Scared To Death (Live to Tell #2)(103)

No wonder the handsome waiter mistook her and Elsa for sisters just the other day, when they were out to lunch with Elsa’s daughter Renny, a student at NYU.

“Would you like to order dessert?” the waiter asked Elsa, turning to her after Sylvie had ordered the crème br?lée, “or shall I just bring two spoons for your sister’s?”

Sylvie—never big on sharing dessert—would have gleefully gone along with it, and with the waiter’s mistaken assumption about their relationship, had her outspoken granddaughter not nipped it in the bud, probably because she thought the waiter was flirting with her mom.

He might very well have been. Elsa is strikingly beautiful even in middle age—nearly as beautiful as Sylvie herself. But her marriage to Brett Cavalon, having weathered many a storm, is stronger than ever.

“Actually, they’re mother and daughter,” Renny promptly informed the waiter, “not sisters.”

“Is that so? Well, I sure can see the family resemblance in all three of you.”

As soon as he walked away, Renny rolled her eyes and sipped the pinot noir she’d glibly ordered as a newly minted twenty-one-year-old. “He’s so full of crap.”

Sylvie scolded, “Renny! Such language at the table!”

“Oh, it could have been worse, Maman.” Elsa grinned. “She could have said he’s full of—”

“Elsa!”

Her daughter had the audacity to laugh, and Sylvie shook her head. Americans.

“I didn’t mean he was full of crap because he thought you were sisters, Mémé,” Renny told Sylvie, who couldn’t help being as pleased by her granddaughter’s French term of endearment as she was displeased by the repetition of the offending word. “But he’s all, ‘I see the family resemblance.’ Meanwhile, I’m adopted.”

“Well I’m not,” Elsa pointed out, “and you actually look more like me, Renny, than I look like Maman.”

C’est vrai, Sylvie thought. While they were adopted years apart from the foster care system, and don’t share blood with their mother or each other, Elsa’s grown children do resemble her and each other. Both Renny and Jeremy have dark eyes and dark hair. Renny’s complexion is on the olive side compared to Elsa’s fair skin, and Jeremy’s eyes are darker than his mother and sister’s, so dark they’re almost black.

Ah, such a shame that Sylvie’s blue eyes—which Frank Sinatra himself once told her were bluer than his own—will die with her.

But not, God willing, for a long, long time. She’s feeling good, despite getting around with a cane these days: a handcrafted walking stick, imported from the century-old Fayet in France.

And yes, her cardiologist is always telling her to go easier on the butter and cream, but Sylvie has no intention of obliging. She’s svelte as ever, despite butter and cream, wine and chocolate—all the pleasures of life, which she’ll continue to enjoy to its fullest, merci beau-coup.

“Mon Dieu,” laments the great Piaf over the bathroom speaker, and begs God to let her lover stay with her a little bit longer.

Such a sad song. Sylvie thinks of Jean Paul as she turns away from the fogged-over mirror. Such a painful loss.

And yet, life goes on. She has much to look forward to. Fashion Week begins in a couple of days. Come summer, she’s spending a month visiting friends on the C?te d’Azur.

And when she returns to New York, if all goes well this time, she’ll be a great-grandmother at last. At lunch, Elsa told her that Jeremy and his wife Lucy are expecting again.

“The kids have been through so much. Will you offer a novena that nothing goes wrong again, Maman?”

“But of course.”

Two lost babies in less than a year is a lot to bear. God willing, there won’t be a third. Sylvie, who attends daily mass at Holy Trinity, is a strong believer in the power of prayer, as is her granddaughter-in-law.

Sylvie is impressed by Lucy’s unshaken conviction that she will be blessed with a child.

After all she’s been through—the tragedy that marked her childhood, and now the heartbreaking miscarriages in the past year—she’s been remarkably resilient.

A woman like Lucy can survive anything. Sylvie just hopes she won’t be tested again in the months ahead.

Poking a fingertip through the frothy layer of bubbles into the steaming tub, she decides the water temperature is just right. She turns off the tap, fits a shower cap snuggly over her fresh coiffure, and uses the sleeve of her robe to wipe a small window into the mirror.

Checking her reflection to ensure that her hair is neatly tucked beneath the shower cap, she glimpses a flutter of movement reflected in the filmy glass. Frowning, she wipes a wider swath.

Reflected in the mirror, a robed, hooded figure stands behind her.

The sight is so shockingly out of place that Sylvie blinks, certain it’s a trick of the light. But it still seems to be there.

Slowly, she turns.

She isn’t alone.

The cloaked intruder swoops upon her, hands outstretched—ominously wearing rubber gloves, Sylvie realizes in horror.

“Mon Dieu!” Edith Piaf sings, reaching the crescendo as the gloved hands push Sylvie down, down, into the full bathtub. She thrashes and gasps, sucking hot water into her lungs.

I can’t breathe…I can’t breathe…