It wasn’t the usual sort of a portrait one saw of an author, I thought. It was intimate.
“He isn’t here,” Noah said.
Turning, I saw his eyes filling with tears and that made me feel even more useless because I still didn’t know what I could do. So it helped that the next thing he said was, “He’s lost.”
Then at least I knew I could correct him. “We don’t know that. All we know is we can’t find him,” I said, using simple logic, “but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t know exactly where he is.”
Noah paused to think this through. I wasn’t sure if it made sense to him, but it did stop the tears.
Relieved, I carried on, “So, where else—”
I didn’t get to finish. I was interrupted by a thump, a thud, and a shriek from Denise in the room underneath us. My room.
Noah, as always, was faster than I was. His feet seemed to barely connect with the stairs, and he made a loud thump of his own at the landing in front of my bedroom door. I came more cautiously, not sure of what I would find.
Denise smiled as we entered the room. She had bent to recover a basket of clean folded sheets that had dropped to the floor and now lay on its side with its contents disheveled and half on the carpet. “I’m sorry,” she told us, “I’m fine. I just opened the wardrobe to put the new sheets in, and this beast decided to pounce from on top of it.”
Noah looked where she nodded and let out a squeal of his own, only happy. “Diablo! You found him, Maman!”
Denise, in the middle of righting the basket, said, “I didn’t realize he was lost.”
“He wasn’t. Madame Thomas said he wasn’t, and he wasn’t. Were you?” Noah asked the cat, now sitting very innocently near my bed. “You knew exactly where you were.”
The cat, without denying or confirming this, blinked back at him.
“Thank you, Maman,” said Noah, and he hugged his mother tightly. Turned to me. “Thank you, madam.” He hugged me too, so quickly there was no time for me to respond. Which was, I reasoned, just as well. I wasn’t good at hugging, either.
Diablo didn’t seem to have a problem with it. He allowed himself to be scooped up without complaint. As Noah bounced off with Diablo cradled closely in his arms, Denise smiled and remarked, “Noah likes you.”
I wasn’t sure what to reply but it didn’t much matter, since she didn’t leave any time before adding, “And so does his father. That jacket he loaned you today was his favorite. He never lets anyone touch it.”
She said that the same way a school friend might point out a boy in your classroom who fancied you. Maybe, I thought, I was doing a poor job of reading her tone and was missing the jealousy. Then again, she didn’t look out of sorts. She was putting the clean sheets away on the shelf of my wardrobe, without any cat this time lurking on top to surprise her. She swung the doors closed and said, “These few belong in the next room, the room where your cousin stayed. Then I’ll be out of your way.”
In honesty, I didn’t really want her to be out of my way. I liked Denise. And there was something I wanted to ask her, so when she moved into the small adjoining room I trailed behind her. The bed here was stripped to the mattress, and Denise explained, “I should have done this right after your cousin left, but I got sidetracked with my trip to Chinon and since then it slipped my mind.”
I watched her shake out a sheet. “Would you like me to help you?”
“You needn’t bother,” she said. “I can manage.”
“It isn’t a bother.” I’d always enjoyed making beds. I enjoyed the precision of centering sheets on the mattress and smoothing the wrinkles and tucking things in, and I’d always felt soothed by the feel and the smell of fresh bed linens. Taking the end of the sheet Denise handed me, I stretched it over the bed and asked, straight out, “Why did you and Luc get divorced?”
Even to my ears, that sounded too blunt, so I added, “It’s only that you seem to get on so well with each other. Like friends. And you’re nice, and he’s…well, he’s…” I faltered, not sure I should tell her I thought he was “hot,” as my cousin would say, but Denise seemed to know what I meant.
“Yes,” she said, smiling, “he certainly is. And we are friends. We’ve been friends a very long time, since my parents brought me from Chinon to Paris. I wasn’t much older than Noah then, and I was lonely. Luc’s desk was beside mine at school. He was good-looking then, too,” she told me, “but I never saw him that way. I still don’t.”
“But you married him.”
“Yes, well, we did a ridiculous thing, once. There might have been wine involved. Maybe a lot of wine. And I had just broken up with a boyfriend, so partly I wanted to be reassured that it hadn’t been me, you know? That I was worth being loved by a man.” With a shrug she selected a blanket and shook it out, passing one side of it over to me. “It was stupid, but there you are. And I got pregnant. My parents were not pleased, but Luc…well, he tried to make everything right. To take care of me. And for a while, I let him,” she said. “But you can’t make a spark where there isn’t one. We don’t belong with each other like that. We both knew it. The day of our wedding I knew it, but I didn’t want to hurt Luc any more than he wanted to disappoint me, so we didn’t say anything. Then on our first anniversary—there might have been wine involved then, as well—we finally sat down and said what we felt, and we felt the same thing, so we fixed it.”