Dear Emmie Blue

by Lia Louis

  Half an hour later, we were in Marie’s pristine car, winding our way through the leafy country lanes as she talked nonstop about her business—a new deli she’s opening soon—and I listened, but mind wandering the whole time to Lucas’s face as he had waved us off. It’s the same face I’m sure he’d wear waving off his two children to school for the first day. A proud face. That “and there they go” smile. And why wouldn’t he? It’s a dream situation, isn’t it? Your fiancée getting along with your best friend.

  “Any dress you see that you enjoy the style of, just let me know. If it isn’t perfect, it doesn’t matter, because my, er… er…” Marie pauses, eyes skyward, searching for the English word. “Dressmaker?”

  I nod.

  “Yes, well, she said she can make anything that we please, adjust, change…”

  Marie’s English is practically perfect in that husky, sexy French accent that melts many a person. She went to university in London, and her mother was born in Cornwall. Like Lucas, her dad is French, and he and Marie own a deli together. One that sells things to gym-goers and the health conscious. Protein shakes, juices, “clean” salads and faux brownies and so many things made from avocados. It’s how she and Lucas met. The deli had just opened, and Lucas had gone in for lunch after a gym session, and he and Marie had ended up talking so much, they had lunch together.

  “It was avocados, wasn’t it?” I’d asked Marie on our first meeting. “It’s all Lucas eats. I think he goes to bed with them. Kisses them good night. Gives them massages. Listens to their problems.”

  Marie had giggled madly and held my arm. “It was. We ate two avocado dishes. I eat so many of them too. I even make hair conditioner from it.”

  “A match made in heaven,” I’d said, and ever since, avocados have been a little “in” joke of ours.

  I nudge Marie’s arm now. “What would you think,” I say, lowering my voice, “if I insisted on that,” and I point to a tiny red minidress only Rosie and Cher would be able to pull off.

  “Oh,” Marie laughs. “But if that is what you want, Emmie, I would be happy for you to wear it.”

  We wander through the shop, hardly able to hear each other over the blasting dance music booming from the shop’s stereo, but both of us talking all the time nonetheless, and I am struck with a pang of something that feels like guilt and heartbreak all at once as Marie turns to me and says, “I’m so excited, Emmie.” It’s the shame, I suppose, of wishing deep down that this wasn’t happening, and I imagine for one painful, stomach-churning moment as Marie takes a photo of a dress on a mannequin and looks down at her phone, punching away on the keyboard in WhatsApp, sending it excitedly to her bridesmaids to add to their shared Pinterest board, what she would do if she knew—if suddenly I told her, right here, what I had expected Lucas to ask me that night at Le Rivage.

  “Emmie.” Marie links her slender arm through mine. “What do you say? Shall we eat?”

  “Sure. I could definitely eat. And escape this music.”

  “My treat,” she says. “For our best woman. And considering I woke you up too early.”

  “Oh, I’m glad you did,” I laugh. “When I don’t have an alarm, I could be out for a good thirteen hours.”

  Marie squeezes into me and gives a warm giggle. “Luke said you are an epic sleeper. Now, come on, I know this beautiful little place. You’ll love it.”

  Marie takes us to a small but higgledy café down a cobbled alleyway, with round, rustic tables and empty tin cans holding cutlery in the center. It smells like strong coffee and garlic, and we take a seat at one of the outdoor tables.

  It’s only eleven, so we are handed a breakfast menu—paper clipped to a small wooden clipboard, the text small, spaced and neat, as if it’s been written on a typewriter. Marie leans in. “The waffles and chocolate, oh my goodness.”

  “Good?” I ask, and she sighs and says, “Like heaven, Emmeline.” Then she freezes. “Gosh. I never say Emmeline. Sorry. I don’t know why I said that. You don’t like being called it, do you?”

  Heat passes over my cheeks. “Nobody really calls me Emmeline,” I say. “But don’t be sorry. At all.”

  “No, I should be. I think a person’s preferred name should be respected,” she says, and I just want to reach out and hold her face and tell her I’m sorry, because she is so bloody nice.

  “My mum calls me Emmeline. Jean used to too, actually. He doesn’t believe in shortening names.”

