Miracle

by Deborah Smith

  This caring man was someone she knew. She shuddered with relief and bent her head to his shoulder. “For God’s sake, tell me what we’re doing here.”

  “Wait. It’s just a little farther. I swear.”

  He lifted her hands to his mouth and kissed them, then guided the car back onto the pavement and drove at a reasonable speed. Amy vaguely noticed the road bending around another hairpin curve. Then she saw a jutting lip of mountain spread into a grassy apron beside the road, a small sweep of green between the road and the plunging mountainside dotted with clumps of trees. At the edge of the grassy area was a thick barricade of steel posts and rails.

  Sebastien turned the Ferrari onto the grass and stopped well back from the barrier. He cut the engine and sat in silence, looking at the gray steel wall, his breathing noticeably shallow, his eyes slitted with thought.

  Suddenly she understood, at least in part. “Is this where your mother had the accident?”

  He inclined his head in an almost indiscernible nod. His attention never left the steel wall. “It was made of timbers, then. Not nearly so strong as now. Now, no matter how much one tried to break through, the barricade would probably hold.”

  No matter how much one tried. Trembling, she got out of the car and went to the driver’s side. Opening his door before he could reach for the handle, she knelt on the door ledge and put her arms around him.

  His control faltered inside her embrace. Bending his forehead against hers, he sighed raggedly. “You need to understand why I feel so pulled apart by my family. How I came by this ridiculous mixture of loathing and dedication. Perhaps you’ll see why I can’t leave them when they need me—”

  “Sebastien, I didn’t say that I want you to desert them—”

  “You’ll see why I can’t leave them,” he repeated. “But also why I never want to share—why I can’t share—in any true sense of family with them. Come. Let’s walk over to the railing.”

  He got out of the car and took her hand. Her knees were weak with dread as they walked to the chest-high barrier and stood looking down the steep, forested slope.

  “It’s changed a great deal. The trees … are all different.”

  “This is the first time you’ve come back?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sebastien, you always let me think that this accident didn’t affect you very much. You made it sound like something you’d forgotten years ago.” She squeezed his hand as tight as he was squeezing hers. Something was more horrible about this place than she could imagine. She wanted to scream with the anticipation of it. “What really happened here?”

  He turned his proud, agonized face toward her. The wind raked his hair roughly. “It was no accident.”

  “What?” She glanced down the slope, feeling sick to her stomach, then looked back at him for answers. He couldn’t mean what he’d said. “How could it not have been an accident?”

  “My mother drove through the barricade deliberately. She wanted to kill herself as well as my brother and sister and me.”

  Amy swayed against him. “Why?”

  “Because she blamed herself for my father’s unfaithfulness. He had mistresses. My mother decided that the shame and the fault were all hers. She wanted to punish herself, but she didn’t want to die alone.”

  Amy’s knees buckled. He caught her by the elbows and they sat down together. She looked between the steel rails at the pretty spring slope, trying to picture it covered in snow, a van twisted among the trees, blood and bodies on the snow … and Sebastien, hurt, terrified, and all alone with so much death.

  She held his hands in her lap. “How did you know that she meant to kill you all?”

  “She told me before she died. She was convinced that she was talking to my father. She thought I was dead, like Antoine and Bridgette.” He swallowed harshly. “I always felt doomed after what happened here. As if I’d cheated on an exam and would be caught for it, sooner or later.” A bitter smile crossed his mouth. “A self-destructive attitude, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Tell me exactly what happened. Everything. Please.”

  He began. She leaned her head against the barricade and listened dry-eyed while a large, broken ache settled in her chest. When he finished she put her arms around him again. This time he returned the embrace, holding her hard, with his face buried in her hair. “You’re one of only three people who know the truth,” he whispered eventually. “My father and I are the other two. How does it feel to be part of an unholy triumvirate?”

  She stroked his shoulders. “It’s much better than being an outsider.”

  “Do you feel reassured about my intentions, or just convinced that I’m too much trouble?”

