Chapter Six
Maggie knelt beside her sister and put her hand to her face, pulling back the hair that fell in filthy dreadlocks around it.
Dear God. Elise. Alive!
She gripped her sister’s shoulders and the face—the haggard and lined face puckered into a cowering visage of pain—cried out. Maggie released her. “Elise,” she whispered. “It’s me, Maggie.”
She watched as her sister struggled to recognize her.
“Maggie?”
Maggie gently touched her shoulder again. She looked closely into her face. The resemblance was so strong. The voice was right. But her face…her face looked like a police artist’s rendition of what Elise might look like at fifty. It was lined and haggard, as if it had formed every exaggerated expression of woe and mirth and had no elasticity left. But her eyes were the worst. Protruding in their sockets, they looked at Maggie with hunger and despair.
“Is it really you?” Elise asked, a shaking, withered hand reaching up as if to touch Maggie’s face.
Maggie took her hand and felt its warmth, felt it trembling. A surge of joy hit her as she began to slowly pull Elise to a sitting position on the pavement and the reality of her new world began to sink in.
Elise was alive! She was home!
“I’m taking you home, Elise,” Maggie said, her voice full of emotion to hear the words come out of her mouth, to imagine the miracle that could allow the words to be true. She envisioned her mother’s bliss to see Elise back from the dead, saw little Nicole running to Elise with happy shrieks of “Maman! Maman!” Thought of her father weeping with joy and gratitude for the gift of second chances.
She helped her sister to her feet and moved her to the passenger side of her car. Elise was so thin. She walked like an old woman. Her clothes smelled as if she lived in them.
Maggie had so many questions for her but she forced herself to hold back.
How did you get here? Are you still with Gerard? Why did the Cannes police think you were dead? Who was that woman in the morgue?
Maggie bit back her questions and focused on getting Elise safely to her apartment—concentrated instead on the ecstatic videos playing in her head of the tearful, joyful reunions to come.
Maggie pulled the seatbelt around Elise as if she were a child. Her sister slumped against the door and quickly fell to sleep. Worried that she should take her straight to an emergency room—no telling what the bastard Gerard has drugged her with!—Maggie decided that what Elise needed first was rest and a bath and to be safe. She looked around the parking lot to confirm they were alone and that Gerard wasn’t watching them, ready to pounce and snatch Elise away. She started the car and drove slowly back to her apartment building, her hand on Elise the whole way there. As she drove, with Elise softly snoring in the passenger’s seat, Maggie’s mind was awhirl with feelings of joy and worry. She touched Elise’s hand, limp in her lap, and knew that whatever was wrong with her, she and her family would fix it.
Elise awakened long enough to shuffle down the hallway of Maggie’s apartment building and collapse onto her couch. Maggie’s plans of helping her with a bath and a decent meal evaporated when it became clear that Elise was semi-comatose on the couch and likely to remain so for several hours. Maggie covered her with a blanket, made herself a cup of coffee, and sat in the armchair in the living room to wait.
Maggie sat in her living room, a bulky cardigan pulled around her. The heat of the Southern night had given way to a chilled moistness. Her mind struggled with conflicting ideas and urges. Twice she’d nearly picked up the phone to call her parents, and twice, for reasons she couldn’t name, she’d stopped herself. She rubbed her arms in agitation, as if to bring a surge of warmth back to them, and looked at her sister on the couch, sleeping peacefully.
Now that she’d had a good couple of hours to process the sheer magic of having her sister back from the dead, Maggie found herself questioning how it had happened. Are she and Gerard back together? Did they travel here together? Is she here for Nicole, or for money from the family? Was she a part of Gerard’s ploy to get the five thousand tonight?
Maggie felt a surge of annoyance at herself for that last thought, but it had to be considered.
No one in the family had heard from Elise in three years. Who knew what she was capable of now?
A sound from the couch snapped Maggie’s attention back to the present. Elise struggled to sit up. Maggie watched her look around the room in confusion and then croak out the word “water.”
Maggie jumped up and grabbed two bottles of water from the fridge. She set one down on the coffee table in front of Elise and handed her the other one.
“Hey, sis,” she said softly. “Remember me?”
Elise glanced at Maggie as if not at all surprised to see her. She took the water. Her lips were cracked and she drank as if she’d not quite mastered the skill. Water trickled out of her mouth and down onto her shirtfront. When she finished, she looked at Maggie, her eyes filled with such pain that Maggie’s throat closed and she worked to control her emotion.
Oh, Elise, what happened to you?
“Little sis,” Elise said as she leaned back into the couch. She looked around the apartment but said nothing more.
“How do you feel, Elise?” Maggie didn’t know what else to say. It seemed too early to ask the one million questions she had buzzing around her brain.
Elise licked her lips. She spoke carefully, as if unused to talking in English. “I’m a junkie. I don’t feel too good.”
