When I open my eyes again it’s morning. My body finally feels as though it’s beginning to right its inner equilibrium, though my head still pulses with pain and my nightdress is wringing with sweat. Then I remember I never made it downstairs to check on you. I stumble to the window but the terrace is deserted, except for a tide of empty bottles and ashtrays. The salon doors are still open. Someone’s T-shirt is discarded over the back of one of the chairs.
A presence behind me makes me turn and nearly lose my balance. It’s Élodie, hollow-eyed and unkempt but still beautiful.
“Maman, you shouldn’t be up.”
She helps me back to bed, turning over my pillows so they’re cool and dry, then brings me a tall glass of iced tea just like you did the day before, or was it the day before that? I can’t work it out.
“Where’s Emma?”
“Fast asleep. It’s early still. Only just seven.”
“Is she all right?”
She shushes me and produces a cold washcloth, pressing it to my temples. It’s blissful.
“What about Luc?” I manage to say, though the heavy blanket of exhaustion is creeping over me again.
“But I saw him. I saw the two of you. You were—”
She places two cool fingertips on my mouth, and as she leans over, a hank of her long hair falls forward to brush my collarbone, goosebumps rising all over my sore skin in response.
“Hush, Maman, you must have dreamt it. He was never here. Sleep now.” She kisses my forehead and then she’s gone, closing the door softly behind her. I lie there peacefully for a while, then force myself to get up, get dressed. But the vertigo and nausea swell again, and I lie down, helpless. The hours pass meaninglessly, the sun moving round behind the shutters oddly fast, like someone’s time-lapsed the day and is playing it back to me. Soon enough, it’s dark again, and Élodie is back with another drink.
You slide into bed with me that night, I don’t know when, and relief that you’re okay penetrates the fog briefly. There’s a strange odor to your skin but I’m still too weak and cotton-headed to work out whether it’s perfume or alcohol or something worse. It comes to me just as I drift back into another fathomless sleep: you smell older.
In the morning, I feel weak but purged. Almost like myself again, which in itself seems quite miraculous. We forget to appreciate feeling well until we’re ill. We lie on our sick beds and the memory of just feeling ordinary—no sickness, no pain—is like a beautiful shore we’ve been carried away from, exiles who might never be allowed to return.
I look down at you, asleep beside me, and feel as though the two of us have survived a shipwreck. I can see the remains of make-up around your eyes, mascara clogging your lashes, glitter on your lids, but you’re intact. There are no bruises or pinch-marks, there’s no awful wheeze as you breathe in.
I creep downstairs, noting that Élodie’s door is closed. There has been some sort of attempt to tidy up but the kitchen and salon still carry a soiled air, cushions squashed down into the gaps between chair seats and frames, crumbs and sticky patches on the work surfaces. The wine and beer that were in the fridge have gone, but much of the food looks untouched. I wonder when you last ate.
Out on the terrace, a coffee bowl overflows with cigarette ends, some hand-rolled, others bought. I can smell it on the hot air, distinct from the smoke that doesn’t seem quite so strong today—that, and the sourness of spilled beer. It makes my mouth water nauseously and I remember that I need some food. I have no memory of eating anything in two days, swallowing only those drinks, which kept arriving, cold and sweet down my sore throat. As I sit eating stale baguette dipped in milky coffee on the terrace steps, a plane goes over, wings glinting in the sunlight. Though the sky above the house is a sharp, celestial blue, it’s one of the Canadair planes, heavy with water pulled from the Mediterranean. Dimly, I think I ought to check the news, see what’s happening with the fires.
I don’t hear Élodie come up behind me until she’s already there and putting a sunhat on my head.
“Thank you,” I manage to say, as she sits down next to me. I’m startled by her sudden presence and oddly shy of the intimate way she’s helped look after me. I have a vague memory of her changing me into a clean nightdress before you came up to bed, moving me about with a nurse’s deftness and ease, as though I were as light as a bird. But perhaps I’d dreamt that too.
“Maman, I’m so sorry about the mess. I thought I would get up early this morning and clear up but you’ve beaten me downstairs. I’ll replace the wine.”