  “Reassured. I’ll go back to America and wait.”

  “All right. Good. I don’t want you to be drawn into the ugliness that surrounds my family. The … curse. There, I’ll risk sounding ridiculous and call it what it seems to be. No one in the family escapes it.”

  Cursed. She’d never expected Sebastien to be so melodramatic. “You don’t believe that.”

  “I believe in this curse, yes, whether it’s simply coincidence or not. Perhaps it’s only the ugly results that have come from my father’s manipulations. Whatever the cause, I don’t want you caught up in my family problems.”

  She struggled to speak without breaking down. “After ten years of bein’ apart, I thought that now—”

  “We are together, and nothing has changed.”

  “You’ve changed, just in the past few days. All the bitterness has come back; I look at you and see something so cold it scares me.” She covered her face with her hands. “Jacques and Louise need you so much. How can you treat them so bad?”

  “I try very hard not to. I try to avoid them.” His voice was soft, anguished.

  “But that’s exactly how you hurt them!”

  “No. I fear that I might harm them some other way—spiritually, I mean.” He faltered, stopped, swallowed thickly. “I’m afraid to care too much about them. Children are so fragile—”

  “Like that little boy who saw his family die? And he was never the same. It colored his whole life. Like him?”

  “Perhaps I see myself, yes. I only know that it’s very hard for me to encourage their affection.”

  “How are you going to live in your sister’s house with them for the next few months? They need affection, not the cold-blooded supervision of some stranger who calls himself their uncle.”

  “The house staff will take care of them. They have a nanny. They spend their days at school. Annette will be brought home from the hospital in a few weeks. They’ll be fine.”

  “Look, Doc, I can help you with Jacques and Louise. I’ll work on your attitude like a dog with a bone.” She tried to coax him with a teasing tone, but he shook his head.

  As the impact of the upcoming months settled, they shared a look of quiet misery. “Stay with me until you have to return for your movie work,” he said, his voice hollow. “And I will visit you afterward, before you begin working on the club tour.”

  Nodding, crying, she kissed him. “Can you keep that ol’ curse off of us for the next couple of weeks?”

  “I’m sure I can.” He stroked her, kissed her in return, then bowed his head against hers and shut his eyes. “It’s the months afterward that I dread.”

  He went to the de Savin offices every morning at six and came back at six in the evening, his face haggard with frustration and fatigue. Each night after dinner they went upstairs to their suite, where she massaged his shoulders and listened to him describe the maddening tangle that his father’s businesses had become. They made love during those hours, sometimes in bawdy and quick couplings, sometimes with such unhurried tenderness that her throat ached with emotion. Afterward, his eyes more peaceful, he would shower, dress, and leave to spend the rest of the evening at the hospital.

  Amy saw how much her support meant to him, and it magnified her feeling that she alone could make his problems insignifica
nt. That sense of her value in life had been firmly instilled during the years when she’d struggled for and craved Pop’s approval, and now it drove her relentlessly.

  Late each night when he returned from the hospital, worn down and depressed, she greeted him with a sympathetic ear, a stiff brandy, and pampering hands. She refused to let herself fall asleep until she made certain he was content and sleeping soundly, and she rose ahead of him every morning to hurry downstairs, where the cook would arrange his breakfast on a bed tray. When he woke up in the cool predawn light, Amy had the morning paper, his breakfast, and her devoted attentions ready.

  After he left for the office she worked doggedly on new comedy routines, worrying about her upcoming tour. When she wasn’t working she spent the hours with Jacques and Louise, trying with all her energy to bridge the gap Sebastien’s indifference had created, so that when she went back to the States his niece and nephew might approach him more openly, and draw him into their lives.

  She ran on adrenaline and felt so tired she was weak, but she never slowed down. Sebastien wanted to pamper her, but she disliked being dependent and preferred to be the caretaker, as usual, in her life. With Elliot it had been a maternal job, but with Sebastien it was a satisfying partnership. She ignored its dark side: the obsession always to be supportive, to read Sebastien’s mind and anticipate his every need, the sense of inadequacy whenever she failed.

