Castle of Water: A Novel(58)
“What do you think?”
“We can’t name her Marie-Antoinette?”
“Pfff. No way.”
“Sophie? After her mother?”
“Non. We don’t do that in France. It’s weird.”
“What about Caroline, then? Your middle name? That’s pretty.”
“I don’t know. Maybe for the middle name, but not the first. Anyway, we have seven months to think about it. That gives us lots of time.”
“Seven months,” he repeated, trying to still his panic as he imagined the big day. Labor wards, midwives, trained doctors, Lamaze classes—all nonexistent. And even if everything did go off without a hitch, what kind of existence would it be for a child, to know nothing of the world beyond a few acres of sand and a meager subsistence on half-wild bananas? What kind of life would that be?
Needless to say, the mother-and father-to-be did not fall asleep easily that first night, with the rains drumming down upon their roof and the winds outside lashing at the coconut palms. Neither wanted to appear overly frightened, for the benefit of the other, but the implications were unavoidable, and that new class of fear was excruciatingly real.
But then again, there was always hope. Sophie’s patois-speaking grandmother had squeezed eight children into the world through her broad Occitan hips, and although the mountain village of Gavarnie in the 1930s wasn’t quite a desert island, it wasn’t the maternity ward at St. Luke’s, either. And while their unspoken fears sought to overshadow it, there was no small amount of pride and joy in one very simple and profoundly human realization: They were going to be a mom and a dad, maman et papa. Making photo albums and coaching T-ball may have been up in the air, but that one fact was as sure as the sunset. And it was not the wind in the palms or the rain on their roof, but this thought alone that eventually balmed their worries and sang them to sleep. Barry settled down onto the bamboo cot and curled up beside Sophie, his head atop hers, his arm gently cradling the invisible life in her belly, and he gave her a kiss on the pale crescent of skin behind her ear. Sophie smiled and wove her fingers through his. Je t’aime, she told him. Moi aussi, he answered. J’ai peur, she said to him. I’m scared, too, he replied. And they stayed clasped together like that long into the night, the thunder receding gradually in the distance, the voices on the radio fading slowly into static.
38
Ironically, the very same week that Barry Bleecker discovered he was soon to be a father, he was also declared officially dead. Under normal circumstances (if a human being vanishing without a trace may ever be considered normal), obtaining a death certificate in absentia is a lengthy process, demanding seven years of inexplicable absence. In the case of Barry, the fact that his flight was known—or at least strongly presumed—to have gone down in the sea was indeed an expediting factor. And as such, almost two and a half years after he had vanished, the death certificate was rendered by the state of New York to his heartbroken parents. Barry had left no will behind him, and the vast majority of his savings had already been donated to the United Way, so there wasn’t much for anyone to do. Mr. and Mrs. Bleecker held a memorial service at a Presbyterian church in Cleveland, at which a number of his childhood friends and elementary school teachers offered heartfelt eulogies, accompanied by a touching, although perhaps a tad cliché, rendition of “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes, courtesy of the local fire department. His high school football coach offered to make a closing speech but choked up halfway through and had to sit down. The service was followed by a picnic on the grounds outside of the Cleveland Museum of Art—all in attendance remembered how much it had meant to Barry—and a rough approximation of a funeral reception line. The guests trickled out one by one, while his mother untaped the plastic tablecloths from the picnic tables and gathered up the grease-stained paper plates. The entire affair ended for his parents with a somber car ride home in a rust-flecked Toyota minivan; they proceeded slowly up Cedar Hill, to the house they had shared for the better part of their adult lives, and released two long, desperate sobs, almost in concert, when they came to a stop beneath the sagging basketball hoop of their only son. Then they wiped their eyes and went inside. It was finally over.
As for Sophie Ducel’s own version of a premature memorial service, it had occurred only six months after the Cessna was swallowed by the sea, the government of France being a little less stingy with its death certificates. The ceremony commemorated both her life and the life of her husband, at the very same church in Toulouse where they had been married. Both families were in attendance; Sophie’s drove in from their village just outside the city, and étienne’s took first-class flights down from Paris. It was short, sincere, and followed by a meal of cassoulet at a restaurant on the edge of Le Capitole square, directly across from the big Occitan cross where Sophie had played marelle as a young girl. The portions were huge, and few of the guests were able to clean their plates, leaving her parents and her brother to clear away the sad sight of all that uneaten duck. The next day, feeling that the memorial had been only half complete, they decided to give it some closure with a hike in Gavarnie. The three of them parked in the town and followed the path up into the mountains, taking note of how the wind at their peaks stirred up a delicate curtain of snow: The sunlight caught it in glorious suspension, a pall of pure and crystalline white, and it was done. They were at peace with it, as only those born of mountains ever truly can be.