The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted

by Bridget Asher

  “They have a smoke detector in here,” I told him. “We’re fine.”

  “Okay,” he said, and then he closed his eyes. I sat there listening to his breathing, which quickly smoothed into an even rhythm. He was exhausted after all. Once I was sure that he was asleep, I lifted the dictionary out of the bed and held it for a moment on my lap. It had sharp edges. I didn’t want Abbot to bang into it in the night. I thought of opening it, letting myself indulge in what Henry had left behind. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I set it on the end table, and then I looked up and caught myself in the wardrobe’s mirror—foggy, ghostlike, someone who used to be but now was almost gone.

  rom my seat in the dining room, where Elysius, my mother, and I were having brunch, I could see Abbot and my father in Elysius’s heated pool. Abbot was already trolling around the surface. My father was wearing swim trunks that I found a bit skimpy. It was quite possible that he purchased these trunks in the seventies. He had nearly hairless pink legs and a paunch. He and Abbot were quite serious this morning. They were going to pretend they were in the Caribbean, and this would take some imaginative effort, especially since neither had ever been.

  My mother, Elysius, and I were eating pastries that my mother had picked up at the local bakery, as if there weren’t a huge block of uneaten wedding cake. I was eating the pastries while trying not to judge them. But every once in a while, my critical mind would kick in and I’d think, Pretty enough, but if it’s dry, what’s the point?

  Elysius had made a pot of coffee with some exotic beans that she claimed had a powerful effect on Daniel’s work. “Top grade, high octane.”

  There was an agenda. I knew that there had to be. Elysius and my mother had talked, and Elysius had written notes, and there was a list of items that we were going to get to, like it or not. I was not given a copy of this agenda, but I knew it existed, and so I proceeded through the conversation with caution.

  We talked about the wedding—anecdotes, details, other people’s dresses. My mother and I let Elysius complain about Daniel’s postponing the honeymoon to work until she came full circle and defended his art. “When you marry an artist, you also marry his work. I know that well enough by now. And I love his work. Not as much as I love him, but I do love it.” And, as if love were an appropriate segue, my sister said, “Jack Nixon said that you were charming.”

  “Charming?” I said, and I could feel myself blush. “I could barely make eye contact.”

  “I told you,” Elysius said, “the art of flirting—use it or lose it.”

  “Well, it’s already lost.” Jack Nixon was good looking and nice and he’d called me a beautiful woman, even after I let him off the hook, and now he’d said I was charming. Still, I was scared not only of him, but everything he represented.

  “So, did you like him?” Elysius asked. “He was hinting that he wanted to ask you out on a date. Something casual. He’s never been married. He has no kids, no baggage. He’s uncomplicated! He’s perfect!”

  Was that a sales pitch for me? I’d been married. I had a kid. I didn’t just have baggage; I hauled around steamer trunks! Not that there was anything wrong with Jack Nixon. There wasn’t. He seemed perfectly fine, but he wanted to date me? Dating? How could I be expected to date someone? I must have looked slightly stricken, because my mother jumped in. “Now, now,” she said, “she’ll find love again on her own time.”

  “Wait,” Elysius said. “You were in on this. You thought Jack was a good catch.”

  “I’m not ready,” I said, and then quickly asked where Charlotte was.

  “She’s still asleep,” Elysius said. “She tends to need a full day’s sleep to function.”

  “She’s that age,” my mother said.

  “I was never that age,” Elysius said. “I always woke up early.”

  “You had plenty of other ages, though. Your back talk phase. Your diet of cream cheese and chocolate phase. Your cigarette phase,” my mother said gently.

  It was quiet for a moment.

  “Well,” my mother said to fill the space.

  “Well?” I said. I was impatient for her to get on with it. What was her idea and how could I remove myself from what it required of me?

  “Well …,” Elysius said.

  “The house,” my mother said. “It needs someone to look after it.”

  “The house?” I said. My house was a little on the messy side, sure, and the back porch needed a coat of paint, and the dishwasher was on its last leg, but it seemed a little extreme to say that I wasn’t looking after it.