  It took a toll. When he came home a little early one night he found her curled up on the blue-carpeted floor of Jacques and Louise’s playroom, asleep. She woke to his hand squeezing her shoulder lightly and his voice speaking her name with awkward command. Amy blinked groggily and sat up. Sebastien had dropped to his heels beside her. He presented his usual elegant, forbidding image in a tailored black suit, and he frowned at the floppy cloth doll she’d been using as a pillow, then pushed it aside.

  Amy fussed with her disheveled hair and wondered if her face was imprinted with the doll’s dress buttons. “Oh, Lord, I was goin’ downstairs to wait for you, but Jacques started showing me one of his picture books, and—where are he and Louise?”

  “Having supper with their nanny. They said you were here.” He pulled her up with him as he stood, kissed her brusquely, and glanced around as if the playroom were a strange, discomforting world. “Why do you spend so much time with them? What were you doing in here?”

  She wrapped her arms around his neck and eyed him with wicked melodrama. “I’m having an affair with one of Jacques’s toy soldiers. I admit it. I have a fetish for tiny, plastic men.” His frown lightened into a hint of a smile, but lines of exhaustion fanned from the corners of his eyes. She touched them with a fingertip. “Not to worry, Doc. I’m only kidding about my toy boy. I’m sorry I wasn’t waiting downstairs when you got home.”

  “The children adore you. Are you trying to make me feel guilty for avoiding them?”

  “Yep.”

  “It won’t work.”

  “Well, on to Plan B, then.” She kissed him, hiding her chagrin beneath a determination to be patient and cheerful. “Come along. The table in our suite is set for supper, and I bought a new bottle of massage oil today. Edible. Herb-flavored. We can put it on the salad and play cute with the lettuce.”

  “You look pale.” He held her chin and studied her face. “You have dark circles under very bloodshot eyes, dear Miracle. This is not the face of a woman who claims to lounge about the boudoir all day.”

  “I’m fine. Stop diagnosing me, Doc. You’ve the one who needs rest and pampering, not me.” She kissed him again and danced away, pulling at his hands. “I’m making myself indispensable, see? So that when I leave a week from now you won’t forget me. Now come on. I want to be alone with you and our lettuce.”

  “Hmmm. I think I’ll put you to bed and give you a mild sedative. I’m beginning to see that I’ve taken advantage of your compulsion.”

  “What compulsion?”

  “The one that drives you like a maniac when you want to please someone you love.”

  “I’m not driven.”

  “You blame yourself because I’m depressed, even though it has nothing to do with you. That’s an attitude I hope to break you of, but I can see that I have a long way to go.”

  “I simply want to take care of you. Now be quiet and come to supper.”

  “This won’t do, Miracle. I don’t intend to spend the next week worrying about you. You will stop running after me with your hands held out. If I want a slave, I’ll hire one.”

  Her facade crumpled, and anger took its place. Didn’t he understand that she only knew how to be a caretaker? That the constant attention to other people’s pleasure—making them laugh when she was on stage, making him her absolute focus during this troubled time in his life—was a habit that made her feel secure, and without it she wouldn’t recognize herself?

  “I’ll have to go home early if you won’t let me take care of you,” she told him.

  “What nonsense.”

  “I’m not kidding. I don’t know how to act any other way. I’d feel lost. I’d brood about you all the time. I have to feel like I’m helping you. Like I can control all your problems for you, if I just try hard enough. Don’t be mad at me for that.”

  Swiftly he scooped his arms under her and picked her up. “Love, I’m not mad at you. But I’m not going to let you exhaust yourself. To bed, now. I’ll feed you and keep you still until you fall asleep.”

  “You and what army?” She tried to joke, but her voice trembled. “I’ve got a hundred little plastic soldiers on my side.”

