Thirty-Nine #3
She closes her eyes, brows drawing together, like she might cry.
After a few moments, she opens them again.
“There was a logic to it. Just like the trees. But there’s no way I could explain it now.
” She puts her hands on the table. Her nails are buffed, evenly rounded.
“I’ve had to put it in a box,” she says.
“Those years. My love for her. My love for you. Pascal, Mary Beth, the other people in my life who are close to me, they know about it. I’m not pretending it didn’t happen, or that the two of you don’t exist, or that it isn’t painful.
” She starts to say something. Stops herself.
Says it anyway: “It might sound strange, but there’s a woman I see sometimes.
She’s from back home, actually. Much older than us.
She has a little upstairs room above a clothing store and she practices the healing arts. Spells and rituals.”
“Voodoo?” I ask, remembering the women from back home, the roots and herbs, the drums and candles and gris-gris dolls and statuettes of Jesus and Mary. Maman always pulled us away from them, kept us from looking too closely.
“Some voodoo, yes. Some Tarot and other things like that. I take it all with a grain of salt. But she really does seem to know what I need. When I’m especially heartbroken, I go to her.
” She cocks her head, thinking. “It’s a little like psychotherapy, but at the same time the complete opposite.
On Nathalie’s twentieth birthday I woke up, gripped by worry.
That’s the age when they started for me.
The delusions. So on her birthday I went to my woman, the healer, and she did the usual ceremony, only it didn’t work.
We could both tell, when it was over, I was just as distressed as when it started.
So I knew that the worry and sadness weren’t things I could just accept and tuck away again.
I had to reach out to you, to make contact, so that I could know that Nathalie was okay, or help her if she wasn’t.
” She wears a ring on her right index finger.
I watch as she turns it around and around.
“It can be genetic,” she says. “I’m not sure if you know that.
Have you noticed anything in her? Anything that concerns you? ”
“She feels things deeply,” I say. “She can have a temper.”
“Nothing else?”
“No.” We look at each other across the table. I say, “It might turn out fine for her. Papa struggled, and I’ve been okay.”
“If you do ever notice anything, please call me right away. I know the right places to go. We would need to take her in at the very start of anything. It makes a world of difference, to check yourself in instead of being taken somewhere against your will.”
“All right.”
She stares at me hard, like she’s trying to make sure she can believe me.
“At any sign of anything,” I say. “I promise. I’ll call you.”
She takes a deep breath, satisfied, moves her hands back into her lap. “I did threaten you. I had to make sure she was safe,” she says. “I would have done absolutely anything.”
I wait for her to say that she’s sorry. Or to ask what it cost me. Or to tell me she hopes we can be close again. But she doesn’t. We sit, her cup empty, my coffee growing cold.
She says, “Last week we had a rainstorm. It pounded the windows until it felt like we were underwater. Do you remember, back when we were children and a storm was coming, we’d make sure we were both either at your house or mine so that we could wait it out together?
We’d help our parents pull the shutters closed and latch them, and we’d burn candle after candle until the wax dripped all the way down and hardened on the tables and the windowsills, and we’d read and tell stories and listen to the wind and the rain. ”
“I remember.”
She’s quiet for a little while, and then she says, “Remember how there was so much color back home? All the houses were different—blues and pinks and greens and purples and yellows—and we’d play a game where we chose a house on each block to have as our own when we grew up.
If we chose the same house, we would flip a coin to see who got it. ”
“I remember,” I say.
“There’s color in San Francisco, too. It’s part of why I love it here.
And there’s this place—the Conservatory of Flowers.
It’s in Golden Gate Park. It’s my favorite place in the entire city.
I volunteer there once a week, on Sundays.
I know you and Nathalie don’t have much time tomorrow, but I’m certain you’d like it. ”
Eventually, I say, “I wish I could see where you live.” Her chest rises and falls. She’s grown tired, but I can’t let her go. Not yet. “Describe it to me,” I say.
“It’s an old building. Victorian, on Page Street, in the Haight-Ashbury.
