18. Maman
Maman
Bliss
My mother answers on the second ring.
For one second, I forget how phones work.
The screen shows her name, Maman, and the little contact photo I took three years ago outside her gallery in Montreal. She’s wearing red lipstick, a black coat, and the expression of a woman who could convince a wall to apologize for standing in the wrong place.
Then her voice fills the room.
“Bliss?”
One word. That’s all it takes.
My hand clamps around the phone until my knuckles ache.
Matthias sits in the chair near the window, close enough to stay if I need him, far enough to let this be mine. He offered to leave. I asked him not to.
“Maman,” I say.
The sound that comes back isn’t a word. It’s breath breaking apart.
“Ma petite,” she whispers. “Oh, my girl.”
I close my eyes, and Montreal opens inside me.
The gallery after closing. The squeak of the old floorboards. My mother’s perfume, orange blossom and something expensive. Her hands framing my face when I was twelve and furious because a critic called my work too loud. Her voice telling me loud was better than invisible.
“I remember,” I say, and the tears come immediately. “Maman, I remember. I remember everything.”
She starts crying then, and my mother doesn’t cry easily. Colette Fontaine can stare down collectors, landlords, customs officers, and men with too much money and not enough taste without smearing her mascara.
But she cries now.
“I heard your voice at the institute,” she says. “I knew something was wrong, but you sounded so far away. So polite. You called me Mother.”
The word hurts worse than it should.
“I’m sorry.”
“No.” Her voice sharpens through the tears. There she is. My mother with steel under silk. “You don’t apologize for what they did to you. Never.”
I press my fist against my mouth, nodding even though she can’t see me.
“They told me I was healing.”
“They lied.”
“Yes.”
“And now?”
I look toward the canvases stacked along the wall. Serenity’s supplies have taken over half the suite. Jillaine sent extra drop cloths with the careful expression of a woman who’s decided not to ask questions about paint on hotel furniture.
“Now I’m painting again.”
My mother sobs once, quietly.
“Color?”
“All of it.”
“Bon,” she says, fierce and broken at once. “Paint them into dust.”
A laugh escapes me through the tears. It sounds messy and alive, and I hear her cry harder because she hears it too.
“I missed you,” I whisper.
“I was here,” she says. “Every day. Every hour. I was waiting for you to come back to me.”
My gaze finds Matthias. He looks down, giving me privacy even while he stays.
“I’m back,” I say, and this time, the words don’t feel like hope.
They feel like proof.
“I’m coming to you,” Maman says.
“I know.”
“And when I get there, I’m going to hold you until you complain.”
I wipe my face with the heel of my hand, leaving a smear of blue across my skin. “I might not complain.”
“You will. You’re my daughter.”
The smile comes through the tears before I can stop it.
Yes. I am.
MacLeod’s Baby Bump Hotel, Bliss’s Suite, Sausalito, California. 2100 hours
Maman arrives smelling of orange blossom perfume, recycled cabin air, and panic she’s tried to hide beneath lipstick.
She doesn’t make it three steps into the suite before she reaches for me. I reach back. Then we’re both crying too hard to manage anything dignified.
Her arms close around me, tight enough to make my ribs protest, and I hold on with paint under my nails and blue smeared along one wrist. She makes a broken sound against my hair, half French, half prayer, and rocks me the way she did when I was small and feverish and furious about needing comfort.
“Ma petite,” she whispers. “Ma fille. Ma belle fille.”
“I’m here,” I say into her coat. “Maman, I’m here.”
“I know. I know.” Her hand moves over my hair, my face, my shoulders, checking me in pieces because seeing all of me at once must hurt too much. “Let me look at you.”
I lean back.
Her hands cup my face, thumbs brushing tears and paint from my skin. Her eyes search mine, and whatever she finds there makes her mouth tremble.
“They didn’t keep you,” she says.
“No.”
“Dieu merci.”
The words come out fierce, almost angry, and I laugh because that is my mother. Grief in one hand, battle plan in the other.
Matthias stands near the doorway, giving us space. Maman notices him because Colette Fontaine notices everything, especially men standing too quietly in rooms where her daughter has been hurt.
Her gaze sharpens.
“You are Dr. Cross.”
“Yes, madame.”
“Thank you for bringing my daughter back.”
His expression shifts, but he only inclines his head. “She brought herself back. I helped where I could.”
Maman studies him for another second, then seems to approve of the answer enough to spare him.
The paintings take her next.
She turns slowly, one hand holding mine, and sees the canvases leaning against the walls. Red. Blue. Orange. Green. Gold. A woman emerging. A man beside her. Montreal in broken fragments. Fire. Music. A gallery crowd returning through color.