  “Not any longer.” Leaving the playroom with her still cradled in his arms, he shoved the heavy wooden door shut with one foot. It closed with a solid, authoritative thump. “It’s just you and me, now. No one to rescue you from my orders. Surrender.”

  She ate supper in dull silence, anxious because he had rebuked her for the one thing she did best. Her skin felt clammy and tight. The meal’s roast lamb and delicately flavored vegetables weren’t welcome in her stomach, and she stopped eating halfway through the meal. Finally it occurred to her that she was suffering more than an emotional slump.

  “Are you all right?” Sebastien asked, reaching over to touch her damp face. “No! You’re sick. I knew it. You’ve made yourself ill!”

  “Excuse me.” She left hurriedly and went to the suite’s black marble bath, locking the door behind her. He stood outside listening to her throw up, scolding her for locking the door, his voice worried. “I’m fine,” she yelled, clutching the commode stubbornly while her stomach told her that its problems were far from solved.

  “There’s a stomach flu going around,” Sebastien called. “You’ve probably caught it.”

  “Nope.”

  She cleaned herself up, shivering and feeling weak but determined not to spend the night in a marble palace of plumbing. Opening the door, she straightened her shoulders and frowned up at Sebastien. “See? I feel better. I don’t need you to fuss over me.”

  “Perhaps I’d enjoy taking care of you. Or is that an honor your dignity refuses to grant me?”

  “You’re a sweetie, but I’m not sick. Now you go to the hospital to see Annette and your father, like usual, and I’ll be perked up again by the time you get back.”

  “No. You look like hell. Stop being stubborn.”

  “You’re making me sick by arguing with me. All Frenchmen like to argue. It’s a national sport.” She sucked in a sharp breath as her lower stomach cramped. Without thinking she rubbed a hand over the front of her wraparound blue dress.

  He saw her reaction and shook his head. “Are you getting diarrhea?”

  “What a romantic question. Yes!”

  “Don’t blush, for God’s sake. I spent years studying, smelling, and cleaning up every unlovely by-product the human body can make. Nothing offends me. Or embarrasses me. And after all the intimacies you and I have shared, I’m surprised that you’re embarrassed.”

  “We only have a week left! I don’t w
ant to be sick!” She sagged against the door frame, shook her head angrily when he stepped inside, then groaned with exasperation when he picked her up. “Shall I take you back to the toilet, my lady?” he asked in a gentle, if somewhat droll, tone.

  She clutched her stomach and gave up with a weary nod.

  Sebastien sent one of the house servants to a pharmacy with a prescription, but the medicine barely eased Army’s stomach. All that night and the next day she struggled with what she began to call Napoleon’s revenge. Sebastien waited on her hand and foot, forcing her to accept a new role in their relationship. She loved him for it but was miserably uncomfortable with her helplessness. He refused to leave her for the office or the hospital. His father, still unconscious, wouldn’t know if he visited or not, he told her, and Annette would hardly notice his absence among her nightly parade of friends.

  The next afternoon Jacques and Louise peeked in at her once when the suite’s door was open. She waved at them wanly from under the bed covers, and they waved back. Louise looked tearful, and Jacques frowned with anxiety. She knew that the adult world must seem unpredictable and dangerous to them right now.

  “I’ve only got a stomach ache,” she called, with all the cheerfulness she could muster. “And boy, do I stink.”

  They clasped their mouths and giggled. Sebastien watched from a desk across the room, where he was reading business documents. “Let Amy rest, now. Go and play.”

  They dragged their heels when their nanny herded them away. Amy shut her eyes as her stomach made gurgles of queasy protest. “If you want to make me feel better, go visit with them.”

  “Sssh. I’m going downstairs in a minute and fix you another cup of tea.”

  “I don’t want a cup of tea. I want—” Her stomach revolted unexpectedly, and she flung herself to the edge of the bed. When she threw up on an antique tapestry rug beside it she burrowed her head on her arms and began to cry, thumping the mattress with one fist as frustration overwhelmed her.