Aix Marks the Spot

by Sarah Anderson

  My skin was slick with sweat, sticking to the seats. I wanted to be anywhere but there right now. Especially with Dad raving in the front seat, his voice somehow raspy and shrill at the same time. When he was mad, his French accent came bursting through like an uninvited guest.

  “Seriously, Jamie,” he spat, “you told us you were going to a sleepover! You realize this means you’re grounded, right? You should never have been drinking, not this much, not this late… what would have happened if someone called the cops?”

  “I’m sorry,” I muttered. My tongue tasted of acid and tequila. Or at least, I think it was tequila. “Why are you here, mom?”

  “Dad’s here to yell,” you said soothingly, “I’m here to make sure you’re ok.”

  “Thanks, mom.”

  “Thank your father. You deserve to be yelled at, too.” You turned back to face the road, grinning sheepishly into her reflection. “But I’m glad you called us, I…”

  I was on the ground now, this time, the lights around me blinding, flashing. I couldn’t remember how I got here, either. Unlike the other memories of the night, which were fuzzy, vibrant, spinning dizzily and wildly in my head, between here and then there was only darkness.

  And cold.

  I found myself crying out as I pushed myself up. A piece of shattered glass had pierced my palm, though where it had come from, I couldn’t possibly tell you. There was a ringing in my ears so loud I couldn’t even hear myself think.

  There was an arm on my shoulder, both gentle and hard. In a daze, I turned to look at the stranger, shocked to see them in uniform. Bright fluorescent yellow stung at my eyes. He was saying something, his lips moving, but no sound was coming out. I blinked the confusion from my eyes, offering him my hand, not sure what he was looking for. He nodded, a single, curt nod.

  “Over here,” he said, his voice getting louder, “Ma’am? Ma’am? Can you tell me your name?”

  It took me a minute to conjure it, but the man was patient. He waited as I sorted my brain, trying to push the fuzziness away from my carefully organized facts.

  “Jamie,” I said, my voice salty on my tongue, “Jamie Martin. What happened?”

  He’s not the man who answered me. Instead, the answer I received was in the form of an earth-shattering scream. The ringing burst back into my ears as the entire night was swallowed in a single, horrifying, “Monica!”

  I was in a hospital bed now. My racing mind was finally beginning to settle, but nothing was making any sense. I couldn’t find my parents, but then again, I wasn’t allowed to move in the first place. The glass had been removed from my skin, every gash stitched up and bandaged. If you were to look at me, you might think I had fallen off my bicycle.

  But I hadn’t fallen off my bike. I didn’t know what had happened to me. I couldn’t make the pieces fit together in my head, everything come out in a shoddy jumble.

  Finally, dad walked in the room, bandaged even less than I was. His skin, however… I had never seen it so pale before. Ashen might have been the proper word. It was so devoid of any color, he looked out of place in the real world, as if he had stepped right out of a black and white film.

  “Dad.” I would have run to him like a toddler if I wasn’t pinned to the bed by my IV. He closed the door and collapsed into the chair in the corner, staring at the floor. With a deep breath he folded forward, laying his head in his hands, muffling a scream.

  “Dad, is mom…?”

  I didn’t know how to ask it. I didn’t know how to say it. My worst fear, his worst fear, our nightmare playing out on the other side of that door. My heart was racing, while my mind refused to process it.

  “She’s alive,” he said, throwing himself back into the chair and staring at the ceiling now instead. Grief has a funny way of not allowing you to experience it comfortably. “She’s still alive. But her legs, Jamie, her legs…”

  That was the first day I saw my father cry. And in the next few months, it wouldn’t be the last.

  I told Valentin everything. I told him about moving into my Grandmother’s house, so that you could recover and go through physical therapy. I told him about the supposed ‘lack of space’ and my father calling up the one woman he had vowed never to speak to again, in order to get me out of there. In order to get me away from you.

