The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted

by Bridget Asher

  They looked at each other.

  “My mother is either going to want to throw down or join an ashram. It’s hard to say,” Charlotte said to Adam. “Elysius and Daniel will go ballistic. It won’t be pretty.”

  “What’s an ashram?” Abbot asked.

  “Another word for ‘community.’ It’s kind of for hippie freaks,” Adam explained quickly, and then he straightened up and said, “Well, I predict Bert and Peg will take this well. I’m the youngest. They’ve been through the fire. They may make me go to a shrink, and they’ll certainly have to up Peg’s dosages. But I don’t think this will be a total nervous breakdown or anything.”

  “If you don’t tell them, then I have to,” I said.

  “Well, I guess I don’t have a choice,” Charlotte said.

  Adam smiled. “We can come up with some talking points together. We can manage that much.”

  Charlotte nodded. “Okay,” she said.

  “Are you taking vitamins?” Adam asked. It was a question I should have thought of.

  “Of course,” Charlotte said. “Horse pills. I got them at the co-op health food store.”

  “They’re prenatal?” Adam asked.

  “Yes, they’re prenatal,” Charlotte said. “Do you want me to get out the packaging?”

  “Actually, I wouldn’t mind,” he said. “There’s a lot of research on folic acid. Do they have enough folic acid in them?”

  And this is the moment I kind of fell for Adam Briskowitz. He’d been doing research. He’d brought baby books with him on the plane. He went on to ask Charlotte about any morning sickness, any spotting, any lightheadedness. As far as Charlotte and the baby’s health was concerned, there was nothing the least bit scattered or philosophical about him.

  ater, I tucked Abbot into bed. The injured swallow had settled down for the night in the box on the floor. He and Julien had made a small nest for it, some sticks, grass, and a dish towel, tucked in one corner of the box. It seemed to me that this joint mission—saving this swallow—held great weight for both of them. What would happen if the bird died? I felt trapped by the two options. I couldn’t suggest giving up on the bird, and yet every moment Julien and Abbot invested in it seemed to up the ante on an unwinnable bet.

  Abbot’s notebook of drawings was next to him in the bed, and he was holding his flashlight, the one he liked to shine out his window some nights, “just to see what’s out there,” he said, but I also figured he used the flashlight after lights-out so that he could stay up and draw under his covers. He was flipping it off and on.

  “Tell me a Henry story,” he whispered.

  I didn’t tell Henry stories at home every night, far from it, but still, there had been no Henry stories since we’d arrived. There had been no Henry stories since the night Abbot asked for a new Henry story, the night I ended up on the front stoop and found the purple plastic egg and decided to come to France. I hadn’t wondered why before, but now I did. Abbot surely had intuited that I was coming here, in part, to try to free us from some of the grief surrounding Henry. But I wasn’t here to free us from the memory of him. I was looking for a new relationship with Henry, in a way. Our house at home was filled with mementos. I had memories of Henry built into every street corner, every park and playground, Elysius and Daniel’s house, the neighbors’ yards, the Cake Shop, the downtown, Abbot’s school. Here, Henry wasn’t so much thrown at me as I was allowed to simply carry him with me. For the first time since I arrived, I realized that my relationship with Henry had changed. It was quieter, more peaceful.

  “A Henry story,” I said. I thought of Adam Briskowitz. Henry would have adored the kid. I thought of a story then, one I’d never told Abbot. “When your father was sixteen, he was a baseball player. They won the state tournament that year. He knocked in the tying run. But he also once confessed that he bought a pipe and a smoking jacket. Your dad could be kind of funny like that.”

  “What’s a smoking jacket?”

  “It’s something fancy that British people used to wear when smoking pipes,” I said. “I asked him where he got the smoking jacket and he confessed that it was really just a robe.”

  “Why did he want to wear a smoking jacket and smoke a pipe?”

  “I think he wanted to be sophisticated,” I said. “He didn’t want to be just a baseball player. But he didn’t really know what sophisticated looked like.”

  “Did he smoke the pipe?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But he was just a kid, like, Charlotte’s age?”

  “Yes, just a kid but trying to be an old man.”

  “But he’ll never be an old man,” Abbot said.

  “Nope.”

  “So it’s good he tried it out when he was sixteen.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Tell me another house story,” he said. “Maybe one about you.”

  “The Bath whites, I told you that story.”

  “Tell another one.”

  I thought a moment. “This story takes place just a little bit away from the house, up the mountain.”

  “Okay,” Abbot said.

  “Julien and I knew each other as kids. And one time, he goaded me into climbing the mountain to get to this little chapel that’s built into the rock of the mountain itself. It’s the chapel of Saint Ser, home of a hermit who, Julien told me, had his ears chopped off and then his head.”

  “An earless, headless hermit?” Abbot said.

  “Yes, and Julien said he was a phantom, a ghost, but then he told me that he was a good phantom, because he watched over all the souls of the people who died on the mountain.”

  “Did he hold his own head like that picture in Notre-Dame?”

  “I never saw him. But once, I thought I heard him whisper my name.”

