Visible (Ripple)
Page 8
Sam grunts a short laugh. “As Sir Walter said, ‘Over my cold and deceased flesh.’”
I raise an eyebrow. “The French have a definite way with words.”
“Meanwhile, Chrétien’s beside himself.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Kind of picked up on that.”
“Apparently, when she died, Chrétien was going to burn his wife’s diary, but Sir Walter convinced him that there might come a time he would want to read it. I guess she wrote a few entries toward the last days of her life that Chrétien couldn’t bring himself to look at back then.”
“Oh, wow. Bummer.” Then I remember something. “Chrétien was reading a very old book just before he and I went clothes shopping together. He set it down to help me when my jeans button popped off. It had a brown leather cover.”
“That was it,” says Sam. “In our hurry to leave, he forgot all about it. Brown leather book, brown leather chair … no one saw it.”
“Fritz saw it,” I say, angry. And then a small part of me does this little hop-skip-jump inside. Chrétien set down his wife’s journal to go shopping with me. I don’t want to read too much into that, obviously, but the symbolism is, as my English teacher would say, readily apparent for anyone who’s awake.
“Maybe it’s for the best,” I say, slowly. “Maybe it will help Chrétien to let go of the past. Isn’t that what he needs?”
Sam looks at me, her brows drawn together. “What Chrétien needs is his wife’s diary back. You saw the look on his face just now.”
I frown. I’m not sure Sam’s right about this, based on things I’ve heard Ma say. “Let me ask you a question. Have you ever seen a picture of my dad at my place?”
“No,” replies Sam.
“That’s right,” I say. “And you never will, either. My mom says the best thing she ever did to help her move on was to get rid of every trace of him. Trust me, this may hurt now, but it will help Chrétien in the long run.”
Sam is quiet for a second, but then she shakes her head. “You can’t compare the two things at all. They’re completely different.”
I raise an eyebrow. “They look pretty same-same to me.”
Sam continues. “In the case of your mom, it was her choice. Bridget’s choice.” She wraps her hands around her arms in a sort of self-hug and looks at the fire. “There’s a difference between choosing to let go of your past and having your past ripped out of your hands,” she says quietly.
How do I respond to that? I mean, she’s right, obviously. There’s a difference. But is it an important one?
I sigh. “Maybe you’re right about choosing versus not choosing. I don’t know.” I don’t say out loud the other stuff I’m thinking: that either way, after three hundred years, it is maybe time for Chrétien to think about moving on.
“Me neither,” says Sam. “Not really. All I know is we can’t let any offspring of Helmann’s get that password.”
A disturbing thought occurs to me. “Fritz’s office is in San Francisco, right?” I ask. “Do you think Chrétien decided just now to zip back to San Francisco and steal the diary back?”
“Before you woke up, Will already suggested going to San Francisco, and Chrétien rejected the idea as too dangerous,” says Sam. “They have rippler detection in the lab where Fritz works.”
“Excuse me? How do you detect invisible, insubstantial people?”
“By temperature,” says Sam. “If a rippler strolls into the lab, the change in temperature registers and they set it up to make the lights dim and a warning siren go off.”
“Oh,” I say. “That’s handy. For them, I mean.”
And for me, too. The more I think about it, the more I am glad Chrétien has had his hand forced, as it were. If he can say goodbye to his past, he’s got a better chance at happiness now.
I look around the farmhouse. It’s awfully quiet with just me and Sam. A chill runs along my shoulders. How would I know if it wasn’t just us?
“Why don’t we have one of those temperature things?” I ask, looking around for signs of invisible kidnappers.
“We have Sir Walter,” says Sam. “He hears what he calls people’s ‘thought signatures’ when they are invisible and nearby.”
“Oh. Right.” Like me with Chrétien. I try listening for him for a sec, but he must not be talking to God at the moment. Or to me.
“By the way, I’ve been meaning to tell you something,” I say. “Chrétien and I can converse when we’re invisible. We found out on the car ride down here.”
