South

They head south, and as they move out from under the dense Baltimore sky toward air and ocean and hot sun, Flo and Tristan beg their mother, Marie-Claude, to tell stories. Flo loves the ones about when Marie-Claude was as young as she is now, and Tristan wants to hear, over and over, how he was born.

Because Marie-Claude does not want her children to talk about their father, who left her at the end of last spring, nearly a year ago now, she gives them the stories they ask for. She tells Flo about Alain Delor, her first crush, and Tristan about the market in Paris where her sac broke as she stood buying peaches in the rain.

But when she begins the story about her first dance, Flo interrupts her.

“What about the ghosts in Austria, Mom? Is there one about some ghosts at a fancy ball?”

Marie-Claude shakes her head, certain she has never told either child that story.

Using the headrest, Flo pulls herself up closer from the back seat. “Yeah, there is.” Some of her mother’s fine hair tangles around her fingers, sticky from candy.

“That hurts, Florence,” she says. “Dammit,” she adds in English.

“Maman!” Tristan says, truly shocked to hear an American swear word out of his mother’s mouth.

Marie-Claude is surprised, too, and a bit alarmed by the sudden swell of anger. She had promised herself no harsh words to Flo today.

She looks at the enormous clock beside the speedometer: four more hours. She wonders if Flo or even both of them should have gone with their father to New York instead of coming with her to Hatteras. She cannot

predict her moods or the size of Bill and Karen’s house or whether Tristan and Flo will like her friends’ children. She wishes she had enough money to fly them home to Lyon for Easter. She takes her eyes from the road to the fields beside them, a movement as welcome as straightening her legs might be. She wishes she could go on looking sideways.

Tristan says, “What story about ghosts in Austria? Watch the road, Maman. What story about ghosts?” She knows he will persist, never forget, not for one day of their vacation.

“It was in a castle,” Flo says, “a really old spooky castle that used to be a big deal, like a king or a count used to live there or something. And Daddy was there. I think they were engaged then. Were you engaged to Daddy then? Please tell it, Mom.”

This is new, Flo calling her Mom instead of Maman, and Marie-Claude hates it.

She wonders how Flo can know about Austria. Sometimes it feels there is nothing about her life her children cannot uncover, cannot redefine. Once she had thought there would be a certain amount of grace and mystery in being a parent and that what went unsaid about her experiences would be respected and what was revealed would be absorbed without contradiction, occasionally sanctified. Wasn’t that how she had treated her own parents’

pasts? Perhaps it is because they have become American, these children of hers.

“You two tell me stories. I’m tired of talking.”

“No,” says Flo. “Tell the ghost story. Please, Mom, please. Please!”

Tristan joins in, and Marie-Claude lets them continue far past the point at which she’d assumed they’d stop, until their chanting unsettles her more than the idea of telling another story. “Okay,” she says. “Okay.”

“Your father wasn’t with me then,” she begins. “I hadn’t even met him.”

She tries but fails to conceal the pleasure she takes in this fact. “I went with my cousin Giselle. She had been invited by her best friend at boarding school in Lausanne, Sigrid. The ball was just outside Linz at a palace that had once belonged to a Habsburg archduke, Franz or Friedle or someone, one of Francis the First’s sixteen children. The palace was later confiscated when the imperial family was forced out of the country by the new government. Eventually, it was resold to this Sigrid’s grandparents. I didn’t know much of the history. I just knew that Giselle traveled with a pack of rich friends and that Sigrid wasn’t the only one who could throw a party in

her own castle. And I was a bit more like your father then. I loved big houses and beautiful clothes.”

“He does not,” Flo says, but even in her irritation at one of her mother’s jabs, she can’t muster up enough conviction to pursue an argument. She has already begun to notice how her father seems more pleased when she plays at Janine’s house with the pool than at Bree’s apartment.

Marie-Claude instantly regrets the comparison, regrets this mood on the first day of their trip, and rushes on. “My date was one of Sigrid’s cousins, a sullen boy who seemed to want to talk about nothing else but the strategical blunders of the French army. His country gets occupied twice during one war, and he has the nerve to bring up the failure of the Maginot Line! But I didn’t really care. I was at a ball in a fancy dress and could laugh at just about anything.”

