1993

We end up in the salon by mid-afternoon, you and Élodie trying to tune in the old television while I hover, packing and repacking the same box and seemingly getting nowhere. I’ve tried to phone Greg again but there’s still no answer. Though Élodie seems unaffected by the heat, the two of us—unused to such extremes—have been driven inside by it. I want nothing more than to go upstairs, run a cool bath, and submerge myself, but I won’t leave you. I close my eyes against the light streaming in through the open doors, voices flickering and receding as you turn the dial, anxiety roiling inside me. It’s a relief when the phone rings at about four.

“Allô,” says a breezy voice. “It’s Martine here, from Century 21. No offer from the Bernards yet, but we’ve had another request for a viewing, from an English couple. I can do this one so it doesn’t matter if you’re going out. Tomorrow at eleven okay?”

“Oh. Yes, I think that’s fine. Thank you. We’ll probably be here, though. Me and… my daughters, I mean.”

I glance toward Élodie to see if she caught the plural that feels so rusty in my mouth but she’s still facing the television, where a half-tuned news bulletin stretches and fragments. When it briefly settles, a reporter is talking in front of a line of burnt-out cars. A pall of smoke has turned the sky to lead behind him. I squint to read the place name at the bottom of the screen and see, with a lurch, that it’s less than an hour from here. Élodie’s expression, reflected imperfectly in the television as the blizzard of static takes over again, is hard to make out.

Martine talks on for a few more minutes, her light chatter washing over me. I’m dimly relieved that she doesn’t seem to know or care about Élodie’s return. Perhaps people in the village aren’t aware of it yet. As for the viewing, I wasn’t expecting more interest so soon. It makes me feel agitated—there’s too much going on. I’m not sure I trust myself to say the right thing to these English people who might want La Rêverie. For the first time in a long time, I’m thinking of the English as Other and myself as French. And that wrong-foots me again.

As evening approaches, the three of us still ensconced in the hot salon, I realize that, even as I’m trying to ensure you’re never alone with her, I’m also avoiding being alone with you. It isn’t very difficult for me to pull this off: you’re like her little shadow already and, unlikely as it seems, given the past, Élodie appears to want to be wherever I am.

I try Greg yet again, letting it ring out for a good five minutes before giving up. He must be in Normandy and I don’t have the number.

Élodie insists on cooking that night. I need to go shopping but she says there’s enough for some approximation of a salade niçoise, waving me out of the kitchen when I try to protest. I join you at the table on the terrace. You’ve changed into something floaty but slightly grubby, which must have come out of Élodie’s rucksack because I don’t recognize it. I resist telling you to go and change.

“She lent it to me,” you say, catching me looking. “She said if I wanted, I could keep it.”

“It’s a bit big, isn’t it?”

That’s true—it keeps slipping off one shoulder—but what I really mean is that it’s too old for you. Too provocative.

“Élodie says it suits me.”

What can I say to that? I’m beginning to feel as though I have to tread carefully or you’ll choose her. That’s how the dynamic already seems to be shaping up, and she’s only been back twenty-four hours.

By ten, you can no longer keep your eyes open. Reluctantly you head upstairs, leaving your sister and me alone. Although I’m exhausted, my body thrums as though it’s over-caffeinated. I’m too alert to sleep now. It’s the first time Élodie and I have been alone together since the morning.

She isn’t going anywhere, playing solitaire with a soft old deck of cards on the glass coffee table she learned to walk around. I can see her tiny fingerprints in the sunlight as though it were yesterday.

I watch as she goes over to the record player and checks what’s on the turntable before turning it over to side two and dropping the needle. It’s a James Taylor LP I’d put on a couple of nights earlier.

“You didn’t come to see me again,” Élodie says softly, after “Fire and Rain” has finished. “In the center. I waited for you, every week. But you never did, not after that last time.”

“I—I’m sorry. But don’t you remember? The doctors said it was a bad idea. They said that with… cases like yours, it was better if there was no family contact while they worked on treatment.”

She smiles ruefully. “They told me that, too. I thought they’d made it up. I thought they were avoiding telling me that you didn’t want to see me. Do you think you would have come, if it had been allowed?”

The guilt rushes in again. “Of course. I often rang to see how you were getting on. Didn’t you know?”

She shakes her head. “Look, like I said before, I’m not bringing any of this up to make you feel bad. I understand now. I would understand if you said you hadn’t wanted to see me.”

She’s sitting cross-legged on the floor, her back against the sofa, her loose hair half covering her face. I’m holding my breath because I think she’s about to admit what she did. She had never done that before, not directly—not even during that last visit. But then she veers off again.