Sam’s left brow arches. “You can hear him?”
I nod.
“I can’t get Will to hear me,” she says, sadly. “We have to send images. Sir Walter said it might get better someday, but so far it hasn’t. Well, except now when we ripple, we can ‘write’ each other even if we’re not touching.” She sighs. “You’re lucky.”
I’m on the verge of saying something very sarcastic, but at the last minute, I don’t.
Proof Gwyns can be reformed.
“It must be Chrétien,” says Sam. “Sir Walter says he is exceptionally talented in that regard. Sort of a human amplifier.”
“Chrétien’s exceptional in a lot of regards, most of which are hidden under way too many layers of clothing,” I murmur.
Proof Gwyns can’t be reformed.
“Gwyn, we talked about this. No breaking his heart.”
“Can’t break what you can’t touch.” I’m light and breezy about it. Like it’s not breaking my heart.
Sam looks worried still.
I take one of her hands in mine. “I know, Sam. I’m giving him a wide berth. I mean, wide for me.”
She hugs me. “I just hate to see him suffering like this,” she whispers.
Me, too. And for once, I don’t try to make a joke out of it.
Chapter Eleven
MOVIE POPCORN NIGHT
Chrétien returns two hours later, arriving just after Sir Walter has come back and conjured a meal out of thin air. (Okay, a few cans and jars and wheels of cheese were maybe involved.) We are just sitting down together for a late lunch.
I pat the seat next to me. “Give me some sugar, sugar,” I say to Chrétien. It’s something I said all the time back home. It’s flirty, I know, but for once I’m not trying to … you know, flirt. I’m just hoping to redirect his thoughts to Las Abuelitas and to his life now. I wish I could stop that look of hurt on his face. This much of what I want for Chrétien is real and true and solid.
We talk about stuff over dinner, the five of us, but Chrétien doesn’t exactly join in, beyond answering yes and no a few times. I can’t seem to do anything to cheer him up, although if I don’t do something, I’m going to plunge right down the rabbit hole after him, I swear.
The whole room is catching Chrétien’s sad mood, as if depression is contagious. Sir Walter gets quiet, and then Sam gets worried looking at Sir Walter being quiet, and then Will gets concerned about Sam looking worried. I mean, this cannot be allowed to continue. So I make a decision: the buck stops here.
“Okay,” I say. “That’s it. Movie Popcorn Night. Where’s the computer?”
Everyone in the room stares at me.
“What?” I demand. “Why are you looking at me? Like that?”
Sam responds. “Movie … popcorn … night?”
“Yes,” I say, crossing my arms. “It is totally a thing.”
Will frowns. “I don’t think they’re big on popcorn in France.”
“Fine,” I say. “Movie pâté night then.” I hold up a ceramic pot of pâté. “Or movie pickled onions night.” I point to the jar of pickled onions.
“I take it ‘movie popcorn night’ is where you watch a movie and eat popcorn?” Sam asks.
“It’s a Li family tradition,” I say. “Because, you know, Ma’s thing with cooking dinners. Or, rather, her thing with not cooking dinners.”
“She makes dinners.,” says Sam. “Just … weird ones.”
“Organic popcorn is very healthy,” says Will.
“Um….” says Sam, looking around the cottage.
“Mick’s computer has internet,” says Will. “I’m sure we can find something.”
Ten minutes later, we are arguing over the selections on a French site devoted to films américains. I put the kibosh on Romeo and Juliet, both the Zeffirelli and the Leonardo DiCaprio versions, as suggested by Will. Sam, her eye on Chrétien, won’t say yes to anything that’s a straight comedy. It’s looking like we’ll never get Movie Popcorn Night started. But then I find one.
“Oh,” I say, a bit of a sigh in my voice. “Ever After is perfect!”
No one but me has seen it, although I spend a minute trying to convince Sam and Will they must have seen it. But they’re both pretty sure they haven’t.