  Marie rolls her eyes, an elbow coming up to rest on the table. She leans her face on her hand. “How shocking it is that it’s a man who ignores a woman’s preferences,” she says quietly. “So, you were baptized Emmeline?”

  “Oh no,” I say, “I’ve never been christened or baptized. My mum never really believed in any of that. But it’s on my birth certificate. My mum loved the name. Plus, my dad is from France.” My mouth feels dry as I speak those last words. “It’s been years since I’ve gone by Emmeline, that’s all.”

  She nods, almond eyes serious, and doesn’t press, which tells me she either knows more than I have told her, or that she can tell I don’t really want to give her any more than that. Robert called me Emmeline; used my name so many times, in such short conversations, that it felt weird sometimes, and purposeful. He called me Emmeline that night. Hot and wet against my neck and my ear, the back of my head pressed hard against the door. I couldn’t bear hearing it after that.

  “So, Emmie, shall we order?” Marie smiles warmly, clearing her throat. A waiter hovers by the door, waiting, his eyes flitting from us, to the two couples eating, chattering quietly at neighboring tables. “Are you ready? I know I am off caffeine, but surely one Americano can’t harm me?”

  We order our food—both of us go for the waffles with chocolate sauce—and Marie tells me about the bad wedding dreams she keeps having despite it still being eight months before she marries Lucas. She asks me about my journey here, with Eliot, too, and I tell her it was nice. “ ‘Smooth, no traffic.’ ” I don’t tell her that we talked for an hour, solidly, about my dad and the birthday cards, and even about Mum, too, or how much telling him has helped. I feel lighter after talking to Eliot. Like he’s taken some of the weight that was dragging me down. A smiling waiter brings our food over, and we sit in the shade, watch the world amble by beneath the sun, and swap stories and anecdotes, the rich smell of coffee and cigarette smoke from a man at the next table swirling around us. Mum’s ex Den used to smoke roll-ups, standing by the front door, blowing the smoke into the outside, as I hung off the handle and gave him an hour-by-hour account of my school day. I love the smell, and I feel a warm settling, as if there’s a cat curled up, snuggled on my lap.

  “I still cannot believe how you and Lucas came to meet,” says Marie, adjusting the napkin on her lap. “So… serendipitous.”

  “I know. I still find it so difficult to believe that he found it, all those weeks later.”

  “Your balloon?” She says balloon in the French way—ballon—and I love the way it sounds.

  “Yes.” I smile. “I still remember where I was when I received that first email.”

  Marie beams at me, brown skin smooth, a line above her top lip appearing as she smiles. “What did he say?”

  I remember every word, and of course, have it printed out and in an envelope, which is now safely back in a shoebox under my bed.

  * * *

  Hi Emmeline,

  My name is Lucas Moreau. I’m 16 and I live in Le Touquet, France. I found your balloon on a beach near Boulogne-sur-Mer yesterday. It made it over one ocean and over 100 miles!

  I’m from London. We just moved here.

  Hope me finding this means you win some sort of prize!!!

  Well done to you and ur balloon.

  Lucas x

  PS: I hope you’re okay.

  * * *

  “Just that he’d found my balloon in Boulogne-sur-Mer,” I tell Marie, “and that he’d just moved there. I was so excited when I got that email. Honestly.
Having French roots and everything. I couldn’t believe it.” I don’t say anything else, or how I clicked on it on a computer in Mrs. Beech’s geography class while hiding from the other kids at lunchtime, tears streaking my cheeks. And I don’t tell her that Lucas’s P.S. was like a gentle, wordless hug that morning when I opened my inbox. In that moment, this stranger across the ocean—Balloon Boy as he jokingly called himself after that—was the only person who cared in the whole world.

  “It’s amazing,” Marie sighs dreamily. “He told me you sent him DVDs and jars of food.”

  I laugh. “Yes. Marmite. Tesco’s own brand of fizzy sweets. Anything he missed from home.”

  “And did he send you French food back?”

  “No,” I say. “No, he actually sent CDs back.”

  “CDs?”

  “Mix CDs that he’d make. Music.”

  “Oh God.” Marie laughs, hand touching my forearm on the table. “You poor thing. My fiancé’s taste in music leaves a lot to be desired, do you not think?”

