This makes no sense as Mellie and I aren’t biologically related, but I loved hearing it because my grandmother’s laugh is joyful and contagious.
When I relayed this conversation to Mellie,shesaid that I’m like Mum in that I never give up. She said that this is both a blessing and a curse and that sometimes I need to know when to walk away.
I reminded her of these words three years ago when Jackson married Chloe and I said that I would never return to Sainte-Églantine-les-Bains in the summer again.
“I’m walking awaynow, Mellie.”
“You’re not walking, you’re running,” she replied.
Étienne swerves off the road onto a lane and slows down—the surface is uneven and full of potholes, but soon Les Saules comes into view.
I draw in a sharp breath. This is not the river house of my dreams. This house looks practically derelict.
I remember it in sunshine when the walls were a golden peach and its terracotta tiles vibrant against the blue sky. It didn’t matter that the plasterwork had come off in places to reveal the plain building blocks underneath or that some of the tiles were missing—the house looked warm and inviting.
Now it’s cast in shadow and it just looks…broken.
Étienne pulls to a stop and cuts the engine.
The windows are dark and dirty and weeds have run rampant, suffocating the grass and wildflowers and leaving brambles and stinging nettles in their wake.
This side of the house was once covered in grapevines, but someone has pulled them off along with chunks of plaster. The ghostly tracks of vines are still visible on the remaining render—they remind me of staples suturing skin after a cut.
I glance at Étienne and only when I see him staring back at me so bleakly do I realize that he’s witnessed my shocked reaction.
“I tried to pull off the vines but it made everything worse.” His voice sounds rough.
“You can fix up the walls and plant more vines,” I reply with a surge of determination. The thought of him suffering any more than he already has is unbearable. “You can get it back to how it was. No, you can make it even better.”
“Why would I bother?” he asks miserably. “She’s not here.”
There’s a world of emotion in his gray-blue eyes and his grief feels fresh and unhinged.
“Étienne,” I say desperately, reaching out to…I don’t evenknowwhatI was going to do because before I can make contact, he unclicks his seat belt and gets out of the car.
I hesitantly do the same, following him to the back door as he retrieves his keys from his pocket. Gone is his vulnerability; now his features are hard-edged.
The house smells just as I remember, of wood fires and smoke that has been ingrained in the walls over decades. I come to a stop at the living room door. The room looks the same, only dustier. It still has the same two threadbare sofas, the same tattered rug, the same coffee table, the same old TV set. It even appears to have the same books on the shelves. The only thing that’s missing is his mother’s blanket.
And his mother.
I remember Estelle sitting right there on that sofa ten years ago. Étienne and I had come in to play cards as it was so hot outside. When Estelle called out from upstairs, I was racked with guilt—we’d obviously woken her up.
Étienne brought her into the room—he carried her, his own mother, in his arms, like a baby. I was shocked. She was so small; there barely seemed to be any flesh on her bones. When he laid her on the sofa, he did it incredibly carefully.
She was wearing a cornflower-blue nightdress and there was some sort of brace on one of her arms. She was gaunt, but beautiful, with very long dark hair tied into a loose plait that draped over her left shoulder. Curls had escaped it to frame her face, revealing high cheekbones and delicately curved eyebrows. She had rose-pink lips and the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen—even bluer than Mellie’s. They were dark in shade, like sapphires.
“I have been wanting my son to introduce us for days,” she said to me when Étienne disappeared back upstairs. “This is the first time he’s brought a girl home,” she whispered.
“He didn’t really bring me here,” I replied with an awkward smile. “I just keep coming back.”
She laughed as Étienne returned. He glanced between us, disconcerted, and then laid a chunky woolen blanket over his mother’s frame, which helped to disguise how thin she was.
“Would you mind if I joined your game?” she asked. Her breathing was shallow. “I get bored upstairs.”
We had such a fun afternoon. But that night, when I finally got around to googlingmaladie de Charcot, my blood ran cold. I was devastated to learn that Étienne would lose his mother before long, that soon he’d be an orphan. After that, it was hard to look at him the same way.
“Do you remember how we used to play poker with matchsticks?” I ask now as I retrieve a pack of cards and a box of matches from the bookshelf. “Your mum was even more competitive than you are.”