“It was when I got to the ashram that I truly began to understand,” she says. “All the anger—and I had been angry for a long time—just melted away. I was taught about forgiveness, about letting things go. We meditated every morning, and each time that ball of grief and hate was smaller and then one day it had just… gone. I felt the last of it disperse through the pores of my skin. I felt as light as air. There’s no anger in me now, no negative feelings. I’m clean, Maman. I was reborn that day.”

“Ashram?” I say stupidly. “What ashram? You went to India?”

She laughs. “To Spain. Up in the mountains in the north. We called it the ashram because the couple that started it were followers of Osho.”

“So it was a cult?”

She smiles, beatific and serene. Another one I haven’t seen before. “No, not a cult. A community.”

I study her face again, and though I’m trying to entertain the possibility that Camille could be right—that she’s been changed for the better by the years we’ve been apart—all I can think of is what happened at that commune in Texas a few months ago.

Your father always liked to think of Élodie as a rebellious soul because the student riots coincided with her conception. Afterward, though, I could never quite divorce her arrival from those stories that came out of California in ’69. The end of the hippie dream. I always remember those girls. The baby they cut from the womb.

And so as Élodie talks on about her Spanish community, eyes fever-bright in the lamplight, the part of me that has been on high alert for so long can’t help fearing the inverse: that far from mending her, this place and the center before it might have helped hone her own peculiar charisma, her skill at manipulation—like a prison can harden a petty thief into a murderer.

A couple of years ago, I read about an experiment carried out in California (of course) in the 1970s, right at the time when I was struggling so much with something the doctors round here barely had the vocabulary for.

A group of criminals who had been diagnosed as psychopaths were basically locked up together to see if they could help each other. It sounds like the sort of experiment that someone could only have devised when high, and it wouldn’t surprise me if this was the case, but I could see a perverse kind of logic in it, too. Who could understand the psychopath’s mind better than a fellow psychopath? The long-term outcome, though, was chilling. When they reoffended after release—and they did reoffend—their crimes were more violent and depraved than those who had not taken part in the experiment. They had become better psychopaths.

I watch Élodie as she rolls a cigarette. I can’t take my eyes off her.

“Do you want one?”

I shake my head, although I do, badly. “You’ll have to open the doors if you’re going to smoke,” I say, and wonder if I imagine the light in her eyes fading a little. “It’s bad for Emma’s chest.” I hate my spiky tone, when what I really am is nervous.

She rises obediently and pushes them back as far as they’ll go. The night sidles in, perfumed and heady, still singed from the fires. I see Waco in my mind again: the compound burning with all those people still inside, flames and smoke rolling off the roof, tall as mountains.

She comes and sits down, closer now, and I resist the urge to reach out to her, because I don’t want to get it wrong. My hand hovers in the air.

“I just want you to know that I forgive you, Maman. I wanted to say that. It’s an important step on my journey to self-actualization to speak those words to you, face to face.”

I draw my hand back. “You forgive me?”

She smiles again. “I do. I forgive you.”

“Doesn’t it have to work the other way, too? Don’t I have to forgive you?”

Something flashes across her face, too quick to interpret. Then she nods. “You’re right. I ask your forgiveness too. I’m sorry I wasn’t the daughter you wanted.”

“No, hang on.” My voice cracks with emotion. “That’s not asking forgiveness. If you don’t mean it, you shouldn’t say it.”

She puts her head on one side. “But it’s true. It wasn’t until Emma that you wanted to be a mother, that you felt you were a mother.”

I shake my head. “No, no, that’s not how it was at all. You don’t know. If you had seen me when they put you in my arms for the first time… I wanted so badly to meet you while I was pregnant, and when I did, the feeling was instant. It was a fierce kind of love, like nothing I’d ever gotten close to before. It is a fierce kind of love. Nothing changes that.”

She rescues me then, returning to the subject of the ashram: the wildflowers that grew on the mountains even as snow lingered on the peaks, the guitar chords someone taught her to play, the profound peace the place helped her find. I want to believe in it. Part of me does.

Slowly, fatigue begins to overtake me. It’s so warm in the salon. Her voice too, which has deepened and softened with the years, is having a soporific effect.

“Aren’t you tired?” I say.

“Not really.” She smiles sadly. “I don’t need much sleep, not since the Institut.”

“Oh, Élodie.”

She shakes her head. “No, I didn’t mean it that way. It’s ancient history, really. It’s just that there was always something happening there at night, something to wake you up. I feel as though I did nothing more than cat-nap during those years.”