Flo marvels at the thought of her mother (whom friends call a slob, who always wears her hair yanked back with the brown rubber band off the newspaper) in a ball gown, patiently humoring her date. Flo is beginning to question these images her mother feeds them of her disposition before she married their father. She always makes herself out to have been giggly and lighthearted, the gravity of life never pulling on her until she found herself married with children to raise. But her mother’s face is serious, has always been serious, her expression in even the most spontaneous childhood photographs resembling, as her father once said, the portrait of a disgruntled cabinet minister.

Slowly, the story begins to make Marie-Claude feel better as she describes the carriage they rode in, the view of the Danube, the black horses in the twilight. She senses her children’s full attention, Flo’s syrupy breath near her ear and Tristan’s small body turned sideways toward her, and this audience makes her feel needed in a more extravagant, less basic way than usual.

There is so much to tell: the gardens, the courtyard, the intricate bodice of her dress. Finally, the words she chooses are the right ones; they take on the exact shape and magnificence of the moment they describe. She feels strong and alive, driving her children south on a smooth highway.

She tries not to think beyond it where somewhere there is an unfamiliar dirt road that she must find in the dark. They will arrive late, and Marie-Claude, who promised to be there for dinner, will be treated like a reckless child by Bill and Karen, who are a real family, complete with bicycles and a

live-in sitter. And no matter how many games her children invent in the water or how relaxed she feels half-asleep in the sun, the sight of Bill’s large, winter-tender feet hobbling down the rocky path to the beach will remind them all each day of what is gone.

“Mom,” Flo says. “Where were the ghosts?”

“The ballroom was enormous and filled with these fabulous gowns and tuxes and champagne goblets. The floor was black marble, and I remember how beautiful my shoes looked against its surface. Have you ever seen black marble? It’s so pure and sleek, like sapphires or the fur of a black panther.”

“Is that where you saw them, on the dance floor?”

“No, I saw her in the garden.” Marie-Claude feels a face, a squat forehead, the sharp edge of an aquiline nose, an ugly, distended mouth, taking shape within her. “She was young, perhaps the same age as I was then, but her face was old with sadness. She held herself straight, upright, but inside she was bent with grief.”

“How did you know she was a ghost?”

“When you see a ghost, you know it. You feel it.”

“Was she see-through? Did you speak to her?”

“She was different. Something about her movements. And she was so sad, the way she walked around the garden, touching petals and branches, as if she could rid some of her sadness on them. It might have been the way her mouth was shaped. I don’t know. It’s difficult to describe how I knew.”

Flo pushes off hard from her mother’s headrest and falls back in her seat.

She pops a sourball out of its cellophane wrapper and, after putting it into her mouth, sighs loudly.

A sweet fake-lime smell works its way quickly to the front.

“Have I lost you?” Marie-Claude says, finding Flo’s bulging cheek in the rearview mirror.

“Nothing happens in this story.”

Marie-Claude has an awful impulse (because they are so rude, demanding the story she didn’t want to tell, then snubbing it, Flo so impatient, Tristan already asleep) to remind them of sadness. It would be so easy to do. She waits for the resentment to subside, then continues: “She wasn’t transparent, but her skin was peculiar. I’m sure that’s how I knew she wasn’t human.”

“What do you mean, peculiar?”

“It was like patina almost, that greenish color that gets on certain metals, you know, the way that bracelet of your father’s, the one he wears for his imaginary arthritis, the way that turns when he forgets to make someone polish it. That’s how her skin looked up close.” Instead of the woman Marie-Claude sees the wrist, its hairless skin beneath the bracelet, the puffed vein that travels from his hand to his elbow. She still loves him. If he does not come back she will never feel again what she felt touching that arm.

“I like polishing it. He doesn’t make me.”

“Oh, Flo, you don’t remember. You used to hate it. The polish stung your eyes. Anyway, her skin was like that.” Beside her, Tristan’s head, which has been slipping and jerking back, slipping and jerking back, finally slides all the way over to the armrest on his door. She checks the lock and feels for a moment what he feels: that delicious surrender to sleep in the passenger seat of a car.

