The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted Page 13

  The rain was so loud now that I could barely hear the officer’s voice. I was losing reception. I got out of the car, pacing in one direction and then another. I hunched over, trying to keep the phone dry.

  And then a man’s voice came on the line and spoke to me in English. “Yes. Can I help you?”

  The phone beeped that it was running low on batteries. It was going to die. Charlotte’s charger had been in the computer bag. The computer bag that was now gone.

  I explained what had happened, as quickly as I could.

  The officer was very calm—tranquil, as the French would say. “The gun probably wasn’t real. They’re illegal here. Children have fake guns. It was probably, how do you say? A joke.”

  “Where I come from, guns aren’t funny,” I said, near hysteria.

  “Well, no,” the officer said. “Where you come from, the people shoot each other.”

  I wasn’t sure how to take this, but I was insulted—although it was true. “We’re staying in the house next to Véronique Dumonteil’s bed and breakfast. My family owns this house.”

  “Yes. I know the house you’re telling me. Listen, the thieves sometimes leave the non-valuables by the road. I will send someone to look. You must make a report at the station in Trets.” Trets was the closest good-sized town. I knew it well. We’d gone there sometimes as kids for the attraction of the larger grocery store. The village of Puyloubier was too small to have its own police station.

  “Today?” I asked.

  “No, no,” he said. “Tomorrow is fine. Rest. Be calm.”

  I got back in the car, soaking wet, humbled. “The gun was a fake,” I said. “That’s what the cop said.” This was no comfort. My head felt like it was filled with air. My chest felt swollen and my breaths became shallow.

  “What gun?” Abbot said.

  “The fake one,” Charlotte said. “They were just kids in flowered shorts with a fake gun.”

  “They could have been in a gang,” I said.

  “It’s absolutely possible that gang members in the South of France wear flowered shorts,” Charlotte said.

  I turned the key in the ignition. The engine sputtered then died. I slammed my fist on the steering wheel and tried it again. The engine coughed then nothing. I imagined Henry, standing on the shore while calling to Abbot and me in the ocean, Too far, too far! This was when I started to cry.

  “What if we’re stuck here and the robbers find us and want to shoot us?” Abbot, still shaken and sniffling, said from the footwell in the backseat.

  “I can’t breathe,” I said. “Roll down the windows.”

  “It’s still pouring,” Charlotte said.

  “It’s a rental!” I shouted. “Get up off the floor, Abbot! It was a fake gun!”

  “We don’t have to panic,” Charlotte said, calmly now. Abbot kneeled on his seat, his forehead pressed against the window, trying to see out. “We’re in a car in the South of France. The robbers are gone. No one is coming after us. It was a fake gun! Everything is fine!”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. Henry would have known what to do. Henry would have saved us. But he was gone. All of our things were gone. “What am I doing here?” I said. “What in the hell am I doing here?”

  “Call Véronique,” Charlotte said. “That’s what you were going to do before.”

  I looked at Charlotte. Her eyes were clear and bright. She was focused. She was good in an emergency. Charlotte! “Right,” I said. I dug the phone number scribbled onto a little piece of paper out of my pocket. I dialed. The phone rang. I was expecting Véronique, but it wasn’t her voice. Did I have the wrong number? “Allô?” I muttered.

  Charlotte took the phone. “We’re looking for Véronique Dumonteil,” she said, then listened. She cupped her hand over the receiver. “Yes, yes. Thank you.” Charlotte explained that the car had died, where we were, and then said, “Mm-hmm, okay, blue. Thank you.” She shut the phone. “Someone’s coming,” she said, rolling up the window.

  “Why blue?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “You told them blue. Why?”

  “The color of the car,” she said. “It sounded like a party was going on in the background.”

  “A party?” I said. “We just got robbed!”

  “I don’t think the party’s for us,” she said. “No correlation. Are you going to be okay?” she asked me.

  “No,” I said. “Probably not.”

  The rain kept pounding the car. We sat there in silence, except that Abbot was still crying a little, and the car filled with steam that fogged the windows.

