“So what happened?” Olivia asked.
Brody shrugged. “She says it serves him right. Let him die alone in his goddamn cabin by the creek.”
“What?”
“He left her. He hurt her. She doesn’t want him back.”
“That’s impossible.”
“I’ve never seen my mother that angry.”
Olivia stopped walking and pulled Brody toward her.
“I get this,” she said.
“What?”
“I’m not big on pain. When something hurts a little too much I turn it into anger.”
“I’ve never seen you do that.”
“I’m saving it for after you marry me,” Olivia said with a smile.
“You devil,” Brody said, stroking her chin with the back of his hand.
“She can’t stand to lose Sam. She can’t even begin to feel that pain. So she’s pushing him away. It’s easier.”
“Do all women do this?”
“Only the best women,” Olivia said.
Brody shook his head. “So what happens next?”
“It might take her some time. She’ll be angry for a little while.”
“And then?”
“Maybe she’ll take him back.”
“They’re both crazy,” Brody said, running his hand through his hair. “One flees and then the other flees.”
“If I thought I was going to lose you I’d be a crazy woman.”
“You’re not going to lose me.”
“Ever?”
Brody leaned forward to kiss her.
A car honked. They looked toward the street; a Peugeot pulled to a stop beside them. Emily rolled down the window.
“Are you guys making out on the street?” she asked. “We have rooms at the inn for that.”
Olivia blew her a kiss.
“Go visit that winery,” Emily told them. She pointed to the gate at the side of the road. “Tell Monsieur LeBlanc that I sent you.”
“Is that an order?”
“It is. And then crawl back to the inn. I promise you lots of privacy in Room 5.”
“Oui, madame,”
Olivia said.
Emily sped off.
“Un verre de vin, mademoiselle?”
Brody asked.
“Bien sûr,”
Olivia said, and they turned into the winery.
After failing to understand the garbled voice through the intercom, Olivia pushed the gate, holding it open for Brody.
“My French sucks,” she said.
“So does mine,” Brody told her. “But we’re really good at wine tasting.”
Hand in hand, they walked up the long driveway to a large apricot-colored villa at the top of the hill. They were surrounded by vineyards, long rows of grapevines hugging the land.
An elderly man greeted them at the door.
“Bonjour! Entrez! Vous êtes venus pour une dégustation?”
“Oui,”
Olivia said, relieved that she could understand him. He spoke slowly, probably accustomed to tourists.
“Je suis une amie de Emily Bourdon.”
“Ah, Emily!” the man said. And then he recited the charms of Olivia’s best friend at great length.
As he spoke he led them around the villa to a terra-cotta patio behind the house. He offered them seats at a small wrought-iron table. And then he disappeared.
Here the grapevines stretched for a very long distance and seemed to tumble into the sea. Olivia felt as if she were looking at a painting divided in three parts: vineyard, sea, sky, each one its own rich color. Far in the distance the first clouds hovered.
Two glasses of white wine appeared on the table in front of them.
“Merci,”
Olivia said.
“C’est magnifique,”
Brody said, gesturing at the view.
“Mais, oui,”
the man said, bowing. He described the wine in language that was lost to Olivia though she kept nodding in appreciation.
“Et, voilà,”
he finally said, and gestured for them to sip. He, too, held a glass. He brought it to his lips as if tasting the wine for the very first time.
“C’est bon,”
he announced and again, he disappeared.
“C’est délicieux,”
Olivia said.
“Imagine this,” Brody. “We live here. We end every day right here with a glass of wine and a view of our paradise.”
Olivia shook her head. “That’s not what I want,” she said.
Brody looked at her, surprised.
“I want the mess of our lives,” she said. “I want San Francisco and my crazy daughters and Wyoming and your crazy parents. I want it all, not just the pretty stuff.”
“Olivia, your girls are grown up. My parents are responsible for themselves. This is all about us now. Our lives. Our future.”
“You’re right,” Olivia said. “But I’m never going to be done as a parent. Your own mother said that. And I don’t want to be done. They’re going to get married and have kids and then our lives get even more complicated. I want the whole damn mess.”
Brody sipped his wine, staring out toward the sea.