Her breath leaves her.
“Oh,” she whispers.
I squeeze her hand. “I couldn’t stop.”
“Of course you couldn’t.”
She walks to the largest canvas and stops in front of it.
For once, my mother has no performance ready.
No gallery owner’s assessment. No collector’s eye. No elegant sentence designed to make art sound expensive.
She covers her mouth and weeps.
“There you are, mon c?ur,” she says. “There you are.”
The words undo me all over again. I step beside her, and she pulls me close without looking away from the painting.
Matthias’s attention moves over the streaks of red and black cutting through the canvas.
“The fire,” he says carefully. “What happened?”
Maman’s hand tightens around mine. I look at the painting before I answer.
“They said it was faulty wiring,” I say. “But it started in the back storage room, where I kept the paintings from my first collection.”
Matthias goes still.
“The ones not insured yet?” he asks.
I look at him. The fact that he understands that quickly hurts and helps at the same time.
“Yes.”
Maman’s voice is quiet. “I never believed it was an accident.”
I swallow hard.
“Neither did I.”
Maman touches the edge of the canvas with two careful fingers, not quite touching the paint.
“Your father would have stood in front of this for hours pretending he understood it better than everyone else.”
I laugh through the tears. “He would’ve been insufferable.”
“He would have been proud.”
We stand there together, both of us crying, surrounded by every color they tried to take.
MacLeod’s Baby Bump Hotel, Bliss’s Suite, Sausalito, California. 2130
Maman is holding me tight when her gaze lifts over my shoulder and catches on Matthias again.
At first, I think she’s looking because he helped bring me back. Then her hands still against my back.
“Oh,” she whispers.
I lean away enough to see her face. “Maman?”
She doesn’t answer me. Her eyes stay on Matthias, moving over his face with the same focus she gives a painting when one detail has changed the meaning of the whole piece.
Matthias straightens slightly. “Colette?”
“You,” she says softly. “You’re the face.”
The room seems to narrow around those words.
I turn toward him, and Matthias’s expression shifts before he can hide it.
“The face?” he asks.
Maman releases me slowly, one hand still gripping mine as if she’s afraid I’ll vanish if she lets go completely. “The Montreal show. The crowd painting. You were the man near the center.”
Matthias doesn’t move.
“You recognize me?”
“My daughter has been painting you for three years.” Maman’s voice breaks, but wonder comes through it too. “I’d know you anywhere.”
Heat rises behind my eyes again.
Maman looks at the canvases leaning against the wall, especially the newest one, the one with the woman emerging through color and the man beside her.
“She painted you again,” she says.
“I didn’t mean to.”
Maman turns to me with a tenderness that hurts. “Yes, you did, ma petite. Maybe not with your mind. But artists don’t only paint with memory. We paint with recognition and heart.”
Matthias looks down, and unusual as it seems for him, he has no answer.
“I didn’t know she’d seen me,” he says.
Maman looks between us, her smile softening through the tears. “The heart is sometimes much faster than the mind, ma petite. Yours found him years ago.”
Then she crosses the small distance between them and hugs him, sudden and fierce, like he’s become part of the story she’s been trying to understand for years.
Matthias’s arms close carefully around her.
I stand surrounded by color, watching my mother hold the man my hand remembered before my mind could.
She steps back from him and wipes her face, though she keeps one hand on his sleeve a second longer than necessary.
“You bought the painting,” she says.
Matthias looks startled. “You knew?”
“I’m a gallery owner, Dr. Cross. I know where my daughter’s work goes.”
Maman looks at me. “You knew?”
“Yes,” I say, my gaze moving to Matthias. “He told me.”
Matthias’s expression softens. “I should’ve told you sooner.”
“You told me when I was ready to hear it.”
“The original?”
“Yes.”
“Where is it?”
“In my study in Cape Town,” he says. “Every morning before work. Some mornings I’d walk past it. Some mornings I’d stand there longer than I meant to.”
The answer moves through me with a strange, aching warmth.
For three years, while I painted a face I didn’t understand, he had been living with the painting itself. Passing it every morning. Carrying my vision of him into his day.
Maman looks between us, her expression softening into something almost satisfied.
“Well,” she says, “that explains why the canvas refused to sell to anyone else.”
“Maybe it already knew where it belonged.”
And suddenly, nothing about us feels accidental.
MacLeod’s Baby Bump Hotel, Bliss’s Suite, Sausalito, California. 2230 hours
Maman kisses my forehead before she leaves.
“Bonne nuit, ma petite.”
“Bonne nuit, Maman.”
She pauses at the door, looking from me to Matthias one last time.
A knowing smile touches her mouth.