Fifteen
ON THE LAST SATURDAY of October, we go to the beach.
Al drags a wagon laden with folding chairs and towels and sand toys and hats.
Bernard carries a cooler in one hand and a picnic basket in the other.
Adele’s radiant in her bright-blue sundress, holding Titter’s hand, and Claire’s lovely in yellow gingham, holding Bobby’s.
The older children and I carry the stray things.
Some paperbacks, an assortment of hats. We set up our beach chairs, spread out the towels.
Bernard and Al throw a Frisbee while the children get to work on a sandcastle.
An hour in, we eat the chips and sandwiches we brought, and when that’s over, the children hold hands in the water, waiting for waves to come and lift them.
“Don’t go farther than your knees!” Adele calls, and Al, the only strong swimmer among us, stands closer to supervise.
Nathalie runs back up the beach after a few minutes of it, rubbing her eyes, climbing onto me.
“Rudy kept letting go of my hand.” She butts her head into my clavicle, hard.
“That must have been scary,” I say. She settles her body onto my lap, her bathing suit’s cold dampness seeping through my shirt to my skin. Her hair drips onto my shoulder.
After a little while, she says, “I’ve been here before.”
“To the beach?”
“This beach.”
Her childhood until now, a blankness cast over it. A photograph with a light leak. Her head rests on my chest; if my heart quickens, she’ll hear it.
I will myself to stay calm. “When?” I ask. Tell me everything you know. Tell me everything you remember.
“When we lived in the moon room.”
I rest my hand on her back. Her breaths turn short and jagged. I say, “You know, she didn’t want to leave you. She got very sick.”
“But she didn’t have a fever.”
“That’s true. It’s a complicated kind of sickness. A sickness in her thoughts. But she still loves you more than anything in the whole world.”
Nathalie sits up. “You’re crying,” she says.
“It makes me sad, what’s happened to her.”
She hugs me, pats my back with her little hand. “Shh,” she tells me. “Dry your eyes.”
Soon she’s ready to go into the water again.
Claire’s watching me over her magazine. “What were you talking about?”
“She thinks she’s been here before.”
“Hm,” Adele says. “What a strange thing that we have no idea if she has.”
I take it all in: Children splashing. A couple embracing. Tilted umbrellas. A pair of dogs bounding through the surf. And then a small hand, placing a shell in my palm. I look up, and here’s Clément. “Isn’t it nice?” he asks.
White ridges on the outside, smooth and pearlescent inside. “Beautiful,” I say, running my finger across it.
“It’s for you.” He scampers back through the sand, and I’m overwhelmed by it all—the smell of salt and sun lotion, the happy dogs, my sisters stripped down to their bathing suits, Nathalie and Clément holding hands in the water now, catching their own wave, not letting go.
It’s possible to believe that no matter what happens next, we’ll make it through, we’ll be all right.
Al and Bernard are on their knees, building the sandcastle the children abandoned, and a dog runs up, shaking himself dry.
He sprays Adele and Claire and they yelp as his flustered owner runs over calling, “Scout, stop that!” A surfer nears us with a long, yellow board.
I look and then look again—a woman, muscular, easy in her body.
She sees me noticing her, smiles. I turn to the shell in my palm, but there’s an electricity to the air now, and I don’t lose track of where she is.
I watch her riding a wave like it’s easy, and Al notices me staring, looks to see. “Is that a woman?” he asks.
I nod.
Claire says, “It isn’t very feminine, but it sure looks fun.”
Later, Clément arranges smooth stones in a spiral near my chair. A flock of birds fly overhead. “Clément, look.” He follows where I point and we watch them moving together, shifting, falling into place until they’re spaced perfectly apart, a beautiful symmetry.
Later still, alone in my bed, I call back the surfer. Her smile, how she moved through the water. The tension between us. I imagine her coming to the door of my apartment at night. I step aside, I let her in.
The next time I visit Delphine, the day is cloudy, softer light through the windows. Her hair’s been washed, longer than it’s ever been, in a braid down her back. “Tell me the plan,” she says.
I tell her that Nathalie’s doing better all the time—in school, at home, with her cousins. “We’ve decided to keep her at Adele’s through Christmas. After that, my son and I will be moving to an apartment, and Claire will take Nathalie to live with her and Bernard.”
“Claire? Why not you?”
“I’m not married. I don’t meet the criteria for adopting. And Claire’s life is all set up.”
She scrunches her forehead, effortful for her, to follow what I’m saying. “What about … Hattie’s brother … I thought you married…”
A jolt of anger, even now in this place, at having to repeat what I say to strangers: “He died in the war.”
She’s still for a moment, and then claps her hands over her ears, rocks forward.
My anger vanishes. I want her to rest her head on my knees, want to pet her and tell her it will be all right.
Instead, I sit with my hands folded in my lap.
I say, “Claire really loves her. She’s going to be so good to her. I’m certain of that.”
“Not Claire. Not Claire. It has to be you.”
“Delphine,” I say, “I wish I could. I’m not able to. I’m not married. It isn’t my choice.”
I’m telling the truth, but still, my whole body is wrong with it. She takes my hands, the first time she’s touched me in years. “Please,” she says. “Find a way.”
“You’ll come live with me when you’re out,” I say. “We’ll go over to Claire’s all the time. We’ll make a new way to be a family—”
“I have to be dead.”
“No.” My heart pounds, thoughts coming scattershot.
“Has Dr. Jamison told you what they do to me?” Her voice has gone cold. “How they put me to sleep?”
I nod, dig my nails into my palm. They pump her full of insulin until she falls into a coma, shocking the brain. Afterward, they revive her. They do this for stretches of five days at a time, with one day off for observation, and another one to rest.
