The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted (43 page)

“That’s all I’m asking,” Charlotte said.

Elysius walked to the stone fountain and sat down. She looked broken. She stared out across the vineyards, her face slack, her eyes drifting.

“Heidi,” my mother said, “are you sure?”

“Yes,” I said. “I want to help Charlotte however she needs it.”

My mother raised her hands in the air and said to all of us, “Get your chairs. Pick them up. Follow me.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Come with me,” she said. “Up, up!”

“Come where?” my sister asked.

“We’re going to watch the mountain,” she said, and she began dragging her chair out of the shadow of the house across the gravel driveway into the grass, where the mountain was in full view.

Charlotte grabbed her chair, and I grabbed mine. We
pulled them through the gravel and set them next to my mother’s.

“Are you all crazy?” Elysius said.

“No,” my mother said. “This is how we’ll come to our answers and how we’ll find our resolve to stick to them.” I remembered Véronique’s explanation of the mountain, the wide canvas, as she put it, and how she said that my mother used to stare at the mountain that lost summer when she first arrived.

“Staring at a mountain?” Elysius said.

“What do you think the mountain is for?” my mother said.

“It changes colors all throughout the day,” I said.

Charlotte said, “There are people who go on tours and spend a lot of money to pay a guru to take them to the mountain so that they can get answers by watching it change colors.” I was fairly sure this was a lie but one that would grab Elysius and pull her in, and that made me a little proud of Charlotte for coming up with it on the fly like that.

“There are?” Elysius said. “Gurus?”

“Come on, Elysius,” my mother said. “Line up.”

Elysius picked up her chair and put it next to mine.

“We won’t talk about anything, not until sunset at least. And then we can talk as much as we need to, but for now, quiet,” my mother said. “We’ll sit here all day and the answers will come.”

And so we sat down, in silence, and started watching the mountain, waiting for answers.

he mountain was a force. I’d been feeling its pull since I arrived. It had given my mother answers in the past. She’d gazed at it when she first arrived, and maybe it told her that it was okay to fall in love, to be a heart thief, and, in the end, when it was on fire, it told her to go home.

I didn’t expect anything that dramatic. Maybe this gazing would simply allow us all a little time to think—to measure our words, at the very least. And so this was where I found myself, and I was more than willing to give in. We needed something beyond ourselves. Why not this? Why not attempt to find a few answers and some resolve?

The day went on. Abbot resurfaced. He played waiter and brought us drinks, jambon sandwiches, olives, and more of Charlotte’s homemade peach ice cream. Charlotte got out
of the chair and sat on the ground. Abbot brought out a blanket and pillows, and I lay down, my ankles crossed, my hands behind my head. Charlotte curled to one side, her hands tucked under her head.

Elysius found all of this nearly impossible, as you can imagine. She was a deeply anxious person. She’d have to break every once in a while to pace around a little or do a few restless yoga poses and then some squats. But she took it seriously. In fact, early on, she handed Abbot her BlackBerry, a great act of sacrifice. She was
trying
, as she’d said in the dress shop earlier that summer. Deep down she knew that quiet observation and contemplation weren’t her strong suits, and she was an overachiever, bent on getting things right.

Véronique emerged at some point in the afternoon and asked what we were doing. My mother told her.

“Oh,” she said. “Can I sit with you?”

“Of course,” my mother said, and they sat side by side. I imagined them as kids again, their childhood selves looking on at the grown-up women they’d become. There were no guests in the house. It was empty. They kept their eyes on the mountains, and sometimes their eyes closed, and they dozed. I couldn’t fall asleep. I was committed. I didn’t want to miss answers.

The swallows appeared. Together we watched them scatter and swoop against the backdrop of the mountain. Abbot drew pictures in his notebook. This time he drew each and every one of us, and we all had wings and were flying with
the swallows—Henry was just another person in the group, flapping among us. That seemed right. He wasn’t a ghost. We weren’t ghosts. We were all together.

And when the mountain was a dusky, bruised blue, I was struck by how incredibly beautiful it was. I thought of Henry after the miscarriage, how I finally confessed that I felt sorry for him. He told me not to.
I’m only a beggar here
. This mountain, the arched back of the earth risen before us, it made me feel humble, like a beggar, just lucky to be here at all, even briefly. And in light of this mountain, we’re all here only briefly. I started to cry, very quietly, because of the ache of missing Henry. A simple ache, and the tears were simple, too. Abbot noticed right away, and he wiggled over and rested his head on my stomach.

Véronique warmed leftovers and Abbot helped her serve. After dinner they disappeared into the house and returned with a tray of candles, red wine, glasses. We set the candles down around us, filled the glasses with wine, and kept on watching the mountain, as the stars began to appear in the night sky.

There we were—Charlotte, my sister, my mother, Véronique, and I—all of us sitting now in a ring of candles, with Abbot falling asleep on my lap. It was strange how loud the world was when you weren’t filling it up with your own noise. It was strange how brilliant the colors of the mountain were. Even though I thought I’d been paying attention, I really hadn’t. There was the scent of the lavender, still in season, pungent and sharp and sweet, rolling on the wind.

