Off the Wild Coast of Brittany

by Juliet Blackwell

Or maybe the workers hadn’t shown up because Natalie hadn’t paid her latest round of bills. When he left, François-Xavier siphoned off the majority of their shared bank account, leaving her to get by on a few hundred euros and maxed-out credit cards until she received a check from her publisher for the book under contract, a follow-up to Pourquoi Pas?

  Her jaw tightened again. Her current work in progress was meant to be all about her perfect life with her perfect French chef fiancé, and to be accompanied by a liberal smattering of recipes and mouthwatering photos of the meals she and François-Xavier prepared—what her agent referred to as “French food porn.”

  Natalie took a deep quaff of her pastis, let out a long sigh, and watched as Bobox scratched the ground in her incessant search for something appetizing in the sandy soil of the weed-strewn courtyard.

  François-Xavier was supposed to run the kitchen, and Natalie was supposed to run the guesthouse, and it was all supposed to be beautiful.

  But things had not gone according to plan.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Alex

  Why in the world did Nat move to such a godforsaken island?

  The Île de Feme revealed itself coquettishly, first appearing through the ocean mist like a vague mirage, the kind that shimmered along the highways on the hottest days in the remote Northern California mountains where they had grown up.

  Alex squinted as she tried to make out the strip of low gray land. On the map the distance between the island and the mainland didn’t look that great, but she and her fellow passengers had left the dock at Audierne more than an hour ago. The bobbing ferry had headed north at first, turning to the west only as they passed the Pointe du Raz, no doubt fighting the channel’s famous currents and avoiding the perilous reefs that lurked just below the surface, a vast underwater maze protecting the island. According to the travel guide—Alex always did her homework before beginning something new—the jagged rocks had brought catastrophe to legions of sailors and ships over the years. There had been 127 documented shipwrecks in this strait, and that was only since they’d started keeping track, back in the seventeenth century.

  The danger of shipwreck explained the multitude of lighthouses on the islands and along the coastline of the channel. Perched on rocky outcroppings, the towers appeared lonely and stoic. And hauntingly beautiful.

  Alex had also read in the travel guide that the French had two words for lighthouses: A phare was a true lighthouse, usually home to a keeper in the days before the lights were automated, while a feu—which meant “fire”—was a smaller tower with a smaller light. The mile-and-a-half-long Île de Feme was equipped with one true lighthouse on its western tip, a large feu on the easternmost point, and two smaller feux dotting the southern coast.

  Clearly, this region was well acquainted with maritime disasters. Alex found that oddly comforting. She was a bit of a shipwreck herself, these days.

  Alex climbed the steep set of steps, clinging to the cold metal handrails as the boat pitched sharply. She would be windblown on the open upper deck, but breathing fresh air was preferable to being stuck in the crowded, too-warm cabin below.

  Upon boarding the ferry, Alex had needed to harness every bit of self-control not to climb onto one of the seats and order everyone to don one of the bright orange life vests stacked in a cupboard. Don’t be weird, she reminded herself for the thousandth time. Act like the others. Besides, her very limited French didn’t include the vocabulary for “Safety first, folks!” She had contented herself with grabbing a dozen seasickness bags from a little stand next to the first aid cabinet and making a mental note of the location of an inflatable life raft.

  Just in case.

  As soon as they left the shelter of the harbor, the sea had become choppy and the boat was tossed about like a child’s toy, heaving this way and that, leaving its human inhabitants retching and grasping onto their molded plastic seats for dear life.

  Alex dug through her backpack for a package of wet wipes and handed them, along with a couple of the seasickness bags, to a young father whose little girl had lost her lunch all over the front of his sweater vest and jacket.

  She wasn’t feeling all that chipper herself, but keeping busy helped. It always had.

  Father and child taken care of for the moment, Alex made her way to a seat and kept her eyes on the horizon, gazing at a fixed point to quell the nausea.

  But seriously. Setting aside the “why” for the moment, how had Nat even found this place?