  “And now Mamie told me the truth,” I finished, “the truth that I’m the reason they stopped speaking in the first place. That dad ran off with my mom in order to raise me, because she didn’t approve of him dating my mom. Dad threw me out just like he should have done seventeen years ago.”

  “Jamie…” Valentin reached a hand forward, taking mine gently. His fingers were soft against my skin. “It’s not your fault.”

  “It is,” I insisted, “everything is. Mamie and dad would still be talking if it wasn’t for me. And mom would…”

  “Jamie. It is not. Your. Fault.”

  No one had ever said that to me before. No one had ever told me those words, so clearly, so sternly. For a second, I half imagined Valentin’s voice was coming from all around me, from the land itself, but too quickly that moment was gone.

  “You don’t know anything,” I snapped, pulling my hand from his, “you don’t know me. We met what, a week ago? Ten days? You do not know me.”

  “I know you well enough,” he said, reaching a comforting hand and placing it firmly on my knee. I didn’t know what to make of it: but the hand wasn’t moving. It wasn’t pushing. It was solidifying, rooting me to down to the train.

  “You need to call your father,” he said, his eyes wide and pleading, “you cannot go on thinking that everything is always on you.”

  “But it is,” I said, “and I know - I just know - that if I find the treasure at the end of Dad’s hunt, everything will be better. Mom will recover. Dad will ask for me back. And Mamie…”

  “The hunt won’t help anything, don’t you see?” Valentin practically snapped, “you are distracting yourself. Trying to find a quick fix to a problem that is much bigger than you. You cannot fix your mother, there is nothing you can do to fix her. It is outside of your control. You need to accept that.”

  “Says the man who is always giving up,” I said, pulling my knee away.

  “I do not give up,” he said, “I choose which battles to fight. Some of them are not for me.”

  “Then you never do anything new. You never do anything.”

  “And maybe I need to. But you need to stop feeling guilty about the things you cannot change. Because it will - as they say - eat you alive.”

  “Like you would know.”

  “My father left because of me, and he as much as said it to my face. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy, and you are… the opposite of that.”

  Silence fell upon us once again. The train rolled on, the only sound in the cabin that of gentle wheels on tracks. Valentin stared at his feet, and I stared at his hand, still on my knee, not knowing whether move it or not.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, “how could someone do that?”

  “He didn’t want to be a father anymore. He didn’t want to live in the south. From one day to the next, he picked up his things, and moved to Paris.”

  “That’s awful,” I stammered, “what kind of human being does that?”

  “Cowards,” he said, “so when you called me one earlier, I… no. It doesn’t matter.”

  “But it does. It does matter. You can talk to me.”

  “Can I?” He snapped, removing his hand, “because it doesn’t seem to me like you listen at all. If you weren’t doing your stupid hunt, if you weren’t so… mad, I don’t know, he wouldn’t have seen us together, he wouldn’t think…”

  “My stupid hunt?”

  My hands were shaking, so I clutched them into fists, but it did nothing to help. What had been sadness a few moments before unfurled into anger.

  How could he give up like that? How could he think things were over? The universe had proved it wanted us to finish this hun
t. His refusal to follow through was burning through me like a forest fire.

  “This hunt means everything to me,” I spat, “It’s my dad’s love for my mom. Proof that maybe he might have made the right decision following her to the US. That maybe I wasn’t totally screwed up from birth. It was going to make everything better, and you call it stupid?”

  “But it wasn’t going to change anything,” he said, “The letters, they’re pieces of paper, Jamie. It never was your job to fix your Mamie, your father, or your mother. The accident was not your fault. And here you are, not listening again. I was talking, about my father, and you just brought everything back to you.”

  “Back to me?” I stammered, “You insulted me! And you’re avoiding your own problems, blaming everything on me!”

  “You shamed me! In front of my father!”

  “A man who didn’t even tell you he was here!”

  “He’s still my father! And you’re not listening to me!”