  My mother reached into her pocketbook and placed a stack of photographs on the table and pushed them across to me. “The house in Provence,” she said. “How many times do I have to tell people that it caught on fire?”

  “Maybe it really was just a little kitchen fire,” I said, thinking of the house as my Aunt Giselle had rendered it—a child having a small tantrum.

  “We don’t know the extent of the damage,” my sister said. “But the house has been virtually ignored for decades. I’d go, but Daniel and I have already booked this yacht with its own crew.”

  “And I can’t go. Your father would refuse to go with me, and I can’t go without him. That’s too … loaded,” my mother said.

  Elysius and my mother were quiet as I started flipping through the pictures, blurry color photographs from the late eighties, the last time the three of us had been there. My mother wearing a fitted skirt, Elysius with her long hair and thick bangs, me wearing a baseball cap. Behind us, Mont Sainte-Victoire was luminous. There were photos of the stone house, the three of us eating dinner in the yard by the fountain, the big house next door, Véronique—square-shouldered, a slight smile on her lips—and her boys, looking sheepish, per usual. One picture of their father wearing black socks and sandals, his mouth open as if he were singing. There were cathedrals, one’s architecture blurring into the next, the rows of vineyards, a field of sunflowers, the three of us standing beside them on the roadside.

  The next photograph I turned to caught me off guard: my mother wearing a yellow swimsuit, sitting on the edge of our swimming pool, surrounded by a wrought-iron gate and a garden with small paths running through it. She looked elegant and young, so unbearably young, but she had to be at least the age I was now. “I don’t remember this swimsuit,” I said.

  “That picture is from the following summer,” she said, without emotion, as if that weren’t the summer of her disappearance. In the photo, she was shielding her eyes from the sun, a coquettish salute. I wondered who took this picture. Who was she smiling at?

  She must have felt a little uncomfortable about the way I was examining this photo, because she filled in with some idle banter. “No one has done any real updates on the house for, well, nearly a decade. Even if the house isn’t a pile of charred stones, there’s real work to be done.”

  “She’s right,” Elysius chimed in. “Everything is just on the verge of collapse—the kitchen, the bathrooms … It was beautiful when Daniel and I were there, but in a decaying way.”

  I tidied the stack by tapping them on the table like a deck of cards. “I stole a photo from this stack once upon a time.”

  “Really?” my mother said.

  I nodded. “The one where Véronique’s older son was showing off for the camera, balancing a pogo stick on his forehead.”

  “I remember him doing that!” Elysius said.

  “Pascal is the older brother,” my mother said. “But it was her younger son I talked to about the fire, Julien.”

  “The one who was always pouting and splashed me all the time in the pool,” I said.

  “It rings a dim bell,” Elysius said.

  “Where have these been all this time?” I asked, sliding the pictures back across the table.

  “Locked away,” my mother said. “There’s no need to have them on display. All’s well that ends well.” She was talking about her marriage, our family. Why put these pictures in albums for my father to see? This
was the place she went to and almost never came back from.

  “You both know I’m not going,” I said. “I have work to do. And Abbot is going to a day camp where they teach juggling.…”

  “Henry’s been gone for nearly two years,” my mother said. “You have to keep living in the world.”

  My fork rattled against my plate. Each time someone told me that it was okay to move on, that I should be moving on, the less I felt able. It was as if they were telling me to leave Henry behind, and it felt like a betrayal. In my mother’s defense, she’d never made this claim until now.

  And that was when my mother delivered the line that she had obviously practiced. She leaned forward and said, “Every woman needs one lost summer in her life. This is yours.”

  “Is that mandatory?” I asked, an old resentment resurfacing.

  “It is.”

  “You needed to disappear that summer when we were kids?” I said.

  “I came back,” my mother said, defensively. “That summer allowed me to come back.”

  “This is about what you need, Heidi, right now,” Elysius said.

  “You want me to leave Abbot behind for the summer? Are you two insane?” I said.