  Her little sister was forever bragging on social media, posting photos of herself dancing in the clubs of Budapest or shopping the open-air markets of Marrakech as she traipsed around the world “looking for herself.” On her blog she posted rambling descriptions of how she spent her days learning classic French cooking, and her nights hobnobbing with chic Parisians in cinematic wine cellars and cabarets. And if all that weren’t galling enough, irresponsible, carefree Nat had hit the jackpot when her memoir of finding herself and food—and love—became an international sensation, lingering at the top of the bestseller list week after exasperating week.

  Even the title annoyed Alex. Pourquoi Pas? Seriously? There were always plenty of reasons why not.

  But readers hadn’t agreed. Which just went to show you that people today were pathetic, casting about for direction in their sad little lives.

  Was she now doing the very same thing? Alex’s stomach heaved at that thought more than the seasickness. An island off the coast of Brittany had sounded so fantastical somehow when the thought first occurred to her back in dusty Albuquerque. It had seemed as if destiny had intervened. Anyway, she didn’t need forever. Just a little while, time to regroup, to make a plan. A respite from the convoluted joke that her life had become.

  Alex was out of options; she would swallow her pride. She had swallowed worse in her time.

  The island slowly came into focus. A small lighthouse had “Ar-Men” painted on it in tall black letters. The harbor was full of boats, varying in size from small dinghies to good-size sailboats to large commercial fishing vessels. A sweeping curve of three-story houses with crenellated rooflines fronted the harbor, gazing to the east as though longing for the mainland. Built of native stone, the houses were covered in stucco in cheerful shades of chalky blue, pale apricot, and butter yellow, their steeply pitched slate roofs studded with redbrick chimneys.

  A charming fishing village, read the caption under Nat’s bio at the end of Pourquoi Pas? Alex had stared at that bio for a very long time before making her decision to come.

  The rocking of the ferry subsided as the engines slowed and they navigated the entrance to the harbor. As they chugged toward the dock, a large silver tail broke the surface of the water. The Little Mermaid! Alex thought, then chided herself. It was probably some kind of huge fish, the likes of which she would no doubt soon be dining on.

  Alex hadn’t let Nat know she was coming. Her sister might not be thrilled to see her, but Nat wouldn’t turn her away.

  If there was one thing they had learned from their survivalist childhood, it was the imperative of helping one another when the chips were down. As their father, who insisted on being addressed as The Commander, liked to say as he stomped around their remote mountain compound, barking orders and checking the contents of their bug-out bags, “Nothing brings a family together like Armageddon.”

  It won’t be forever, Alex thought, blowing out a long breath. Just until she figured out her next steps. If there were any next steps.

  Or until her own personal Armageddon arrived.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Violette

  AUGUST 1939

  There were two portents of the coming war: the wreck of the Santa Clarita and my grandmother’s discovery that her spells had been broken.

  To live on our island was to understand that shipwrecks were a fact of life. The rocky reefs that lurked just below the surface of the water
had claimed half a dozen unsuspecting ships in my lifetime, and no doubt hundreds more before I was born. The first that I remember was the steamship Hélène, which sank in 1929, when I was nine years old. There is a photograph of my sister, Rachelle, and me standing on the shoals and gazing out at it. To this day the ship’s motor rests on the gravel path just past the hotel, a useless memorial to those lost to the merciless ferocity of the sea.

  The weather was calm and peaceful the night the Santa Clarita met her doom. But as any islander knows, storms are not necessary to ruin even the finest ships in our reef-strewn waters. When the keeper of the lighthouse, Henri Thomas, spied the ship’s flag of distress, he summoned L’Iroise, which headed out from the sauvetage to rescue any surviving crew and passengers, and to retrieve what they could of the ship’s cargo.

  Whenever the church bells ring out their warning, the entire town rushes to shore and huddles there to assist the survivors by offering warm drinks and dry blankets, and pitching in to salvage lumber and luggage and whatever else is in the ship’s hold. A shipwreck is horrifying, but also electrifying.

