I am at the hospital visiting my mother, who has been diagnosed with advanced heart disease. I have been driving back and forth to Toulouse to see her since before Christmas, buckling you into your car seat each and every time because I’m the only person I trust to look after you.
On my way back from taking you to the toilet, Maman’s doctor catches my eye and beckons me into a small, overheated room. He tells me she probably won’t last much longer. Though he hasn’t yet said anything to her, she seems to know this intuitively, asking me when I get back to her bedside if I would mind going to pick up her rosary from the flat she still shares with Aunt Mathilde.
Outside the plate-glass window at the end of the ward, the night is bearing down hard on the day, though it’s not yet four o’clock. Machines hum and beep; nurses glide past on rubber-soled shoes. I sit on a plastic chair molded for someone wider than me and know that I will soon be an orphan. The existence of my own family—Greg, Élodie, you—doesn’t make this any less frightening.
Maman regards me anxiously, even apologetically, and at first I assume it’s because of all the driving she knows I’m having to do in order to see her. She never learned to drive and has always viewed it as an enormous, stressful undertaking. But it’s not that.
“I should have stayed,” she says. “I should have been there when you needed me most. I’m sorry, Sylvie.”
I tell her it doesn’t matter, that she has nothing to apologize for, but her hands reach for mine across the starch-stiff sheets, stroking them tremulously. It’s such a familiar feeling from childhood, but the bones of her hands feel sharper now, the skin like fine old paper.
“I knew something was wrong,” she says, unable to let it go, though I shush her. “I remember when she was only three, maybe four, and you asked me if I thought she was all right, if I could remember you or Camille being like that. You asked if I thought it was just a stage she was going through, and I said yes.”
Tears course down her cheeks, and I wipe them away gently.
“I’m sorry, chérie. I was a coward.”
“No, no. You mustn’t say that.”
But she keeps on, and I let her because she’s so agitated, because this is an apology stretching back years. She needs to say it before she dies, which she does a few weeks later, just after Élodie turns fourteen. She does it quietly and without fuss, much as she lived.
In the bleak, purposeless days after the funeral, a strange and secret part of me hopes that she will now be returned to La Rêverie and to me—that I will have a sense of her in the kitchen behind me, or in the chair she liked to doze in at the end of the day when Camille and I were growing up. But it isn’t like that. It’s the very opposite, in fact: a more acute sense of loneliness than I have ever experienced before. You’re my great comfort in this, of course—my only comfort, or so it feels.
“If you’re not careful you’ll suffocate her,” your father says, one sullen day in late March. He’s packing to go away again. I lean against the window as I watch him move around the room, opening drawers and picking things up, and I can feel the chill fingers of the mistral at my back. La Rêverie was built to keep out the heat of summer and is never really warm enough when the temperature dips and the wind gets up, the old radiators ticking and trickling like empty stomachs.
“Can’t you just be glad that I’m so close to my daughter?”
“Our daughter.”
“You take no notice of her. She tried to show you one of her paintings the other day and you barely glanced at it. She looks so like you too, Greg. I’m amazed you’re not more interested.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I don’t bother answering. Apart from the dense pit of anxiety that always yawns at the root of me, I feel entirely flat and numb, as if nothing could penetrate. My mother has been dead for exactly two weeks.
“Sylvie, I’m talking to you.”
“What?”
He sighs. “You just want me to hurry up and go, don’t you?”
It’s true. I’m planning to get into bed once he’s gone. I’ve just put you down for your afternoon nap so I’ll have at least an hour to lie in silence and think about my mother, gaze fixed on the dull white sky outside. Élodie is out and hasn’t said when she will be back. I’m not entirely sure who she’s with and that feels wrong, but it also feels entirely beyond me to do anything about it. Besides, Élodie can take care of herself. She always has.
Greg has not long driven off when Laurent knocks at the kitchen door. I can see the top of his head from the bedroom window. I wonder whether he’s been watching from an upstairs window at his own house, waiting for Greg’s car to go past.
I hesitate before going downstairs to let him in. I want to be on my own. But then I think how nice it might be to spend some time with a man who isn’t waiting to challenge or catch me out. In a peculiar way, and despite our romantic past, Laurent has become the closest I can get to a parent: someone who has known me for almost as long as I’ve known myself, and who feels something close to unconditional or at least familial love for me.
