Between the Shadow and the Soul - 39
“I like it in the city when two worlds collide.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Hometown Glory
It was not until Teddy slipped out of my room and into his own to “find a better notebook” in which to properly catalog our growing base of information, that I realized I had not moved from my spot on the floor. It certainly explained the twitches of pain in my lower back, not to mention the stiffness that had settled in between my shoulders. Before I took a look at the spare sheaves of paper that had not fit inside the now fully reconstructed diary, I sat up on my knees and gathered the collection into one easy-to-peruse pile, then took the time to actually pull my bedclothes across the width and length of my queen-sized mattress.
Moppet emerged from her little palace and leapt onto the comforter to position herself atop my feet. I scratched her ears with one hand, while I used the other to flip through what my brother and I had discovered to be unsent letters, all of them addressed to Charles Bass, 795 5th Ave, New York, NY 10065, from Blair Waldorf - made returnable to the chateau in Lyon; the mansion in Marnes-la-Coquette; 36 Rue George Sand 75016 Paris, France. All of them bore their original stamps, and none of them had been sent through international mail.
I figured they must have been written after maman and daddy changed their phone numbers to eliminate contact; they were still more proof that she had loved him all this time, but kept herself away. Her private words were sufficient studies in all of the reasons: those people aren't alive anymore read one of the entries; he’s in love with a girl in red lipstick, on a stage that doesn’t exist anymore, wearing a slip she tossed out years ago read another.
Clearly I needed to talk to ma mère. They were both very much alive, obviously, and she wore red lipstick more often than I could remember her not wearing it. Her closet was full of slips, and I had been to Victrola with Teddy and seen for myself that there was definitely still a main stage for burlesque dancers to traipse across.
Teddy owned it, had been in charge of its operations since his 16th birthday the previous June, but it was still part of Bass Industries, and daddy still approved the dancers. Most of them were small, lithe, graceful, and danced to thrumming music while their thick curls of brown hair bobbed with them. I wished, fruitlessly, that they had just talked to each other at some point and done all this heavy lifting for me. It was very exhausting trying to figure out just what had ended their marriage and cast me and my twin on separate sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
I thought of Paris, and it got me thinking about other things. How Teddy had never spoken to his mother or gotten to appreciate their similarities, how I had never hugged my mother and my brother at the same time, how Teddy had never been to Paris, not even to grandmamma's Île Saint-Louis holiday home.
The letters were full of longing - maman wished Chuck had been there to see me smile or see me walk, or see me take a sip out of a real cup for the first time, and how she desperately wanted to see Teddy do those things too. Some were less innocent, but I pretended those did not exist and shuffled them to the back of the pile. Others were just about her day: what she'd had for breakfast, the people she'd met for tea, the color of the sky, and what outfit she had worn.
The plan began to form even before Teddy rejoined me with a fresh spiral and a fully inked pen. As he sat at the end of my bed near Moppet and began sketching out everything we knew (maman and daddy were married on December 27, 2010 when maman was 3 months pregnant; Serena and Nate were our godparents; they had separated and divorced; daddy had sent me to live with maman and she had changed my surname to her own; maman had started the diary because of a second battle with bulimia, et cetera), I reached for my own paper and pen and began composing travel plans.
“What are you doing?” Teddy looked up from his list when he had to turn the page, and caught me. “Are you making a list?”
“Oui. A to-do list.”
He stared at me in disbelief. “You?”
I nodded, feeling equally surprised. “Je sais.”
“What is it?”
“Our itinerary for Paris, of course. How do we get the Bass jet ready without daddy knowing?”
Teddy took care of the technical details - calling daddy's pilot and discovering there was a business flight already prepped to take off that night, but we would need to catch the helicopter at Pier 6 and have our luggage and passports at hand for the touchdown at Charles de Gaulle. Since we had a staff at hand to pack our bags for us, and a full-time chauffeur ready to drive us anywhere we wanted to go, this scenario presented just one problem: my passport was still wherever Nathaniel Archibald had locked it up, along with my birth certificate.
