Late in the afternoon on Saturday, we laid out a blanket on a promontory overlooking the ocean, and set out to capture the view in watercolors. It had become something of a ritual for us, painting side by side. I dreaded the day she would outgrow it.
I watched her as she painted in broad, sure strokes, confident in her artistry. Her nose screwed up in concentration, her French pout. Her long hair knotted at the base of her neck, secured with a pencil, like I used to wear mine in school. For all her independence, she was still my mini-me. We had marveled at that when she was small. Those first few weeks home from the hospital when everything was new and full of wonder. Daniel and I would lie in bed cocooning her and gazing at her features, her every little movement. Discovering what was mine and what was his and what was decidedly Isabelle’s. Falling in love with her, and each other, anew.
“Do you think you’ll ever get married again, Mom?”
It came out of nowhere. The big questions always did.
“I don’t know, peanut. Maybe…”
She was quiet for a moment, filling in her sky.
“Why? What made you ask?”
Isabelle shrugged. “I just wonder sometimes. I don’t want you to be lonely.”
“Lonely? Do you think I’m lonely?” I laughed, uneasy. “I’ve got you.”
“I know, but…” She stopped to look at me. “I just want you to be happy.”
I was not sure where all this was coming from. In the beginning, I’d spent a great deal of time letting her know that I was all right. That the divorce was best for all of us. That Daniel and I would be happier people apart, and how that, in turn, would make us better parents. It took much consoling and eighteen months of therapy, but lately the topic hadn’t reared its head.
“Iamhappy, honey,” I said, returning to my makeshift easel. “I have everything I need.”
It sounded truthful.
She watched me for a while. Scrutinizing my horizon, the meeting of violet and cerulean. And then: “I think Daddy’s going to marry Eva.”
It was a kick to the gut. “Why do you say that?”
She shrugged, noncommittal.
“Did he say something to you?”
“I think he’s feeling me out,” she said.
I sensed it: the familiar tightness in my chest. It had been years, but there it was, that thick, heavy feeling of something lost. “Why? What did he say to you?”
She shrugged again, looking away. I could see her struggling to make this easier for me.
“Isabelle?”
“He said that you would always be my mother. No matter what happened. That nothing would ever change that.”
She’d said it flatly, with little emotion. But it was all there.
“Oh.”
We sat for a moment, neither of us speaking, lost in our thoughts. The sound of the waves. The sun flaring white on the water.
“I just thought it sounded like he was trying to prepare me for something. I thought you should be prepared, too.”
It stayed with me, Isabelle’s concerns. I did not bring it up with Daniel because it wasn’t my place. But it felt a bit like waiting for the other shoe to drop. And so I left for Europe with a little bit of a hollow in my heart. The one that I thought had mended. And I tried my best to forget it was there.
Hayes and his bandmates were staying at a fabulous villa on the Cap d’Antibes. They were there for only a week before heading up to record at some state-of-the-art studio in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. This was a luxury, he’d conveyed, as more often than not they found themselves recording in hotel rooms in between shows. Hayes and Oliver and occasionally Rory doing the bulk of the songwriting with their producers at odd hours of the night; the boys laying vocal tracks in their makeshift studio, mattresses propped against the walls for acoustics. No rest for the weary.
In the time since I’d last seen him, they’d wrapped up the North American leg of thePetty Desirestour, spent two weeks decompressing at home, and were gearing up for their next album. It was a machine, he’d explained. They were milking them, twelve months a year, to feed a growing fandom that seemed to not be able to get enough of these five boys.
“There’s like a clock ticking. An expiration date,” he’d said, late one night on the phone from London. “I think they’re afraid we’re going to grow hair on our chests and our fans are going to just up and disappear. So they’re trying to get as much money out of us as they can now. But really we could use a break. Take That are working on yet another album, and the New Kids are still doing cruises and they’re in their forties. They still have die-hard fans. But they both took breaks.”