  “A good phantom,” Abbot said, “who protected souls.”

  “Yes, in this little chapel up on the mountain. It’s still there. Maybe we’ll go one day.”

  He thought about this a moment and then said, “Julien says we have to throw the swallow tomorrow. We shouldn’t have waited. But I think it’s got to have time for its wing to get better.” Abbot shifted under his sheets. “Do you think the swallow will fly?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But you’re just doing your best for it. That’s more than most kids would do. Most people, for that matter. Regular people would probably just walk on by the bird and go on with their lives. But you stopped to help it. That’s remarkable.”

  He smiled. “Today was weird.”

  “It was.”

  “Charlotte is really pregnant?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she going to get in trouble for it?”

  “That’s hard to say. Parents can freak about things like this.”

  “Would you freak if she was your daughter?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I like babies. Everybody likes babies.”

  “You were a great baby.”

  “Remarkable,” he said. “I was a remarkable baby.”

  I kissed him on the forehead. “Go to sleep, remarkable baby.” I stood up.

  “Check on the swallow. Is it asleep?”

  I looked down into the box. The bird was standing there, its wing still rumpled. It looked up at me. “No,” I said. “But let’s turn off the light. That’ll help.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight.”

  harlotte was already in her room, listening to the radio. She and Adam had gone for a short walk after dinner but came home taking different paths. He’d come back striding through the gardens and she’d walked down a row in the vineyard—both flushed with anger. I wondered if three days was enough time for them to establish a united front—or, perhaps, decide not to have one.

  I walked down to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of red wine. I stared at the place where the oven and cabinets had been. This kitchen will never be remodeled. It will never be finished, I thought. I sat down at the tab
le, set the glass of wine in front of me, and rested my head in my hands. I thought of my mother in this very kitchen the summer she disappeared. Had she learned to listen to the house? What had it told her?

  I closed my eyes and, as foolish as I felt, I tried to listen. What else could I do at a moment like this?

  The house didn’t say a word, of course, but it did seem to swell around me. It felt fuller now, knowing that Charlotte was pregnant. I thought of the minute fetus moving inside of her and then, oddly, the swallow rustling in the cardboard box. I wondered what was going to happen next. What would our lives look like a year from now? Where would Charlotte and her baby be? With Elysius and Daniel in their giant house? With her mother, consulting her gemstones? Would she be looking at universities, prepping for interviews? Would Adam Briskowitz be home from college for the summer? Would he be a philosophy major after all? In that case, who would be watching the baby?

  The house was quiet. I’d asked too much. I’d started rifling off questions and had stopped listening.

  There was a knock at the door and it inched open.

  I realized in this split second that I wanted it to be Julien.

  “Come in.”

  “C’est moi,” Julien said. He stepped in and looked around the kitchen. “It looks nice in here. Very nice work.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “It’s coming.”

  “I wanted to tell you something.”

  “You’re not pregnant, are you?”

  He laughed. “I don’t think so.”

  “It’s been a long day.”

  “I know,” he said. “I think she is doing well. She’s healthy and she has been happy here, no?”

  I thought about how miserable she’d been at home, and Julien was right. She’d been enjoying the kitchen and drawing birds with Abbot. “She has been happy. The happiest I’ve seen her in a long time.”

  “Maybe this will be good, in the end,” he said. “The boy, Adam, is … interesting.”

  I nodded. “I like him, actually.”

  “He’s eccentric.” Julien seemed restless. I wondered if he was stalling. “Do you want to sit outside?” he said, picking the bottle up off the table. “It’s a warm night.”

  We took wineglasses and the bottle and sat in the lawn chairs by the fountain with its broken pump.

  “What did you want to tell me?” I asked.

  “It’s the bird,” he said.

  “The swallow?”

  “Yes,” he said, and he shook his head. “The bird is probably going to die.”

  “Do they usually die?”

  “Sometimes they live. But as soon as you told me about nurturing the bird and then throwing it, I thought of your husband, Abbot’s father. Now, after today, and the boy Adam arrives and Charlotte is pregnant, and I’m thinking maybe this is a bad idea. Abbot will throw the bird and what if it cannot fly and it hits the ground and dies. I’m sorry I had the idea. It was from when I was a boy. But your family, now, is … delicate.”

  He took a drink of wine. I lifted the bottle and poured him more. I sighed.

  “I know what it’s like to lose a father. We were a delicate family. A different type of delicate family. But I know what it is like, in one way. The father is there and then he’s not.”

  This surprised me. It was different—death versus abandonment—but I realized that Julien understood Abbot in a way that I couldn’t. My mother disappeared, yes, but only for a summer. She came home. But for Abbot and Julien, their fathers left and didn’t come back.

  Julien rested his elbows on his knees. “I think that maybe I can take the box and say that I was feeding the bird in the morning and that it was a miracle but the bird flew away.”

  “No,” I said.

  “What should we do?”

  “I think we should let Abbot throw the bird.”

  “You do?” he said. “But what if …”

  “We have to live a little,” I said. “We have to work at joy. That’s what you told me once, right? That entails taking risks.”