I hang my head. I don’t know what to say. She comes over and takes my hands. The physical contact, like yesterday’s, is a shock.

“Maman, you must understand. I’m grateful to you and Papa for sending me there, not resentful. They helped me. If I hadn’t gone there, and then to the ashram, I wouldn’t be cured.”

“Cured,” I repeat. “I mean, I can see you’re different, of course I can.” I can hear Morel’s words in my head. She could grow out of it. There was an eighty percent chance of it. But then he also said there was no cure.

It occurs to me that the only way I can know is to find out more about her. I gather my last reserves of energy and lean forward. “Élodie, what else has happened to you?”

“I told you, I was in Spain and—”

“Not just the ashram. I mean, who have you been with, where were you before Spain, how did you come to be there at all? What has it been like for you all this time, without us—without your family?” My voice breaks on the last word.

She turns up her palms. “I will tell you everything, Maman, if you really want to know.”

“I do,” I breathe. “I do.”

So she tells me about her life without us. I listen from the sofa with my eyes closed. After she left the Institut, she went south, hitching rides to the coast.

“I was always so cold in the north. It didn’t feel like France to me. It wasn’t home.”

She spent almost two years on the Côte d’Azur, working her way east toward Italy and then west again, as far as the Spanish border and then beyond it, to Roses, where Dalí lived.

“Everything was white and blue there. White fishing cottages, white sand in the calas—the little coves. Blue skies every day.”

“You always loved it by the sea.”

I open my eyes and she’s smiling in the lamplight. “You remember.”

I want to cry. “Of course I remember.”

She worked just enough to live, never staying anywhere long, mostly waitressing. “I always got good tips,” she says, and I smile, the tears receding again.

“I’m not surprised. Élodie?”

I open my eyes and she’s moved closer, so that we’re in touching distance now. I didn’t hear her move. “Tell me where else you went,” I say. “Who you met.”

She sits back. “I went to California once. Someone got me a passport. I went for the whole summer.”

That makes me sit up. “You did? I never got there. I wanted to, once upon a time. What did you see there?”

“Oh, so much. I met a man. He had a house on stilts, looking out over one of the canyons.”

Her smile is another I don’t know, sphinx-like. “Tell me.”

“I met him in the desert, at a festival. He had a Mexican name but he was from LA. I asked him to take me to the Troubadour club. They weren’t playing your music anymore. It was all rock bands by then, but I wanted to go. I thought of you.”

“How did you know?” My voice is thick with emotion.

She gestures at the records stacked underneath the old player. “I told you, I remember everything.”

“What happened to the man?”

She shrugs. “I left LA, went back to Spain. I liked to keep moving. I was always looking for something and not quite finding it. I think, really, I was just trying to get back here.”

I let that land and settle. The silence stretches out. I still can’t believe she’s here. I’m so tired by now that I can’t see straight. “I think I’m going to have to go to bed. I’m sorry.”

She nods. “I’m not tired yet. Do you mind if I stay here for a while, have a last cigarette?”

“No, of course not.” I go toward her but don’t know what to do when I get there. She looks up expectantly and I stroke her hair, just briefly. Then I leave her smoking on her own. As I reach the stairs, the record turns itself over. It’s the Beach Boys now.

The song that’s always been hers starts playing as I reach the landing. “Good Vibrations.” I sit down heavily on the top step, my hand clutching the banister, and as her cigarette smoke finds me I begin to cry again, harder this time, the sound drowned in the music.

The night passes without incident. I try your father again in the morning. To my surprise, he picks up on the third ring.

“Greg. At last.”

I don’t know how to say it now I’ve got him. I glance through the salon doors. Élodie is making you laugh on the terrace, where you’ve just finished breakfast.

“Sylvie, are you there?”

“Élodie,” I push out the word, my voice cracking on the third syllable. “She’s here.”

He inhales sharply.

“Greg?”

“Élodie?” he says, voice oddly high with disbelief. I can hear him casting around for his cigarettes. “She’s with you at La Rêverie? Now?”

“Yes. She just… appeared. We came back from a day out and she was standing on the drive.”

He’s silent again for a long moment, then starts speaking in a rush. “Right, look, I’m on my own with the boys tonight. Nicole’s mum has had a small stroke and they’re really upset—they were with her when it happened—but I’ll set off as soon as she’s back. The roads will be clear. I should be with you by dawn.”

“Okay.” My mind has gone blank again. I twist the phone cord around my forefinger, tighter and tighter, watching as the tip turns red.