  Eventually, a sporty convertible came racing toward us in the rain. The top was down. A man was behind the wheel. He pulled off the road and headed right at us. He stopped just short of hitting us and parked the cars nose to nose. “Jesus!” I said.

  Since the convertible lid was down, he put his hand on the top of the windshield, the wipers still batting back and forth, and pulled himself up to sit on the top of the seat, then rubbed the rain back into his dark hair with his free hand. He waved.

  Charlotte waved back. “That must be the someone who’s coming.”

  I recognized him immediately. I knew his boyish face even though he was all grown up. “That’s the other brother,” I muttered.

  “Brother other than what brother?” Charlotte said.

  “The sulky boy from the lawn chair,” I said. “The one without the pogo stick.”

  tay here,” I said to Charlotte and Abbot. “Let me check things out.”

  “Are you sure?” Charlotte asked.

  I nodded, but I wasn’t sure. I felt panic stricken, irrationally suspicious, and hostile. I climbed out into the pouring rain and walked to the convertible with no idea where to begin.

  “The roof of the car is broken,” Julien said in a French accent, the sounding more like zee, and the rs in roof and broken making a little buzz in his throat. He was wearing an expensive suit, tailored, with a thin gold tie—completely soaked. If he hadn’t been in a convertible in the driving rain, he would have looked like the kind of man you’d see in an advertisement for expensive shoes—a man on a speedboat. “Usually, I only drive in the sun.”

  “What about when it rains unexpectedly?” I asked. This was not important now, of course. But it was all I could think to say.

  He spread his arms wide. “I become wet,” he said, and he smiled, his lips shiny from the rain. Then he leaned over the dashboard, wiped the rain from his dark lashes. He was beautiful. He had a broad chest. I could see the muscles through the thin, drenched white shirt. He was tan, as if he’d spent a good bit of time on Mediterranean beaches. As kids, our families had gone on a few beach trips together. We brought pails and caught small crabs in them. He and his brother, Pascal, wore little tiny French swim trunks that my sister and I made fun of behind their backs. It was as if he was remembering me in his childhood, too. He said, “You came here when you were a girl with your sister and your mother. You would arrive, stay for a little while, and then go. I haven’t forgetten you. You have the same face.”

  “You used to splash me in the pool,” I said.

  “Me?” He seemed to consider this for a moment—had he been the kind of kid to splash American girls in a pool? He decided that he wasn’t. “No,” he said. “Not me.”

  “We’ve been robbed. All of our stuff was stolen from the car while we were out walking around town,” I said flatly. I was trying very hard to breathe normally. “I’m having a panic attack.”

  “Really?” he said. “You don’t seem like it.”

  “I don’t seem robbed, or like I’m having a panic attack?” I said.

  He tilted his head and gazed at me. “You were a strange little girl,” he said. “You were always very courageous. You wore a barrette right here,” he said, pointing to one side of his head. “The barrette had a flower. Is that how you are now?”

  I was having a panic attack. That was how I was now. I said, “After we were robbed, some kid ai
med a gun at us, in the parking area.” I pointed down the road. “Just a few minutes ago.”

  “Ah,” he said, folding his wet arms across his wet chest. “It was probably a fake gun.”

  I was already a little tired of having this pointed out to me. “I think it’s best to go through life assuming that guns are real.”

  He looked at me as if he were about to say something smart-assed but then changed his mind. He’d been a smart-ass kid. I remembered that his brother was the one everyone loved. And Julien was the one who shrugged a lot and kept things to himself and muttered funny things under his breath and sometimes cheated at the card games we played.

  “Are you drunk?” It dawned on me now that he might be—a man in a suit driving in a top-down convertible in the rain. Charlotte had said that it sounded like a party was going on in the background.

  “A little,” he said, shrugging. “It’s a party.”

  “What’s the party for?”

  He paused a moment. “No occasion,” he said, and he slid down in the seat, turned off the car, and pulled the keys from the ignition. “Maybe you should drive?” He threw the keys up in the air to me. I made no attempt to catch them. They landed at my feet.