  “Yes,” he said, cradling his glass of wine in his palm. “You’re right.”

  “It’s just so hard,” I said. “Henry would know what to do. He’d say the right thing. I miss him.” My face felt warm and my throat cinched. I knew I was going to cry. It had been building all day. The tears slipped quickly down my cheeks. “I’m sorry,” I said, wiping them away. “It still catches me off guard.”

  “What was he like?” Julien asked.

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “Yes.”

  I started talking, haltingly at first, but then I found that it was a strange liberation to describe Henry to someone who’d never met him. I explained not only Henry and the Cake Shop and our lives together, but also his tough father, Tony Bartolozzi, and his doting mother, and his younger brother, the one who almost drowned in the pool at the barbecue when he was little, whom everyone called Jimbo. When I told him the story of how Henry and I met, Julien asked me to sing “Brandy.”

  “No,” I said. “I can’t sing. I’m awful.”

  “But you were awful then, too.”

  “I was drunk.”

  “Drink and then sing it!”

  I was already a little tipsy by now, but I shook my head. I told him the story of how Abbot was conceived, a kind-of accident, and he confessed that his daughter, Frieda, was planned, that there were ovulation kits, and then doctors who prescribed pills for his wife, and he loved the idea of an accident even if it wasn’t an accident.

  I told him the story of the miscarriage, Henry busting up tiles in the house. I told him the story of the dry tub, the part I’d never told anyone before—how Henry found me there in the tub, looking in through the holes at the nursery. “I had a fever, unrelated to the miscarriage, but he was worried. He picked me up and carried me back to bed.”

  Julien was quiet, and then he said, “He loved you.”

  “He did,” I said.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “Not everyone knows love like he did. He loved you. 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. To know that kind of love.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” I said. “I got to love him like that, too.”

  We were quiet for a moment, and I remembered what it had been like to fall in love with Henry, that he’d been the exact soul I’d been waiting for, how getting to know him was like opening gift after gift. But right now, I felt aware of handing over gifts, that each story was something for Julien to unwrap. Once upon a time, I’d thought I’d been looking for Henry, but really I’d been just waiting for him, without knowing that I was waiting, and now it seemed like I’d been waiting for myself in some way, without knowing that I was waiting. In telling Julien some of the stories of my life, I was aware that I’d been missing myself, perhaps. And here I was, appearing, one unwrapped story at a time.

  I asked him about his ex-wife, Patricia. He took a deep breath, and I realized that he was beautiful not just because of his face or the set of his shoulders but the way he had listened, his bemused expression when I’d reverted to pantomime to explain something he’d never heard of, the way he’d shaken his head when he laughed, like he didn’t want to but couldn’t help it. And he now was beautiful because of the things that he told me about his failed marriage and his wife. Her mother was an opera singer—very harsh and exacting. Her father was an old softie who cried at commercials. And he missed his ex-wife in acute detail. She sneezed when she walked into the sun—four times, always four times. She was superstitious, even though she denied it and had worn the same charm bracelet since she was seventeen, having replaced the chain many times. She talked to herself when she was cooking. And when they broke up, he tried to disappear. He went to live with his friend Gerard, a bachelor, who lived in Marseille. “Gerard is a flirt. He loves women and detests marriage. I thought it would be fun to be a bachelor again. But, really, most ni
ghts I went to Notre-Dame de la Garde, the cathedral on the hill near the sea. I didn’t go in. There’s a wall outside. And I just looked at the sea, like I was waiting for a ship to come back home. It didn’t. And slowly I stopped expecting it.”

  Maybe that was what was wrong with me. I hadn’t fully stopped expecting Henry to come back. “Why didn’t it work out between you two?” I asked.

  “I could say many things. I wasn’t what she wanted. I wasn’t the man she wanted her friends to adore. I was funny when she wanted me to be serious. I was not good enough. And I was tired of trying to be good enough.” He smiled sadly. “She married the wrong one. In the end, it is that simple.” He waved the conversation off. “Why are you here?” he asked. “Not the answer about the house. Why are you here, now?”

  I told him about that one night I found the purple plastic egg and then looked up Henry in the dictionary and found the word hent, “to seize.”

  “And that is why you are here?” he asked. “That one word?”

  I nodded.

  He sat back and stared at the stones near the fountain left behind by the mason, a hefty man with jowls and the most beautifully scarred hands. “I think it’s more,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “My wife, she wore her charm bracelet since she was seventeen, but she doesn’t really understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “It’s not the bracelet,” he said. “It’s because she believes in the bracelet.”

  “Are you asking me what I believe in?”

  “Yes.”

  “I told Abbot the story of Saint Ser tonight, the protector of souls. I believed in him some, you know, when I was little and you made me trudge up that mountain.”

  He stood up.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “That is a good example. There was no ghost. I invented the ghost because I wanted you to be afraid. But then I was afraid myself, and so I said he was a good phantom, a protector. When we rang the bell and called the ghost, and we waited by the altar, you heard him whisper your name.”

  “I was a kid.”