The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted (36 page)

“I think he’s being funny,” Julien said. “Come on, it will make my mother happy. He’ll want to meet you.”

“No,” I said. “I want to tell you something.”

“Are you angry with me for teaching Abbot the French national anthem?” he asked, jokingly. “He’s part French, so he should know a little about his mother country.”

“Yeah, I heard you two belting it out in the pool together.”

“Belting it out? We were professionals. We were very good. Not like you and your song ‘Brandy.’ We really sing.”

“I heard you. I think people in Ireland heard you.”

He smiled at me. “He is an amazing child. He told me the stories of the house. The enchantments and miracles, the love stories.”

“Did he?”

“I’d heard of this before, these stories. My mother told me when I was young. Not all of them, but some of them were familiar. He believes in the stories.”

I was sure that Julien was asking if I believed in them, too. “He’s deep, that Abbot, and sensitive. He feels everything.”

“He reminds me of Frieda in certain ways. The doors of their hearts are wide open, as my mother says.” There was Abbot buzzing around with the other kids, trying to talk to one in some strange English-French mix, no doubt. He’d brought his notebook on this occasion but was much too distracted to draw anything.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry about Patricia. I didn’t know it was your brother.…”

“I didn’t tell you,” he said.

“But you could have. This really boosts your miserable-ness quotient.”

“Do I win now?”

“No, the prize still goes to those in war-torn countries.”

“I’d let her go easily if it meant that I could always be a father. Not half the time. A real father.”

“But you are a real father,” I said. “I saw you with Frieda for five minutes and I knew that I was watching a father, a real father with his child. You get only half the time, but you get to be a father all the time.”

He looked at Abbot, who was being handed a paper lantern on a stick by the woman with the shiny dark hair. “Elysius and your mother are coming,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “And I still don’t know the truth.”

“Your mother didn’t tell you?”

“I know that she had an affair. My father knows, too. She’s a heart thief. I get it. But what did she really do? How bad was it?”

“We’re French,” he said. “We forgive people who fall in
love even when they feel they shouldn’t.” He looked at me for a moment, and my heart started pounding in my chest. Then lightly, he raised his hand and let his fingers run down my arm to my hand. I wondered for a moment if he was going to kiss me and then he did—a soft kiss, his lips on mine, tender and sweet. It lingered. I closed my eyes. The world fell away around me. For a moment I felt like the kiss was the only thing holding me there, keeping me grounded. As if without him, I’d billow away like a loose paper lantern. It felt good to rely on someone else like this, to feel tethered. We weren’t ghosts in this moment. We were real. And then I opened my eyes and took a small step back. He slipped his hand in mine. His hand was big and warm and strong.

He nodded at the paper lanterns that the children were holding. “Do you remember this?”

“I do,” I said, barely breathing.

“It’s like they have caught glowing fish,” Julien said.

“It is,” I said, and I saw Abbot’s face now lit up in the golden glow of his lantern. He smiled at us and waved wildly. I quickly pulled my hand from Julien’s and waved back. Had Abbot seen us holding hands? Julien waved to Abbot, too. But Abbot stopped waving, gripped the stick of his lantern with both hands, and seemed to stare at us. His expression was hard to read.

I couldn’t say another word, and Julien didn’t seem to expect me to. Charlotte and Adam were sitting on a bench by the bocce pit, their heads tilted together under the dim streetlight. There was a breeze that flitted between us. Abbot
fell in line with the other children, and they started winding up the narrow street, the lanterns swaying and bobbing in the dark.

lysius and my mother both called, together, taking turns with one cell phone. They were in emergency mode. They’d made their travel arrangements already. They were coming in late the next day from Jacksonville to Marseille. I jotted flight numbers and times.

“Do you want me to come and pick you up at the airport?”

“No,” my mother said. “Don’t leave Charlotte there alone.”

“She wouldn’t be alone,” I said. “In fact, she could come.”

“No need to have her on the road,” my mother said. “We’ll take a cab.”

“It’s a long ride. It’ll be expensive.”

Now it was my sister on the line. “It’s only euros,” she said, as if euros didn’t count as anything more than Monopoly money.

In fact, the more money Elysius and Daniel could spend on Charlotte, the more they could prove that they were still good parents. And they
were
good parents. They had their deficits, of course. We all do. But now they doubted themselves on the most basic level. They were shaken. Toward the end of the conversation, Elysius said, “Where did we go wrong?”

“You can’t see this as a personal failure,” I said. “That’s not what this is about.”