“Sylvie?”

“I’m still here.”

“How is… How does she seem?”

“Different,” I say, as I did to Camille. “I don’t know really. I can barely think straight.”

When I put the phone down, I don’t know whether the thought of him coming makes me feel better or not. All I really feel is lightheaded and slightly seasick, which takes me straight back to being pregnant with her. If it were possible, I’d go upstairs and sleep for a couple of days.

“Mum, Élodie says she doesn’t have anywhere to be for a while,” you inform me, when I emerge onto the terrace again. “So she’ll be able to stay longer.”

I sit down and pour myself some coffee. “That’s good,” I say carefully, the word so woefully inadequate that I could laugh. Now she’s here, I can’t imagine wanting her to be anywhere else. But it doesn’t make her presence any easier.

Élodie shoots me a dazzling smile. “You don’t mind?”

“Of course she doesn’t, do you, Mum?” You smile at both of us. “This is your home too.”

“Maman?” Élodie says.

I nod. “It is. It’s your home. It never stopped being that.” I take a breath, rub my sore eyes. “I managed to get hold of your father at last. He’s driving down late tonight. He’ll be with us by morning.”

“So it’ll be all of us?” You can’t keep the glee out of your voice.

“We will be four again,” says Élodie. “En famille.” She raises her cup and you scramble for your tumbler of juice to clink against it. “I am very happy to be here with you. I have dreamt of it.”

I’ve dreamt of it too, so many times. Isn’t there a theory that there are infinite parallel universes, a new one created every time we make a decision? I think of those endless alternatives, multiplying like a hall of mirrors: the ones where we hadn’t risked coming back to France and the ones where we’d never left at all. I feel like I’ve slipped into one of the latter, dragging you with me. Soon Greg will be here, the slide into that other reality complete.

Martine turns up exactly on time for the viewing, the English couple squeezed into the back of her little Renault. She’s tiny, with a sleek cap of dark red hair and black ballet shoes that must be child-sized. The Johnsons—Barbara and Keith—are a nice couple in their late fifties, her soft-spoken and faded, him trim and twinkly. With their old-fashioned manners, they remind me a little of Greg’s parents, though these two are much more at ease with each other. I haven’t seen Charles and Margaret in years; Greg takes you to visit them once a year, around Christmas.

“Martine said you live in England,” says Barbara, smiling. “Is that right? Your accent is ever so good.”

“Thank you. And, yes, my daughter and I live in London. Her father is English, although he lives in Paris.”

Barbara looks as though she’s going to ask why it worked out that way, but then thinks better of it. “Isn’t it sweltering?” she says instead. “It was like an oven in that car. I thought I’d faint.”

“They’re saying it’s the worst heatwave for a decade,” Keith chimes in. “The whole area’s a tinderbox, and that’s the parts that haven’t caught fire already.”

I follow them as Martine leads the way around the house, just in case she’s unsure about anything, though she seems confident enough. They exclaim over something in every room: first the old wallpaper and original shutters, then the wooden floors and high ceilings.

I’m about to go downstairs when Martine pops her head out to say she’s going to take some decent photographs of the interior.

“While I do that, do you mind showing them the garden?”

I lead the way downstairs and out onto the terrace. The sun is blinding after the relative dimness of the house and Barbara digs in her handbag for sunglasses.

After they admire the pool, which I’d made you skim the usual leaves and insects off half an hour earlier, Keith asks about the barn.

“I’m after a workshop, see. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, just big enough to keep a couple of cars out of the elements. I restore vintage Jags and sell them on. Not to make money—it’s just a hobby really.”

You intercept us on our way round there, smiling at the strangers, which is sweet of you because you don’t want the house to be sold.

“How’s it going, love?” you murmur to me in the old-man voice. “Shall I put the kettle on? Make us all a nice cup of tea?”

I cover my mouth with my hand and you grin back at me. Barbara and Keith are not so unlike our pretend couple.

Though I’d rather you didn’t, you follow us into the barn. It feels bigger than usual, perhaps because I’m viewing it through strangers’ eyes. Although I don’t like being in here, it’s a relief for the eyes after the intense sunlight. Keith whistles as he takes in the space.

“Blimey, it must be twenty-five, thirty feet high.”

I see him notice the open-sided loft space in the back corner, a ladder leaning against it. “Anything up there?”

“I doubt it. I haven’t gone up in years.”

“Be careful, love,” Barbara calls, as he begins to climb. She rolls her eyes at me. “He thinks he’s thirty-five.”