I lead him into the salon. He’s brought a bottle of good red wine with him and opens it to breathe.
“I wanted to check you’re all right. She’s only been gone a little while.” He lays a large, tentative hand on mine, completely covering it.
I lean my head against his shoulder, knowing that I’m breaking one of our unspoken rules, which I began to enforce when I returned from Paris with Greg and found Laurent engaged to Annette.
As the wine begins to work, the effort of holding myself together finally starts to catch up with me. Laurent puts on some music—something classical: a piano played in a minor chord—and I allow myself to cry as I haven’t yet, not even at the funeral. And it’s such a relief, and I am so grateful to him, that eventually I sit up, clamber into his lap, and begin to kiss him.
I don’t really expect him to tell me to stop and he doesn’t. It’s a nice kiss—a comfortable kiss, the angles and sensations of it completely familiar, as though we never stopped. I remember then what I knew when I applied for university in another country without telling him: that I love him much more than I want him. And that my wanting him—what there is of that—is really about how much he wants me. It’s a perverse kind of egotism and suddenly I’m appalled by myself.
I get up and, for a split second before he opens his eyes, his face is naked with longing.
“I’m so sorry, Laurent. We shouldn’t do this.”
“Salut.”
The voice, melodic and rich, makes both of us swing round. Élodie stands in the doorway, a smile playing on her lips. Her hair is loose, like it always is, gold and caramel rippling over her shoulders.
“How long have you been there?” I say, voice sharp.
She twirls a length of her hair as her eyes dart between us. Laurent, who is hopeless at deception, looks at his feet. I know the expression on her face so well—I’ve been familiar with it since she was a tiny child. She’s weighing things up, working out how this new situation can best serve her. She’s gotten better at hiding it over the years, but I can still spot it.
“Élodie? I’m talking to you.” Being in the wrong makes me sharper than I’ve a right to be.
A small cry sounds from upstairs. You’ve woken from your nap and want to come down, your hand reaching up to rattle the handle. I feel for the key in my pocket and, without looking at Laurent or your sister, head for the stairs to unlock the door and let you out.
Laurent has gone by the time I come down with you in my arms, though you’re getting too heavy for me to carry you. You’re still sleepy, your cheeks hot and pink, your eyes unfocused. I love it when you’re like this, curled around me, your head lolling and heavy, like a rose on its stalk. In the kitchen I sit you down on the table and give you some weak grenadine. You swing your legs as you drink.
“I bet you’re hungry too, aren’t you, ma petite?”
You nod and yawn, making me yawn too.
I feel slightly intoxicated from the wine and what just happened with Laurent, as well as Élodie having witnessed it. I move around the kitchen on automatic pilot, peeling a banana to slice, and picking out a couple of the tiny plum tomatoes you love, cutting them lengthways so you can’t choke on them.
It’s only as I reach for a plate from the draining board that I see her. She’s sitting on the stool in the corner. She’s been there the whole time, watching me without saying a word.
“Merde, Élodie, you frightened me.”
She stretches like a cat, lifting her arms and arching her back. “Laurent left.”
“I gathered that.”
“Why were you doing that with him?”
I carry on slicing fruit. “Not now.”
“Why not now?”
She hops down from the stool and sidles over. Beneath the perfumed oil she has taken to putting in her hair, she smells of something else. I can’t quite disentangle the different scents, but it’s something earthy, almost sour.
I’m just about to ask her when she picks up the uncut half of the banana and takes a bite. I watch her wander back to the stool. Your eyes, like saucers, don’t move from her, because you’ve been fascinated by Élodie from your earliest days. Even when she makes you cry you never take your eyes off her.
“Where have you been today?”
“Around. Does it matter?”
“Yes, it matters because I’m your mother and I’m asking you where you spent the day.”
“I went to Marseille.”
I stop what I’m doing. “Marseille?”
“Oui.”
“That’s over a hundred kilometers away. Who with?”
“No one.”
I can feel my temper beginning to fray, as it always does. My mother has just died, I want to scream. My mother has just died and you want to play these stupid games.
“Did you hitchhike again?”
She shrugs.
“You know your father and I don’t like you doing that. It’s dangerous. Élodie, are you listening to me?”