I had suspected for a long time that my birth certificate had my former name printed on it, and that it had been hidden from me for years. Since there was only one place where Nate Archibald kept his valuables, I threw on a discreet pair of skintight designer blue jeans, a loose-fitting light grey sweater, and matched my pointy black boots with a fedora and sleek sunglasses and called my own white limousine around to the front of daddy's hotel. On my way out, I slung an oversized slate colored Chanel scarf around my neck and snatched a navy blue blazer from the front hall closet as I piled my essentials into a gold Ferragamo hobo.
By the time I got to the curb of E 61st St, Suzanne was stubbing out her cigarette and holding open the back door.
“Merci,” I said, sliding into the toasty backseat. I was referring more to the dying cigarette than her required courtesy, but she winked at me and shut the door without a cheeky word.
In truth, I could have walked from The Pierre to the Archibald townhouse, just 13 blocks uptown, but it was cold. Also, I wanted to have a quick getaway in case Jenny tried to coax me into staying with her damned delicious hot cocoa and stupid big blue eyes. It was hard to be mad at her for keeping her mouth shut when I slept under the same roof as Chuck Bass, but part of me wanted to separate myself from both her and her husband until the divorce was finalized and their lives had fallen into some sort of routine. Lux and Lex needed to know that I was firmly on their side in all of it; I was only stopping by to pick up something that belonged to me.
Thankfully, Jenny was out for business, and it was Julian who opened the door. He and Lex were humoring Lux by joining her for a screening of her new favorite movie, The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, a follow-up to her previous favorite of one week Men Don't Leave.
“Thank God,” Julian breathed, even going so far as to pull me across the threshold and into a big bear hug the likes of which saba would have been impressed by. “She's driving me insane.”
My best friend had, as she had told me over and over again the previous night, rediscovered the Van der Bilt dynamo within and, urged forward by what she perceived to be her older brother's new life as a young gay man in New York City, had become a devotee of civil rights activism. Feminism was her denomination de jour, and I foresaw many rants about equality and the demeaning way men liked to stare at her mile-long legs. I had my default eye roll all geared up.
Lex's head appeared around the corner and he, too, looked relieved to see me. It was clear that the two of them had raced from the living room to see who could escape the television's glow first, and my god-brother had lost. “Are you staying? Please tell me you're staying. We have cake?”
“De rien,” I said, genuinely sorry for their plight. It would be best for me to sneak upstairs to Nate's study and retrieve my travel papers without disturbing Lux's religious rites.
A loud thunk accompanied Lex's forehead colliding with the wooden door frame. Julian wrapped his arms even tighter around me and lifted me off the ground to prevent my departure.
“I love you both terribly, but I have a plane to catch.” Lex arched an eyebrow at me as Julian tilted my chin up with his spare hand and did the same. “A jet, actually.”
“Then what are you doing here?” Lex came all the way around the doorway and crossed his arms over his chest. “If Lux kidnaps you, you'll never escape.”
I nudged Julian with my knee, and he reluctantly set me down on my own two feet. “I need to know the combination to your dad's safe? He still has my passport.”
“Oh,” Lex pinched his forehead together for a moment as he tried to recall the numbers. Julian took this silent opportunity to wrap his arm around his boyfriend's shoulders and kiss his temple, and the two of them were just so adorable that I wanted to squeal and stay with them forever, but I had important business to attend to. They would simply have to wait. “071490, I think. At least, that's what it was the last time I broke into it.”
“Merci beaucoup.”
I blew the two of them a kiss and took to the stairs. Before I turned into the first landing and opened the second door on the left, I heard Julian heave a heavy sigh and then the tell-tale noises of a happy young couple making with what, as Lux called them, the smoochies. I smiled wistfully, turning the doorknob and remembered my last incident of lip-to-lip action as clearly as if Maverick Sparks had been waiting for me at the the base of the staircase. All lips and eyes and that delicious natural musk...