  “Leave me alone, Valentin!” I snapped, grabbing my bag and throwing it over my shoulder. “I’m sorry about your dad, ok? That sucks. But I am not him! Stop blaming me for everything that goes wrong, ok? You keep saying to not make things my fault, but I’m not going to do that by blaming something else, ok? So focus on yourself before you go around telling me what to do. It doesn’t sound like you dad leaving was your fault, either. It just sounds like he’s an asshole.”

  I stormed off, though in a small train there was nowhere to go. I slammed the door release button and hopped out onto the platform; my eyes so thick with tears I couldn’t see any farther than my hands.

  The train pulled away, and I realized this was not at all my station. It didn’t matter. I threw myself down on the bench and cried.

  The only number I had saved in my phone (who happened to own a car) was Jean Pascal. Frustrated, missing being able to drive because of this stupid country, I begged him to pick me up.

  “I am at… Je suis… Le Thor?” I said, looking at the tiny station sign.

  “Le Four?” he said, “four-what?”

  “Le Tor?” I repeated.

  “Ah! Je viens tout de suite. Pas de panique.”

  Don’t panic. Yeah, right. Easy for him to say. He hadn’t just alienated the only friend he had in this country, right after he went through some serious crap with his father. Which was also, once again, my fault for making a scene. What a jerk move, Jamie.

  But I was right about one thing: Valentin couldn’t go around telling me how to fix my life if he wasn’t dealing with his own. He couldn’t tell me I wasn’t allowed to feel guilty if he was running around ignoring his own problems.

  Jean Pascal took a while to reach me. Apparently, I was further from home than I had previously estimated. And he had brought the old red buggy, too, just to make things even more awkward.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, as he leaned over to open my door for me. He put all his effort into pronouncing the four words. Well, three, but he made them four by careful consideration.

  “Yes. No. I don’t know,” I replied, taking the passenger seat. As I sat down, I felt myself deflate, my body heavy and weak. “I’m sorry to have to call you…”

  “Slow, please,” he said, “I do not understand.”

  I took a deep breath.

  “Thank you,” I said, “I am sorry to ask for help.”

  “It is ok to ask,” he replied. The car puttered forward, leaving the tiny station and slipping none too gracefully onto the road. “All people need. Not all ask.”

  We drove a couple of minutes through the empty roads, the sun crouching low on the horizon, casting its long, golden shadows on us like a net. I sunk into my seat.

  “We are so worried about you,” said Jean Pierre, causing me to sink even deeper.

  “Oh,” I replied. “Didn’t Mamie tell you? She kicked me out.”

  “She is sorry she made you… run away.”

  “Run away?” I laughed. Not a good laugh, but the anxious, ripping-out-your-own-guts kind of laugh. “No. She called my mother a whore and told me she never wanted to see me again.”

  “She did not mean it.”

  “It didn’t sound like she didn’t mean it.”

  We continued driving in silence for a while, then Jean Pascal, possibly in an effort to lighten the mood, turned on the radio. The first song was an oddly upbeat polka; the next, a remix of that pirate song I think came from Peter Pan. After that, I’m pretty sure they just outright played ten minutes from pirates of the Caribbean. I reached over and turned off the radio – even that sucked in this stupid country.

  I wished I had the words to ask Jean Pascal for all the help that I needed. I wish I could ask him how to reach this woman. How to piece back together a broken heart. How to keep going knowing I was the source of so many awful things.

  Valentin was wrong: it was impossible to move on from them, not until you made them right. Blaming others for my problems wasn’t going to solve them.

  But one thing he was right about was that the hunt was now over. The desk was far out of our reach. Our last lead was dead. The last clue was long gone.

  And there were no words to ask for help on this one.

  “I am sorry,” Jean Pascal said, as we turned off the main road and started to make our way to Lourmarin, “that you are sad here.”

  Sad was one word for it. You had always called Provence home, even if you had only lived there for a short time. But I was a girl without a home, exiled from her mother country and rejected from her adoptive one. My heart had begun to beat for Provence but my blood was too American. I would never belong here, or in the world I had left what now felt like ages ago.