“And has he told you about the electric shock therapy, too?”
“Yes. It feels impossible now. I know that. But we’ll figure it out together.”
“Tell her I’m dead,” Delphine says. “If you don’t, I’ll tell everyone about you.”
I stop hearing. The room blurs. When my words come, they’re very faint. “You wouldn’t do that.”
“I would.” She looks at me. I’m having trouble breathing but she’s alert, sharp, as if she’s been in a trance and now she’s woken from it, a stranger.
“We aren’t that different,” the stranger says.
“They don’t let girls like you keep their babies either.
There was one girl, before I was moved to the insulin unit.
She was here because she fell in love with her friend.
Cried over her every night. She got shock therapy, just like me.
The nurses strap us down. Fix clamps around our heads.
Force our mouths open to get the gags in.
Did you know the convulsions can be so violent they break bones?
It happened to someone here recently. Her clavicle. ”
“Okay,” I say, “stop.”
“You’ll tell everyone I’m dead. You’ll find a way to adopt Nathalie. And if you don’t, I’ll get Claire on the phone, and I’ll tell her all about you.”
I dig my nails in deeper. “I’m not doing that anymore,” I say.
Banish the fantasy of the surfer in my bed. Banish the memory of Ginny, kissing me against the wall. Of Hattie, and all our Thursday afternoons. Push it all out of my body, push it all away.
“You know that Claire wouldn’t hesitate. She’s like our mothers.” Tears trail down Delphine’s neck, wetting her collar, a spot of darker blue at her throat. Suddenly not a stranger anymore. Devastation in her face—like looking into a mirror. So many times we relied on each other and now this.
“It’s over, okay?” she says. “For you and me. It’s the only way I can do it.”
Back in Los Angeles, Adele meets me in the driveway, takes me by the hand and leads me to Claire’s house. Five in the evening and already dark, sitting on the floral sofa.
“Has she changed her mind?” Claire asks.
“No,” I say. On the drive home, my vision had blurred and darkened, I’d had to pull onto the shoulder to steady myself.
“It’s horrible,” Claire says. “But if we put Nathalie first—if we’re truly making a decision based on Nathalie’s well-being—wouldn’t it be easier for her to not have to wonder? Less confusing, and more peaceful in the end? I know it’s a lot. Look: My hand is shaking.”
“Better get a drink,” Adele says. “You aren’t supposed to let yourself get worked up.”
“I’ll get drinks for all of us.” Claire crosses the room to the wet bar.
She’s wearing the suede slippers I bought her from Bullock’s.
Delphine’s voice is in my head, saying, Not Claire.
But it’s Adele and Claire and me now, and they’ll never know that she said it.
Claire hands Adele her drink, hands me mine.
A lowball for each of the Honoré sisters.
I’m searching Claire’s face. I need to believe that she wouldn’t really put me away.
Her brows furrow as she looks at me. “Poor thing,” she says. “It’s all so hard, I know.”
She isn’t Maman. But what would she think of me if she knew?
“They don’t let girls like you keep their babies either.
” I want Delphine’s voice out of my head.
Claire cups my chin in her soft palm, runs her thumb across my cheek.
The comfort of her touch—monumental. She kisses my forehead.
My sister. “You’re right,” I say. “A severing. It’s what Delphine wants, so we should do it. ”
And then I’m lightheaded, chest tight, wondering what I’ve done.
We agree to wait until after Christmas to talk to Nathalie.
It’s November now, a Saturday. I go alone to Lionel’s house.
We sit on his front stoop, his pigeons flying and dropping above us, my throat aching with all I wish I could tell him.
He wouldn’t judge me. He wouldn’t be shocked.
Chances are he already suspects it. What a relief it would be, to say out loud that I’m going along with this plan not because it’s right, but because I’m terrified for myself.
But no one in my family can ever know. Clear to me now, the danger.
“What would you do?” I ask him.
“Delphine’s Nathalie’s mother. She’s losing everything. Seems only humane to do what she asks you to.”
“But it means I’ll have to lie to Nathalie. I’ll have to lie to her over and over again, so many times, for so many years, and what will that do to us?”
Lionel leans back, shakes his head. Above, one of his birds tumbles and rights itself.
“It isn’t the only thing Delphine asked me,” I say. “Don’t tell. She wants me to be the one to adopt Nathalie.”
“Sure, she does. You’re her best friend.”
“She hadn’t spoken to me in six years.”
“I’m just saying it doesn’t surprise me, that’s all,” he says. “I’m not saying you should do it.”
Anger swells inside me, heat rising. “I’m not getting married.”
He pats my knee. “Okay,” he says. “Okay.” After a while, the birds come back. I stay on the stoop while Lionel tends to them, his voice carrying. “Welcome back, KR, you handsome fella. Welcome back, Lady Bird…”
I won’t contact her. I’ll let her be dead. That part, I’ll do. The rest of it, she doesn’t have to know. But her threat—it follows me home, clings to me as I supervise toothbrushing, as I cuddle with Clément and wait for the children to fall asleep.
And then it’s later in the week. Al and Bernard and I get home from work and Nathalie is in the front yard, alone. They go in ahead of me while I hang back. She’s crouched at the edge near the flowers.
“Hey, sweetheart. Where are Clément and your cousins?”
“Playing inside. I didn’t want to play.”
A butterfly flutters past and she gasps. We watch it land on a nearby leaf.
“It’s a monarch butterfly,” I whisper to her, both of us holding still and hoping it will stay.
“Back home, in New Orleans, we had them, and a kind called checkered white. And another one, the summer azure, that was pale blue.” We watch a little longer, until the butterfly flutters away. We both exhale.
She turns to me and says, “My mommy is dead.”