1993

In the concentrated heat of the circus audience, I close my eyes but when I open them again she’s still there. She’s standing at the back, looking toward the center of the ring, where the entire troupe has begun to parade in a circle as the audience rises to its feet to applaud, slow-clapping in time to the music.

I crane to see past all the oblivious people now in my way, to try to spot the sharp little chin again, the familiar sway of long hair, the mesmerizing stillness she was always able to inhabit when she wanted.

“Come on, let’s go,” I say, taking your hand. I pull you after me through our row, treading on people’s feet in the rush. Your reluctance tugs at me, slowing us down like a puncture.

“Mum, what are you doing?”

You wrench your hand free but I blunder on anyway, running to the back of the raised benches, desperate to see her, terrified of seeing her. But people are starting to move now, wanting to get out ahead of the rush. I push through a large family, stupid and slow to part, and catch the reek of garlic sweat on the father as our bodies briefly make contact. He grumbles at me, “Attention, Madame! Doucement,” but I go on regardless.

Even in the sudden crush of people filing back toward the square, there’s a curious hollow in the place where I thought I saw her, as though she’s left a small force field in her wake. I look down at the straw as if, like something from a fairy tale, I might spy some dropped token. One of the rings Greg brought her back from his trips, maybe—different shapes and styles but always set with a turquoise stone, like the necklace you’ve appropriated.

Of course there’s nothing. Élodie was never there in the first place. I wouldn’t find her, as I once had on a beach, nearly twenty years ago. It must have been someone with a look of her or the memory of the tiger or else I’m finally losing my mind.

I look around but I can’t see you. Trying to slip inside the crowd, I find myself pushed back, unable to penetrate the wall of unyielding shoulders and hips. I hover helplessly in the small void Élodie’s lookalike has left behind, an illogical panic spreading through my chest. I glance over my shoulder toward the cages. The tigers and bears will be back inside them now, locked in for the night. The old fear rears up again: the faulty bolt or the rotten bar, the tiger on the loose.

“Emma!” I shout, loud and desperate enough for a few people to turn. “Emma!”

A hand on my arm makes me swing round. It’s Olivier. He looks down into my face with concern. He seems taller.

“Sylvie,” he says. “Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?”

“I saw her,” I say breathlessly. “She was here and now she’s gone.”

“She’s just over there. Look.” He points.

I can’t seem to catch my breath. “Where?” Everything has slowed down, the noise muffled. And then I see that it’s you, not her, talking to Laurent about fifty feet away.

I close my eyes with relief, my body going limp.

Olivier touches my shoulder. “See? She’s fine. Let’s just wait here a minute. There are too many people to get through.”

I take in a lungful of too-hot air and force myself to let it out slowly, the panic ebbing with it. Olivier’s hand on my bare shoulder is cool and dry. He’s so close I can see every gold fleck in his brown eyes.

“Doucement,” he says, unwittingly echoing the man from before, but sounding completely different, the words slow and coaxing from him. “Nothing’s wrong. You need some air, that’s all.”

He reaches out and tucks a damp strand of hair behind my ear. I can feel a solid heat coming off the rest of him. He still seems bigger than I think of him in my mind, hard muscle and dense bone pressing into me. My heart is still fluttering in my chest, a different fear—or perhaps it’s excitement now—sparking outward to my every nerve ending. We’re standing too close to each other for almost-strangers, but I don’t move away and neither does he. When he runs his hand down the sensitive inside of my arm, I feel a pulse deep inside me. He’s gazing at me so intensely that it makes me flush and look away, unable to meet his eye any longer. I turn to beckon you over.

Olivier buys us ice-creams from the new gelaterie just off the square, open late to catch the circus custom. We walk slowly back toward the stalls because you want another look, and the cold ice-cream slipping down my throat is soothing. I’m acutely aware of Olivier next to me.

“Okay now?” he says, quietly so you won’t hear.

“Thanks for rescuing me back there,” I murmur. “I owe you.”

“Anytime. Perhaps you can pay me back by coming to dinner with me.”

“I think I can manage that.”

He smiles and guides me gently past a group of people, his hand warm at the small of my back, making my skin tingle.

I glance back to check on you and stop dead because you’re no longer alone.

He’s ten years older than when I last saw him and the sun damage has made it look like twenty but I still recognize him immediately. Marc Lesage. He’d run the tabac when I was growing up. He’d always been a bully people avoided crossing but I’d never drawn his attention until Élodie.

You catch my eye over his shoulder and I see how uncomfortable you are. His clawed old hand is on your arm, ice-cream dripping down your wrist because he won’t let go.

“… ta soeur,” I hear him say, as I stride up. Your sister.

“Bonsoir,” I say, getting between the two of you so he has to let you go. “Ça fait longtemps, Marc.”

“I was just saying that she doesn’t look much like her sister.” He slurs the words, his breath a hot aniseed fug of sour pastis. “Probably a good thing, eh? You wouldn’t want another like the first one.” He laughs, baring yellow teeth, unknowingly echoing Annette’s earlier barb.

He reaches for you again, staggering as his weight shifts, and I push you in the direction of Olivier, who is hesitating, wondering whether to intervene. Before he can, I lean as close to Marc as I can bear.

“You’re drunk, as ever. I told you ten years ago to mind your own business. Don’t you ever come near me or my daughter again.”