  “I can’t drive,” I shrieked. “I’m having a panic attack!”

  We stared at each other; then he tilted his face up to the sky. “We are unlucky at this moment,” he said loudly, above the din of the rain. And then he squinted toward our rental.

  “The girl?” he said. “She can drive, no?”

  “I don’t think kids learn to drive stick shift anymore.”

  “What is stick shift?”

  I pretended to shift gears. “Manual,” I said.

  “Ah,” he said. “Stick shift.” He gestured for her to roll down her window.

  “What is it?” she called out.

  “Can you drive?” he shouted. “It is a manual stick shift.”

  “Manual stick shift?” she said.

  “Can you drive a stick?” I shouted.

  “Oh, yeah, stick,” she said. “I learned in a mall parking lot at night.” I imagined her out in a mall parking lot driving in the dark with Adam Briskowitz. Maybe the disaster, as my mother called him, had come in handy.

  “Excellent,” Julien said, and then he shook his hair out the way Abbot does when he comes up from under water. It struck me as a very boyish thing to do. Had he grown up at all? “It is normal for an American to assume all guns are real, isn’t it? You cannot fault yourself. Americans have guns the way Brits have bulldogs.”

  “Are you calling me a typical American?” I asked.

  “Do typical Americans have long conversations in the rain?”

  “I prefer the other brother—the one with the pogo stick,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “You are not all alone in that.”

  he car had died less than a mile from the house, which struck me as a real defeat—like the stories of people in the desert who collapse inches from a watering hole. Hydration wasn’t our problem, however. We were drenched. And the rain was still coming down hard. We must have looked strange, the four of us packed in the sports car, driving along with the top down in the rain. Charlotte was doing well behind the wheel, Julien giving gentle directions, his elbow propped on the passenger’s-seat window, which was rolled down—with the top down, what was the point of rolled-up windows? He seemed oddly happy to get out of that house with a nice buzz going, to have an excuse to drive out in the rain in his father’s old sports car, with its busted lid. There was something else about him—a deep restlessness, a nervous energy, something riding underneath.

  The seats were drenched. But the sharpness of the rain on my arms and the cool air was good for me, as if bringing me back to my body.

  “Gently,” Julien said, as Charlotte ground through the gears. Once she got it puttering along in third gear, Julien leaned out the window, the way a dog would on a sunny day.

  All the while, Abbot rattled off the story of what we’d just endured—the robbery, the fake gun, the rain, calling 911. Julien was surprised that 911 worked. Sometimes Abbot did this when he was nervous, “the word barrage,” Henry used to call it. Abbot was rubbing his hands wildly, like someone desperate to get warm. I kept an eye on him. We were sitting side by side in the backseat with our groceries on our laps. Buying groceries seemed like it had happened in a different lifetime, another era, back in the good old days when people could walk the streets safely without the fear of being robbed and taken aim at, albeit with fake guns. Abbot finished his account, ending with, “My grandma would say that when things go wrong, it’s a Buddhist gift.” I was surprised that my mother had shared this insight with Abbot. Her far-reaching knowledge was something she kept to herself. But, of course, she knew about world religions and had once confided in me that she liked Buddhism because “it was the kind of religion that didn’t begrudge you a BMW.” My mother is a complicated woman.

  “Are you a Buddhist?” Julien asked Abbot.

  He shrugged. “Kind of. But I miss my stuff. We had good stuff.”

  “I used to have good stuff,” he said, and he pulled at his thin necktie. “Just up ahead,” he said. “See the sign?”

  There it was: a white sign with small black lettering dug into the roadside. “No wonder we missed it before,” Abbot said.

  “No one has stayed in your house since the fire,” he said, “except this one Parisian couple when we had no rooms. They were desperate. But then they had a fight while playing croquet and left.”

  “Someone stayed there?” I asked. “It must be livable then.”

  “It is,” he said. “The bedrooms were not touched by the fire. But the house needs help. I think the Parisian couple saw the destruction as symbolism. This is the French.”