“Easy for you to say,” she said, which felt condescending. “We’ll be there tomorrow night. At least Mom and I get a trip to the South of France out of it all!”

“Right,” I said. This again wasn’t a bad thing to say. It just wasn’t the right thing.

“We’ll be there tomorrow night. Around eight or so, the way I figure it.”

“Wait, one more thing.” I wanted to ask her this while my mother wasn’t there, but at least I had my sister’s ear, even if briefly. “How does Mom seem to you these days?”

“How is
anyone
doing these days?” she said, exasperated. “She’s fine, considering. She’s a rock, per usual, I guess.” She leaned away from the phone. “Mom,” she said loudly, “how are you doing with all of this?”

“Fine!” she said. “We’re all doing fine!”

wasn’t doing fine. That night as I lay down in bed and tried to be calm and still, my heart felt concussive. I would see Julien in my mind’s eye, and he would turn to me again. I would feel his lips on mine, his fingers run down the length of my arm, the warmth of his hand around mine. I would see the glowing paper lanterns in the background and then Abbot’s strange gaze. Was I falling for Julien? Why him? Why now? Unlike Jack Nixon, he was complicated and therefore not perfect. Put us together and the baggage, our emotional steamer trunks, multiplied exponentially. He was the wrong choice, wasn’t he?

If I was falling for Julien—beyond logic and reason and sensible thought—could Abbot sense it? I’d told Charlotte that this was how we were wired. Was Julien right when we drank wine near the fountain and talked that night? Were we ghosts and, in the moment of that kiss, were we real? If Abbot had seen us, what had he thought of it? Julien meant a lot to him, and I was pretty sure that Abbot meant a lot to Julien. He was teaching Abbot how to play soccer, to nurture a bird, to sing the French national anthem. Abbot had looked to him to see if it was safe to shake Adam’s hand. And, most of all, they had their lost fathers in common.

But was Julien truly interested in me? He’d had a very bad day. He’d seen his ex-wife with his brother. He’d seen his daughter for a brief moment, and then she was taken away. Was he really interested in me or did he simply desire distraction?

I pulled the crisp white sheet to my chest and rolled over, staring out the open window. I loved Henry. I always would love Henry. Was it fair then to show affection for someone else, knowing that I would never be able to give all of my love to them, that it would always be only a portion?

Then I would see Julien piggybacking his daughter, her cheek pressed to his back, the way he looked at her over his shoulder. I would see Julien’s face in my mind, the lanterns all around, and he would say, “We’re French. We forgive people who fall in love even when they feel they shouldn’t.”

he next day, I busied myself getting ready for Elysius and my mother’s arrival. Elysius and my mother would share the fourth bedroom, the only one not yet painted, where there were two single beds. I changed the linens, cleaned the kitchen as well as I could—it still had the feel of a charred hull—and put fresh flowers in vases. I took a jaunt to the Cocci, the patisserie-boulangerie, the vegetable stand off the highway. I went in to Trets, stopped at a pet shop, and bought three fat koi. They sat in the backseat in large, shiny plastic bags, fluttering their wings.

Once I was back home, I picked up the heavy bags and set them next to the fountain and then I found Charlotte making crepes with Adam and Abbot on the hot plate set up on the kitchen table. She’d also made whipped crème fraîche and
mixed it with local peaches and sugar, freezing it all into ice cream. Abbot was in heaven.

When everyone had finished their crepes and peach ice cream, we went out into the front yard. Abbot brought the bird in the box and set it in the shade beside the house. He had his notebook, too, and sat it on the stone lip of the fountain. Adam helped me lift each of three large bags with the koi inside of them and, one by one, we set them loose, with a gush of water, into the fountain. Abbot ran his hands across the surface of the water, making ripples. The fish pulsed their fins, flicked their tails.

“They’re happy in here,” Abbot said.

“Contented,” Charlotte said.

“It’s not a bad place to end up,” Adam said.

“I’d live in this fish pond if it were an option,” Charlotte said.

“Me, too,” I said.

Abbot had found an abandoned soccer ball in the Dumonteils’ house and Julien had told him he could keep it. He’d kicked it in a bush and was digging it out now. That’s when Abbot announced that he wanted to set the swallow free.

“Why now?” Adam asked. “If you don’t mind my probing.”

“The fish like the fountain. They get to swim around. It’s better than the pet store, and yesterday, everybody was talking about the Bastilles, which were prisons,” Abbot said, “and I think of the box as a hospital, but it could be a prison,
if you look at it like a bird.” He pulled the ball out of the bushes and stood up with it propped under his arm.