  “Really? Well, maybe he’s lost his talent,” I say. “Okay, occasionally the odd Jason Donovan slipped through the net, but his choices were not bad at all back then. He introduced me to loads of songs and bands I’d never heard of.”

  Marie laughs again. “I dread our wedding playlist.”

  “Oh, well, I’ll keep him reeled in,” I tell her, and she leans across the little round table, her eyes on mine. “I know you will,” she says sweetly, then she pauses, her eyes still on mine, her smile fading slightly. “He seems happy. Do you think?”

  It makes me swallow, the way she asks me. I recognize something in her eyes. Worry. Unease. “Yes,” I say. “Of course.”

  “You know him more than anyone; he tells me that. And…” Marie reaches for her coffee but doesn’t drink. A prop, I think, for her nervous hands. I feel my heart start to thump in my chest. Is she going to ask me? Is she going to ask me if I have feelings for him, if I think he has feelings for me? “I have had no luck, Emmie,” she says eventually. “I am thirty-four and I have had my heart broken enough for you, me, and everyone in this café.” She smiles at me sadly, eyes shining. “And Lucas. Well, with Lucas, I know we have stopped and started a lot, our silly arguments, distrust, but I feel like it is different this time. And I know that’s cliché, that everyone probably says that…” She pauses, looks up at me, and for a moment I think she’s going to tell me she can hear the loud drumming of my heart; ask me why it’s beating so hard. But instead she says, “I am so happy. I’m engaged. Lucas wants to marry me. Me. He has chosen no other person ever in his life to propose to. To marry. And… it feels…”

  “Too good to be true,” I say. I hardly realize there are tears in my eyes until I speak, and my words are thick, wobbly. Holly, Lucas’s ex-girlfriend, flashes into my mind too, momentarily. Lucas was engaged to her when he was twenty. But they were kids then. It lasted mere moments, really. But I do wonder if Marie knows.

  “Yes,” says Marie. “That is it, Emmie. You understand. I am so happy that I am terrified.”

  It isn’t a question, but I nod. “I do get it,” I say quietly. “I really do.”

  Marie looks at me, laughs, brings a knuckle to her eye. “Gosh, I am sorry. I cry at everything, my father says. Do not let that rub off on you.”

  I smile, tell her not to apologize, and although my appetite is now nonexistent, chased away by the heart that plummeted moments ago and now sits heavy and sad in my gut, we begin eating again.

  “I cannot wait for you to see the hotel tonight, Emmie,” says Marie after a while. “And their bar; the best cocktails. The best dancing. It won awards, you know, for the music, the ambience…”

  “The best dancing,” I repeat. “You do realize Tom is going? I’m afraid after tonight, it may be stripped of its awards.”

  Marie bursts out laughing, neat, manicured hand at her mouth, and says, “Have you seen him do the hips?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Many times. And he hasn’t even improved. I first saw Tom dance when Lucas and I turned eighteen, and I swear, it’s gotten worse since then, if that’s possible. I hope he leaves his hips safely in his hotel room tonight.”

  Marie leans in and whispers, “And the rest of him.”

  * * *

  I feel out of place. I am in a dress I’ve had for five years that’s been sewn twice at the armpit, and I have thirty euros in my purse; the price of one of the most expensive cocktails on the menu. I couldn’t help but notice the wedge of notes in Lucas’s wallet when he got the first round in, and I had tried not to be a part of it. To accept a drink is to owe a drink, and I doubt a soul in our group is on tap water.

  We have commandeered a booth with velvet seats and a hanging orb of a lamp in the center of the table. Eliot and Ana (who has yet to say a word to me since we arrived at the hotel’s bar) sit snuggled in the corner, his arm around her, and I sit in the opposite corner beside Lucas, with Marie on his other side, who is in a fast and smiling conversation with Tom, who is sweaty from the dance floor.