“It’s okay you haven’t seen it,” I say. “That’s perfect, actually. You will all love it. It’s set in France. Long ago France, so there’s something for Sir Walter, and it’s a love story, so there’s something for Sam, there’s Leonardo da Vinci for Will, and Chrétien—you are just going to have to take my word for it: best Cinderella story ever.”
As I say this, I remember Sam’s weird warning when I wanted to do a paper on Cinderella. She’s looking at Chrétien. I look over, too.
Chrétien manages a small smile, his mouth pulling up on one side. “Let us enjoy the performance,” he says.
Sir Walter crosses to stoke the fire one last time, and then, with the computer set up on a low table, we snuggle onto the couch and against the couch, all five of us. It is very crowded, but no one minds.
The music starts and, for the next exactly one hundred minutes, I am swept up in this alternate world where fathers love their daughters, and hard work and attitude pay off, and it is just, maybe, possible to believe that an ever after might end happily.
The fire has died down, and when I glance up to Sir Walter, our usually enthusiastic stoker-of-fires, I see him wiping a tear from his face.
Will starts rattling off historical inaccuracies as the credits roll. “I mean, yes, Francis the First was patron to da Vinci,” he begins. “But if you take into consideration—ow!” he says. “Broken leg, here!”
Sam glares at him. “That’s why I punched your arm and not your leg,” she says.
I smirk just a little because honestly, the way those two never disagree about anything can get a bit nauseating. Plus, how dare he attack the best Cinderella re-tell ever?
Chrétien rises from the couch. “I shall retire,” he says quietly. “Thank you for the evening’s entertainment,” he says, turning to me. “It was most … informative.”
I frown at Chrétien’s broad back as he disappears (literally) for the night. Informative? What does that even mean?
“You must forgive my son,” says Sir Walter. He strokes his goatee in his “I’m worried” way. “He is most distressed at the loss of his wife’s diary.”
“Do you think the movie made it worse?” I ask.
“I believe your kind intention in providing a distraction from the diary made it better,” replies Sir Walter, solemnly.
“Can I ask you a question?” I ask. “What is it with all the journals and diaries anyway? I don’t know one single person who does that in this century.”
Sir Walter chuckles. “It is no longer the fashion; that is true enough. But consider for a moment your own devotion to the … how do you call it?” He raises and contemplates his cell phone. “Ah, yes: the social media. Do you not therein record the manner in which your days are passed, whether by word or by picture?”
“Huh,” I say. “I guess, when you put it that way, my generation does journal. We just do it more publicly.”
Sir Walter does one of his little nods that means, yes.
I swear I should write a book on French gestural language. For a nation that loves its mother tongue, they sure say a lot without words.
The fire is pretty much dead now, and we all sit without talking for several minutes. I get up, finally, and tell everyone good night. The bed is cold, but the down-filled blanket is warm. My last thoughts are about ballet and the language of gesture and whether the French say stuff with their bodies because of Louis Quatorze’s obsession with dance.
When I wake up, it’s dark, although there’s a stripe of moonlight streaking through the window. I can’t figure why I am awake when the sun isn’t up, and I’m feeling pretty grumpy about it, frankly, because I was dreaming I was Danielle de Barbarac and Chrétien was Prince Henry, which is a much nicer thing to be focusing on in the middle of the night than Will’s noisy sleep breathing in the main room.
For a minute, I figure that is what woke me up. Will isn’t snoring exactly, but he’s a pretty noisy breather. But then I realize it’s singing that woke me up. A particular kind of singing. The kind made by a seventeenth century Catholic who’s been transported into the twenty-first century with his old habits intact.
“Chrétien,” I mumble to myself.
Ugh. Now that I can hear him chanting, there is no way I’m falling asleep until I tell him to knock it off already. I’m pretty sure God is fine with you chanting prayers in your mind without … intending the words to fly “out there” or whatever.
I stumble out of bed, trying to remember where it was that Chrétien was supposed to sleep. Out in the main room, Will has the couch. Sam’s got the other room in the house. What’s left? And then I remember Sir Walter was going to ripple instead of taking up a bed. I saw Chrétien ripple last night, too, so he must be doing the same thing.
