“I can’t. I’m in Paris.”
“Paris?” She laughed like it was the craziest of jokes even as I heard my mother shrieking in the background. It was a mistake admitting where I was. I knew it the second it came out of my mouth. I should have said I was anywhere else but Paris. Who the hell was I? An ungrateful daughter who jetted off to Franceto leave her mentally ill mother to fend for herself. Maybe. But there was much more to the story that I couldn’t explain to this exhausted and overworked police officer who was trying to wrangle my violent mom into an ambulance.
“For work,” I muttered. That was true. What I was doingwasmy work; going to school was my job so that I could eventually get commissions and sell my art. Lucie and Colette were constantly reminding me of that. I also came to escape and hide and reinvent myself. All these things could also be true, but I couldn’t justify myself to a stranger judging me from across an ocean.
“Is there anyone else I can call?” The officer’s tone had become less friendly. “Someone who isn’t on vacation in Europe?” And the answer was going to disappoint her. We didn’t have anyone else. It had always been just the two of us. I thought about the home aide I had hired who had her own young children. I couldn’t bother her in the middle of the night.
“No. But I can make arrangements to come home. Where is she being taken so I can reach out?”
“I won’t let you take me,” Mom screamed again. And then she wailed my name. “Emmmmmmmmy, don’t let them do this to me.”
“We’re taking her to Belmont,” the cop said. “If we can manage to get her in this ambulance. I don’t know what they’ll do with her once she gets there. You need to come home.”
The line went dead.
After the episode I went home for a week. Lucie lent me thousands of dollars even though we’d only known one another for six months.
“I’ll make more,” she’d said. I organized doctors, fought with Medicaid, and had my mother committed to an inpatient facility, financed mostly on credit cards. And then I left again, the guilt a stone constantly lodged in my gut. Last night I dreamed of the call and her screams. My mother is safe now. She’s still in a facility, but she’s deteriorating, and I blame myself for that every day. But I won’t say that to Stella, not now.
“I never remember my dreams. How did you sleep?” I ask her.
“Spectacularly. I always do when I’m by the sea. Let’s open your windows so you can smell it. There’s coffee on. The others are up. Lucie’s already been for a swim. She collected an entire jar of snails and has been drawing them for hours.”
“It must be freezing!”
“She’s very hearty. Peasant stock. We have that in common. Get dressed. I’ll be in the other room with the girls.” The girls! As if they are already hers.
Outside the sky is a delicate silver-gray, the color of faded denim. Through the window I spy a path carved into the cliffside leading to a rocky beach. I pull on the warmest sweater I brought with me and some wool socks to protect my feet from the rough-hewn wooden floorboards.
“I don’t see it at all.” I hear Lucie giggle from the great room in the front of the house.
“Photographs will never do him justice, my dear,” Stella says. “But let me try to find a better one.”
She’s huddled on the couch with my roommates flanking her on either side. All three of them are wearing silk kimonos in a kaleidoscope of colors, no doubt procured from one of Stella’s massive suitcases. A moth-eaten hand-crocheted afghan is spread over their legs, and on top of that is a large photo album.
“We’re taking a stroll down memory lane,” Stella explains as she nods for me to sit down.
“Is that your album?”
“It is. I brought it along. One of the things I stashed before my untimely death.”
“And the sword?”
“Of course.”
“And these fashionable robes,” I add, pouring myself some coffee.
“Aren’t they a wonder?” Stella says.
“What else did you manage to rescue?”
“My favorite Diors, but I left all of the McQueens. At least I got these photographs. These are irreplaceable.”
“I was just telling Stella that I don’t see the allure of Maxwell at all,” Lucie says. “At best I would say he looks like a strangely attractive gnome.”
Her comment makes Stella snort indelicately. “He did, didn’t he? That’s really so true. He would have loved that description. A strangely attractive gnome. Too good. But, Lucie, you of all people understand how alluring a brilliant and powerful man can be.”
“I do,” she says with a roll of her eyes. “It’s in inverse correlation to how attractive, brilliant, and powerful women are perceived.”