I glance round for you but you’re still hovering on the threshold. Your smile has gone now and you’re pale under your new freckles. I was scared this would happen. I’m just about to ask if you’re all right when Keith calls down.

“You had someone staying up here?”

“What do you mean?”

“There are clothes. And other bits.”

A wave of anxiety rises in me as he climbs down, Barbara steadying the ladder from the bottom. They want to see the terrace again and I can hardly say no but I want to go up that ladder and see for myself what’s there. I look around again for you, but you’ve gone. There’s no sign of you in the garden as we cross it to the steps either. The anxiety roils inside me again.

Martine is waiting for us on the terrace. “I’ve got a good feeling about them,” she says, nodding toward the couple, who are surveying the lawn, Keith making a sweeping gesture and Barbara smiling. “You wait. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re the ones.”

“We love the house,” he says at the front door, after shaking my hand, “but we’ll need to go away and have a good think.”

“Of course,” I say distractedly, because I’m thinking about the barn loft and you disappearing so fast.

It seems to take forever to maneuver them into Martine’s car but then, finally, they’re driving away, a cheery toot from the horn as they disappear down the drive.

I stand on the front step, paralyzed with indecision. I want to check you’re okay but I also want to go back to the barn and climb the ladder, reassure myself Élodie was telling the truth by the pool. That anything left is from when she would hide out there and I would lie awake, wondering if this would be the night she’d burn the whole thing down with a careless or not-so-careless cigarette. I developed a fixation with it for a while, almost a phobia. Some nights I found myself padding through the dark house to the only window you could see the barn from, the tiny, net-covered square in the souillarde. It was almost as if I knew what would happen.

I give in to the urge to move, hurrying along the overgrown footpath that loops round the side of the house to the barn, quicker than the drive. In the scrub that lines it, the racket of the cicadas is like an assault. Sweat blooms at my hairline and under my arms. A hot runnel slides between my breasts.

It’s quiet in the barn, the noises of outside cut off cleanly. I can hear my heart thudding in my ears. The metal of the ladder is cold. I can smell the iron under my clammy hands as I begin to climb, strong enough to taste, like blood from a bitten tongue.

It’s dark at the top and I have to squint while my eyes adjust. What there is comes into focus slowly: a mound of clothes heaped on an old mattress, a plastic water bottle on its side, and a cigarette packet, its lid ripped off. I scramble onto what is really just a glorified ledge, a glance back to the floor making me falter because, like you, I’ve never been very good with heights.

I pick through the clothes, looking for signs of recent occupation. But I’m just not sure. I can’t be certain if the denim jacket, soft with wear, and a couple of sun-faded T-shirts are old or not, even if they’re hers or not. I thought there would be no doubt—something I’d remember from the past, or else something that is definitively not hers: a man’s overalls or boots, proof that a stranger had slept rough here for a time. Which is, perversely, a less alarming idea to me than the thought of Élodie hiding out here while we were in the house, unaware that all those uncanny feelings I was having about her being close by weren’t so fanciful after all. That they were real. My eyes alight on the foil square of an empty condom wrapper. I snatch it up and turn it to the light to read the expiration date. 1998: five long years away. Surely it must be new.

And then an explanation occurs to me, and I curse myself for not thinking of it before. Perhaps all of it belongs to Luc. That was why I’d caught him hanging around. Maybe he was using this place, or had been, as somewhere to escape his mother’s suffocating attentions. He could have been using it for years, filling the pool for himself, not us. I wondered if he’d ever brought those boys on mopeds back here for a party, or maybe a girl.

The denim jacket has something hard in the breast pocket and I slip my finger under the metal button. It’s a lighter: the cheap disposable kind, made of clear purple plastic. I push down the wheel with the side of my thumb, and a flame sparks. I wonder who was the last person to do the same, and where they did it. I think about the souillarde’s scorched walls.

I find you in the salon, where you’re sitting on the very edge of the armchair where Élodie had sat when she arrived, your hands clasped between your bare knees. I perch on the arm and that’s when I see you’re clutching your inhaler. I reach out to stroke your hair.

“What’s set that off? Something in the barn?” I can’t tell if my voice sounds natural or not.

I don’t know what you’ve recalled, but I hope it’s unformed, unspecific. An aversion to the barn that you don’t understand, and may put down to something irrational and harmless. A fear of shadowy corners, of insects or rats.

There’s still a wheeze in your chest; I can hear it clearly. You look back at me and your eyes are unfocused. I know it’s not me you’re seeing.