Except that I can hear him. He’s got to be around here somewhere.
“Chrétien?” I whisper so I don’t wake anyone up. He must be solid somewhere close based on how loud and clear he’s singing right now. I look in the bathroom because I made him hang out in my bath to sing prayers a couple weeks ago when he brought Sam back from being kidnapped and having an egg harvested. Remembering Sam’s ordeal, I shudder. At least I was only kidnapped and drugged.
He’s not in the bathroom, however. That leaves Sam’s room and the kitchen. Although, if Chrétien is chanting in Latin over my sleeping best friend, that would just weird me out beyond belief. I have caught him glancing at her with this wistful, sad expression.
Oh, no.
Does Chrétien have feelings for Sam?
If there is anything sadder than Chrétien not falling head over heels in love with Yours Truly, it would be Chrétien falling in love with Already Taken. I swing back to Sam’s room, but he’s not there. Thankfully.
He’s not in the kitchen, either. Although without any moonlight on this side of the house, I could be missing him if he were sitting really still.
“Chrétien?” I call out into the darkened room.
He’s not here. I turn back to the main room just in time to see him ripple solid in front of the fireplace.
“Holy guacamole and salsa!” I hiss-whisper.
Will, on the couch, doesn’t even twitch. Mick said something about how he could sleep through a convoy of ambulances, sirens blaring.
“Mademoiselle?” Chrétien whispers back.
“Shh!” I bring one finger to my lips and point to Will with the other.
He walks very close to me. So close I can feel his breath on my neck as he whispers in my ear. “You require my presence?”
I grab his hand and march him into the kitchen so we can talk. Chrétien’s hand in mine feels warm, and I curse myself for not shoving him by the shoulders instead because now I’ll just have to let go of his hand again, and I so don’t want to let go.
But I get us to the long table where we all ate dinner and let his hand slip from mine and let out a long exasperated sigh. For oh, so many reasons.
“You were chanting your prayers and it woke me up. I thought you were in my room or next door or
something.”
“Mademoiselle,” he says, “I beg your pardon. I was in my chameleon form. I did not think to be overheard.”
“You were invisible?”
From somewhere on the table, Chrétien finds and strikes a match. He lights one of the large candles on the table. His face is furrowed in concentration as he tries to light a second candle before the match burns his fingers. He doesn’t quite make it and winces, then brings his finger to his mouth.
Oh, dear God. Those fingers. That mouth. I look away. I swallow hard and try to remember why I am here.
Chrétien tilts his head to one side and answers my question from a minute ago. “I was, indeed, invisible when I was chanting the hours. And yet, you report that you could hear me?”
I nod. In the flicker of the candles’ light, Chrétien’s face is all angles and planes. His eyes are darker, too. He is altogether the most perfect thing I have ever laid eyes on. And he’s altogether unavailable. I look away.
“I suppose,” he says, “that in addressing God Most High, I may be considered as intending my voice to reach outward. It would make sense that you heard, in that case.”
“Yeah, but you were invisible and I was solid. Doesn’t that make it weird that I heard you?”
Chrétien shrugs. The light dances, golden, across his face. “We have … what is the word? Connected. You have become attuned to my thoughts, perhaps.”
Connected. Great. Because that is so what I need right now. I sigh.
Chrétien frowns. “I wonder that Mademoiselle Samantha never heard me.”
Oh, I do know about this. “She heard you, Chrétien. She told me it kept her up nights, too. She also said something about the Catholic Church no longer requiring the same, um, prayer schedule. So you might want to check up on that.”
He does a head-bow-acquiescence thing.
“I shall ask my father. And tonight, I shall chant no more. Forgive, if you please, my unintentional disturbing of your rest.”
“That’s okay,” I say. “You looked like … you looked like you could use some, uh, divine solace tonight.” I seriously don’t know where the word “solace” came from. I don’t recall its being a part of the Gwyn vocab. Must be a Chrétien word.