The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted Read online

  “I know that story,” Abbot said solemnly.

  “I already told it?”

  “Yes,” Abbot said, “and Daddy told me it, too.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  He rubbed his hands together and said, “Tomorrow night, tell me a story that I don’t already know.”

  This surprised me, but I paused only for a moment. “Okay,” I said, and I brushed back his bangs and kissed his forehead.

  “Can I have a new pillowcase?” Abbot asked then.

  “Why?”

  “This one has germs in it from last night and the night before and the night before that.”

  “It’s fine,” I said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  He pushed the pillow out from under his head. “I don’t need a pillow.”

  I stood up, turned on his Red Sox night-light, and walked to the playroom. I paced a lap and then another. Abbot wanted a new story? One he hadn’t heard before? I wasn’t inventing Henry Bartolozzi. I was keeping him here, alive with us. I felt a frantic, electric buzz in my chest.

  I opened the front door. I wanted some night air. It was one of those late-spring nights when the house gets stuffy but the night air is cool. I was trying to rein in a growing sense of panic.

  I looked at the yard, lit by a streetlamp. I thought of my mother pressing me to change my life. Every woman deserves a lost summer. I thought of Elysius saying, I’m trying. I am trying. And Charlotte, so brave, standing up to everyone in Bitsy Bette’s Boutique in her fishing boots. Then I thought of the beluga whales in the aquarium and Abbot talking about their belly buttons. They’re just like us. I looked over my shoulder at the lit-up house. It struck me then that my life felt like a museum, a museum of loss, and I had created it. Whether I didn’t let myself linger or I was overcome with memory, everything reminded me of a story of Henry; everything deserved a plaque: a framed picture of Henry and me at a Japanese steak house with five-year-old Abbot wedged between us; Henry’s old Red Sox cap; his cleats from the over-thirty softball league tucked under a bench. There was a picture of Henry and Abbot standing next to Abbot’s half-eaten cake on his fourth birthday. That was the birthday that Abbot wished for a candle and then blew out the candle.

  I hadn’t boxed up a single thing belonging to Henry—a task that seemed unfathomable.

  I stared down at my stoop, as if seeing it the way a stranger might. Because I am a stranger here, I thought. There were pots that I had neglected for over a year. I picked one up and dumped the dirt in the bushes beside the house and then dumped another. I was crying by this point, my breaths choppy.

  When I picked up the third clay pot, I found a purple plastic Easter egg. I picked it up and held it in my hands, as if it were a real egg, as if a baby bird were about to peck its way out.

  The past spring, Abbot had gone on a hunt with friends at the local park, which meant that this egg had been hidden by Henry two years ago.

  I popped the egg open—the small release of stale air. Inside were two stiff Gummi bears and a piece of hardened bubble gum.

  This simple thing broke something inside of me. I was barely there. I was a little pop of air, then nothing.

  That spring, Abbot had been obsessed with why the Easter Bunny left eggs and why we all used fake grass and baskets. What did it all mean? Henry wrote Abbot a letter from the Easter Bunny to go along with his chocolate bunny. In it, the Easter Bunny confessed that he had no idea how it all got started. Henry read the note aloud to me. I’m just a bunny, you know. There’s only so much that I can understand. “I think that we should be honest when the world doesn’t make sense.” I agreed. “We’re just bunnies,” I said. He slipped the note in the basket with the fake grass.

  Unsteadily, I walked back in to the house. I placed the egg on the dining room table—its two halves, its Gummi bears, and little wrapped piece of hardened gum.