  “Bring him,” Elysius said.

  “Maybe you both need a lost summer,” my mother acquiesced.

  “It’s a little elitist,” I said.

  “I didn’t say that every woman gets to have a lost summer,” my mother said. “I’m just saying that every woman needs one—deserves one—what with all of the shit we have to put up with from men!” She was momentarily flustered. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard her curse. “Plus, this isn’t just any house. It’s like going on a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Lourdes, blind, and then gaining your sight back, but only for us, the women in this family, and only having to do with matters of the heart.”

  “Like Our Lady of Lourdes? Really?” I said. My mother was never devout, but still sometimes her Catholic upbringing would surface, as if to offset some of her other traits—her frankness about sexuality, her desire to be rich, and her indulgent behavior with chocolate and good wine.

  “Yes. Lourdes.”

  My sister put her elbows on the table and said, flatly, “Eight years, Heidi. Daniel and I have been together eight years. He was never going to get married again. Ever. But then I took him to the house in Provence, and he opened up. I can’t explain it, but that’s what happened! He proposed to me. Just like that.”

  “Not to mention your grandmother,” my mother said. “That is the house where my own parents fell in love.” She was invoking the old love stories now. I took this as a sign of desperation.

  I shook my head. “Who can afford to have a lost summer?” I said. “I can’t. It’s that simple.”

  “You can,” my mother said. “You know Jude will take care of the store. She’s already taken charge of most everything. And I have an account for the house. I’ve never tapped it. It would be an investment in the house. Someone needs to go and help oversee that it’s properly restored.”

  “And,” Elysius said, lowering her voice. “This trip could really help me.…” She glanced at my mother for approval.

  “Go on,” my mother said. “Tell her.”

  “It’s about Charlotte,” Elysius said. “When Mom came to me with her idea, I knew you’d never go without Abbot, never, and I thought about how hard it would be to travel alone with an eight-year-old. And then I thought of Charlotte, and how it might be … mutually beneficial.”

  My mother summarized, “Since you’ve decided to take Abbot with you, you might want to also bring Charlotte.”

  “I have not decided to bring Abbot with me or to go at all,” I said.

  “Charlotte is at that age when she needs to expand her horizons. She needs to learn that there’s more to life …” My mother didn’t finish the sentence but now I knew that this was a reference to Charlotte’s needing to learn that there was more to life than her boyfriend, Adam Briskowitz. “And it would get her out of Elysius’s hair. Let both of them breathe.”

  “Charlotte can help you with Abbot,” Elysius said. “You know, so you can get out and live a little.” This was another way of saying that I needed to move on. “Plus she’ll boost her French, maybe skip on to French III, and she’ll have time to study for her SATs without distraction.” Here, again, the unnamed distraction was Adam Briskowitz.

  “You need the house,” my mother said. “You don’t believe it, but you will.”

  I remembered the three of us lost in the swarm of beautiful Bath whites. I didn’t want to be enchanted. I shook my head. “It’s a nice house. That’s all. Let’s not get carried away,” I said. “I went to that house as a kid and I wasn’t magically transformed.”

  “You weren’t heartbroken yet,” Elysius said. “That’s the difference.”

  I looked out the window to the pool. And now I am, I thought. And now I am heartbroken. My father was picking through a large bin of water toys. Abbot’s snorkeling gear was sitting on the cement. He was in the pool without it, a colorful shadow in the deep end. I watched for him to push himself off the bottom, bob to the surface, and shake his hair. But several moments passed. Was he drowning? I jumped up from the table, letting my napkin fall to the floor, and I ran out of the dining room through the kitchen, already screaming his name.

  “Abbot! Abbot!” I shouted, as I ran across the deck, tipping a small potted plant on the railing that cracked with a thud on the grass.

  By the time I was running downhill across the lawn, Abbot was holding on to the ladder, shaking the water from his hair.

  “What is it?” my father called to me. “Is everything okay?”