The words stabbed at Maggie’s heart. Other people, Elise. God, other people.
Elise rubbed her hands across her face then looked around the room again. “You’ve got a knack for color, Maggie. I’m surprised.”
“Elise, can you tell me what happened? You were out of touch for so long. And God, please explain to me about Gerard. I guess you know Nicole is with us?”
Elise continued to stare at the room as if she hadn’t heard Maggie. “Your bedroom at home was always so...orderly. Everything in its place.” She shrugged sleepily and reached for the other water bottle. Maggie picked it up and handed it to her.
“But no style. No color or flair or...life.”
Maggie wondered if Elise was really aware that they were in the present, not back in their teen years. “And your room was always a shambles,” she said.
“Full of life.”
“Yeah, teeming with it.” Maggie smiled nervously at her and Elise smiled back.
Elise, back from the grave. Maggie suddenly realized she had spent a good deal of the past month mourning the loss of her sister. Her tears over losing Laurent had become indistinguishable from her grief over losing Elise, too. Seeing now how the reason for that grief was never true made her feel off-balance—as if anything were possible.
If Elise can be alive when we all knew she was long gone, anything can happen.
“I loved him,” Elise said, and Maggie realized she was answering one of her questions. Elise sat with the bottle of water in one hand and gazed out into the night through the French doors that faced Peachtree Street. Maggie knew she was seeing Gerard in her mind’s eye, and she was seeing the girl she was when she met him.
“From the moment I laid eyes on him, I needed him.”
Elise dragged her eyes back to Maggie’s face. “All you see is the monster who could dump me out of a car.” She shrugged. “He was a loving father, too, in the beginning. Nicole was born with a heroin addiction. I can still hear her screaming, not for food or to be changed...” She looked at Maggie and smiled weakly. “But because she needed a fix.” She sipped her water.
Who are you? Suddenly, Maggie wanted to leave, not to have to hear everything she knew Elise would eventually tell her. Not to have to keep it all from her mother through the happy times, warm times, close moments that she was sure were still ahead of them. To listen to Elise—and she had to listen to her—was to help her keep her awful secrets.
“H
ow did you get here? Did you come with Gerard? I thought you two were finished.”
“Is anybody ever really finished?” Elise shrugged. “I scored the money for the tickets. But he didn’t have to come with me. I think he was delivering me back to my family. To your care.”
“Maybe he thought he could humiliate you this way. Or us.”
Elise just smiled as if she hadn’t heard Maggie.
“How did you score the money?” Visions of Elise wheeling and dealing with nefarious underworld characters on Mediterranean piers and ports for the price of cocaine and smack sprang into Maggie’s head.
“I may not look like much to you now, Maggie, I know.”
My God, she sold herself. Maggie nodded to indicate she understood.
“You really don’t want to hear where I’ve been, do you, little sister?”
The tears formed at the rim of Maggie’s lashes. “I do, Elise,” she said. But her heart whispered, no.
“When I first met Gerard,” Elise said, burrowing into a little nest of cotton throws and satin pillows that studded Maggie’s couch, “it was on the Rue de la Paix. Can you believe that? You know, the café where they say if you sit there long enough you’ll see someone you know? Well, I saw him and I knew.”
Maggie settled back into her chair. Let her talk. Let her tell.
They met on the last day of summer the year she turned twenty-nine. They fell into bed that same afternoon, and before long their world became a spin of activities belonging to the province of lovers. They visited the flea markets on Saturday mornings, fingers intertwined tightly, huddled against the drizzle of the winter days. They claimed quiet, early-afternoon cafés as their special snuggeries, slept late every morning in Elise’s tiny one-bedroom flat on the Left Bank near Notre-Dame, and before the gold had left the autumn skies to reflect the famous green-gray ceiling of Paris in winter, Elise had stopped attending classes at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts…and had stopped writing or answering letters from home.
Elise had found a world, finally, that understood her. A world she had defined but never knew existed. Her new world accepted that grime and the absence of care gave her wardrobe the desired patina that all her painstaking fashion planning could not. She learned to let go. The people in her new society used needles—sliver-thin, beautiful spines that pierced her unpocked flesh in an experience that made her high school pot smoking look sophomoric and ridiculous.
Because Elise was an artist she saw the world differently, and she was finally living in a world that understood her, encouraged her and inspired her. And Gerard applauded louder than anyone. Gerard, with the doe-brown eyes that spoke love even in the throes of a crack-induced half-coma, even when he was hurting her. Because that was a part of her new world too. To be truly wretched, to be honestly and completely in despair, was a feeling of pleasure to Elise that she found nearly unbearable. And she sought this drug, the singular intensity of this high, more earnestly than any other. And Gerard, beautiful, sensitive, loving Gerard was the only pusher in town for this particular brand of agony.
