The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted (12 page)

“You want me to leave Abbot behind for the summer? Are you two insane?” I said.

“Bring him,” Elysius said.

“Maybe you both need a lost summer,” my mother acquiesced.

“It’s a little elitist,” I said.

“I didn’t say that every woman
gets to have
a lost summer,” my mother said. “I’m just saying that every woman
needs
one—
deserves
one—what with all of the shit we have to put up with from men!” She was momentarily flustered. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard her curse. “Plus, this isn’t just any house. It’s like going on a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Lourdes, blind, and then gaining your sight back, but only
for us, the women in this family, and only having to do with matters of the heart.”

“Like Our Lady of Lourdes? Really?” I said. My mother was never devout, but still sometimes her Catholic upbringing would surface, as if to offset some of her other traits—her frankness about sexuality, her desire to be rich, and her indulgent behavior with chocolate and good wine.

“Yes. Lourdes.”

My sister put her elbows on the table and said, flatly, “Eight years, Heidi. Daniel and I have been together
eight years
. He was never going to get married again. Ever. But then I took him to the house in Provence, and he opened up. I can’t explain it, but that’s what happened! He proposed to me. Just like that.”

“Not to mention your grandmother,” my mother said. “That is the house where my own parents fell in love.” She was invoking the old love stories now. I took this as a sign of desperation.

I shook my head. “Who can afford to have a lost summer?” I said. “I can’t. It’s that simple.”

“You can,” my mother said. “You know Jude will take care of the store. She’s already taken charge of most everything. And I have an account for the house. I’ve never tapped it. It would be an investment in the house. Someone needs to go and help oversee that it’s properly restored.”

“And,” Elysius said, lowering her voice. “This trip could really help me.…” She glanced at my mother for approval.

“Go on,” my mother said. “Tell her.”

“It’s about Charlotte,” Elysius said. “When Mom came to me with her idea, I knew you’d never go without Abbot, never, and I thought about how hard it would be to travel alone with an eight-year-old. And then I thought of Charlotte, and how it might be … mutually beneficial.”

My mother summarized, “Since you’ve decided to take Abbot with you, you might want to also bring Charlotte.”

“I have not decided to bring Abbot with me or to go at all,” I said.

“Charlotte is at that age when she needs to expand her horizons. She needs to learn that there’s more to life …” My mother didn’t finish the sentence but now I knew that this was a reference to Charlotte’s needing to learn that there was more to life than her boyfriend, Adam Briskowitz. “And it would get her out of Elysius’s hair. Let both of them breathe.”

“Charlotte can help you with Abbot,” Elysius said. “You know, so you can get out and live a little.” This was another way of saying that I needed to move on. “Plus she’ll boost her French, maybe skip on to French III, and she’ll have time to study for her SATs without distraction.” Here, again, the unnamed distraction was Adam Briskowitz.

“You need the house,” my mother said. “You don’t believe it, but you will.”

I remembered the three of us lost in the swarm of beautiful Bath whites. I didn’t want to be enchanted. I shook my
head. “It’s a nice house. That’s all. Let’s not get carried away,” I said. “I went to that house as a kid and I wasn’t magically transformed.”

“You weren’t heartbroken yet,” Elysius said. “That’s the difference.”

I looked out the window to the pool.
And now I am
, I thought.
And now I am heartbroken
. My father was picking through a large bin of water toys. Abbot’s snorkeling gear was sitting on the cement. He was in the pool without it, a colorful shadow in the deep end. I watched for him to push himself off the bottom, bob to the surface, and shake his hair. But several moments passed. Was he drowning? I jumped up from the table, letting my napkin fall to the floor, and I ran out of the dining room through the kitchen, already screaming his name.

“Abbot! Abbot!” I shouted, as I ran across the deck, tipping a small potted plant on the railing that cracked with a thud on the grass.

By the time I was running downhill across the lawn, Abbot was holding on to the ladder, shaking the water from his hair.

“What is it?” my father called to me. “Is everything okay?”

I was breathless. My heart was thudding in my chest. I stopped and doubled over, my hands on my knees. Finally, I stood up and waved. “Everything’s fine,” I called. “Fine.” I turned around, and there stood my mother and Elysius on the deck, the door flung wide at their backs, the cracked pot having spilled its dirt on the grass. I knew what I must look like to them: so gripped by fear, imbalanced by sorrow, terrified
of living, a widow screaming for her only son who, on a beautiful morning, hasn’t drowned, who hasn’t even come close.

I shook my head. “I’m sorry,” I said. “We’re not going. We just can’t.” I started toward Abbot again. “Time to go!” I called. “Get your stuff!”

here was a Henry story that I told Abbot only in a blur. He knew that I’d had a miscarriage, that there was a baby that didn’t make it, but it wasn’t a Henry story. How could it have been? It was a story I told myself, and I told it to myself a lot, because the loss of Henry echoed this earlier loss.

Abbot was so perfect—fat, with gummy smiles and purring snores—that Henry and I felt almost guilty wanting another baby, but we did, right away. We didn’t give in, though, not immediately, mainly because Abbot made us dizzy with sleeplessness and selflessness—or maybe Abbot, as the manifestation of us, meant that we were dizzy with self-fullness. In any case, we were dizzy with love.

But when Abbot turned four—years that flew at breakneck speed—we were ready, more than ready. Overdue.