I wave my hand. “It doesn’t matter.” And I think I mean it. She’s twenty-four. If she wants to smoke and drink, who am I to stop her?
The day wears on and I stay in the shade. You and Élodie take turns to bring me cold drinks under the oleander tree, where Élodie has dragged a lounger and heaped it with pillows. I even venture into the pool in the afternoon, the water silken and soothing to my dry skin and gritty eyes. When I get out, Élodie is standing there with a plate of cheese and grapes.
“You must eat,” she says, smiling. “Your body needs sustenance after being so ill.”
I do as I’m told, though I can’t manage much. I let Élodie plump my pillows and brush my tangled hair. I’m so bonelessly weak from the sunstroke that I don’t even have the energy to feel anxious. Anxiety becomes habitual, adrenaline pumping at the slightest provocation. But the sunstroke has apparently reset me, leaving my system drained but tranquil.
Even as the light fades out of another day, night seeping in from the darkest corners of the garden, I remain calm. I am becalmed, I think: a placid sea. I test the feeling gently, as though inspecting a bruise, but it’s real. It holds. Even when I look at the turquoise necklace that’s still around your neck, the tremor is only very slight, like thunder that’s long moved away. I can remember everything about my old fear. It’s just that I’m viewing it through thick glass now. Oh, and it’s such a relief to let it go.
All evening and into the next morning, we three are inseparable. Just before noon, Élodie announces that she is going to buy food, before the shop in the village closes for the three-hour lunch tourists always find outrageous.
She comes back with two bags full of the kind of food a child would choose: Petit Écolier biscuits, caramel ice-cream, mini glass bottles of Orangina, a heavy tin cylinder of sirop—the same brand of grenadine I always used to buy.
“Did you buy anything healthy at all?” I say, marveling at the ease in my voice, I who could never sound anything but sharp with her.
She pulls a melon out of a paper bag and squeezes it. “It’s perfectly ripe. It’ll be like eating sunlight.”
Melons were always her favorite, especially the ones from Cavaillon. I had always loved them too, that Amaretto sweetness that seems so decadent compared to other fruit. A barbed memory springs up then: I’m trying to wipe her face clean of melon juice with a washcloth, and she claws my cheek with her sticky little fingers because she doesn’t like it, making it bleed. I push the memory down again and find it recedes, quite easily.
She’s also bought fromage frais, which she spoons into the dessert glasses my mother once used for îles flottantes. Then she stirs in strawberry jam—the expensive stuff in the squat hexagonal jars—until it marbles, pink and cream. It’s delicious: soft, pillowy unctuousness with bursts of intense fruit. I have a small helping before drifting into a light doze, still aware of your voices, kept low so as not to disturb me.
Élodie wakes me a couple of hours later, her breath smelling of grenadine, her tongue and lips dyed an artificial pink. “I know the sirop is too sweet for you,” she murmurs. “I’ve made you another tisane.” It’s iced tea again and I gulp it down, vaguely wondering if it’s Lipton’s or whether Élodie made it herself, enjoying the sound of ice clinking against my teeth. From the bottom of the garden, I can hear you splashing about in the pool.
“Is Emma okay?”
“She’s fine. Like a little fish in the water.” She stands to rearrange the cushions behind me. Faintly, I can smell her old scent, sweetened into headiness by the grenadine.
“Maman, do you remember what you said to me the first night you were sick?” She strokes my hair back from my face and sits down next to me.
“I—I’m not sure. It’s all a bit of a blur.”
She moves a little closer. Even in the soft light, I can see every minute shading of color in her amber eye. It looks almost golden. The blue eye is darker, more uniform, the sea after a storm, sand swirling out of sight below the surface.
I try to cast my mind back but it veers away to more scenes of the sea, heaving gently, the sway of Élodie’s hair. I can’t concentrate. I’m so tired and my head is starting to ache again.
“You said that when I was born you were so full of love you couldn’t eat.”
I smile. “That’s true. It’s true.”
As I fall away into unconsciousness again, the ormolu clock tick-ticking, she’s smiling back at me.