“I didn’t hate it. And I still do it, too.” Flo thinks of the chance she had to go with her father and his girlfriend, Abigail, to Manhattan instead. She had to choose between ocean or museums, a big house with other kids or adjoining hotel rooms (clicked shut at bedtime till morning). All that seems insignificant now. As always when absent, her father has become mild and soothing. She could call him, take a bus back to DC. He isn’t leaving until tomorrow morning. How much could a bus ride cost?

“I did speak to her.” Marie-Claude turns around to see if Flo will still listen. Flo doesn’t look up from what she is doing: dropping flimsy American coins from one hand into another, then back into a pouch. “I asked her if she was enjoying the ball.” Marie-Claude laughs. “I didn’t know what else to ask!”

“Did you speak French or German?”

“German, I think. But she didn’t reply in a voice. It was more like telepathy. But she didn’t want to chat. She moved right past me, back to her old route around and around the rose garden.”

“This isn’t the same story.”

“I’ve never told this story to you before, so I don’t know what you were expecting.”

When she told it to her husband, there were two ghosts. She had wanted him to see what they’d become. She described everything carefully, their movements, their fingers, the shapes of their mouths. We mustn’t become

them, Robert, not yet. But he didn’t understand. He had stopped wanting to understand her.

“Mom, you’re lying. You always do this.”

“What do you mean, I always do this?”

“Change things around. Lie about the truth.”

“I’m not lying, Florence.” And Marie-Claude sees more clearly the scrolled, unbloomed rosebushes, the small pool, more rosebushes, and the woman traveling through. “I have never lied to you.” Each time around the far edge, the woman lifts her skirt so it doesn’t catch on a spigot. “I am not the liar in this family.”

“Yes, you are. You lie all the time.”

“Flo, I do not.” For comfort, she knows she can turn to Tristan, who, still asleep, holds a comic book and her sunglasses in his lap. “Name one lie I’ve ever told you.”

“You said we could take Belle with us. You promised we could.”

“I thought Bill and Karen would bring their dogs, but they didn’t, so I couldn’t very well ask to bring ours. We’re guests. It wouldn’t have been right.”

“But you lied. You said one thing and did another.”

“Flo, that was completely out of my control. That’s not a lie.”

“All right, here’s a better one,” and this is something she’s wanted to mention for a while now. “You told me that you and Daddy separated suddenly, that you were both in love all those years when I was little. You always told us that, Mom, that we were born out of love.”

“That’s true. It’s absolutely true. We loved each other very, very much.”

There was no day happier in all her life than the day Tristan was born. They were living in Paris then. That morning at the market is still so vivid: the wet stalls, the bag of peaches, the young face of the vendor, the train of pimples across his neck. She was reaching over the cherries to squeeze an avocado when she felt the warmth on her legs, when she finally made the distinction between her own water and the rain. And in the afternoon, Robert brought Flo to the hospital. They climbed up on the bed with her and Tristan and pretended they didn’t understand French when the nurse scolded them. That day was just a culmination of the happiness that had been pooling inside her from the moment she met Robert, yet afterward there was only more, a peaceful, languorous bliss. They had jokes about it, about how so much happiness was depressing. “All those years, Flo, right

up until last year, we were happy. You were born and raised in a tremendous amount of love.”

“And then something just happened, just like that?”

“I don’t know.” Marie-Claude can’t bear to play the unknowing victim, to actually reveal how bewildered she still is. But her daughter wants the truth.

“I just don’t know. Whatever happened, it didn’t happen to me.” She looks at Flo in the rearview mirror and says softly, with no edge, “Maybe Daddy can explain it better.”

“He says it happened slowly. He said it wasn’t a big clap of thunder like you always say but a wave that gets bigger and bigger until it breaks.”

Marie-Claude knows Flo is not making this up to hurt her; she recognizes her husband’s similes, stolen from a world entirely alien to him.

“He said he’d been unhappy since before Tristan. He said he hadn’t known anything about real love before he met Abigail. He says he always knows when witnesses are lying because they remind him of himself when he was—”

“Please, Flo. Please stop.”

Marie-Claude slows to the speed limit. Her eyes have been on the road, but she has not been watching. All the windows in the car are open, even hers, which she doesn’t remember rolling down. Warm air, much warmer than an hour ago, blows through, and she leans forward to let the wind unstick the shirt from her back. The steering wheel feels loose in her hands, unrelated to guiding the car. And the road, even at fifty-five, is disappearing far too fast beneath them.

She thinks of what she could remind her daughter of. She could tell the story of Flo’s last birthday in September, which fell on a weekend she went to her father’s alone, without Tristan, and how at first Flo thought he was teasing, not singing at the breakfast table, not alluding to a present hidden somewhere—behind a curtain or in the freezer—and how on the way to check the Saturday mail at his office she expected a surprise party; at lunch she waited for a cake. When he returned her on Sunday, Marie-Claude read the whole story in the raised rash on Flo’s neck.

When she feels a bit more in control of the car, Marie-Claude turns to look at the outlet stores beside the highway. She wishes they were driving through France, passing cows spread flat out on a hill. In France they might come across something extraordinary, like a burning barn or a ewe giving birth. Flo might see it first and, even before she could ask, Marie-Claude

would pull over. They would get out of the car noiselessly so as not to disturb Tristan and witness together the hot collapse of a building or the equally overwhelming spectacle of new life dropping onto the grass. They might squeeze each other’s fingers in anticipation. But barns in France, she remembers, are made of stone.

From the slice she can see of her mother’s face in the mirror, Flo knows she is mad. She decides she will just have Marie-Claude let her off at a bus station before going on to the house. There would be northbound buses every few hours. Her father will be jubilant, even more pleased than if she’d decided on New York from the start.

Her mother is not looking back anymore; Flo has caught her in too many lies. But she is not through. Before she goes, takes a bus her mother will be more than happy to put her on, she wants to catch her in another lie. “You love Tristan more than me,” she says. “You do.”

This is an accusation Marie-Claude has feared since Tristan was born.

Until now, she never knew what she would say. Today, the answer slides out effortlessly: “He makes it easier for me, Flo. He’s easier to love.” She waits for a response, an opportunity to apologize or qualify, but hears only, after a long silence, the crinkling of another candy wrapper. She lets her statement linger between them, hardening into fact. It gives her strength, a sense of utter freedom. They feel like the first honest words she has ever spoken.

More than an hour later, still in the back seat, legs draped over her big duffel that she’s already practiced lifting twice to make sure she can carry it to the bus, Flo remembers when she heard the story about the ghost. It was the first night she’d ever spent in her father’s apartment, after the separation. Her whole life is now divided into what came before and what came after the separation. This was just after, in those first few weeks whose details are impossible to recall. But she has a flash in this hot car heading south of crying in a brand-new bed, begging her father for a story to put her to sleep. He didn’t know how to tell a story, he insisted, but Flo did not believe him. Anyone can tell a story, she hollered at him. Anyone.

Finally he sat on the bed and told her how when they were very young, he and Marie-Claude (and Flo remembers this, too, how he said Marie-Claude and not Maman like he used to, as if her mother were now a sister or some friend of the family) had been invited to a castle in Austria. In his version, he saw the ghosts. And Marie-Claude didn’t believe him. No one did, he

told Flo. They all thought he was nuts. But as the night went on, he became friends with these ghosts and, though he couldn’t tell Flo exactly how, got them back to their other world safely. Remembering this ending, Flo laughs out loud.

“Look,” she hears her mother say softly to herself. The ocean is suddenly beside them. They have reached the beginning of the cape earlier than expected, before dinner, before sunset. Waves crack, then flatten onshore, releasing a sour smell that quickly fills the car. Plump seabirds stand on one leg in the shimmering glaze left behind. Flo has forgotten to mention the bus station.

Marie-Claude feels Tristan stir beside her. “Look,” she whispers again, and he opens his eyes onto the wide shaft of blue alongside the car, turns to her, and asks her to tell him, just once more, the one about how he was born.