Henry and I knew that the world was going to demand that we hand Abbot over at some point. We weren’t going to be allowed to keep him with us forever. “The more children we have, the more we have to fear. Is that the way it works?” I asked Henry.

“I think so. But it’s more of everything,” Henry said.

This time, I handled the morning sickness better. I had no choice. I had Abbot to tend to. And so did Henry. He couldn’t simply dote on me. After the nausea subsided, right at week twelve, I noticed that my breasts weren’t as engorged, either. At a routine checkup, the Doppler didn’t pick up a heartbeat.

“Not to worry,” the obstetrician told me, wiping the goo off my stomach. “We’ll get you in for an ultrasound tomorrow and just make sure all’s well!”

Not to worry
, I told Henry on my cell phone while getting dressed. But later, while waiting to check out, I heard one of the technicians calling in an ultrasound. “Stat,” she said.

And that’s when it hit me—the possibility that there was reason to worry.

My mother came over to babysit Abbot, and Henry came with me to the ultrasound. We were stoic. He kept telling me that the doctor said there was no reason to worry.

I said nothing.

Finally, the technician took us to a small room and started the ultrasound. The tech said nothing. When I was pregnant with Abbot, the technicians talked through every ultrasound. They pointed out his parts like they were tour
guides. “Here’s the vertebrae. Here’s a foot.… If you turn your attention this way, you’ll see Big Ben.…” That’s what it was like.

Henry said, “Is that the baby?”

The tech said, “Yes.”

“So, how does everything look?” he asked.

The tech said quietly, “Your doctor will want you to come in to talk.”

“Oh,” Henry said. “Okay.”

But I already knew, knew in a way that Henry couldn’t, knew in a way in which dread precedes devastating news, the way a phone ringing at the wrong time of night is never good. I turned my face to the wall and cried in a way I hadn’t ever cried before—it came from deep within me, something guttural and barbaric.

Henry said, “Heidi, listen to me. Heidi, I’m here. Look at me.”

But I was gone, lost inside of myself.

By the time I was dressed, we’d gotten a message from my doctor’s office telling us to come straight over. There, we heard the news. The baby no longer had a heartbeat. It had died within me.

Henry had to call my mother. He said, “This baby didn’t make it.” Henry told me later, in bed, that he felt that he’d failed, that he’d done something wrong, that it had been some genetic deficiency on his side.

I wasn’t ready to share the blame. It was a miscarriage, and I was the carriage. I imagined myself rattling over
cobblestone, a wobbly thing on wooden wheels. I said flatly, “It wasn’t your fault. I can tell you that as easily as you can tell me the same.”

Eventually, I was able to whisper that I felt sorry for him. “I got to hold the child inside of me, and you never did.” It seemed like a gift to have been able to carry the baby with me, for a short time.

“Good God,” he said, and he got out of bed and paced. “You cannot be sorry in any way. I’m only a beggar here.” I understood what he meant. He was a beggar. He’d gotten more than his share. We’re all beggars, really. He climbed back into bed and put his face next to mine on the pillow. He was so beautiful—his soft blue eyes, his beautiful teeth that were so very slightly crooked.

Then there was the sterile hour that Henry spent alone while I was having the small surgery that often accompanies a miscarriage—as if the emotional loss weren’t enough, there was the physicality of it all. Henry read about sports. He told me later that he’d never felt farther away from me. He looked around the waiting room: old men turned inward, women his mother’s age knitting some fabric out of idle chatter, the news prattling on in high spirits. He didn’t know that what would come next would be a flood of miscarriage stories. It seemed like everyone we knew could tell at least two miscarriage stories: mothers, daughters, children, wives, friends. Henry said, “Miscarriage. It’s another secret society, like the secret society of married people, but this one we joined by accident, just by living.”

“How many more secret societies are there?” I asked him.

“I don’t want to know.”

I would find out later about the secret society of young widows—the way people would introduce one young widow to another, how they would want you to talk about your losses. How many times did my mother tell me that I should spend time with my Aunt Giselle? “Maybe she’ll have something important to say.” I already knew the truth, that when it is only you and another widow, there is nothing to say. Nothing at all.

After the operation, there was a leak in the house. Henry tore up the bathroom tiles, went rummaging through the house’s piping looking for the source of the leak. Henry wanted desperately to make something right.

And I tore into pastries. My mind was filled with elaborate designs. I created gorgeous wedding cakes. We had the Cake Shop by this point, but we hadn’t yet developed more than a small, local following. Henry called in professional photographers. The business began to rev up.

A few months before Henry died, he confessed to me that he still wanted another child. “I don’t care about money or stuff. And I don’t mind the diapers or the sleeplessness, of course. I am not in it for the pride in that first step or any of that. It’s more of you that I want—one more angle, one more topic of conversation, one more knowing glance we give each other in the day before we both fall asleep. That’s what children offer, isn’t it? Isn’t that what Abbot’s given us—a lifetime of more conversation, our own common ground? He’s
given us more of each other. Is that wrong, to want more of that? Is it greedy?” His face was so open, his eyes clear.

“I don’t care if it’s wrong,” I said. “Do you?”

“We could really hone our greediness, really blow past our amateur status, and play on the professional greed tour.”

And so we started trying again.

Leading up to his death, we felt new to each other, and because no one else knew that we were trying to get pregnant, our sex life took on a kind of covertness that made it feel secretive, urgent.