Florida(63)

The emails all say the same thing: that this good and quiet man has killed himself.

There is a sucking sound. When she looks up, the edges of the little square have blurred. It is here again. It has found her again, the dread, in Yport, this place that she thought would be too small to be noticed.

When the mother and her boys come home to Florida, there will be a memorial service in the Thomas Center atrium and the mother will stand in the heat against a cool stone pillar and feel shy in the presence of such collective grief. Her friend’s widow and her teenaged daughter from a different marriage will be there; the baby will be there. The mother will touch the baby’s perfect head and feel her warmth. And then she’ll remember the flash of gratitude and understand the harm she’s done the baby in that moment, the sin of relief that the terrible thing happened on the mother’s periphery, not at her center. Because this is a grief that she could survive.

She moves over to her children and puts an arm around both. They let her hold them, wondering. They smell mealy and could do with a shower, and she should probably toss these rotten shoes. But oh, God, she thinks. Let them stink.



* * *



—

The mother and her sons go back to Paris for their last week in France.

But first, they pack up the Yport house and drive to Dieppe, still scarred from World War II. Dieppe is not far at all from Calais, where, she’ll read later, migrants are massing into a giant camp called the Jungle, waiting for passage to England. In their little Mercedes, the mother and the boys see none of these desperate people. The Norman countryside looks oddly depopulated. They drive down narrow roads through green and gold fields, through towns luxurious in their flowers and cleanliness, to the Chateau de Miromesnil, where they stay in a tower room, fragrant and clean and white and peaceful and expensive. This is the place where Guy was born, though she finds that she could give no fucks at all about him anymore.

After the constant noise of the sea, the gulls and the waves and the music and the tourists, the chateau in the warmth of its fields is almost eerily quiet.

The birds sing, but songs. The gardens are vast and dreamy, giant potagers so perfectly kept it makes the mother cry with misplaced tenderness. There’s a wall of espaliered pear trees, heavy with almost-ripe fruit. A kind of miniature apple tree that was trained on a knee-high vine. Black dahlias, glossy eggplants, butterflies an impossible shade of minty green. The boys swing the ancient bell in the chapel, pulling on the rope with all the strength in their bodies. She takes pictures of them with a mossy stone bust of Guy de Maupassant, and in every picture, the older son scowls.

There are no restaurants anywhere near for dinner that night, and the only place open within ten kilometers is a bakery, so they buy what is left, pastries and bread and jam, and eat in the garden, with the last of the visitors strolling through.

The boys run up and down the long alleys, careful children, touching nothing, ruining nothing. Good, smart boys. There will still be time, perhaps, at least she hopes, to make them into good men. They run back to her to finish their milk, to throw their arms around her, perhaps relieved that they aren’t so cold anymore. An apple falls on the older son’s head, and he looks betrayed at her, that she’d let this happen, then he relents and laughs.

There is a storm in the night, the trees lashing in the dark garden, the boys on the floor in the sleeping bags and the mother penned up with them.

The mother cannot sleep and she thinks of Laure Le Poittevin, Guy’s mother. How terrible for her to outlive her two sons, both of whom died very young of secretive sex leading to syphilis, which spread through their bodies and cracked into insanity. How lonely it would be, the mother thinks, looking at her children, to live in this dark world without them.

She watches as the new light in the morning wakes them up. She is so weary. Her sons belong in their own beds. She doesn’t belong in France, perhaps she never did; she was always simply her flawed and neurotic self, even in French. Of all the places in the world, she belongs in Florida. How dispiriting, to learn this of herself.



* * *



—

    And yet this will not be what defines the trip.

Two things will stay longer.

The first is their last night in Yport, coming up from salted caramel crêpes, when the mother sees a man picking up jars from a box at his feet and heaving them into a great green container beside the casino. She laughs aloud. Recycling. Of course. When the boys are finally asleep and the streets have gone quiet, she hangs her arms with plastic bags full of bottles and runs as fast as she can down the hill, holding her breath against fire in the house or one of the boys waking in a terror and calling for her and finding nothing where she is supposed to be.

She throws the glass in all at once and bolts home. The boys are asleep, safe in their beds.

At midnight, as she finishes the last bottle of wine in the house and continues to write nothing at all, there is a knock on the door. She feels courageous, almost light, and opens it angrily. Jean-Paul is on the step, fist raised to knock, so it looks as if he is punching. She almost ducks. He seems bashful and holds another folded paper in his hand.

He pardons himself, hopes they had a pleasant stay, has something for the mother but she isn’t supposed to read it until he has left.

He found the mother, he says, very sympathetic.

She is far from sympathetic.