  Not much usually happens on our little island.

  On that night the news spread quickly: The Santa Clarita had left Algiers and was headed to Brest with its keep full of wine. This news motivated some of the islanders more than usual.

  I was on my way to the cove to help haul crates out of the shallows and onto the sand when I found my grandmother, my mamm-gozh, kneeling in the mud by a hole in the ground, sobbing.

  “What is it, Mamm-gozh?” I asked, crouching beside her.

  “The spells . . . the spells have been broken,” she wailed.

  My grandmother kept the old ways: She understood the movements of the moon and the sea, the never-ending cosmic ballet of the earth and the stars and the heavens. She taught me that just as the sea rose to be closer to the moon, the moon drew itself closer to the sea. Mamm-gozh was a healer who mixed soothing salves and teas and tinctures. But she also cast spells, gathering items, wrapping them in bits of muslin or paper, and tying them with cords knotted many times, each knot representing an incantation. She would bury the packets at high tide during a full moon for spells of focus and perseverance, or during the low tide on the new moon for spells of financial success and protection.

  Now she knelt over a muddy hole, crying.

  “Surely it’s the dogs,” I said. “The dogs dug it up.”

  “No, ma petite fille,” Mamm-gozh said, shaking her gray head. “It is a sign. All the spells have been broken. This happened once before, you know. Before la Grande Guerre, the War of Nineteen Fourteen.”

  “I’m sure it must be the dogs, Mamm-gozh,” I repeated, uncertain but unwilling to consider what else this might mean. “Let me take you home.”

  I grasped her arm to help her up, all ninety pounds of her, leaning over to brush the mud from the black skirts of her traditional garb, the robe noire that hung loose on her shrinking frame. When I was young my grandmother had been hale and hearty; we islanders are not a diminutive people. Mamm-gozh still had the wiry muscles from a lifetime spent collecting seaweed on the shore and coaxing vegetables from the island’s sandy soil, but lately she seemed to be collapsing into herself, disappearing before my eyes a tiny bit at a time, as inexorably as the tide.

  After leaving Mamm-gozh in the care of my mother, I returned to the beach and spent the night assisting my fellow villagers in salvaging the wrecked ship’s cargo of wine. Together we dragged crate after heavy crate up the beach and down the path to the church, where we deposited them in Père Cecil’s storage room behind the sacristy because the Good Father said he needed the wine for communion. No islander would contradict a priest, even though everyone knew how rapidly Père Cecil was apt to deplete the stores of “communion” wine.

  By the time I returned home, the sky over the mainland was just beginning to brighten with the soft bluish tint of the new day.

  I found Mamm-gozh in her bedroom at the back of the kitchen, sorting through her death drawer. Though bone weary from hauling the heavy wooden crates all night, I watched, mesmerized. My grandmother had always kept this bureau drawer locked.

  “These are my grave clothes, Violette,” she told me, running her thin, blue-veined hand over her black silk wedding gown, stockings, slippers, and undergarments carefully wrapped in oiled paper. Mamm-gozh had written out her funeral arrangements in detail: the text for the sermon, the three hymns she wanted us to sing to mourn her, the inscription for her headstone. She even specified how many chickens to roast for the memorial feast. “You will remember this, yes?”

  I nodded.

  “And do not forget to bury my plate, cup, and saucer, and my knife, fork, and spoon with me,” she said. “I don’t want anyone else to use them.”

  “I will remember, Mamm-gozh,” I said. “But why?”

  “Because they might ingest my dreams and start living my life instead of their own.”

  “Don’t leave me, Mamm-gozh,” I begged.

  “That is not for us to say, child. The spells have been broken. I won’t live through another war,” my grandmother replied, shaking her head. “War is for the young, ma petite fille. I lost a son in the last one. I have no wish to endure it all again.”