The sight of the Archibald safe snapped me back to daylight and I quickly retrieved what I needed from within its carefully organized depths. My fingers itched to open a few of the velvet jewelry cases and take a peak at what Jenny stored away for special occasions, and it wouldn't hurt to take five minutes to peruse all of the little files to look for something of interest - I slammed the door shut and pressed down on the knob, wondering just how long it would take to break the detective habit. I chanted to myself that there was nothing else I needed in there, and it would be rude to get my fingerprints all over the Van der Bilt diamonds, and I did a few breathing exercises I had learned in my drama classes, and the urge passed.
I managed to avoid Lux on my way back through the front door, and was privately thankful that Lex and Julian had not turned the foyer into another public baisodrome - I was ecstatic that they were together and that I could go out for drinks with them at the same time and feel jealous of their preciously transparent intimacy, but that did not mean I was any more keen to witness either of their tongues down either of their throats. Once had been more than enough.
The file containing my travel papers 'happened to fall open' in my lap once Suzanne had turned the limousine around. I gazed down at my passport for less than a second before brushing it aside to view my birth certificate - both of them. The one on top read the standard ELEANOR MISTY WALDORF that I was used to seeing on school records, in the folds of junk mail back in Paris, and hearing from Dorota whenever I accidentally forgot to neatly fold my washable laundry in the hamper.
But underneath, on the same paper, printed in the same font: 'This is a certification of name and birth facts on file in the Bureau of Vital Records, Department of Health, City of New York. Date of Birth: JUNE 11, 2011. Borough: MANHATTAN. Name: ELEANOR MISTY BASS. Sex: FEMALE. Mother's maiden name: BLAIR WALDORF. Father's name: CHARLES BASS.'
There it was, written - or typed - in black-and-green. I somehow felt that I never needed to see it to know it was true, but it was nice all the same.
Eleanor Misty Bass.
I zipped everything back up when the limousine came to a stop back at The Pierre. The doorman already had the front doors open for my swift walk from warm to cold to warm, but something about the bare trees across the street, the quiet way pedestrians hushed their way to and fro along the border of Central Park, coupled with the crisp quality of the thick city air, made me feel like taking a long walk. My valet would have everything pressed and packed long before Teddy and I departed for downtown, and the maid would give daddy our letter explaining why we were going on a short trip upstate to visit the Lifton family's Long Island estate.
It was all planned, all my brother and I needed to do was be at the helipad on time.
Which is exactly why I took the detour to inhale the current of brisk wind as I wandered the paths that stretched and and turned beneath a canopy of spindly trees. It was easy to look at the pavement and imagine it was the sidewalk leading up to our house in Paris, lined with neat buildings and wrought iron balconies brimming over with colorful plants. The city would be full of black coats and quiet residents quietly hoping for the first rays of sun to allow them their short skirts, shorts, and shades.
The Empire State Building could be La Tour Eiffel. The stretch of green earth before me: the Champ de Mars. The tourists would brave the chill for a stereotypical picnic in the shadow of Paris's most famous lady, and I could feel superior in my Frenchness by turning up my nose at how ridiculous they looked and mocking them with my friends.
At least, that's what I would have been doing, had I not been wandering through Central Park, a little lost, and without any companions to speak of, much less to.
When I saw Paris again, from my comfortable position in my own cushy seat aboard the Bass jet, I silently apologized for the way we had left things. After all, it had not slighted me; it had never turned its back on me, lied, cheated, used, or abused me. It had simply been.
I had adjusted so marvelously in Manhattan, grown used to the sights and smells and the ebb and flow of obnoxious traffic, become tolerant of the company of exuberant Americans (and I begrudgingly forgave them their continent-wide misunderstanding of the word 'civilized'); perhaps because I had been born there, because maman had always been a New York City darling and daddy owned practically the whole island, or possibly because it did remind me a little bit of home.
In that it was nothing like it, bien sûr.
Though it had never been my lifelong dream, many of my childhood friends had fantasized about living in New York. Some of them had never been, others had visited, but none of them had lived there as I had; and now that I had, I could not dream of living anywhere else, and anyone who could was fooling themselves.
New York had invigorated me from the moment I saw it. It made me feel alive, vibrant, young, fast, all the things that Paris was not.
