Thirty-One #3
The kids return from New Orleans, tired from the train ride but happy, new strength in their arms as they hug me hello.
We pick up where we left off, peace among us again.
I give them more responsibilities and more freedoms. Nathalie gives me more patience, and Clément spends hours reuniting with his birds, taking notes on how they’re flying.
When I was finished painting him, we buried KR near the coop.
Bernard carved a small wooden tombstone, which Clément now keeps clean and tended.
Life feels comfortingly predictable until a day in early January, when I get a call at the plant from Our Lady of Victory, asking for me to come in.
I clock out early and drive to the school.
When I get there, Nathalie is sitting stiffly in a corner chair in Sister Bethany’s office, staring at her lap.
“Please sit,” Sister Bethany tells me, gesturing to the chair across from her at a desk.
My first time in her office, and it smells of metal and bleach, and Nathalie’s positioned so that my back is to her.
I have to crane my neck to see if she’s all right.
“It’s rare that we need to meet with parents this way,” Sister Bethany says, interlacing her fingers.
Her eyes are piercing blue, her bare face and habit making me aware of the sparkle of my earrings and the wave in my hair, my thin arc of eyeliner and curled lashes.
Even in my simple blouse and trousers, I must seem vain to her.
“Nathalie has proven to be unusually difficult.”
I turn to my daughter. She’s still staring at her lap. “That surprises me,” I say.
Sister Bethany narrows her eyes, smiling ruefully as though my response is evidence of something.
I don’t want to be here. I want to take Nathalie and go.
But Sister Bethany has more to say, about Nathalie’s insolence, her lack of respect for authority.
She doesn’t respond to punishment and she sets a poor example and she neglects her academic subjects in favor of music and art.
“What’s funny?” she asks, and I shake my head and say, “I’m sorry, it’s just … Music and art. I love them, too.”
“You aren’t comprehending the seriousness of the situation.”
“Yes,” I say. “I mean, no. Maybe I’m not.”
This time when I look at Nathalie her head’s lifted.
She’s watching me. That same expression from the night she showed me her swollen hand.
I told her to play along but I know with a suddenness that makes me dizzy that I was wrong to tell her that.
Sister Bethany drones on but I don’t turn back to her or listen.
Instead, a revolt in my body. I’m up from the chair, taking Nathalie’s hand, and now we’re flying out of the office, around a corner, down the dim hall, and out the double doors to the street.
We cross to the car, lean against it, facing the squat school building adjoining the grander church.
It’s decades newer, but not so unlike the school Adele and Claire and I went to when we were young.
All three of us knew how to be there, never had trouble. Maman had trained us well.
“I hate Sister Bethany,” Nathalie says.
“I hate her, too,” I say.
A car door near us slams shut. A dog barks. A crow alights from a tree, dashes through the sky.
We get into the car and wait. Clément will be dismissed soon. Gradually, cars driven by mothers fill the parking spots ahead and behind us. I say, “Honey, I’m not sending you back.”
Shocking to decide it, but Felix showed me with his leaving that what’s terrible at first can turn ordinary.
It was a January when he left us, right about this time.
Since then: Rainstorms. Heat waves. Afternoons swimming.
Birds and painting. Thanksgiving dinners.
Christmas wreaths and Easter Masses. Four years.
From children to teens. The days between then and now like the view from a moving car.
I open my arms to Nathalie. She’s not a little girl.
I can’t assume that she’ll come to me. She hesitates before sliding over, but then she leans against me and sobs into my shirt.
I pet her hair like I used to when she was little.
At some point Clément spots us and opens the car door.
Climbs in. I tell him what happened and what I’ve decided.
“I’ll leave, too,” he says. “We’ll start at a new school together. ”
We sit in the car, in no hurry to go, and I swear, they mature yet again before my eyes.
And as we sit, a voice surfaces, strange at first. Poor Tom at the restaurant.
“What do you want for your children? Most of all, out of everything?” There was a time when Clément would wrap his arms around my legs until I scooped him up and carried him.
A time when Nathalie would cry and rage and only I could calm her.
Over now. On from that. Nearly grown and on the verge of making all their own choices.
I say, “Nathalie, I was wrong when I told you to play by their rules. I was wrong and you knew it.” I take her hand and Clément’s, hold them together.
“What I want you both to know,” I say, “deep in your bones, is that you are beholden only to yourselves.”