  One week later—just before Germany invaded Poland, prompting France and Britain to declare war—my mamm-gozh, the one person on the Île de Feme who understood me, passed away in her sleep.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Natalie

  That woman looks exactly like Alex.

  The slim, fortyish tourist was dressed in her sister’s customary outfit of jean shorts cut off just above the knees, sporty shoes, and a long-sleeved T-shirt topped by a vest with multiple zippered pockets. Alex never wore anything without pockets, in which she carried not only a Swiss Army knife and matches but water-purification tablets and nutrition sufficient to last several days.

  Some people dressed to impress. Alex dressed to survive.

  This new arrival also carried a large backpack, ample enough for all the basics for survival. The Commander would have approved.

  Natalie peered more closely. Same straight dark hair as Alex, same deeply tanned skin. Of the five Morgen girls, only Natalie and Alex shared their mother’s olive complexion. But Natalie had gray eyes and had begun lightening her hair with subtle highlights at a Parisian salon so that she was now nearly blond.

  Natalie ran her fingers through her hair and studied the length of one lock: It bristled with split ends. She needed a trim. As she noted every morning when she looked in the bathroom mirror, it was evident she was no longer in Paris. The island’s part-time hairdresser did the best she could, but the results wouldn’t win any awards. Natalie hadn’t had a proper manicure in months, either. If she stayed on the island much longer, she would risk going feral.

  It had been so much easier, and felt so much more compelling, to maintain good grooming when she lived in Paris, where there were world-class salons on every other corner.

  The locals were fond of insisting that Brittany wasn’t really France at all. Natalie wasn’t sure about that, but the Île de Feme was definitely not Paris.

  In addition to her unkempt hair and ragged fingernails, Natalie wore typical island summer attire: cutoffs and a tank top, flip-flops on her sandy (and unpedicured) feet, a light sweatshirt at hand in case the winds picked up. Never, not in a million years, would she have dressed this way in Paris. It was simply not done.

  A nasty thought skittered into her consciousness: Maybe if I wasn’t such a mess, François-Xavier wouldn’t have—

  She shook her head. Stop it, Natalie. This isn’t about you. It’s about him being a scumbag.

  Living Well was Natalie’s brand. Happiness was all about gratitude and self-acceptance, becoming the best version of you, not living to please a man or anyone else. That was the message she preached to her many followers on
social media, and it was the resonant theme of her bestselling memoir. And she believed it. She did. But at the moment she was having a hard time . . . living it.

  Natalie took another sip of her pastis, enjoying the way the liqueur filled her mouth, slid down her throat, and made the harsh lines of her present situation ever so slightly fuzzy.

  That woman really does look like Alex.

  But that was absurd. Natalie had grown up with only her parents and her four older sisters for company, and ever since breaking free of the compound—she liked to say she escaped, like in that movie about World War II prisoners of war—she often imagined them in the faces of strangers: a bank teller or the cashier at the grocery store or, most disconcertingly, someone in line at one of her book signings waiting to speak with her. But inevitably they would turn out to be regular, normal people.

  This woman paused, checked the paper in her hand, scanned the street, and headed straight for the Bag-Noz, stopping at the small iron gates set into the stone garden walls. Respecting the boundary.

  “Hey, Nat,” the woman said, in the deep, slightly husky voice Natalie would recognize anywhere, that voice she would always associate with her childhood.

  Alex.

  It really was her.

  Alex now wore glasses, and her face had thinned and settled into worry lines, making her look a lot like their overworked and overburdened mother, Carla. Otherwise, though, Alex seemed exactly the same as the last time they had been together, almost ten years ago, when the family had gathered to scatter their mother’s ashes in the Klamath River, whose rushing waters Carla had loved so much.

  What is Alex, of all people, doing here?

  After a stunned pause, Natalie answered: “Hey, Alex. Is something wrong with Dad?”

  “Not that I know of,” said Alex.

  They stared at each other for a long moment before Natalie gathered her wits enough to say, “Sorry. Come in. The chain’s not locked.”