I had always loved the petit beauty of the city of lights, Le Mouelleux au Chocolat, complaining loudly to my friends over coffee, and rebuking slight errors in French as we watched the stars on bicycle rides through L’Ile Saint-Louis, where we ate our Berthillon and allowed ourselves to feel like those picnicking tourists beneath the starry sky. It was charming, in its way; crotchety in comparison to Manhattan.
I had read somewhere that Paris is every Parisian's wife. New York is their mistress. Parisians know how living with your wife gets old. New York, c’est vraiment super, y a une énegie.
And I knew it was true.
Teddy and I were near Rue George Sand in the 16th arrondissement, where maman was undoubtedly taking her morning coffee and getting ready for a busy day. I was explaining to mon frère jumeau that the address made us “gros bourges”. It was privately amusing to me that he was strolling alongside me in a Ralph Lauren shirt, his collar popped roguishly to stave off the cold, and that he had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. He would never survive à Paris for more than a brief holiday. He was too happily ignorant and...well, just that. Happy. It was very unfashionable of him.
I had never felt happy before uprooting myself to the States, at least not since my childhood in Lyon. Too much thinking, too much pondering, and not just over the identity of my father. I had always been a little too indulgent, even by my circle's decadent standards; ordering dessert after dinner when all my friends 'asserted' themselves with le café gourmand; too much red had led more than one person to question the stability of my sanity. What I was supposed to want was to be unnoticed, to wear la couleur de l’été in summer and shake my head exasperatedly at those who did not understand; to make “J’ me suis acheté un petit pull noir, tout simple, super mignon” my motto the rest of the year.
But I had never done that.
Perhaps that is why it had been so easy for Sophie to so thoroughly usurp me. I was too unpredictable. After all, excess is vulgar. Everything in moderation.
So, when I returned that grey January morning, I wore a long black coat, black tights, and simple black flats. I was in mourning for the late joie de vivre.
They say distance is a Parisian's best friend, and I had learned just how true that is, at least a little bit. For me. Distance had made me realize more than the fact that Teddy and I looked quite similar: I didn't belong à Paris either, not for anything longer than a brief holiday. I had become too happy. It was very unfashionable of me.
Not to say I did not scoff with disdain when we were passed by a woman wearing white socks. Mauvais goût vestimentaire. People who wear white socks are, naturellement, terrible people, and being out of the country for any length of time would never do anything to alter that incontrovertible truth. I knew I would always be une jeune fille de Paris, stoutly French and in love avec fromage no matter what anyone said et le vin no matter what the government said et fêtes à la maison no matter what Manhattan said. (Et en l'amour avec moi-même, évidement.)
Je suis français. I had been raised by le Parisien ultime. A woman who had been born on the shores of America, but bred to live in Paris. L'âme de la France.
Just as I had not been made to live there, perhaps she had. But we were there to convince her of exactly the opposite: that Manhattan needed her.
That we needed her.
And we were not going back empty-handed.
We turned right on Avenue Mozart onto my familiar street, et voilà, the red door that led home stood only meters away.
A tall blonde with well-disguised dark roots rounded the corner, carrying a black version of the Valentino studded tote I had slung over my arm for my last day at Janson. The rest of her ensemble was black like pitch, coal heels, ebony coat, charcoal tights, obsidian earrings, onyx accessories, an inky form-fitting dress. Black was most certainly Sophie Schumacher's color.
Our eyes met instantly, and I could feel her gaze sweeping up and down my form even through both our pairs of tinted sunglasses. Not to be caught flaunting the city's priceless social color, I was sure to keep my trench open to reveal the tan khaki color of my pleated skirt, the beige of the stripes that ran horizontal along the black material of my mostly-unbuttoned cardigan. I was just demure enough to topple her crown and regain recognition at my old Lycée and become queen before my year as a première student came to an end. I had once told Lux that I could have stayed in Paris and staged a spectacular coup, made Tristan Marchand eat his words and come crawling on his knees, but...
I finally, really, absolutely no longer wanted to. I had Manhattan. Sophie was fooling herself.