  “Romantic,” I said.

  “Like we are trapped in an old French film,” he said. “An American film, well, that is different. You can have a happy ending sometimes. But a French film? No, but here we are.” He held out both hands, proof of his existence. He was lean and muscular, that lithe European body type that lent itself to the development of soccer players.

  “I never realized the heavy responsibilities that come with being French,” I said.

  “It is a burden,” he said.

  We drove up the long shared driveway, vineyards on either side, tires clipping along through a few fresh puddles. On the left was their large stone house, and on the right was our smaller one. Our house looked disheveled, embattled. The shutters were askew, as if the house had been beaten by too many mistrals, the cold violent winds that whip through the region most bitterly in winter and spring. The yard was newly mowed but not tended beyond that. Weeds had taken over the flower beds, bullied up higher than the lip of the old fountain, barely visible from afar.

  “It’s still standing,” I said quietly.

  “It’s not only the fire,” Julien said. “My mother’s fatigued. She has let things fall. She wants to talk to you.” He looked at me for a moment, his dark lashes still wet. “Yes,” he said as if answering a question I hadn’t asked. “I studied in America one summer in university. I expected to run into you.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Were you in Florida?”

  “No,” he said. “Boston. I didn’t realize how big the country is. I never found you.”

  “You should have gotten your mother in touch with mine, given me a call.”

  “No, I wanted to run into you. It’s different. But here you are now.” He glanced at me, smiled. Was he confessing that he’d had a crush on me all these years? He changed the subject. “The rains here are rare and brief.” And he was right. The rain was already letting up. On the distant ridge of the mountain, there was late afternoon sun, clear and bright.

  Julien told Charlotte to park in a garage that sat between the two houses—both in the shadow of Mont Sainte-Victoire.

  We all climbed out of the car. The rain was ticking in the tall trees overhead. Our view of the mountain was
its long, ridged back. It went on for miles, ending at the far left in a steep cliff that plummeted down to the villages outside Aix-en-Provence. Massive and hulking, Mont Sainte-Victoire, one of the earth’s ancient monuments. I remembered walking on the mountain as a child. The mountain’s terrain was rough—dusty, with large rocks for handholds and footholds, but small stones that made your sneakers slip. It was easy to fall, skin a knee. But it was worth the effort—the idea that you could pull yourself up, at least partially, to afford a view high enough to make the houses look like dollhouses, to make you feel mighty.

  The Dumonteil property stretched all the way to the base of the mountain, but the large backyard was delineated by tall trees, and within the space, there was a long table, covered by a tablecloth, slack with water. There were a few drenched candles and abandoned wineglasses, filled now with rain.

  “You’re welcome to join us,” Julien said. “I have old friends of the family and many archaeologists, wild archaeologists.” He sighed as if wearied by wild archaeologists.

  “Wild archaeologists?” Charlotte said, indicating that wild didn’t go with her definition of archaeologist.

  “There has been … an infestation of archaeologists here. They have lived in both houses. One archaeologist started the fire, in fact. They work here during the day and sometimes take meals but are now living in Aix. Less dangerous.”

  “Why are they here?” I asked.

  “A man found something while digging for the pipes. It was a tomb. They have been pulling things from the earth.” He gestured vaguely beyond the trees.

  “Bones?” Abbot said.

  “Yes, a Gallo-Roman tomb, ancient,” he said. “My mother is very, how do you say, nostalgic about old tombs.”

  “I see.” I didn’t see. I’d never formed an opinion about old tombs.

  “Come in?” he asked. “The food is excellent, the real Provençal.” It seemed like he didn’t want to go in himself. He was lingering. A round of laughter rose up from the house, and the back door opened.

  Véronique emerged. She was wearing a small cast on her leg, taking the back stairs one at a time—and then she said, “Our Americans!” I walked to her, and Charlotte and Abbot followed. She smiled at us, embraced me, kissing each of my cheeks. “You became a woman. You’re beautiful.” I didn’t feel beautiful in the least, especially not in this moment. “Always a surprise!”