“Why didn’t you have kids?” Olivia asked, her voice quiet.
“Grace didn’t want them,” Brody said. He squinted as if looking for something on the horizon.
“You never told me that.”
He shrugged. “She felt like the world was too dangerous a place. She had grown up in New York and when she was twenty
a couple of teenage boys stole her purse and beat her up pretty badly. She fled the city and escaped to Wyoming. When we met she told me right away that she didn’t feel strong enough to have children. I don’t mean physically. She was strong enough to raise a barn. But she didn’t want to worry about the fragility of children. How hard it was to protect them from danger.”
“What did you want?” Olivia asked.
“I wanted her. And so I gave up on the idea of kids.”
Olivia sipped her wine. She heard a grumble of thunder in the distance. The clouds were far away; it seemed as if a storm was something that couldn’t happen in this valley, with all this blinding sun.
“We’ll learn how to do this,” she said, reaching for Brody’s hand.
When they got back to the inn, Brody headed up to their room while Olivia walked into the kitchen for a bottle of water and a couple of glasses. On her way up the stairs she heard loud voices coming from one of the rooms.
She tiptoed down the hall. A door opened just as she reached it. Emily almost toppled into her.
“Sorry—”
“Excuse me—”
Olivia glanced in the open door. Jake lay in bed, the sheets twisted around him, his hair a tousled mess. His chest was bare. The room smelled dank.
“It’s not what you think,” Emily said.
Olivia stared at her. “What is it?”
“Nothing.”
Emily reached for the door and slammed it closed.
“It doesn’t look like nothing,” Olivia said.
“I wanted—I don’t know what I wanted,” Emily muttered. Her eyes were red and swollen.
“Revenge sex?” Olivia asked.
“Just one time.”
“You thought that would even things up?”
“I don’t know what I thought,” Emily said, her face pale.
“Did it? Are you done now?” Olivia asked, her voice loud.
“Jake kicked me out before I climbed into his bed,” Emily said. She turned and marched down the hallway. “God damn him.”
Olivia could hear her heavy steps on the stairs.
N
ell was swimming laps in the pool when she heard her cellphone ringing. She pulled herself out of the water and grabbed the phone off the lounge chair.
“Carly,” she said, a wave of relief washing over her.
“I’m sorry,” Carly said. “I know you called.”
“Mom’s been crazy worried. Where the hell are you?”
“I need a ride,” Carly said. “I’m in Marseille. Can you come get me?”
“What? What are you doing in Marseille?” Nell asked, but then she realized: Gavin. Sébastien had told her that the car had been found in Marseille. In the silence she began to imagine her sister in bed with Gavin, their limbs intertwined, their bodies slick with sweat. “Tell me about your sister,” he had said. Fuck
Gavin. Fuck Carly. Which is just what they had been doing all day.
“I asked you a goddamn question,” Nell said.
“Listen,” Carly said, her voice wobbly. “I need help. I’m stuck here.”
“Get a fucking taxi. I’m not your limo service,” Nell said, and she hung up.
She dropped into the lounge chair, the phone in her hand. Her eyes started to well up. He wanted her, not me.
The phone buzzed in her hand.
“Did you think I wouldn’t figure it out?” Nell spat into the phone.
“Please,” Carly said. “I need help.”
“You need help? You steal my guy and you fucking need help?”
Nell could hear the pulse of her heart. She felt panicky, as if she might scream or sob or flee.
“Nothing happened,” Carly said, her voice so quiet that Nell had to strain to hear her. “I was walking to town—”
“Spare me the details.”
“I need you,” Carly said in a voice Nell had never heard before. “I need your help. Please.”
“You can call a cab,” Nell said, though the anger was gone from her voice.
“Please, Nell. I can’t come back right now. I just want to be with you.”
Nell stood up and looked around. Everyone except for Sébastien was gone—she had no idea where they all were. When she had walked back from town she had expected to find
them still at the table, enjoying a marathon meal like last night’s dinner. But the kitchen was clean, the doors to all the bedrooms were closed and the pool beckoned her.
“Where are you?” she muttered into the phone.
“At the Vieux Port,” Carly said. Nell could hear the relief in her voice.
