Ellen in Pieces (10 page)

“Just back there,” Celine told her, and Ellen, believing her, plodded on because if she stopped she would never start again.

“I haven’t,” she said after a while. “I haven’t seen any marker for a long, long time.”

It was dead people. Centuries of them. The dead were watching them from the trees. Just then Celine sank down on the path, as though she’d had the same realization, and the weight of her
pack tipped her onto her side and held her there. Out of her rose a wrenching, leaf-stirring sob.

Ellen looked down at her. “I shouldn’t have mentioned Richard.”

“Shh!”

“I’m sorry, Celine.”

Ellen undid her own pack and let it thud to the ground. The relief was exquisite, but short-lived. When she knelt to unfasten Celine’s buckles and liberate her, a burning pain ripped up her thighs.

Celine sobbed. “I thought you could use this trip, Ellen. That’s what I thought.”

(Was he here too? Her father? Ellen looked around.)

At that moment Ellen simply gave up. She lay down and curled in a ball on the forest floor among the tiny wildflowers and the super-sized bugs. She closed her eyes. She didn’t give a flying fuck what happened next.

Which was that they both fell asleep.

When they woke, they were cold and stiff nearly to the point of paralysis, and utterly alone.

Somehow they struggled to their feet. Celine’s face was streaked with mud. Dried leaves and dirt decorated her hair. Ellen pulled some from her own, then lifted Celine’s pack for her to put on; Celine lifted Ellen’s. Equally burdened, they limped back to the road, where they turned in unison and carried on downhill, right past the X, completely in sync, as though they never, ever disagreed on anything.

“W
E’RE
too old for this,” Ellen told Celine from her twin bed that night, when it all seemed funny. “I mean, we’re middle-aged. Didn’t that occur to you?”

Celine said, “Speak for yourself.”

“We might have died out there. Now I’ve bonded with that boy. He saved our lives. I’m in love with him.”

“His name is Oog,” Celine said.

“What?”

“That’s what he said.”

“That’s unfortunate.”

Celine rolled over so her back was to Ellen. She giggled.

“What?” Ellen asked.

“I’m surprised you aren’t screwing him right now.”

“I would!
He
wouldn’t. I’m too old.”

Ten minutes down the road they had come to a riding stable. “I’m stealing a horse,” Ellen said, but when they staggered into the barn a young man was there brushing the animals. Celine asked in French for a phone to call a cab. Despite her exhaustion, Ellen got the gist of what he told Celine in reply, that he was actually a prince, not a lowly, well-built stable boy, that he had been waiting a hundred years for them to stumble in and break the cruel spell that had been cast on him.

Celine turned to Ellen, tears shining in her eyes. “He’s going to drive us!”

His van was white, further proof of his enchantment. Celine immediately claimed the passenger seat, because she spoke French. Ellen hoped this didn’t mean that Celine got to marry him. No, Ellen did, because the prince offered his hand for Ellen to climb in the horsey-smelling back of the van that had no seats, just a foam mattress. Ellen was Cinderella. He threw in their packs, and his, and a rolled-up sleeping bag.

With just one touch, her pain had vanished.

Up front, Celine explained their predicament. “Ellen? He says he
can drop us off in Lourmarin, or we can go where he’s going. Another town a little farther. He has a friend there who runs a winery with a campground and a
gîte.
A hostel. He says there’s even a pool.”

Ellen said, “I go wherever he goes.”

T
HE
next morning Ellen woke alone in the cramped room at the top of the stairs. Two twin beds separated by a night table. A wardrobe for their things. Stiff, battered, she limped to the window. Celine was down in the vineyard, saluting the Provençal sun, her purple yoga mat unrolled between the vines.

A twenty-minute walk in sandals brought Ellen to the large stone reservoir surrounded by plane trees in the centre of town. Café tables clustered on one side. Here she sat for the rest of the morning in perfect contentment with her
café au lait
and
croissant
, writing postcards to Mimi and Yolanda, notifying them that they had very nearly been left motherless. Then she poked around the town buying delicacies for lunch.