  I missed Henry so keenly. This desire for him would well up in me in an unexpected rush. I missed the whole of him—the reality of him, not the stories. I missed his neck, the smell of aftershave that collected there. I sometimes put on his T-shirts after he took them off, still warm from his body, and slept in them. I missed laying my head on his chest and feeling his heartbeat. And I missed his shoulders, his collarbones, his beautiful hands, the fan of his ribs. His body buoyant in the ocean, red with sun. His body in the tight cocoon of sheets. His body bent over tying Abbot’s shoes. I wanted to adore him. I missed how his face, in sleep, looked as young as the day I met him. I missed his stomach. He had what I called rapper abs. Of course, I missed having sex with him. I would have given anything to have sex with him again—summer sex, if I were allowed to choose—on the bed stripped of its blanket and top sheet, collapsing at the end, the rapt and dazed panting that came after, like two shipwreck survivors who’ve just crawled onto shore.

  I didn’t need to go to Provence to appease my mother and sister, to become enchanted. I could learn the lessons I needed to learn right here. From now on I will try not to lose or be lost. I will not fix my gaze solely on Abbot. I will relearn to live in the real world. Abbot and I don’t need a lost summer to learn to live. We’ve lost enough. We’ve been lost enough. But even as I said this to myself, I knew it was probably a cop-out.

  Now that I had the little purple plastic egg, I needed something more—a message from Henry. He would tell me not to go. He would tell me to stay with him, to be bound to this house, to let the fig vine that grew around the door actually weave me and Abbot in. Or would he want me to save Charlotte? I wanted to save her. Maybe I wanted to save her because I had the overwhelming desire to save someone, and I couldn’t save Abbot or myself.

  That was when Abbot’s dictionary came to me. I walked back to Abbot’s bedroom. There was the dictionary, lit by the dull glow of the Red Sox night-light. I looked at Abbot, his face softened by sleep. I picked up the dictionary, heavy in my hands, and I felt like a thief. But still, I took it.

  I walked to the dining room, set it on the table, and sat down in front of it. I opened to the dedications, Henry’s father’s dedication to him and Henry’s dedication to Abbot. I thought of Henry’s father then, a tough guy, a man who played football in college, tight end, and was proud of how flimsy the helmets were back then, but at the same time, a romantic, tenderhearted. At Henry’s funeral, he broke down and cried. He grabbed my hand as I was getting into the backseat of some long, dark car, and said simply, “I can’t accept this. He’s my boy. He’s my son. It’s not right. I can’t get over it. I won’t.” It felt like he was making me a promise of some kind. Henry’s mother appeared then, over his shoulder. “Let her go, honey,” she said in her soft Southern drawl. “The cars need to move on.” I couldn’t bear to look at him. I nodded and slipped into the backseat next to Abbot. Henry’s father closed the door for me and then pressed his hand to the window—and that gesture I understood. Hold on, he was telling me. Just hold on.

  Henry, I thought to myself. I wanted to look up Henry. Would the word exist? Had he put a little picture of himself there?

  I flipped through, found the right page, and let my finger slide down it. This is what I found.

  Hennery, a poultry farm.

  Henotheism, the belief in one god without denying the existence of others.

  Henpeck, to dominate or harass (one’s husband) with persistent nagging.

  And then henry. The unit of inductance in which an induced electromotive force of one volt is produced when the current is varied at the rate of one ampere per second.

  And next?

  Hent, to take hold of; seize. Obs. Obsolete.

  I’m just a bunny, you know. There’s only so much that I can understand.

  But I did understand—this poultry farm, this henpecking, that I can believe in one god, but didn’t have to deny the existence of others. I understood the electromagnetic force of Henry and that he was saying one thing: Seize it.

  Go.

  nd so the lo
st summer was seized.

  Or should I say that it seized us? Apparently, this is how you get hent—without being prepared, without time to brace.

  The three of us had passports—Abbot and I had ours because of Henry’s good intentions to get us to Europe one day, and Charlotte from a trip to Canada with the French club at her private school for two weeks when she was in eighth grade. I asked Jude to take over the bakery, completely, which was not a dramatic step. She was already in deep. Still, at first I was sure that I could spare only two weeks. But my mother insisted that two weeks wasn’t enough time to get the work of remodeling under way. Six full weeks in Provence was the minimum that would do it. I made the reservations quickly, then, knowing I’d back out if I waited too long. We arranged to fly out within a week.