“You always get what you want,” Nell said. “No matter what you do. You always win.”
“I’m not winning anything,” Carly whispered.
“I’ll call you when I get there,” Nell said, hanging up the phone.
Nell walked through the open door of the inn and found Sébastien sitting at the front desk. He was staring at the computer and didn’t look away until she stopped in front of him.
“Can I borrow your car?” she asked.
“Emily has the car. She went to the market. I have the motorcycle.”
“I’ll take it.”
“Where are you going?”
“Marseille.”
“You cannot go after Gavin,” Sébastien said.
“C’est fou.”
Nell rolled her eyes. “It’s Carly. Somehow she ended up there.” Why was she covering for her sister? Why not tell the world: Carly ran off with my guy!
“Carly?” Sébastien said. “Why is she in Marseille?”
“Who knows,” Nell said.
Sébastien reached into a drawer and pulled out a set of keys. “You can ride a motorcycle?”
“I once rode a Ducati from Santa Monica to Big Sur and back in a day.”
He tossed them to Nell. “Do not get into trouble,” he said.
Trouble, she thought. It’s not me. It’s my sister.
When the cops arrested Nell for the pills they found in her pocket after the high school dance, she felt an odd sense of calm. I can handle this, she thought.
“Let me drop off my sister first,” she told the police officers.
“Call someone to pick her up,” the male cop said.
Nell had pulled out her cellphone and called her mom. She told her to come immediately, that she was being taken in to the police station for questioning, that Carly was sick and needed to go to bed. When Olivia flipped out, Nell calmly said, “Just get here, Mom. No drama right now, okay?” and then gave her the address.
Nell felt suddenly grown-up. No one was telling her what to do. She was making important decisions, decisions that would affect her in all kinds of ways. It felt both terrifying and absolutely right.
“Let me go wait with my sister,” she told the cops, and they nodded.
Nell climbed into the front seat of her car.
“Stop crying,” she told her sister. “You have to listen to me.”
“I’m so scared,” Carly said, her voice quiet.
“You’re going to be fine. But you have to do what I tell you. They’re going to arrest me now. Mom is coming to get you. Tell her that you have some kind of bug. The flu. Anything.
You can cry, you can throw up, but remember that you’re sick. You’re done being high. You feel lousy and you want to climb in bed. Do you get that?”
Carly nodded.
“No one at school can know about you taking drugs. Do you get that?”
“Why are they arresting you?” Carly asked. “Were you speeding?”
“I rolled a stop sign.”
“They don’t arrest people for that.”
“I know,” Nell said, thinking about jail for the first time.
“Call Dad,” Carly said.
“Yeah. Good idea,” Nell said. “Where is he?” He had left on a business trip earlier that week.
“New York, I think,” Carly said.
Nell pulled out her phone. Her father picked up on the first ring.
“Dad,” she said. “I need your help.”
“I was sound asleep.”
“I just got arrested.”
“What?”
“They’re arresting me for possession.”
Carly shot Nell a terrified look; Nell waved her hand through the air as if all these problems would fly away.
“Of what?” her dad asked.
“Just get someone to meet me at the station. Okay?”
“How did they find it?”
“They took my jacket,” Nell said. “And they found a pill bottle in my pocket.”
“Illegal search,” he said. “I’ll send someone right away.”
—
Nell felt comfortable on Sébastien’s motorcycle within minutes. I need a bike, she thought, climbing out of Cassis on a winding mountain road. She remembered telling her mother that she was going to buy a bike a few years ago, after riding her friend’s Ducati for the weekend. Olivia went ballistic, threatening to cut off her money. Here she was, twenty-eight, still taking money from her mom. Her dad had cut her off when she was busted at eighteen, telling her it was tough love. Grow up. Get a job. Olivia gave her money on the sly for years, and then after the divorce she set up an account for Nell, sending her $500 every month.
She was kicked out of school after the arrest, even though her father got them to drop the charges because of the illegal search. UC Santa Cruz first rescinded its offer of acceptance and later, once the charges were dropped, agreed to let her attend if she finished her last semester of high school. But Nell said no, that she had other plans. In fact, she felt untethered to any life plan.