On the way back to the
gîte
she spotted the white van of their saviour, Oog, in the adjacent campground. The stone house, bearded with ivy between bright blue shutters, was divided, one side the elderly proprietors’ residence, the other the
gîte.
Despite the campground being full, Ellen and Celine were the only guests. It was normally only open in summer, Celine had translated the night before. They had made an exception for Celine and Ellen, since they had come with Oog.

Now a truck about the size of a moving van was backed against the barnlike building that stood at a right angle to the house. Celine and the old woman were sitting together at one of the picnic tables under the trees.

“They’re bottling the wine,” Celine told Ellen when she walked up. “And his name is Hugues.
Hugh
. It’s pronounced differently in French.”

“I’ll say.”

The old woman’s filamentous hair suggested illness; it barely concealed her pink scalp. She smiled at Ellen.

“Bonjour,”
Ellen said.
“Comment allez-vous?”
This malpronounced greeting unleashed a long gravelly reply, which Celine had to translate.

“She’s asking how you slept.”

“Très bon.”

Ellen sat down with her provisions at her feet, but gave up on the conversation. She was still deeply tired and the French floated around her in the scented air with the strange insects and the masculine voices in the barn and the machinery sounds. Now and then she understood something Celine said to the old woman.
Divorcée
. The old woman gestured to the barn, got up, and went into the house.

“She’s making their lunch,” Celine said.

Ellen went into their side of the house to do the same, to the
gîte
kitchen. She cooled the bottle of rosé in the freezer while she assembled a tray, then brought lunch out to Celine. “I am going to be so fat when this is over.”

“Don’t eat so much,” Celine said.

“What would be the point then?”

Ellen shook the water off a lettuce leaf, dipped it directly into a saucer of walnut oil, salted it. As she ate it some of the oil ran down her chin and christened the front of her little green dress. She opened the wine. Celine wouldn’t drink in the daytime. She would only eat the lettuce and a bit of baguette and chèvre.

Though Ellen’s back was to the barn, she could tell from Celine’s face when the men came out. “You’re blushing,” she said.

Hugues walked right over in his undershirt and pirate bandana, bringing the son of the old couple, who looked in his early forties. He had fine brown hair, rolled sleeves, and glasses with thick frames. Hugues nodded to Celine and said, “Hélène,” by way of introducing her. Ellen he called
Celine.

“Actually,
I’m
Ellen,” said Ellen, shaking the hand the son extended to her.

“Jean-François,” he said. “John-Frank.”

“Ah,” said Ellen. “Someone I can talk to.”

“Not today, I regret. We are embottling the wine.”

Hugues and Jean-François entered the house while the other workers washed at an outside tap then gathered at a picnic table across the yard. The food came out in several trips, carried by the old couple and Hugues and Jean-François—an armload of baguettes, two casserole dishes, cheeses, three bottles of wine. The old man, very Cézanne in his straw hat, waved to them. Now and then Ellen glanced over her shoulder to admire the unselfconscious way the men ate, bowed low over their plates, tearing at the bread, swallowing the wine like water.

“We’re ahead of schedule now,” Celine said. “Do you want to stay a day or two and rest up?”

“Do you?” Ellen asked.

T
UESDAY
after the long weekend the campground emptied out—no more screeching children, no radios playing American rap. The bottling was finished and the enchanting Hugues drove off in his white van, stirring up clouds of dust and yearning. The next few
mornings glided into routine: Celine drank her herbal tinctures, yogaed, swam in the pool, while Ellen walked to town for
petit déjeuner
and postcard writing and a few chapters of
Chéri
by the reservoir. In the afternoon, they hiked with day packs. Afterward, the old man, who was born in the area and something of a naturalist, would look at the pictures on Ellen’s camera and name all the bugs and flowers in French.

They came across the bizarrest sight on Thursday. A trail of caterpillars almost two metres long, each holding onto the caterpillar in front. This prompted a long incomprehensible story from Monsieur Cézanne. (They were calling him this to his face now and he liked it.) He got Celine and Ellen up, Celine’s hands on his waist, Ellen’s on Celine’s, and they marched around the yard, laughing.

“We’re getting along better here,” Celine told Ellen when they were tucked into their twin beds that night.

“That’s because you’re not being such a bitch,” Ellen said, and Celine laughed again.

Neither mentioned getting back on the trail.