  My mother and I had a remodeling meeting at my dining room table a few days before I left. She’d spoken with Véronique and had a better sense of the fire damage, which seemed contained to the kitchen. I was to remodel the kitchen, update the bathroom, and spruce up the four bedrooms with paint, new fixtures and updated wiring for outlets, and wireless Internet access. The yard was also supposed to be brought back to some former glory—including the pool and the stone fountain.

  She’d gone out and accumulated a dozen magazines and, bestowing them on me, said, “Feel free to remodel the house with a more modern interior. The juxtaposition of old and new will give the house life. Maybe we’ll keep the bedrooms’ crisp whites, like linens.” She pulled out some color samples she’d picked out at Sherwin-Williams—creams and ivories, a few soft, buttery tones. When she showed me a magazine wholly devoted to tile, I realized that I was in over my head. My mother had even dog-eared some sleek, environmentally friendly toilets. “Which one do you like the most?” she asked.

  I thought about it and finally pointed to the wrong one. I knew it was the wrong one by the way my mother tilted her head.

  “Really?” she said.

  “I guess,” I said, and then I pointed at another one. “Or this?”

  “Yes, me, too,” she said. Suddenly, she shut all of the magazines and piled them neatly on the table. “Listen to me,” she said. “I want a lot of things for the house. But dictator is not my role. In the end, you have to do it as you see fit.”

  “Really?” I wasn’t sure I believed her.

  “Really,” she said. “I have full confidence in you.”

  She and my father had worked out a budget, a generous one, and she gave me instructions on drawing money from her account to pay for the remodeling. “You must be patient. There’s a good bit of bureaucracy when it comes to things like this in France.”

  “What kind of bureaucracy?”

  “Véronique will explain,” she said. “Just go and begin to feel the house. You’ll connect and then allow decisions to form.”

  “So, my job is to feel and connect and then make decisions?”

  “Allow decisions to form,” she said. “It’s different altogether. The house will tell you what to do.”

  We were set to fly in to Paris, so my mother booked a hotel for us, insisting that we enjoy a few days in the city before heading out into the Provençal countryside. In addition to sparing me some logistical concerns—she bought our train tickets, too, and made our rental car deal—she gave me a neatly typed list of restaurants, salons, dress shops, parks, museums, theaters. I dutifully tucked them into my bag. It was a list that would take months to tick off—her dream trip, not mine. There was only so much I could do.

  Then came time for the flight. Movies on tiny screens, chicken Alfredo served in small, compartmentalized, plastic-wrapped trays, and thin, navy blue airplane-regulation blankets.

  Charlotte slept with her earbuds in. Elysius and Daniel had sat her down to tell her the plan. They were braced for resistance, certain she’d say no. But she blinked and said, “Wait, are you telling me that I’m going to France with Heidi and Abbot? Is that what’s with the bad-news faces and all the seriousness?”

  They nodded.

  “Well, I’m in.”

  “In where?” her father asked.

  “Where do I sign?” she said.

  Elysius and Daniel still weren’t sure they understood.

  “Yes!” she said. “Is that clear enough? Yes! I want to go!”

  Abbot, on the other hand, had to be talked through it. He wanted to pore over the photos. He got out books from the library and found out about scorpions in the South of France. “You have to shake your shoes out before you put them on because scorpions like to live in shoes,” he said. “Do you want to live in a place where there are scorpions in your shoes? You’re endangering our lives!”

  He was afraid of germs. “They have completely different germs there. French germs. We won’t have built-up immunity!” We’d discussed, at length, the upside of germs, and so he was very comfortable with the term immunity. In fact, he liked throwing it around. I finally gave in and agreed to buy him a travel-sized bottle of Purell for the trip.

  He said, “We won’t be able to drink the water. The Powells went to a foreign country and couldn’t drink the water.”

  “They went to Cancún,” I said. “That’s Mexico. It’s different.”