I don’t know if you’ve heard much about the neighborhood?
” I shake my head. “So much is going on there. So many young people, and creative people, and people who don’t fit in are forming a little haven there, all about love and connection and speaking truth to power.
A new way to live. We’re lucky to be right at the center of it.
The top-floor flat is ours. We each have our own bedroom, and we share the living and dining rooms and kitchen.
Mary Beth’s a textile artist. She weaves and makes quilts.
She’s colored and from the South, like us.
We talk a lot about what it costs a person to uproot out of necessity. It’s been very healing.”
“And Pascal?”
“He’s an actor and a waiter. He’s white, and it took me a while to understand that I could be my full self around him.
I had all these memories of being with my old neighbors and Bill—the fear and isolation—but it’s not like that at all with him.
Lately his boyfriend’s been coming over a lot, which turns every night into a little dinner party.
It isn’t always fun though. Pascal has fits of depression.
Sometimes they last a long time and get very severe. ”
“I’m sure you and Mary Beth take good care of him.”
“We do. And Pascal and Mary Beth help me.”
I can feel the night getting later, feel her almost ready to leave. I don’t want her to. She’s going to put me back into a box, after the night is over. I say, “Tell me more about the apartment. Tell me about the living room.”
“It has a bay window with a reading chair in it, a small wooden table—”
“Hold on.” I walk to the office and ask the night receptionist for a pencil and paper. He opens drawers, finds me what I need. I thank him, pause in the restaurant doorway to straighten my skirt. Wipe under my eyes in case my mascara has smudged. “All right,” I say, returning. “Go ahead.”
I sketch out the window, the chair, the table.
The ceiling medallions and the chandeliers.
She tells me more, going room to room. I ask her about the art on the walls.
I ask her about the view from the windows.
I ask about their favorite types of coffee and tea and wine.
I ask what cold cream she uses. I ask her about the clothes hanging in her closet.
I make notes and sketch until both sides of my paper are covered and my eyes are bleary and she tells me she needs to get home, that she’ll fall asleep at the wheel if she doesn’t.
I walk her to the door, and we open our arms to each other.
Her cheek against my cheek, the rosewater scent of her hair, the tight grip as she holds me, the spasm in her stomach as a sob rises.
I let myself lean into her. Let myself hold her and cry.
Across the room, the night receptionist shifts in his chair, turns his face to the wall.
The next morning, after breakfast, on our way out of town, Nathalie and I drive into Golden Gate Park.
The Conservatory of Flowers rises, grand above vast green lawns and flower beds, palms flanking the path to its door.
It’s a Victorian greenhouse, all white and glass, a rotunda at its center, wings on each side.
Inside it’s warm and humid. “Feels like New Orleans,” Nathalie says, and I agree.
Just steps from the entrance, exotic plants grow thick and tall around a pond.
Fish drift through it, their mouths opening and closing.
Rush of water from fountains, white-framed windows, a strip of stained glass like in a church.
We wander the rooms, each with its own climate, its own rare display of trees and flowers.
Orchids and water lilies and carnivorous pitcher plants.
Coffee berries and tropical fruits and species of cycads so old they predate the dinosaurs.
We find a tucked-away bench and rest there, taking everything in.
“I didn’t steal you,” I say. “I want to make sure you know that.”
“I know you didn’t. I was angry.”
A group of tourists speaking another language stops near where we are. One of them crouches to snap a photograph with a compact silver camera. Rises again and moves on.
“I read the letter this morning. When you were in the shower.” She tips her head upward and I follow. White steel and clouded glass and green leaves and red blossoms. “Do you think I’m going to lose my mind? That’s what it was about.”
“No. I don’t.”
“But what if I do?”
“If there are any signs, anything at all, then Delphine will help us. And you’ll have me, and Clément, and Ginny, and everyone else you love and who cares about you. And you’ll get through it, just like your mother did.” All right again, to be one of two.
She rests her head on my shoulder. “My other mother.”
“We’re both your mothers.” I wonder how many more times in my life I’ll say it. A refrain to get us through.