Everything has slowed right down, just like in the seconds before the impact of a crash. Walking toward her seems to take long minutes, my thought processes strangely ordered and calm. She had turned at the sound of the car, but doesn’t now make any move to approach. I force myself to keep going forward.
As I get closer, I see that her face is thinner, the cheekbones more pronounced, which makes her odd-colored eyes seem larger and even more arresting. Her skin is browner than I remember it, as though she spends most of her time outside. She’s lost some of that ripe and dangerous lushness she possessed when I last saw her but her features, set harder in the intervening years, are more eerily perfect than I’ve recalled in my dreams. My heart lifts and swoops: a huge kick of maternal love to the chest, which also wakes the old fear. I feel it surging in.
And then she smiles and I’m thrown because it isn’t one of the Élodie smiles I know. This one is tentative, even nervous, and for a fleeting moment, I wonder if she’s an imposter.
A hand on my arm makes me jump. You’ve come up behind me, your fingers digging into my skin, but you aren’t looking at me, not even for an explanation. You’re staring at your sister, wide-eyed, drinking her in, like you could never get enough.
“Mum,” you wheeze. “I don’t… Is it…?” I upend my bag and watch loose change and tissues and lipsticks fall to the dirt. You scoop up the inhaler just as I bend down to get it. No one says anything as you suck in the medicine, Élodie’s face unreadable as she watches you.
“It’s your sister,” I say, when you’ve handed it back to me, though I’m not sure I’ll be able to speak until the words come out. “I know I need to explain. But… this is your sister. It’s Élodie.”
At her name, she turns her gaze from you to me, and as our eyes lock I think she flinches minutely, as though it’s hurt her to do it. I watch the nervous bob of her throat as she swallows, and I can’t help marveling at it, even in my shock, because I have never seen Élodie show nerves about anything, not even the day Greg drove her away.
I am so transfixed, so fundamentally shaken, that it takes me a while to register that your pupils looked huge as you used the inhaler, black pooling over blue. You’re much more shocked than I am, of course you are. Here, standing before you, is a ghost made flesh. Your almost-mythical sister, miraculously resurrected. I look at her again, half expecting her to have dispersed into the golden light, and it’s then that I see Luc in the background, moving out of sight on the path that leads to the barn. Then my eye returns to her, and he drops out of my mind—just like Olivier, until he taps me gently on the arm.
“Sylvie, I’m going now. You need time alone with… with your family…” He tails off. “I’ll ring soon, okay?”
I nod absently, the words meaning nothing. As he drives away, it strikes me that I haven’t touched her yet. I haven’t even managed to say anything. I cannot think straight.
And then she steps toward us and I automatically mirror her. As she embraces me I realize we are exactly the same size. Her arms around me are strong. She is utterly alive.
“Maman, you’re shaking. Your heart is beating so fast,” she says, into my ear. So close, I feel overwhelmed by her, like I don’t know whether to weep or faint. My child, I think, the words sliding cleanly, simply into my mind. She smells different and the same—of fresh air, the sea, patchouli. Her hair, when I clutch at a lock of it, has lost some of its girlish silkiness, replaced with the same tensile strength I can feel in her body. While I tremble, I notice that she is completely calm.
“Let’s go in,” I find myself saying.
I turn after I’ve ushered you into the house and catch her momentary hesitation on the threshold. But then she steps inside and, like all old lives revisited, it’s as profoundly familiar as it is dizzyingly strange.
We go through to the salon. I make coffee with sugar for all of us, though you don’t drink it and I have no idea if Élodie does.
I glance over at you, clutching your cup of coffee, like it’s the only thing stopping you spinning away. You still have that dazed expression; you look like I feel. Across from us, sitting with perfect upright posture on my mother’s armchair, Élodie is looking around the room.
“It’s just the same,” she says, in apparent wonder. “It’s been here all this time, unchanged.”
“I’ve been packing up,” someone says. Me. “Trying to clear the place out.” I reel at the absurdity of our conversation, this chit-chat that signifies nothing after ten years.
“Pourquoi?” Her eyes are soft, vulnerable.
“It’s for sale. La Rêverie is for sale.”
“Oh. You don’t want it anymore?”
I shift in my seat, check you again. “Emma, sweetheart, you still look pale. Why don’t you go upstairs for a while, until you feel better? I’ll come up and talk to you soon, I promise. I’ll explain everything. I just need some time with your sister.”
You’re outraged. “No way. I want to be here. I want to know…” Your eyes fill with tears, and a terrible guilt sluices through me. “You told me she was dead!” Your voice strangles as I look at Élodie, who flinches, more obviously this time. Guilt that she should hear that makes me sway in my chair. I put my hand to my face and realize it’s wet.
Élodie gets up and goes to kneel in front of you. Gently she pulls your hands away from your streaming eyes as I wipe my own.
“I am so sorry, Emma,” she says gently, musically, in slightly stilted English. Her accent is stronger than it used to be, as though she hasn’t spoken anything but French for a long time. “This is my fault.”
You exhale shakily. “Your fault? How is it your fault?”
“I told them not to see me. I say to them, ‘I am dead now, to you.’ And then, later, I disappear, so they would think I really was. Tu comprends? I make everyone think it.”
I sit frozen as you look at me, then back at her. “But why?”
“I was angry. I was a bad person then. I thought only of myself.” She places her hand on her heart.
I stare at it because I don’t know what I’ll see if I look at her face. She’s taking the blame and it makes my head spin.
“Emma, go upstairs. Just for a while.” It’s not fair of me but I can’t cope with this right now. I need to sort things out. I raise my hand when you open your mouth to object. “Please, just go. I’ll come and get you when Élodie and I have spoken.”