But if I was prepared for a battle the likes of which the right bank had never seen, I was very mistaken. She lowered her shades and stared at me, and I saw my old friend shimmering in the light of her very surprised eyes. Gone was the cold stone carving I had last seen on the steps at Janson, and there she was: the girl I had giggled with, thrown parties with, planned Les Grandes Ecoles with, gone on p'tits weekends with, criticized fellow Parisians alongside, taken along for a second opinion on shopping excursions.
I had tried not to think of her as that girl, especially not after the terrible things Tristan had almost done to me in her name. But I could not help but recall how quick I had been to judge her, how easy it had been for him to twist her words, events, life to suit his destructive needs; perhaps she really had been going through something, and her frequent absences had been necessary - and what had I done? Jumped on the hatred train just because she had won our wager, fair and square.
“Elle...” she finally said, eyes flitting back and forth between me and Teddy. “Que fais-tu ici?”
I tightened my hold around Teddy's arm and he squeezed back without, I assumed, really knowing why. “Je suis ici pour voir ma mère.”
“Your accent is different,” she observed en anglais, gripping the handle of her purse and pressing her lips together in a pink line. “It must be New York.”
“Oui,” I said, wary of her cordial demeanor. “It must be.”
“I was just at Tristan's,” Sophie blurted, seemingly unable to hold it in any longer. But it was not gloating that colored her tone, nor did she seem particularly triumphant.
Beside me, Teddy's eyes narrowed as he remembered just how much he loathed the 'psychotic little shit' (as daddy called him) who had attacked me not once, but twice. I knew that, had Sophie and I chanced to meet on a New York street corner just hours before and found out he was residing in a building nearby, his fingers would have already been pressing the speed dial for daddy, then Nate, then - after they were done taking care of things - the police. That gave me comfort, as did the fact that Dorota was very near and undoubtedly very willing to tear him to shreds and beat him to a pulp with her cast iron cooking skillet.
And mère, ma mère had never liked him in the first place.
“Were you?” I did my best imitation of a casual voice, as much for her sake as for Teddy's, and smiled unfazed. “And how is he?”
Then, the triumphant gleam flickered at us in her irises. “Black and blue since his encounter with you. And a lot less smug about it now that I have ended things.”
My eyebrows leapt to my hairline of their own accord. “You have? But I thought...”
“I never sent him after you,” she assured me, anticipating my doubt with the foresight of someone who had been amply warned. “Je promets.”
As hard as it should have been to believe her, I remembered the many webs of lives Tristan had spun in order to earn his immortality at Janson, and it was all too likely he had made up her vendetta. After all, where was the sense in enacting revenge against a girl who had already conceded by leaving the country? Exile was much more humiliating than sleeping with Tristan Marchand, anyway, but fortunately I had fallen in love with the turn my life had taken and would not trade Central Park for Roland Garros for all the box seats in the world. And Sophie had never been one to assert herself as a true queen, anyway; international grudges were more my territory.
“Je te crois.”
“Je dois y aller.” She did not sweep across the cement for a friendly hug, nor did she whip out her mobile phone and ask for my new number. But she did smile and wave and bid me adieu.
“That was it?” Teddy was stunned, and I led him underneath the red awning of Toques Et Chefs - Degustation sur place, specialties etrangeres, cuisine Française, comestibles de luxe, vins fins. “No take down? You didn't even insult her hair.”
I steered him to the counter so I could order myself something to nibble on. The sight of that familiar door, bright and vermillion against the stonework, all those colorful flowers bursting from behind wrought iron... it was all so much to take in, even though the trees seemed to be faring well, and the people on the street were imbued with some sort of non-hostile welcoming spirit. Maybe we had gotten off at the wrong airport and were not really in Paris after all, but some charming provinciaux ville that happened to look exactly like it...
“We do things a bit differently in France, mon chère. Buy me a croissant.”