I thought of Henry and, this time, not how much I loved him, but how much he loved me. That was how Julien had put it.
Everyone thinks that it is a gift to have someone love you, but they’re wrong. The best gift is that you can love someone—like he loved you
. How had Henry loved me? It was as if he was the world’s leading expert on the arcane subject of Heidi Buckley, the
only
expert on the arcane subject of Heidi Buckley. He knew me in exquisite detail, in contradiction, in all of my little vanities and falsehoods and flaws. I would catch him studying me in the kitchen of the Cake Shop, laboring over a cake.

“Stop it,” I’d say.

“Stop what?” he’d say back, knowing exactly.

“You look stupid,” I’d say, smiling.

“Can’t a man show that he’s in love? Is that allowed in contemporary society?”

“Yes, but you have a stupid look on your face.”

And he did. It was dreamy, almost drunk. “It’s weird,” he’d say, “it’s like I’m having a stroke and all the edges of things fade away and it’s just you there and you are the ether and every element in the room gets out of whack, and it’s all particles and I’m in the presence of love and I can’t believe it, and it’s you, and I can’t believe I found you, and you found me, and you actually love me back. It’s really a wonder I don’t fall down and hurt myself when all this washes over me. Yes, I’m love-struck. I’m stricken. I’m a stroke victim and I have a dumb look on my face. I love you.”

Henry could go on these little verbal rampages about love. When we were first dating, they were short, like, “I love
you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you.” But as we grew older, it took him more words to get at love and how he loved me.

And these were my fears. As many versions of Henry that I lost, I was losing his version of me. I loved that version—the one he invented when he watched me while I worked, the one he invented when we first met in the crowded kitchen, the one without her pocketbook, locked out of her house demanding to be kissed, the one who got out of the car in the middle of the intersection to tell him she was pregnant, the one who was so sure she’d die in childbirth, the one who had a miscarriage, whom he lifted from the empty tub and put back in bed.

Where had those versions of Heidi gone? Were they lost forever?

But there, in the presence of the mountain as the sun slipped away and the dark purples emerged and the sky took shape overhead, I realized that every time that I returned to the world at hand—for Abbot, mostly—I grew stronger. And maybe Henry’s Heidi wasn’t gone but still here, only tougher. What if Julien truly loved me and I loved him? What if there were more versions of myself out there and I had shut them down?

Eventually Charlotte stood up, the candles glowing at her feet, and said, “I’m sorry. I know I didn’t get knocked up on purpose or anything, but I’m sorry that I’ve put everyone through this.”

Everyone started talking at once. There was an outpouring.
My mother said that she loved Charlotte, that of course she hadn’t meant to get pregnant. I said that this was what family offered each other. We were here for her. Even Elysius started to say something, but Charlotte raised her hands and cut us off. “You don’t have to tell me everything,” she said. “I get it. And I’ve also realized that I love Adam Briskowitz, but I’m not
interested
in him right now. He’s pulling me away from my focus. And I’d rather let him go.”

Elysius looked at Charlotte. She stood up, too, and said, “I have a baby already. It might not be something that anyone else really gets, but your father is my baby. I’m protecting and caring for and tending to an artist. And that’s why I haven’t done a good job of raising you, Charlotte. I’m raising him.”

Charlotte nodded. I figured that this made sense to her, although it was hard to hear. It was the truth. It probably put words to a hunch she’d had for years.

“Heidi would do a better job. Her house would be a home. And I’m sorry about what I said earlier, about trying to bring back the dead.”

“It’s okay,” I said.

Elysius looked at my mother. “Is that what’s supposed to happen here?” she asked.

My mother looked at Véronique.

“C’est clair?” Véronique said.

My mother translated. “Does it feel clear to you? Really clear?”

Elysius put her hands on her hips and took a deep breath, then let it out. “Yep.”

“Then, yes,” my mother said. “That’s what’s supposed to happen.”

“So, it’s okay with you still, Charlotte?” I asked. “To come live with Abbot and me?”

Charlotte smiled. “I know it’s going to be hard. It’s a lot to ask of you and Abbot. I mean, it’s more than okay with me.”

“Me, too,” I said.

“Me, too,” Elysius said, and then she added, matter-of-factly, “Can I go to bed now? I’m spent.”

“Yeah,” Charlotte said. “Can I go to bed?”

My mother was staring at the mountain again. Véronique nodded. My mother gave permission with a flick of her hand, once again a matriarch.

“Abbot needs to go to bed, too,” I said, pointing to his head on my stomach.

“I’ll bring him with me,” Charlotte said.

I jiggled Abbot’s shoulder and whispered his name. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. Charlotte lent him a hand and I boosted his butt, and he was on his feet, limping sleepily to the house. On the way, I heard Charlotte say, “Uncle Abbot. Do you like that or do you prefer the full proper term, Uncle Absterizer?”

thought about getting up and following Charlotte and Abbot inside. I’d gotten an answer of some kind. Wasn’t I learning to feel, connect, let decisions form? I turned over onto my stomach, propped on my elbows, and looked back
at the Dumonteils’ house, which was dark. And then I turned and looked at my mother and Véronique. I said, “The box.”