I hate the tone I always use with her, flint-hard and shrewish. I’m not like that with anyone else, even Greg. She has the knack of bringing out the worst in me, though I feel guilty even thinking in these terms, as her parent. Still, I can’t help believing our relationship and our ages are irrelevant sometimes: a pair of magnets that were always destined to repel. Mother and daughter, adult and child, but also equals, forever pitted against each other.
“Laurent looked like this when he left,” she says, pulling the upside-down mouth she did as a child when she was pretending to be upset. She’s moved on to different methods now. These days, if Greg is there, and one of us has crossed her, or refused her something she wants, she weeps—big tears that well up in those mismatched eyes and slide prettily down her cheeks. What is it they say in English? Don’t turn the waterworks on. That’s exactly what it looks like: no more emotion than an opened tap, though Greg is taken in every time. He finds her crying almost unbearable to watch. The first teardrop has scarcely rolled off her chin before he is by her side, his thumb brushing away the tears tenderly, his wallet out if money is what she’s after.
“Poor Laurent,” she says now.
I ignore her, popping a tiny tomato half into your mouth. You like holding them on your tongue, waiting until they’ve warmed up before biting down.
“Does Papa know about him, Sylvie? Sylvie, Sylvie, Sylvie, Sylvie, Sylvie. Are you listening to me, Sylvie? Tu m’écoutes? Tu m’écoutes?”
She echoes my own nagging words—Are you listening, Élodie?—but the sing-song tone is her own, and it grates on every nerve. “Tu m’écoutes? Tu m’écoutes? Tu m’écoutes?”
“For God’s sake, shut up!”
Your bottom lip begins to tremble because you hate any conflict, even when it isn’t to do with you. In contrast, Élodie always seems invigorated by it. Her goading or defiance makes her hard and bright, like a diamond, cutting through all that hippie lassitude she affects when it pleases her, her eyes suddenly alert, and her mouth twisting as though she’s trying not to laugh or cry out. Fighting is the only time the two of us truly engage with each other, to the exclusion of everyone else, even you.
“Sylvie, Sylvie, Sylvie, Sylvie!” Her voice grows louder each time.
You put your hands over your ears and begin to cry in earnest.
“Ça suffit, Élodie!” I feel myself give in to my own anger in a hot, blissful rush. I storm over and start to pull her off the stool. She’s only half a head shorter than me now, and almost as strong. Feeling her resistance makes me pull harder. I’ve almost prized her off when she goes heavy and limp, and because she’s jammed her feet behind the bar, her full weight barrels into me. Both of us crash to the stone floor. You begin to scream with terror as I struggle to get out from under her. The physical intimacy is a shock—it’s rare we touch at all.
I realize then what it is she smells of. I scramble to my feet and look down at her, still sprawled on the floor.
“You’re stoned.” I’ve always hated the heady herbal smell of cannabis.
“Papa does it sometimes.”
“I don’t care what he does. You’re only fourteen.”
She stands up and tries to push past me but I get hold of her arm. With my other hand, I start patting the pockets of her jeans.
She stands motionless while I search her, eyes dull now. She’s retreated into herself again, spark tamped out.
There’s nothing on her but a few coins and one of my lipsticks, which I put into my own pocket.
“Up to your room,” I hiss in her ear. “I don’t want to see you again tonight.”
For once she goes without a fight.
In the morning, when she fails to appear at breakfast, I go upstairs to find her gone, the windows open and creaking in the breeze. She’s done this before: clambering out and dropping to the top of the shutter below. It’s dangerous but possible, if you’ve got the nerve, and Élodie always has the nerve. I go over to secure the windows so they won’t bang and it’s then I notice the scorch marks on the wall, the jungle animals I painted when I was pregnant with her now burnt away in places.
Perhaps the pattern of it is random—Greg certainly thinks so when he comes back and I show him. And it’s true that human eyes will find faces in anything. But to me, already uncomfortable in the room—I always feel I’m trespassing there—I see it immediately: the mouth a howl, the eyes round and staring.
I don’t want to think about what it might mean, but I can’t help wondering what your sister might have in store for us next.
All I want to do is go downstairs and ring my mother. I know exactly what she would say to calm me down, but when I whisper the same words aloud it isn’t the same. It doesn’t work at all. I sit on the floor outside Élodie’s room and cry in silence so you won’t hear me. It only makes me feel worse because, for the first time, I truly understand that I will never be able to speak to her again.