  Lucas throws his arm around me and squeezes me against him. He can always tell when I feel uneasy, or nervous, because every time, along comes that strong arm and that squeeze. The arm, protection, the squeeze, a wordless Everything’s okay. I’m here, right next to you. It was mostly after our nineteenth birthday when I needed it the most. A night Lucas, Eliot, and I had looked forward to for weeks—a house party. A huge inflatable swimming pool. A barbecue. Cocktails made at Jean’s bar. A night we counted down to. A night that ended up driving a wedge between me, Lucas, and Eliot. The two people that knew everything about me, because I trusted them with it. And I shouldn’t have. Eliot betrayed it. In one stupid moment that ended up throwing me miles backward, sent me toppling. I dropped out of college, moved to Shire Sands, into a new flat in a new town that felt alien, but at least it was far from everything and everyone I knew. And I’d get through it, I was sure, because of Lucas. His arm around me. My head against his chest, his lips against my hair, listening to the strong, dependable beats of his heart.

  “Hey,” he speaks into my ear now, whiskey on his breath. “Where you at, Emmie Blue?”

  I look up at him. “In a bar,” I say over the music. “With Tom’s offensive hips.”

  Lucas laughs, crinkles at the corners of his eyes.

  The bar is heaving. When Lucas mentioned the bar of the five-star Le Touquet hotel he is to be married in, I expected a tinkling piano and 1920s light shades. I didn’t expect this. It reminds me of a London bar on a Saturday night. Ears ringing from the layers and layers of music and chatter of hundreds of voices dying to be heard above it, the clinking glasses and bottles. The lights are low, and behind the bar are glowing blue panels, casting the white-shirt-wearing bar staff deep lilac, as if they’re standing under UV lights. It’s dark and the air smells like perfume and wine. People are dancing, too, on the minuscule dance floor, and Tom is getting up from beside Marie now and heading back there, to where he’s been most of the night, dancing as if he has a family of live eels trapped in his underpants.

  “It is quite extraordinary,” laughs Marie to me now, leaning over Lucas, her hand resting on his thigh.

  I nod. “He has only one move.”

  “Sorry?”

  “He only has one move!” I shout above the ever-increasing-in-volume music, and she laughs and takes a sip of her cocktail. Ana, opposite, explodes into laughter, and I catch Eliot’s eye, who smiles at me and sips at his beer, Ana’s arm around him, her free hand on her chest. Lucille is beside her, Marie’s maid of honor who hasn’t looked up once from a smiley conversation she’s been having with a handsome man who wouldn’t look out of place in an aftershave ad. He sidled up to her at the bar within about ten minutes of us getting here, and joined us pretty much straightaway, transfixed with Lucille. But it’s no surprise, really. Lucille is beautiful. Like a 1950s movie star or something. The pair of them look like a moving GIF from a black-and-white film. He even floated over as
if there were a stage cue.

  “Don’t fancy joining him?” Eliot leans toward me as Ana’s long fingers pummel her phone’s screen, beside him.

  “Who, Tom?” I shout.

  Eliot smiles, nods.

  I shake my head. “I think it’s law to avoid people that dance like that.”

  “Ah, I dunno, you might learn a thing or two.” Eliot grins and starts mimicking Tom popping his shoulders. I laugh. Eliot always did make me laugh. I missed that, once upon a time. Ana, brow furrowed, looks at him now, as if he is far from the apparent comedic genius she thought he was only a moment ago. She looks at me. I smile—an “isn’t your boyfriend funny?” smile. Her face doesn’t move. She looks back down at her phone.

  “Won’t learn that on any podcast,” says Eliot over the music, and puts his lips to his beer again, acting as though he hasn’t noticed Ana’s face, her coldness toward me, but I see his eyes, just slightly, shift to the side to her as he drinks. I fix a smile on my face to mask the awkwardness I’m feeling, too, pretending to not even care, or notice that beside me, Lucas’s face is buried in Marie’s neck—they’re talking, laughing about something, and as I drink, I notice Ana is staring at me. I smile again. This time so does she; all teeth.

  “Your dress,” she says.

  Instinctively I look down at it, then back at her. “Yes?”

  She says something, smile fixed, and her words are lost over the music.

  “Sorry? I can’t hear you.”

  Ana laughs, large, round eyes rolling, then motions with a hand for me to lean in closer. Eliot watches us. “I said,” she says, “you should have pressed it.”

  “Pressed it?”

  “Yes. Pressed it. Ironed it. It is very creased.”

  I am thankful for the dark lighting, because my neck, my ears, my whole face beams red-hot at those words. Creased? What sort of person leans forward in a loud bar and tells someone—and tells them twice—that their dress should have been ironed because it’s creased?