Tatiana de Rosnay - A Secret Kept

I take them in to see her. On our way, we bump into my father and Joséphine. My father greets everybody with his brutal hugs. He pulls on Arno’s goatee. “What is this, for God’s sake?” he roars. He slaps Arno on the back. “Stand up straight, you good-for-nothing nincompoop. Doesn’t your father ever tell you that? He’s as bad as you, honestly.”

I know he is joking, but as always, there is a bite to his jesting. Ever since Arno was a small child, my father has been on me about the way I raise him-always the wrong way, in his eyes. We all tiptoe into Mélanie’s room. She is still sleeping. Her face is even paler than it was in the morning. She looks frail, all of a sudden older than her forty years. Margaux’s eyes well up, and I see tears glisten. She seems horrified by her aunt’s appearance. I wrap my arm around her shoulder and draw her close to me. She has a sweaty, salty smell. No longer the little-girl cinnamon smell. Arno stares, his mouth open. Lucas fidgets, looking from me to his mother, then back to Mélanie.

Then Mélanie turns her head and slowly opens her eyes. She sees the children, and her whole face lights up. She gives a weak smile. Margaux bursts into tears. I see that Astrid’s eyes are wet too, that her mouth is trembling, and all this is too much for me. I back away discreetly and slip out into the corridor. I take a cigarette out and just hold it.

“No smoking!” booms a matronly nurse, waving an irate finger at me.

“I’m just holding it,” I explain. “Holding, not smoking.”

She glares at me as if I were a shoplifter caught red-handed. I put the cigarette back in the pack. I suddenly think of Clarisse. She is the only one missing here. If she were still alive, she would be here now, in that room, with her daughter and her grandchildren. Her husband. She would be nearly seventy. Even if I try as hard as I can, I cannot imagine my mother at sixty-nine years old. She will always be a young woman. I am the middle-aged man. She never knew middle age. She never knew what it was like to raise teenage children. She died before all that. I wonder what kind of mother she would have been to us when we were in our teens. It would have been different had she been alive. Everything would have been different. Mélanie and I had kept our puberty in check. We had been coerced into submission. No outbursts, no screams, no slamming doors, no insults. No healthy teenage rebellion. Uptight Régine had muzzled us. Blanche and Robert had looked on in approval. It was the done thing, in their eyes. Seen and not heard. And our father had overnight turned into someone else. Someone who wasn’t really interested in his children, nor in whom they would end up being one day.

We had not been allowed to be teenagers.

As I accompany my family back outside, a tall woman wearing a pale blue uniform walks past me and smiles. She has a badge, but I can’t make out whether she is a nurse or a doctor. I smile back. I wonder fleetingly who she is and think how nice it is in these provincial hospitals that people actually greet you, which is never the case in Paris. Astrid still seems tired, and I begin to think the drive back to the city in the grueling heat is not a good idea. Can’t they stay a little longer? She hesitates, then mumbles something about Serge waiting for her. I add that I have checked into a nearby hotel, as Mélanie can’t be moved yet. Why doesn’t she go and rest there for a while? The room is small, but cool. She can even have a shower. She tilts her head and seems to like the idea. I hand over the key and point out the hotel to her, just beyond the town hall. I watch her and Margaux walk away.

Arno and I go back to the hospital and sit on the wooden bench in front of the entrance.

“She’s going to make it, right?” he says.

I nod at him. “Mel? You bet. She’s going to be fine.”

But even to me my voice seems strained.

“You said the car drove off the highway, Dad.”

“Yes. Mel was driving. And it happened.”

“But how? How did it happen?”

I decide to tell him the truth. Recently Arno has been closed up, remote, only answering my questions with short grunts. I can’t even remember the last time we had a decent conversation. Hearing his voice again, having him look me in the eyes and not somewhere near my feet makes me long to keep this unexpected contact going, no matter how.

“She was in the middle of telling me about something that upset her. And then it happened.”

His blue eyes, so like Astrid’s, zoom into mine.

“What was she telling you?” he whispers.

“She only had time to say she recalled something. It bothered her. But since the accident, she doesn’t remember.”

Arno remains silent. He has such big hands now. A man’s hands.

“What do you think it was?”

I take a deep breath.

“I think it was about our mother.”

He looks surprised. “Your mother? You never talk about your mother.”

“No. But being in Noirmoutier for those three days brought back old memories.”

“Why do you think Mel remembered something about your mother?”

I like the way he questions me-simple, fast questions, no fuss, no stalling.

“Because we spent a lot of time during our stay talking about her. Remembering all sorts of things.”

I stop. How can I explain all this to my sixteen-year-old son? What will he make of it? Why does he care?

“Go on,” he urges. “What things?”

“Like who she was.”

“You forgot that?”

“That’s not what I mean. The day she died was the worst day of my life. Imagine saying goodbye to your mother, going to school with the au pair girl, living your normal school day, and coming back in the afternoon with the au pair again, like every afternoon, with your pain au chocolat in your hand. Except that when you get home, your father is there, your grandparents are there, and they have this dreadful expression on their faces. And then they tell you your mother is dead. That something happened in her brain, and she died. And then, at the hospital, you are shown a body under a sheet and you’re told it’s your mother. The sheet is pulled back, but you close your eyes. That’s what I did.”

He stares at me, shocked.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me all this?”

I shrug. “Because you never asked.”

His eyebrows, one of them pierced with a silver stud that I find repulsive, come down.

“That’s a dumb excuse.”

“I didn’t know how to talk to you about it.”

“Why?” he asks.

Now his questions are starting to bother me. But I want to keep on answering them. I feel a strong urge to get this off my chest and tell my son about it for the first time.

“Because when she died, everything changed for Mel and me. No one explained to us what happened. Those were the seventies, remember. People are careful with kids now, they take them to shrinks when stuff like that happens. But no one helped us. Our mother flew out of our lives. Our father remarried. Our mother’s name was never mentioned. All her photos disappeared.”

“Really?” Arno mutters.

I shake my head. “She was erased from our lives. And we let that happen because we were dazed by grief, we were kids, we were helpless. And by the time we were old enough to fend for ourselves, it was time to leave our father’s house. So that’s what we did, Mélanie and I. And somewhere along the way we let everything concerning our mother be boxed up and locked away. And I’m not talking about her clothes, her books, her objects. I mean our memories of her.”

I find it hard to breathe all of a sudden.

“What was she like?” he asks.

“Physically, like Mel. Same coloring, same silhouette. She was bubbly, joyful. Full of life.”