My love of old people began when my French teacher, Madame Petit, took my seventh-grade class to spend an afternoon at The Three Pines (before The Hydrangeas existed in Milly). After lunch, we all got into a bus for a drive of almost an hour. I remember throwing up twice into a brown paper bag.
At The Three Pines, the old people were waiting for us in the dining room. It smelt of soup and ether. Made me want to throw up again. When we had to greet them, I stopped breathing through my nose. And they were prickly. When it came to facial hair, it was anarchy.
My class had prepared a show: we were supposed to sing ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” We wore white Lycra costumes and wigs borrowed from our school’s theater club.
After the show, we sat down with them to eat pancakes. Not one of them let go of the paper handkerchiefs gripped firmly in their ice-cold fists. But for me, it was there that everything began: they told us stories. And old folks, since that’s all they have left to do, can tell the past like no one else. Don’t bother searching in books or movies: like no one else.
On that day, I understood that, with the elderly, it’s enough just to touch them, to hold their hand, for them to talk. Like when you dig a hole in dry sand at the seaside, and the water instantly rises up under your fingers.
I have my own favorite story at The Hydrangeas. She’s called Hélène. Hélène is the lady in room 19. She’s the only one who offers me a real vacation. And given the day-to-day of a nursing assistant in geriatrics, that sure is a luxury.
The staff call her “the beach lady.”
When I started working there, I was told that “she spends her days on a beach, under a parasol.” And that, since her arrival, a seagull had set up home on the establishment’s roof.
Around here, there are no seagulls. This is the center of France. Blackbirds, sparrows, crows, starlings, plenty of them, but not seagulls. Apart from the one that lives above our heads.
Hélène is the only resident I call by her first name.
Every morning, after her ablutions, we settle her into her armchair facing the window. And I swear, what she gazes at isn’t Milly’s rooftops, but something fabulously beautiful, like a blue smile. And yet her light eyes are like those of the other residents here: they’re the color of a faded sheet. All the same, when I’m feeling down, I pray for life to give me a parasol like hers. Her parasol is called Lucien; he was her husband. Well, her almost-husband, since he never married her. Hélène told me her whole life. But in jigsaw-puzzle form. As if she’d given me the finest object in her home but had broken it into a thousand pieces first, without meaning to.
For a few months now, she’s been speaking less, as if the song of her life were playing at the end of a record and the volume reducing.
Whenever I leave her room, I cover her legs, and she says to me, “I’m going to have some sunlight therapy.” Hélène never feels cold. Even in the middle of winter, she treats herself to warming up in the sun, while we’re all pressing our backsides to the Hydrangeas’ dodgy radiators.
The only family of Hélène’s that I know is her daughter, Rose. She’s a painter, and does drawings, too. She’s done many portraits of her parents in charcoal, some seascapes, harbors, a few gardens, and bunches of flowers. Hélène’s walls are covered in them. Rose lives in Paris. Every Thursday, she arrives at the station and hires a car to come to Milly. On every visit, it’s the same routine. Hélène looks at her from a distance, or rather, from where she seems to live.
“Who are you?”
“It’s me, Mom.”
“I don’t understand, madame.”
“It’s me, Mom, Rose.”
“No it isn’t . . . my daughter’s only seven, she’s gone for a swim with her father.”
“Oh, right . . . she’s gone for a swim . . .”
“Yes. With her father.”
“And do you know when they’ll be back?”
“Later. I’m waiting for them.”
And then Rose opens a novel and reads passages to her mother. Often love stories. When she’s finished reading, she leaves me the books. It’s her way of thanking me. Thanking me for caring for her mother as if she were mine.
The craziest chapter of my life began last Thursday, at around three in the afternoon. I opened door 19 and saw him, sitting beside Hélène’s armchair. Those portraits of Lucien hanging on the walls. It was him. I just stood there, like a fool, looking at the two of them, not daring to move: Lucien was holding Hélène’s hand. And as for her, the expression on her face was one I’d never seen before. As if she’d just discovered something amazing. He smiled at me. And said:
“Hello, are you Justine?”
So, I thought, Lucien knows my name. That must be normal. Ghosts must know the names of the living. They must know plenty of things we don’t know. And above all, I thought: I understand why Hélène waited for him on a beach. I understand why she stopped time. Everything can suddenly make sense; with a guy like him, it’s as if life were delivering everything. His eyes . . . I’d never seen anything as blue. Even when scouring Gran’s mail-order catalogs.
I stammered:
“You’ve come to collect her?”
He didn’t reply. Neither did Hélène. It’s crazy how she was looking at him. Her eyes, the faded sheets, all that, it had gone.
I approached them and kissed Hélène on her forehead. Her skin was even warmer than usual. I was in the same state as the sky when they say the devil’s beating his wife: in my head, it was rainy and sunny all at once. It was the last time I would see her: Lucien had finally come out of the water to lead her to their paradise.
I took Hélène’s hand in mine.
“Are you taking the seagull with you?” I asked Lucien, with a lump in my throat.
From the way he looked at me, I could see he didn’t understand. The man before me was no ghost.
It’s then that I got the fright of my life. This guy existed, in real life. I turned tail and left room 19 like a thief.