  “Mexico is a foreign country, and France is a foreign country. I’m not drinking anything.”

  He wouldn’t let go of the fact that there had already been a fire there. This was irrefutable proof that France was dangerous territory.

  I found the dictionary packed in Abbot’s suitcase under a stack of underwear. I picked it up and looked at him. “I can put it on the table next to my bed in France.”

  I shook my head. “It should stay here. We’ll look forward to seeing it again when we get home.”

  He came up with more fears and excuses, and I told him time and again, “You can’t let your fears stop you from living your life.” I was talking to myself, mainly. I knew that.

  Still, we went. There was no turning back. His barrage of fears only made it clearer that we needed to go.

  In the airport, he was afraid of terrorist plots and kept pointing out suspicious people. He begged me to turn in a kid carrying what looked to be a clarinet case.

  As the plane touched down at Charles de Gaulle, I looked at Charlotte. She seemed shut off from the world, wearing her earbuds and staring blankly through the small plane window. I thought of what Elysius had said about her—living in the world in her own head. What was that world like? I wondered if I’d ever have any idea, and it struck me for the first time that this trip could be a disaster. What if Charlotte hated it here? What if she shut down completely? I didn’t know anything about teenagers. Elysius and Daniel were rational people, and they were at a loss as to how to handle Charlotte. I hadn’t really imagined everything going wrong, but it so easily could. I could get stuck in France with a teenager who’d come unhinged. What then?

  Meanwhile Abbot was squeezing my arm with his Purell-slick hands. What if the French germs and the contaminated water and the possible house fires and the threat of scorpions proved too much for him? He could come unhinged, too.

  And was I really all that sturdy?

  Why were we here? The three of us suddenly seemed like an unlikely trio. This was a time for Charlotte to broaden her horizons, a chance for Abbot to overcome his fears, and me? I was on a pilgrimage for the brokenhearted and was supposed to learn to live again—to be alive. And how was I to go about that, exactly? Wait for some enchantment? Feel, connect, and allow decisions to form? I thought of Henry. I had closed my eyes on the plane and whispered to him, “We’re going, after all these years. We’re really going.” And by we, I didn’t mean just Charlotte, Abbot, and me. I meant Henry, too. How could I see Paris and the old house in Provence without seeing it as Henry would? How could I do this without sharing it with him, without seeing the world with my eyes and his?

  And, on top of all else, there was a house—a charred one, overstocked with various love stories—that I was supposed to restore?
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  At this point, though, these were all abstractions, and the screaming brakes of the jet, the tires skidding and bumping along the runway, the French flight attendant welcoming us to Paris, these things were real, very real.

  y our internal clock, we landed in Paris in the middle of the night. We were exhausted, bleary, but had a jagged energy. There was customs to go through, that slow, shuffling line, and then the swell of a foreign language. I heard things crisply for the first time in a long time, because I had to. I remembered the Babar books from my childhood, the Jacques Brel albums, the French woman in our neighborhood, and her parrots, screeching French vulgarities.

  I was surprised how much French I recalled from my mother, who made us speak to her in French from time to time in between our summer trips, seemingly on a whim. She would make a rule. “If you want something, you better ask in French. I’m no longer taking requests in English.” She also taught us French through English. “Maigre means ‘skinny.’ Do you hear the word meager in it?” She had us listen for words we knew: sorcerer in sorcier, obligatory in obligatoire, roses in the color rose, rouge in the color rouge … But most of all I remembered the scolding. In public, she scolded us in French because she thought it sounded elegant to strangers. But to us it just sounded like being scolded. “Ne touchez pas!” “Ecoutez!” “Faites attention!”

  As we walked out into the bright sun, these phrases flooded back to me. I didn’t touch anything! I was listening! I was paying attention!

  Outside the airport we got in a taxi and I gave the address of the hotel. The driver understood, and I was impressed with myself.

  “Look at you, trotting out the nice French,” Charlotte said.