  I was breathless. My heart was thudding in my chest. I stopped and doubled over, my hands on my knees. Finally, I stood up and waved. “Everything’s fine,” I called. “Fine.” I turned around, and there stood my mother and Elysius on the deck, the door flung wide at their backs, the cracked pot having spilled its dirt on the grass. I knew what I must look like to them: so gripped by fear, imbalanced by sorrow, terrified of living, a widow screaming for her only son who, on a beautiful morning, hasn’t drowned, who hasn’t even come close.

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry,” I said. “We’re not going. We just can’t.” I started toward Abbot again. “Time to go!” I called. “Get your stuff!”

  here was a Henry story that I told Abbot only in a blur. He knew that I’d had a miscarriage, that there was a baby that didn’t make it, but it wasn’t a Henry story. How could it have been? It was a story I told myself, and I told it to myself a lot, because the loss of Henry echoed this earlier loss.

  Abbot was so perfect—fat, with gummy smiles and purring snores—that Henry and I felt almost guilty wanting another baby, but we did, right away. We didn’t give in, though, not immediately, mainly because Abbot made us dizzy with sleeplessness and selflessness—or maybe Abbot, as the manifestation of us, meant that we were dizzy with self-fullness. In any case, we were dizzy with love.

  But when Abbot turned four—years that flew at breakneck speed—we were ready, more than ready. Overdue.

  Henry and I knew that the world was going to demand that we hand Abbot over at some point. We weren’t going to be allowed to keep him with us forever. “The more children we have, the more we have to fear. Is that the way it works?” I asked Henry.

  “I think so. But it’s more of everything,” Henry said.

  This time, I handled the morning sickness better. I had no choice. I had Abbot to tend to. And so did Henry. He couldn’t simply dote on me. After the nausea subsided, right at week twelve, I noticed that my breasts weren’t as engorged, either. At a routine checkup, the Doppler didn’t pick up a heartbeat.

  “Not to worry,” the obstetrician told me, wiping the goo off my stomach. “We’ll get you in for an ultrasound tomorrow and just make sure all’s well!”

  Not to worry, I told Henry on my cell phone while getting dressed. But later, while waiti
ng to check out, I heard one of the technicians calling in an ultrasound. “Stat,” she said.

  And that’s when it hit me—the possibility that there was reason to worry.

  My mother came over to babysit Abbot, and Henry came with me to the ultrasound. We were stoic. He kept telling me that the doctor said there was no reason to worry.

  I said nothing.

  Finally, the technician took us to a small room and started the ultrasound. The tech said nothing. When I was pregnant with Abbot, the technicians talked through every ultrasound. They pointed out his parts like they were tour guides. “Here’s the vertebrae. Here’s a foot.… If you turn your attention this way, you’ll see Big Ben.…” That’s what it was like.

  Henry said, “Is that the baby?”

  The tech said, “Yes.”

  “So, how does everything look?” he asked.

  The tech said quietly, “Your doctor will want you to come in to talk.”

  “Oh,” Henry said. “Okay.”

  But I already knew, knew in a way that Henry couldn’t, knew in a way in which dread precedes devastating news, the way a phone ringing at the wrong time of night is never good. I turned my face to the wall and cried in a way I hadn’t ever cried before—it came from deep within me, something guttural and barbaric.

  Henry said, “Heidi, listen to me. Heidi, I’m here. Look at me.”

  But I was gone, lost inside of myself.

  By the time I was dressed, we’d gotten a message from my doctor’s office telling us to come straight over. There, we heard the news. The baby no longer had a heartbeat. It had died within me.

  Henry had to call my mother. He said, “This baby didn’t make it.” Henry told me later, in bed, that he felt that he’d failed, that he’d done something wrong, that it had been some genetic deficiency on his side.

  I wasn’t ready to share the blame. It was a miscarriage, and I was the carriage. I imagined myself rattling over cobblestone, a wobbly thing on wooden wheels. I said flatly, “It wasn’t your fault. I can tell you that as easily as you can tell me the same.”