| |
Philippe and Elodie were in pajamas and robes late at night, worrying about Meredith, when the doorbell rang. They opened the front door, and Meredith spilled over the threshold. A man twenty years older than her, with a grizzle of facial hair and red, bleary eyes, followed her in. Her blouse was on backwards.
The man looked Philippe insouciantly in the eye, then left without a word. Elodie and Philippe supported Meredith up the stairs to her room. Their eyes met over their daughter’s dangling head. She reeked of bourbon and vomited just inside her room. Philippe lifted her over the puddle she had made and put her on the bed. She was oblivious.
Elodie began to take off Meredith’s shoes.
“No! Leave them!” Philippe said.
Elodie began to wrestle with the quilt—a red and white compass rose on a white field—to cover Meredith for the night.
“No! I’ll clean up her mess. But I’ll be damned if I’ll help her any more.”
“I’ll get a bucket and some paper towels,” Elodie said.
While she was gone, Philippe stared at his daughter. Vomit had caught in her long brown hair. The make-up on her eyes and lips was smeared. Where had she been tonight? What had she done? How much say did she have in what had happened to her?
Philippe couldn’t help himself, he dabbed at the vomit in her hair with his handkerchief. Her helplessness took him back fifteen years.
Meredith, more than her two sisters, had loved the ocean as a young girl. The Mediterranean with its small waves was not enough for her. She wanted the Atlantic. When the family would arrive on the French coast of a summer’s morning, she would stand in the shallows with the waves lapping around her legs, letting the receding water dig her feet deeper into the sand.
She would beg her daddy to take her wave jumping. He would put the yellow waterwings on her arms and blow them up until they were snug. He could still feel her little body on his right hip, her arm around his shoulder, as he taught her the timing, to catch a wave’s power. When she seemed big and strong enough to get in and out of the surf on her own, he would stand near, at the ready to save her. He was still at the ready to save her.
He was crazy about her.
She was killing him.
Elodie came in the room with water and paper towels, and they cleaned the mess on the floor together. Then Elodie hurried downstairs, and Philippe stood and looked at the photographs Meredith had taped to the mirror above her white dresser. In the midst of her two sisters, laughing harder than anyone else, brown hair parted in the middle. A beautiful set of white, even teeth. Laughing so hard her eyes were slits. Beautiful. Fun. His lovely girl.
He went downstairs and found Elodie doing dishes again. By mutual, silent agreement, they stood side by side, leaning against the counter in the kitchen.
“How many times have we done this in the last couple years?” Philippe said.
“I lose count. It’s ‘appening more often wis Meredees, don’t you sink?” Elodie asked. He had married a French girl, and she couldn’t manage the “th” sound. He’d insisted on naming his daughter after his sister, even though it meant that Elodie would never be able to pronounce her own daughter’s name accurately.
“We have to do something different,” Philippe said. “She’s gone back to drinking after every hospital stay. You know what some other parents have done.”
“I don’t want to do zat,” Elodie said, shaking her head. She tugged at a piece of her short blonde hair. “Some of zose parents nevair see zair child again.”
“We can’t save her.”
“We can’t kick her out ze door.” Elodie’s voice was pleading. “Let’s give ‘er an ultimatum.”
“We did that two weeks ago. She broke it within four hours. We have to kick her out. We help her to be a drunk—we give her a bed, we feed her when she doesn’t have a job.”
“How will she earn money?”
“Elodie, I don’t know.” Philippe’s heart had been wrung for well over two years because of Meredith, and now it broke at the thought of his little girl at the mercy, day after day, night after night, of men like the one who had brought her to the door.
“I’m so scare’,” Elodie said.
He pulled her to himself. As they clung to each other, he tried to think of a way to encourage both of them. Light sentences fit for a Hallmark card, like “this cloud will pass,” flitted through his mind. They felt like wisps of vapor when what they both needed was solid ground to stand on.
You know what Scripture says,” Philippe said. “‘Be strong and of good courage.’ It’s the only way she’ll change. It’s our only chance to save her.”
“She might not change.”
“True, but can we live like this the rest of our lives?”
“I’m exhaust’,” Elodie said.
“I’ll tell her when she wakes up tomorrow.”
“Oh, dear God, I ‘elp you,” she said.