The two of us sat at a round table in spindly black chairs and sipped coffee. We both liked it strong, how it was meant to taste; bitter and full of caffeine. Instead of making me jittery, it calmed my nerves and put the strange run-in with Sophie out of my mind completely. As long as we could manage to cross the street without being hit by a mindless driver or worse, a mindless bicyclist, or running into anyone else we knew, it would be a straight shot to the front door. I would use the key I had not removed from my key chain and open the door, and spare Teddy a tearful attack from Dorota.
“Ellie?”
I knew I should have wrapped a scarf around my head and worn bigger sunglasses...
Dorota's eyes were as wide as the saucers on which she loved to serve her home brewed tea. The reality of our situation was slammed home right about when I stood up, trying to think of some pithy excuse for just way I was loitering around the corner from maman's home, when the roundness of her eyes became a distant second to just how close her jaw came to scraping the ground when she saw Teddy in the seat next to mine. The incident at that fateful luncheon with Nate and Tristan came to mind in that moment, the sound of porcelain breaking on the ground and the wine that spread in a steady stain that bled through antique cloth.
The grocery bags in Dorota's arms did not suffer the same fate as that fine china, thankfully, but I was tensed to spring forward and catch them should the Polish maid grow faint.
Her mouth closed, then opened, then closed again, and she finally just settled for gaping; her eyes darted between us both, questioning, and understanding, and elation.
“This is Teddy,” I told her, and it sounded lame even to my ears. “Teddy Bass.”
The vegetables went tumbling into the street, and that was all it took: Dorota gasped, and I was afraid she had really, actually become speechless.
“Is maman home?” I asked, mostly to elicit a verbal response from her shocked vocal cords.
Instead, she nodded, and fumbled in her pocket for the door key. “Follow me.”
As soon as her back was turned, Teddy allowed his carefully constructed façade of disinterest to crumble into a portrait of absolute fresh terror. I bit my lip to withhold a chuckle when I read the signs in the shadows that fell across the hollows of his cheeks, because they screamed that he had thought Dorota might attack him with an enormous hug, and he just was not ready for that kind of commitment until he was finished his coffee.
“Just breathe,” I whispered, taking his arm once again and steering him through the slow procession of cars and pedestrians that littered the street. “She will not attack unless provoked.”
“Very funny,” he muttered out of the corner of his mouth, and he raked his free hand through his hair so many times I thought I might need to warn him about early balding. “Shut up.”
He was just nervous, and though I could not admit it out loud (for his sake, clairement), so was I. Ma mère and I had not parted on the best terms, if two full blown Waldorf meltdowns can even be called 'parting'. I had not said goodbye, had not told her I loved her, had not even offered to keep in touch with her while I gallivanted around a foreign city and tried to prove that she was not my mother. I hoped everything could be mended now that I had clawed and scraped and found the truth, because I was more than willing to say I was sorry and have her hold me again, like when I was une petite fille.
And she could apologize to Teddy and explain everything to both of us, and then she could hold him like she had never gotten to when he was un petit garçon.
Then, I hoped, with a swell in my chest as Dorota unlocked the door and led us into the entrance hall, we could all go home.
Everything was just as I had left it, but watching Teddy as his eyes roved across the furniture and all the décor, so perfectly arranged and beautifully displayed that Elsie de Wolfe might very well have put her hands to it from the afterlife, it was like seeing it for the first time. The white floors, every tile polished to a faultless shine by Dorota herself, the dramatic curtains that were almost always swept aside to offer a chocolate box view of the street.
The curving stairs that sloped gracefully and disappeared to the upper level stayed empty for minutes after Dorota ascended them, so Teddy and I doffed our outerwear and took the long pause as a cue to tiptoe into the sitting room, where my piano was still upright and dust-free, and the stain of Crémant de Bourgogne was barely visible on the soft Arabian rug I had given ma mère for her 36th birthday. I made sure not to let Teddy perch on the edge of the chaise lounge that I quite frankly could do an entire eon without setting eyes on again, and instead forced him to the piano bench so the two of us could pass the quiet minutes with some playful duets.
Only the ticking on the grandfather clock alerted us to the slow passage of time.
“Do you ever wonder what it would have been like if maman had never left?” I finally broke the tense silence and let my fingers off the keys. The chords played themselves out on the whisper of the hammer. “If her and papa had never divorced and we had grown up together?”
