daughter told me about her. I … I need to go find Kali—I mean, Sarah.” I trip over my own words. It’s the first time I say the name
Sarah
and it means something completely different in my life. In my head, she’s still Kali while I attempt to wrap my brain around the fact that Kali’s real name is Sarah. I hear Joella’s prophecy on constant loop, replaying in my head like a broken record. How could she have known this? Could her words actually come to be? Is the girl with the biblical name, the one that was meant to save me, could she be Sarah LeBlanc and not Sara Klein? Did I get it all wrong? The proverbial rug is being pulled from under my so-called life, but suddenly, for the first time since that day Joella spoke to me over fourteen years ago, I am able to see my future with lucid clarity.
“My name is Victor LeBlanc. I am the surviving husband of Kali Gitanos and the father of Sarah LeBlanc. It’s good to meet the man who claims to love my daughter after only meeting her once, I believe. But I am no hypocrite. I fell for her mama before she even said hello to me. Did my daughter tell you why her mama left America to come live with me in France?”
I shake my head. I know it had to do with Joella and something she may have said about her future, but we didn’t get that far.
He sighs and offers a defeated grin. Placing his hands in his pockets, he turns his back on me to gaze toward the blue waters in the distance. “Joella Gitanos would go to great distances to make certain her heirs do not ever suffer. But she’s not God, and her gift can’t change the future. All she can do is see small parts of it and then try to piece it together, which is in itself a curse. To know, but not be able to do a damn thing about it except try and help her loved ones suffer less, that’s all she can do. Growing up, my wife wasn’t allowed to go anywhere near a body of water. No baths, no pools, no rivers, no bays, no seas, and no oceans. Joella wouldn’t even permit her daughter to fly over water—crazy woman.
“Thirty years ago, I came for a visit, and when my family and I stopped at a local historical pub that sold our vin rouge for years, it didn’t take me long to fall madly in love with the striking American girl behind the counter. I have never seen anybody like her. My family returned to Bordeaux, but I stayed; I couldn’t leave after meeting her. I enrolled in university and continued courting the most breathtaking girl in the world to try and convince her to give a good-looking French boy the time of day.
“I would come to the pub every evening to keep an eye on the young girl I knew would one day be my wife. One night, I went up the stairs to use the lavatories when an elegant gypsy woman, dressed in rich, vibrant robes and adorned in gold chains, called upon me for a reading. I laughed and couldn’t help but become captivated by the theatrics of it all. She took hold of my hands and my life changed forever. She traced my lines and told me I would have one daughter but that my happy life wouldn’t last because the sea is jealous. She said my life was about to collide with pain and suffering, but perhaps, I could change my future by staying away from the sea. Perhaps I fell in love with the wrong girl, she said. I remember looking at her and wondering what kind of horrible fortuneteller she was. Shouldn’t she say good things to me? Isn’t that what people pay her money to do? I removed my hands from her grip and was about to leave when she said that if I leave and go back to where I came from, I could escape this horrible fate and perhaps have a new one with someone else and spare the poor girl from being surrounded by water and dying too young.”
I look at this man, disbelieving my ears once again. His encounter with Joella has a familiar ring to it. Why would she play with our lives like that? Why would she try and navigate him away from his destiny with her reading? Didn’t she want her daughter happy and in love?
“Do you understand what she tried to do? She wanted to run me out of town, thinking she would save her daughter because she saw me in her future. Thinking that by me leaving, Kali would be safe and away from water. I was a fool. I didn’t believe a word she said and I decided to stay in spite of her cruel words, because I was in love and I couldn’t see a life without the most beautiful girl in the world.
“I told Kali about this horrible woman I met at the top of stairs—not the prophecy, just our encounter, which she later informed me was her mère. She was very upset with her for giving me a palm reading. She said she’s never seen her read anyone’s hands. I wasn’t going to tell Kali the gypsy’s forewarning prediction. Joella, too, wouldn’t tell her daughter what she had read on my hand. There was a great big argument between them with lots of crying, words and threats being thrown around. Kali had found one of her maman’s journals, and after reading it, decided she needed to leave Rhode Island, her home, her friends, and outrun her maman’s predictions. She wanted not a thing to do with Joella, and even refused her inheritance. The only object she couldn’t part with was her beloved violin.
“The two of us ended up leaving America and came to build a life in Cassis. Before you ask why Cassis and not Bordeaux, I will tell you that Kali only agreed to leave if I took her to a place her mère would never find her, a place surrounded by water. Joella knew my family and our wineries in Bordeaux, but she had no knowledge of Cassis.
“Kali and I—we were children and she just wanted a new start. We wanted to be together and live our lives and run away from the silly prophecy that I was told and she had read. But you see … that old, retched woman knew how her own daughter would die, and she couldn’t do a damn thing about it. Maybe if she didn’t say what she said to me that night, maybe Kali wouldn’t have found her journal and read about her own death, and maybe we would have stayed and lived in America and Kali wouldn’t have ended up at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. But everything she tried to do brought us to our fate—almost as if her mission was to send us away toward our destiny.” He closes his eyes and smiles as if in pain, probably holding back more tears. It reminds me of how his daughter also tries to smile while chasing tears away. I imagine he must be thinking how everything in life only makes sense and becomes clear after it happens, and sometimes, it’s too late.
He continues talking with his eyes shut. “Joella told my wife the night before we left Rhode Island that she knew she would never see her again, but that she would not leave this world until her only granddaughter was set on the right path. Kali refused to believe in her own maman’s visions, calling her evil and crazy. She wouldn’t even tell people she was a Gitan or, as you Americans call it, a gypsy. As an only child to a single parent, Kali vowed we would have ten kids, but Joella knew there would only be one, sweet, talented little girl, who looked just like her mama and loved to play her violin.
“The last thing Joella told her daughter was that she couldn’t follow her while she tries to run away from her destiny, because her job was to wait for a boy named Godfrey. A boy with two different eye colors and two different lives to find her granddaughter with the key that she will give him. I know who you are, Godfrey. I knew exactly who you were when my daughter came back home and spoke about losing her heart to a complicated man. I’ve been waiting for you for thirty years.”
Every word from his mouth leaves me in a complete and total state of marvel. But it also brings me a step closer to Sarah—his daughter Sarah, the gypsy’s granddaughter … my Sarah. I need to go. I need to run. I need to tell her who I am and what she is to me. I impatiently get up, not able to wait another second. I’m speechless. He must know that I have to go find his daughter immediately or I’ll disintegrate.
“Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer is where you’ll find your promised future, Godfrey. Be good to her, she’s all I have left,” he adds as I nod my head, frantically understanding what I was born to do and run out the door.