  “It’s not your fault,” I said, “you have been so generous.”

  “People see Provence like dream,” he said, “but dreams are for sleep. Real world not a dream.”

  “Yeah, I get that.”

  “Real world better. Real world real.”

  Insightful, this Jean Pascal.

  He pulled up in front of Mamie’s gate, hitting a small beeper in his car. Just who was this man, to my grandmother? She had never said, and he had never admitted.

  “Jean-Pascal,” I said, nervously. But when the question arose in my throat, another one rushed past it and reach my mouth first, “why do you drive this old car? Your new one is much nicer.”

  “Pfff,” he said, throwing himself in an elaborate, shoulder raising shrug, “you can always drive nice car. Why not drive special car?”

  “Thanks, JP.” As the car pulled up the gravel car port, I could tell he wasn’t going to park. He turned around the fountain and stopped, ready to go.

  “You do me favor,” he said, poking his head back out the window, “you read one book for me. La fin du printemps. Your Mamie’s best.”

  “I will, promise.”

  As I shut the door and made my way towards the house, I realized just how futile that promise was.

  The kitchen was empty when I came in. The keys were on the table, an unasked question to lock up behind me when I came in.

  I walked up through the living room, checking the oddly placed front door. It was definitely locked. No drunk Mamie on the couch this time. Good.

  I owed the woman nothing. She called my mother a whore and told me I was a pawn: she had lost all of my respect in one fell swoop. I didn’t bother to check if she was in her office. I knew there was nowhere else she would ever be.

  My room felt smaller now. I fell down on my bed, defeated, tossing my bag on the floor. The four letters were stacked neatly inside, but I no longer cared. The fifth letter was gone. The treasure, whatever it was, lost to time.

  In that moment, the only person I wanted to talk to was you.

  The sun was starting to set outside, painting the sky a wild shade of orange. The grass and trees knelt in pink before it. To capture the color would be a feat accomplished only by masters. I would never create a work as beautiful as it. I saw why the greats came to love this pla
ce: I would love it too, if it could ever love me back.

  As if a place could love.

  My phone buzzed. A text, from Valentin. I slipped it away with a flick of my thumb. And there, sitting in my inbox, was a message from Jazz.

  “Haven’t heard from you,” she said. “Call me when you get this, if you can?”

  I checked my phone data: there wasn’t much there, and I wasn’t about to waste it on Jazz. Not after how she had abandoned me the other night, when I needed her most.

  She started calling me immediately, as if she had been waiting for that little silver ‘seen’ to appear under her message. I would make this quick.

  “I have nothing to say to you,” I snapped, before she even had time to greet me, “I really don’t. I have to go.”

  “What the hell, Jamie?” she stammered, “what happened?”

  She seemed genuinely surprised: less bubbly than when I left, fully grounded and fierce. My finger hovered over the red decline button.

  “What happened?” I said, “What happened is I’ve been living through hell! My Mamie kicked me out, and I needed you, and you weren’t there!”

  “Oh my god, Jamie, are you ok?” she asked.

  “No, I am not ok!”

  “Do you have a place to stay?”

  “I slept at a friend’s house. But now he hates me, so I’m back at Mamie’s, though I don’t think she can even tell. And I’m going to hang up now.”

  “Oh come on,” she scoffed, “Jamie, I’m trying to help here!”

  “Help? How are you helping? You’re living the summer that we planned, you’re still driving around, free, happy, while I’m trapped here and I can’t… I can’t…”

  I burst into tears then. God, I was doing so much crying today. My life was in pieces, and there was no way I could put it back together again.

  “Jamie,” said Jazz, so stern she would have made the looney toons stand to attention, “You think I’m happy here, living my summer without you? I miss you so much! You don’t even know! Every freaking day I’m worried about you. The only reason I’m still taking those classes is because you said it was fine by you!”