She used to believe, long after she stopped painting and all her brushes and canvasses and oils were gone, that if she had never gone to Paris, never met Gerard, she would simply have walked through her life in America, in Atlanta, like some servomechanism or automaton going through the motions of eating, and painting and loving and dreaming...with some essential core inside her faulty or nonoperable. When she thought of how closely she’d come to living a pedestrian life of appointments and movie dates and Sunday dinners—a life like Maggie’s—she trembled.
“I’m sorry about Mom and Dad.” Elise picked at the cheese sandwich Maggie placed before her on the coffee table. “I thought I was doing them a favor by dropping out. I had this idea that now they could just mourn me and get on with their lives.” She made a gesture in the air of wrapping up a box. “All the embarrassing questions and stuff, just tidy it up, cry some, and make it go away.”
Maggie looked at her and licked her lips. Your little experiment in pain management just about killed Mother.
“You don’t remember them very well, I guess.”
“Ah, that must be it. Very good sandwich, little sis. I don’t usually have much of an appetite. Perhaps you’ll change me in that way.”
“Why did stop writing or calling?”
“I don’t know. Just didn’t think of it, I guess.”
Maggie felt a flash of anger at Elise’s titanic selfishness. She caught a glimpse of Elise, not caring, wrecking everyone’s lives that she came into contact with—a glimpse of the Elise they all knew so well.
“How about Nicole?” Maggie said evenly. “Did you ever think about what was good for her? The kid’s a basket case. She doesn’t even speak.”
“She doesn’t speak English, I’m afraid, darling.”
She doesn’t speak anything, Elise. Not English, not French, not baby-talk.”
“That’s not true. Nicole is a normal child—”
“She was born a dope addict!”
“That was years ago. She’s a normal little girl now. She talks as much as—”
Maggie leaned forward toward her sister. “Elise, I know you love Nicole, but she is not normal. You’ll see for yourself soon.”
Elise didn’t answer, her Mona Lisa smile firmly back in place.
Maggie cleared away the sandwich dishes and carried them into the kitchen. She caught a glimpse of herself in the hall mirror as she returned to the living room and was surprised to see how fresh and relaxed she looked. She didn’t feel that way at all.
“The woman whose body I identified in the Cannes morgue,” Maggie said, “she was found wearing your charm bracelet.”
“Oh, really? Did you get it back? That’s worth money. The bracelet is eighteen-carat gold.”
“No. They said I would—just like they said I’d get the body to bring home. I’m not even sure whose ashes they gave me.”
“Oh, well.”
Maggie decided not to mention the fact that the woman everyone thought was Elise had been murdered. “My question, Elise, is how did she get your bracelet? Did you know her?”
Elsie seemed to concentrate in thought for a moment. “It might have been Delia. I think I might have sold her the bracelet last year some time.”
“You sold your bracelet?”
“How nice it must be to never feel hunger or have to think about selling your precious memories to feed your child.”
“Please don’t give me that shit, Elise. You chose to walk away from this family and the constant stream of funding you know Mom and Dad would’ve shot your way so that you could instead sell a sentimental charm bracelet for peanuts.”
“Oh, I see you haven’t been keeping up with our story and how the world turns, darling.” Elise rearranged the blankets around her knees and Maggie could see the rest and the food had strengthened her. “Dad cut me off three years ago. Goodness. Now I see why you’re so annoyed with me. Are you sure he really wants me back? Be kind of hard to align his version of the truth with mine, don’t you think?”
“Dad cut you off?”
“It was a very dramatic my-way-or-the-highway kind of speech as I recall.”
“I didn’t know,” Maggie said. She sank down on the couch next to Elise.
“It doesn’t matter now, darling,” Elise said with a heavy sigh. “I’m here to get my baby back. And that will make everything all better for everyone.” Her eyes looked clear and focused, and within seconds the two sisters were in each other’s arms.
“I missed you so much,” Maggie said into Elise’s shoulder.
“I know. I missed you, too.” Elise held her tightly. They sat that way and rocked for a few moments before Maggie pulled back.
“When do you want to go over there? I can’t wait for them to see you.”
Elise shook her head. “Let me get myself cleaned up first.” She gestured to her clothes. “I want to present myself to them, you know? Not like this.”
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Maggie nodded uncertainly.
“And Maggie, darling, I’ll need to score some stuff, sweetheart. I’ll need you to help with that.” Then, seeing the expression on Maggie’s face, “Just enough to get through seeing them again. After that, I’m kicking it, okay? I promise. But I can’t see them while I’m messed up, right?”
“Nicole will be so happy to see you,” Maggie said.
“I expect she’s changed a lot since I saw her last. It’s been nearly a year, you know.”
“Mother’s been working with her.”
“I can’t imagine a better person to be mothering her. