A Wedding in Provence (19 page)

She never told anyone—except for Chaney, years later—that the drugs belonged to her sister. Weeks after Nell’s arrest, Carly began her prestigious Google internship. Did Carly know that Nell saved her ass? Nell wasn’t sure. They never talked about it. Carly might have been too fucked-up that night to remember what happened. But Nell was sure that she had made the right decision. Carly was destined for so much success; a drug bust could have jeopardized everything. Nell was destined for jack shit. After the bust, she left town, drove to L.A., found a room in a house with a bunch of struggling actors and drifted. Ten years later and she was still drifting.

Would it have been different if she had finished high school and gone to college? Maybe. But she could have done that at any time along the way.

She sped along the road to Marseille, hugging the mountain along the coast. She leaned into the curves, feeling bolder and stronger with each turn. When she entered the city she pulled over and opened the map on her iPhone. There it was:
VIEUX PORT
. She tucked the phone back into her pocket and headed seaward.

The port was bigger than she had imagined, a sprawling area that had been cleaned up for the tourists. Around the busy harbor were shops, restaurants, office buildings, even a market on the promenade. She parked the bike and called Carly.

“Where are you?” she asked, her voice still tinged with anger.

“Are you at the port?” Carly asked.

“Yes. I’m looking at some weird sculpture thing. It’s a mirrored ceiling or something. In the middle of the promenade.”

“I’ll meet you there in five minutes,” Carly said. “I’m right down the street.”

It wasn’t long before Nell saw Carly approaching from the other end of the harbor. She walked with her head down, her shoulders slumped. Not Carly’s usual jaunty walk.

Carly led them toward a bench at the edge of the port, overlooking the harbor. They sat with a wide space between them.

“I just got a ride from him,” Carly said, her voice soft.

“You’re full of shit.”

They sat in silence for a while. Nell watched two very tanned guys fixing the mast of a sailboat. They were muscular
but wiry, both with bleached-blond hair that curled over their ears. Brothers, she thought. Is that easier? She couldn’t imagine working side by side with Carly. Why was it so hard to do right by her?

“Talk to me,” Nell finally said.

C
arly felt as if she hadn’t slept in days, weeks. She remembered the crush of work before she left for France. EyeDate was gearing up for an international launch so she had spent hours interviewing managers for new offices. She’d been overwhelmed by the paperwork to incorporate in each country; the Brazilian consulate had been particularly troublesome. On top of all that, they were at the tail end of another round of fund-raising. Most of the high-level bullet points were sorted out but the lawyers were still arguing about the fine print.

Now she couldn’t imagine returning to work and diving back into all of that unfinished business. She wanted to do nothing. She had never done nothing.

“What do you do all day?” she asked Nell, who sat beside her on the bench.

“What?” Nell asked. “What are you talking about?”

“Maybe I’ll quit work. Take time off.”

“You can’t quit work, Carly. Not when the company’s about to go public.”

“Just tell me what you do all day.”

“You’re trying to figure out the life of a bum? It’s really hard, Carly. You have to sleep as late as you can. You switch clothes from your pajamas to your yoga clothes, which are just like pajamas only tighter. You go to yoga class. You go to a café. You memorize your four lines for your thirty seconds in that week’s episode of “Crappy Cop Show.” You go to a bar because it’s five o’clock. Some guy buys you a drink. The night disappears. You wake up the next morning and hope this one’s different.”

Sounds wonderful, Carly thought. Sounds dreamy. No meetings, no deadlines, no reports. No Wes lying in bed next to you, his iPad on his lap.

“I didn’t sleep with Gavin,” she said.

“Why don’t you tell me what you did do?” Nell said.

“I got in his car,” Carly said. She heard thunder, like the low growl of an angry dog. The sky was still blue, the air suddenly still. The wind had been howling in her ear all day. And now it had stopped. Something hovered in the air, the echo of all that absent noise.

“That’s a start,” Nell said.

“He wanted to go to Marseille,” Carly said. “I wanted an adventure. I wanted to step outside of my life. I wanted to be you.”

“You have never wanted to be me for one second in your life,” Nell said.

“I don’t know what passion is,” Carly said, looking at Nell.

Nell waited a moment, considering this. “You have passion for your job,” she offered.

“Maybe once. Now it’s just a job.”

“Wes?”

Carly shook her head. “He’s a great big mind. An enormous mind. His penis is hiding behind an iPad.”

Nell burst out laughing. Carly finally smiled.

“Don’t be mad at me,” she said and reached out her hand.

Nell crossed her arms over her chest. Carly’s hand drifted in the air for a moment and then dropped.

“You took off with my guy,” Nell said flatly.

“I did. I’m sorry,” Carly said. “I kissed him and didn’t feel a thing.”

“I’m supposed to feel good about that? You run off with my guy and then you don’t find him hot enough for you? Are you fucking nuts, Carly?”

“Yes,” she said, her voice quiet.

“I don’t know what’s going on here,” Nell said. She stood up, shaking her head.

Carly saw two guys on a sailboat eyeing Nell. They didn’t even look at Carly. I don’t exist, she thought. I’ve disappeared into thin air.

“Bonjour!”
one of the guys called out.
“Tu veux une bière, chérie?”

Nell walked toward their boat. She didn’t hesitate. Cute guys, a sexy sailboat, a cold beer. She didn’t look back at Carly. Who needs a confused sister when you can have all that testosterone in such close quarters? Sure enough, Nell hopped onboard the boat. She offered her cheeks, first one and then the
other, as if she were French, as if she knew these men, as if she did this every day of her life. Carly didn’t even know which cheek to kiss first. How could she have taught herself programming, yet she doesn’t know how to kiss French-style?

Nell chatted with the guys for a moment, accepted a beer and a seat. They both faced her, their hunger for her as apparent as her own delight in them.

How do you do that? Carly thought. I would have said no. I would have considered the danger of unknown men and unfamiliar territory. But Nell sat there in the hot sun, already laughing, the men leaning forward as if drawn to the bright shining light of her.

Nell never looked back at her sister.

One of the guys got up, grabbed a baseball cap hanging from the wheel of the boat and put it on Nell’s head. She stood up and spun around, modeling the hat. The man put his hand on Nell’s ass and Nell smacked it away. The men roared with laughter.

Get away from there, Carly thought.

But one of the men headed down the steps of the boat to the galley below and Nell followed.

Carly stood up and cleared her throat. Don’t go down there, she thought.

The other man followed Nell.

Go get her. Get her out of there, Carly told herself. But she stood there and the sky flashed with lightning. Carly blinked. Nell was gone. The three of them, down in the belly of the boat.

You don’t know them, Nell.

Carly took a few steps toward the boat. Thunder rolled in
the distance, a long foghorn of sound. And then the world fell oddly silent, as if waiting for what would come next.

Let her go, she thought. Nell takes care of herself. But there are two men. Strangers. No one to hear her cries for help.

She walked along the dock until she reached the side of the boat. She could hear voices; she could smell marijuana.

When she stepped onto the boat, it rocked and she grabbed the guardrail for support.

“Qui est là?”
a man’s voice called out. He sounded angry.

Run, she thought, but instead she took a few hesitant steps toward the back of the boat and almost barreled into one of the men, who was leaping up the stairs from the galley.

“Et oui? Excusez-moi?”

“Ma sœur,”
Carly said tentatively. Was that the word? My sister?

“Carly?” Nell called, and her face appeared in the opening of the galley.

“I thought maybe you were in trouble,” Carly said quickly, under her breath.

“You think you’re my fucking savior?” Nell asked. “Is that it? After all these years you think you owe me one?”

Again, lightning flashed, this time followed by a loud crack of thunder.

“Holy shit,” Nell said, her face quickly changing as she remembered. “I’ve got the bike.”

The other man appeared behind Nell, joint in hand, smile on his face.
“Tu veux?”
he asked, offering the joint to Carly. She shook her head.

“We’ve got to beat the rain,” Nell said.
“On y va.”

She turned and kissed the guy behind her, then the other
guy. It was hard to tell them apart. Twins? Both looked extraordinarily stoned and pleased.

“Ciao, mes amis,”
Nell said.

She jumped off the boat. Carly turned and followed sheepishly.

I want to go home, she thought. But where’s home? Her house with Wes in Palo Alto? Her mother’s house in San Francisco? Then she thought about the inn, Emily’s beautiful inn, and she ached to be in her single room at the top of the stairs.

She raced to keep up with her sister.

“Nell!” Carly called.

Nell looked back, her mouth twisted in disgust. “Hurry,” she said. She was still wearing the baseball cap the guys had given her. It was bleached to a pale lemon color and marked with sweat stains. I would toss it in the garbage, Carly thought. But Nell wore it proudly, her wide eyes vibrant below the visor.

“I’m sorry,” Carly said, catching up to her and fast-walking at her side.

“Yeah, I heard you,” Nell told her. “Call Mom. Let her know that you’re okay.”

“I don’t know what to tell her,” Carly said.

She thought of her parents’ bedroom in the house they lived in when she was a child. She would wake up in the middle of the night and climb into bed next to her mother, taking a part of her mom’s flannel nightgown and pressing it up against her nose. Then she would sleep like that, holding on.

“You went for a walk on the beach. You lay down on some rocks and fell asleep for a few hours.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Carly said.

“So tell the truth,” Nell said. “Whatever the hell that is.”

Carly looked down at her feet, racing across the pavement.

Nell pulled out her phone and tapped on it. “I’ve got Carly,” she said after a moment.

Carly could hear the buzz of her mother’s voice, a rush of words that came spilling out. She remembered waking up one night when she was a child to the sound of a glass breaking. She heard laughter and lots of people talking at once. She padded downstairs in her pajamas and found her mother on the couch in the living room, surrounded by so many people and so much noise that the room felt as if it were shaking. A party, her mother told her. We’re having a party. Carly climbed onto her mother’s lap and watched the party for the rest of the night right there, tucked in her mother’s arms.

“I’m bringing her back. We’ll be there soon.”

Carly wrapped her arms tightly around her sister’s waist. She had never been on a motorcycle. When Nell revved the engine and took off, Carly felt dizzy with fear. And then she rested her head on her sister’s back and disappeared. It didn’t matter if the road seemed to rise up and move away, if the noise pounded her head, if the sky lit up with lightning or rocked with thunder. She had her arms around her sister, her face pressed into her back.

And then, finally, they were turning into the driveway of the inn. She looked up. Olivia and Brody stood at the top of the driveway waiting for them.

She climbed off the bike. She turned around and already her mother was at her side and then she was in her arms and Carly held on to her as if something might sweep her away.

T
he mistral came through during the night, pummeling the earth with rain. The wind howled through the trees, knocking down branches. Olivia watched from the bedroom window and saw a large patio umbrella crash into the swimming pool. The inn creaked and groaned while the storm raged.

Her daughter was back. But something was wrong. In the middle of the night, standing alone by the window, Olivia was sure that something had happened to Carly. She didn’t believe her daughter had fallen asleep on the beach. Some other story was etched into Carly’s face.

She climbed back into bed and finally fell asleep, the noise of the storm penetrating her dreams.

When she woke up, hours later, Olivia wrapped her arms around Brody’s back. He was still sleeping, still warm and
bear-like. Olivia buried her nose in his neck. He smelled of the woods, of the earth. She loved his smell.