You do as I say, thank God, stamping up the stairs and slamming your bedroom door, which seems fair. Besides, I’d rather your temper than the blank shock.
When I turn back to Élodie, a hundred other moments with her in this room flash through my mind, like a magic lantern being spun. Out of the evening light, she looks younger, blurrier, closer to the age she was when she left.
We need a proper drink. In the kitchen, hands still shaking, I open the fridge and take out a new bottle of wine. Élodie reaches up to the cupboard where the glasses are kept and it’s that casual gesture—her unthinking familiarity with the kitchen—that finally brings it home to me that she’s back. It makes me sway again. I feel like I’m already drunk.
“Ça va?” Her hand on my bare shoulder is cool. I jump and then flush, with shame or embarrassment, I’m not sure.
“I’m sorry,” I say, after I’ve drunk the first glass straight down. “I just—it’s such a shock, that’s all. There’s so much to say, to ask you, that I don’t know where to start.”
“It’s a shock to me, too.” Another wavering smile. “I didn’t think anyone would be here, but then I saw the British number plate on the car, and the shutters were open. I was about to leave when the other car drove up.”
The possibility of that makes me dizzy again. Would I ever have known she’d been here if we’d missed her? I think I would. The air would have had a different weight, a different color.
“Come outside,” I say, wishing my voice sounded steadier. “Come and talk to me.”
On the terrace, she sits in the chair opposite. She curls her legs under her in exactly the same way I do. I’d forgotten that. She holds her wine glass like I do, too. Learned or innate? I never did know the answer to that one.
“Élodie—” I begin, but she talks over me.
“It’s so strange. Apart from Emma, everything looks the same as I remember, even you.” Her finger traces the dimple in her cheek and I find myself copying her again, finger to my own face.
“How are you, Élodie?” I begin, unsure how to convey that I need to know everything suddenly: where she’s been, how she’s coped all this time without her family, perhaps without anyone. This thought makes me crumple inside. But all I have are the same words I’d put to a casual acquaintance in the street. How are you?
“Are you well?” I try again. “You look well. You’re still so beautiful, maybe even more than you were.” I put out my hand but draw it back when she doesn’t move. “Élodie, where have you been all this time? Where did you go when you left the Institut?”
Her fingers flutter to her hair and begin to twist a lock of it round and round. A couple of her nails are broken off at the quick and there’s an angry-looking graze from her little finger to her wrist bone. It strikes me then like a body blow: this is my own daughter and I have no idea how she came to hurt herself. She’s been out in the world on her own for so long, fending for herself. Shame eddies through me again.
“I’ve wanted to come back,” she says, looking away across the garden. “Lots of times. I often thought about it. But I never actually did it until now. I must have known, in here.” She lays her hand flat against her chest again. “Something told me I had to come back now.”
“But then you were just going to leave again? Without seeing us?”
“I got afraid. When no one answered I lost my nerve. I thought that maybe it wasn’t the right time after all.”
“You were afraid? But I have never known a child as unafraid as you.”
She shrugs. “Like you say, I was a child. I guess I didn’t know fear until I… went away.”
“Oh, God, Élodie.” I hang my head. “You know we would never have done that unless…”
“I know. I didn’t say it to make you feel guilty. You and Papa did what you had to.” I watch her scratch carefully around the edges of the graze. “What did you tell Emma about me? Apart from the fact that I’d died, I mean.” Her eyes flick toward me and then away as I wince.
“I—she was told that you had to go away. That you were—ill.”
“And that I died of it, this illness?”
I sigh shakily. “We thought it was best, that it would be easiest on Emma—she was still such a little girl—if we let her think you were physically sick. I’m—I’m so sorry for that, and I’m grateful for what you said in there. I really am.”
“But did you actually say I was dead? Did you say those words: ‘Élodie died’” Her voice trembles.
I hang my head again. “No. Someone in her class gave her the idea that you must have gone to heaven, and when she asked me I let her believe that. Look, I know how awful it sounds but I never… I never said the words—”
“I understand.” She cuts me off. “It was easier for her to believe that then. She was only little, like you said.”
“Your father was against it at first. I should say that. He was angry with me about it. Still is, I think.”
“Of course. I’ll ring him later.”
“Later. Does that mean I can stay here tonight?”
Blood pounds in my head. “You must.”
I still don’t know where she’s been all this time, or why she’s chosen to come back now, beyond a nebulous feeling that it was the right time. As I watch, two tears roll simultaneously down her cheeks and I move to comfort her instinctively, even as it strikes me that she never cried, not really. It had never looked like this. This looks like proper crying, an overspill of emotion that can’t be contained. I had always felt Élodie was too much in control for that.
I hurry inside for a box of tissues. Kneeling next to her chair as she wipes her eyes, my hand comes to rest on her back.
“Perhaps I shouldn’t stay after all,” she says, after she’s gathered herself. “Perhaps it would be better if I went somewhere else.”
“No, no. You can’t go. You’ve only just come back. You’ll sleep in your own room. It’s just as it was. I mean, some things have gone, of course, but your clothes, your bed…” I run out of breath. Three words circle in my head. She’s my daughter. She’s my daughter.
She nods. “Thank you.”
We lapse into silence again. I watch her surreptitiously as she wipes her nose. A sudden breeze lifts her hair, a golden pennant rippling out behind her.
In the pit of me, my old friend Anxiety strikes up a new beat, faster than before. It’ll be dark in a couple of hours. And for the first time in ten years, Élodie won’t be out there in the vastness of the world, but under the same roof as you and me.