“Why have you come back anyway?” he calls as I walk away. “We were glad to see the back of you. Vous nous avez apporté encore une brebis galeuse?” Have you brought us another rotten apple?

And then he switches to English, raising his voice so you’ll hear. “Bad apple,” he shouts, his accent thick but understandable, as I hurry you away. “She bad apple.”

People turn toward us, the background hum of the crowd abruptly switched off. A group of boys standing under the plane trees with their mopeds are laughing and whistling and I think we both notice in the same instant that Luc is among them, though he remains silent and unsmiling. I barely have time to absorb your stricken expression before you turn and run in the direction of the square.

Without a word to Olivier, I follow. People are dawdling and stopping, seemingly oblivious to anyone behind them. Ahead of me, you’re pulling away, somehow able to weave much more deftly between the groups than I.

Just before reaching the square, where the clot of people is finally able to disperse, I lose sight of you, just like before. You’ve eluded me as easily as the mirage of Élodie by the benches, another ghost daughter vanished. I come to a stop, unable to think straight about what you might do next.

I make for the far side of the square, where the road beyond the barriers erected for the circus will take me back to La Rêverie. I’m about halfway across when I see, at the very edge of my peripheral vision, the familiar swing of hair again. I wish it were yours, but it isn’t. I cover my face with my hands, resisting the urge to scream. Somewhere in my mind, the thought registers that I badly need a drink.

When I take my hands away, she’s gone, whoever she was. Almost everyone has gone from my end of the square, in fact.

“Come on,” I say aloud. “Pull yourself together.”

I set off again, determined that nothing will put me off this time. Beyond the village limits, plunged into sudden darkness, I run along the main road, ignoring as well as I can the flashing headlights of passing cars, the same dance song coming from one, a blaring horn from another, full of teenagers, high-pitched laughter Dopplering into something low and threatening as they fly past, so close my hair whips my cheek.

By the time I get back to La Rêverie, I’m breathing hard, my hair plastered to the back of my neck.

“Mon Dieu, Sylvie!” Camille exclaims from the salon door. She’s holding one of our grandmother’s antique coffee cups in her hand. “What melodrama. And you such an Englishwoman these days. Emma is upstairs. She wouldn’t say a word to me, just ran straight up. What on earth has happened?”

I take the stairs two at a time but you aren’t in your room and, for a second, the panic returns and I’m ready to take to the streets again. As I turn to go back downstairs I notice the faint bar of light under the door at the other end of the hall. Of course. You’re in Élodie’s room.

As I reach for the handle, its brass plate gouged with half a dozen tiny Es if you know where to look for them, I feel the dread that always hits me on this threshold. Inside, you sit cross-legged on the dusty floor, surrounded by heaps of her clothes, torn from the rail in the wardrobe. Hanging from the open door is the key.

You’ve lifted your face, your eyes red. “I found it next to Camille’s cigarettes.”

I think you look more fearful than angry, which is something I never witnessed in your sister. Nothing ever frightened her, especially me.

I rush over and kneel to pull you to me, crushing the clothes under my knees. “Oh, Emma, I was so worried. You shouldn’t have run off like that. That road is dangerous in the dark.”

You don’t pull away, but you don’t return the embrace either. When I lean back to look at you properly, a single tear runs down your cheek and falls to the faded blue shirt in your lap.

“Darling, what that horrible man said—”

“He said she was a bad apple.” You look down at the shirt in your lap and begin to pleat the fabric between your fingers, pinching each fold so hard that your thumbnails turn white. “I know what it means but why did he say it?”

I look at the detritus around you and see the white sundress. The small splash of red wine staining the hem is still there, faded now to pink. I pick up an old flip-flop and trace a finger along the indentation her foot made long ago. There’s something even more intimate about it than the clothes.

I take a breath. “Em, you know I told you she was taken out of school when she was ten?”

You nod.

“Well, it wasn’t because we decided to teach her at home, like I said. She was expelled.”

Your eyes widen. “What did she do?”

“She was unkind to another girl in her class.”

“Is that all?”

You sound like Greg, never wanting to acknowledge that Élodie might have done anything wrong, and it makes me sharp. “It was bad, Emma. The girl was seriously hurt. The point is that this is a small village. Everyone knew what Élodie did and some people still remember it now. That’s what that man meant. He should never have said it to you but I wanted to tell you why he did so you understood. Unfortunately, people have long memories in a place like this.”

You gesture to the clothes strewn around you. “Can I have some of these?”

I shake my head. “No, I don’t think that would be—”

“Why?” You speak over me. “She was my sister. You’ve never wanted me to have anything of hers.” Your hand goes to the turquoise necklace. “You don’t even like me having this.” It’s then that I hear the wheeze in your chest.

I get to my feet. “Choose a few things, then. And put the rest away, please. I’ll get your inhaler.”

That she was expelled doesn’t tarnish your image of her, I realize. Her hurting someone is just an abstract detail. It only makes her more fascinating.

“Mum?”

I’m almost at the door, thinking about your asthma and how, after years of absence, the symptoms are creeping back in. I’m also thinking about the wine in the fridge downstairs.

“What is it, Em?”

You pull in your breath and I wince at the sound. “I found something else earlier. In the study.”

I wait. I’ve gone through that room, or at least I think I have.

“It’s all in French but I worked out some of the words. I think it’s her medical notes.”