Teddy took up the case for Clair de Lune and played it as gently as he could, as if maman had not already been told we were in the house. Maybe he had dreamed of meeting her the same way I had dreamed of meeting daddy, and he had not intended for it to be in Paris on a foggy Sunday in January. Perhaps he had wanted it to be in a fine restaurant, with crystal chandeliers and white napkins draped across bone china, in the frame of a sunlit window. Of course, in those daydreams, she had always looked like Misty Bass, never Blair - maybe he had catered his wishes to suit his circumstances, as I had?
The deep chords were a little louder than the light ones, and I could not help but notice him frown as he answered me. “Of course I do.”
“Do you think anything would be very different?”
I had given the matter a starring role in many of my nighttime lullabies, and was convinced that Teddy and I would merely have a greater knowledge of how to get on each others nerves, and that we would have to put up with public displays of affection from our still very-much-in-lust progenitors. But past weekend brunches at The Palace, holiday lunches at The Empire, and weekday dinners at The Pierre (and possibly less free reign over daddy's bank account), I could not picture anything else. Daddy with a smile on his face, maman glowing like the lit fuse of a Roman candle.
Teddy and I were still Teddy and I, only I had an impeccable American accent. That part, I did not like. I was quite fond of the exotic way my tongue wrapped around English words.
It was not so much that I sensed we had not missed anything, but that I knew we had. There were so many things Teddy and Chuck had experienced together, a history of traditions maman and I had forged over the years, and only a handful of things I could say I had done with my father, with my brother. And none of those things had included my mother. It was not right, for us not to be a family. Maman had to come downstairs, and we had to sort this out.
The footsteps that fell on the landing above could not have come a moment sooner.
“Merci, que Dieu...”
I stood up and brushed down my skirt so maman would not be displeased with the sight of wrinkled fabric. Teddy tugged at his bow tie, and I fussed over his hair.
He swatted me away and I pouted indignantly. He would be in grand trouble when mère saw his weedy tufts of hair sprouting all over the place. But that was no longer my problem.
I wondered if she had taken so long because she wanted to look perfect, and then I decided it was stupid to wonder that. Of course she had taken so long because she wanted to look perfect, it was maman I was thinking about; her curls would need to be glossy, her makeup flawless, her complexion smooth and radiant, her ensemble structured and fashionably chic before she could alight the stairs and grace her children with her presence. And that was fine, because she was nervous too, I knew it - her son was waiting for her, and I knew from reading her intimate thoughts that she had been dreaming of him for 16 years, the same papa had been dreaming of me.
Their reunion would be much less dramatic, but no less important. I held my breath and waited for her to appear around the corner.
“It's about time you two got here.”
I never saw Teddy's face when the realization dawned, because I was too busy trying to keep my eyelashes from beating so furiously against each other that they obscured my vision, and my vision had to be cleared because there was absolutely no way I was seeing what my eyes were seeing. My neck would not turn, so I could not check to see if my twin's brow was equally as creased, his lips parted just slightly and on the verge of whispering a question they did not really require an answer for; I felt him tense, though, and from that I could deduce that we looked like an identical pair of thoroughly bewildered toddlers staring at a row of books. Toddler fish, because I, for one, was gaping just like one.
Toddler Dorotas, actually, because that's exactly what she had done upon seeing Teddy for the first time since he was an infant.
It was a day for gaping fish.
Daddy leaned casually against the chambranle, the barely concealed smirk on his face matched only by the amused glint in his black eyes.
Teddy managed something like “puh?” before more footsteps sounded on the tile and there she was all in one not-slow-motion-at-all instant, brown curls dripping over her shoulders. She was halfway through clipping an earring in her right earlobe, looking altogether rushed but no less meticulously coiffed. The clicking of her heels stopped when her eyes met mine, then Teddy's, and that smile bloomed as vibrant and sweet as Monsieur Monet's Les Coquelicots.
“Oh, Teddy. Ellie.” Her eyes melted, the skin around them smooth alabaster. “You kept us waiting.”