T
HE
following morning a car pulled alongside Ellen as she was walking to town. “
Allô!
Celine!”

“John-Frank,” said Ellen, recognizing the emphatic glasses more than the rather vague driver. “I’m Ellen.”

“Hélène! Sorry!” he called across the empty passenger seat. “You see, in French they are confusable names.
Say-leen. Ay-len
.”

About as similar as
Hyoo
and
Oog
were different. She told Jean-François, “We don’t even look alike.”

Jean-François drew back in surprise. “You do. Let me drive you, Hélène.”

“I’m supposed to be on a walking holiday. Thanks, though.”

“Celine isn’t walking,” Jean-François said, still matching her pace in the Audi. “I saw her in the vineyard. Exercising.”

“She’s like that,” Ellen said. “Where did you learn English?”

“Canada.”

“Really? Where?”

Actually, he’d learned it in university but spent six months in Canada last year helping friends set up a winery. “You probably don’t know this place. Kelowna.”

“Of course I do. I’m from British Columbia.”

“No!”

Then a funny thing happened. In his amazement Jean-François let go of the wheel. There was no verge. Ellen was on the very edge of the road next to some prickly sort of hedge. As the car veered toward her, she instinctively put out her hand, as though she could actually stop several thousand pounds of machine from running into her. And when that didn’t work, she smacked the hood hard.

Jean-François braked just in time, seemingly unaware he had nearly killed her. “I wonder. No.” He shook his head.

Ellen bent to look in the window. “What?”

“If you know my friends. Mireille and Réné Vardon? No, see? I always expect too much. Still, it’s amazing you ended up here, don’t you think?”

Ellen resumed walking, still accompanied by Jean-François. No one honked. She hadn’t heard a single horn in France. Traffic swerved around the crawling Audi and eventually Ellen and her escort reached the reservoir, where Jean-François parked the car on the sidewalk and leapt out. At one of the café tables, he pulled out a chair for her and hurried inside, returning shortly with two espressos.

Ellen felt a tiny bit annoyed. Because this life wouldn’t last forever and she wanted it
just so
for as long as possible, the ritual of her
croissant
and bowl of coffee. She wanted to order it herself, to say out loud what were practically the only French words she knew. Then she thought, why not have coffee with him? Jean-François wasn’t good-looking, but he wasn’t bad-looking either, especially now that Hugues was gone. He had a sexy, hyphenated name and a sexy accent, particularly the way he said “the Okanagan.”

Ellen had been to Kelowna once and thought it was a dump.

“What’s a dump?” Jean-François asked.

“You probably don’t have them here,” Ellen said.

He picked
Chéri
off the table and studied it. “How long are you staying?”

“Actually,” Ellen said. “I might never go back.”

“That would be pleasant,” Jean-François said, still looking at the book.

A fluttering started inside Ellen that was very pleasant in itself, like a cloud of butterflies inhaled. She looked at Jean-François to see if he meant what she thought he meant.

Smiling, he pointed to the plain orange and beige cover of the book with its jaunty little penguin. “
Chéri.
Darling.”

Flutter, flutter.

Jean-François didn’t live with his old parents, but in an apartment in town. He went back and forth all day. When Ellen said she was picking up groceries, he offered to meet her back at the car in an hour. “I’ll take your food for you. So you can have your walk.”

It seemed only right to ask him to dinner.

O
N
their hike that afternoon, Ellen and Celine passed a vineyard where a tractor was spewing a greenish powder over the rows of vines. The breeze shifted and the cloud about-faced and headed for the path Celine and Ellen were on. Celine clapped a hand over her mouth and nose and ran.

When Celine told Jean-François about it at dinner, he grew indignant. They did not apply pesticides or antifungals to their vines. As soon as he said this, Celine took a bolder sip of the wine he’d brought, pronounced it delicious, then went on to have two full glasses—about half what Ellen had been drinking every night. Celine’s unlined complexion often seemed translucent (
pallid
, Ellen thought, when she felt uncharitable), but the wine made this rosier Celine laugh freely, with her head back so her hair, blond camouflaging the grey, brushed her narrow shoulder blades. Yet every time Ellen glanced across the table to see the effect Celine was having on Jean-François, he smiled at Ellen.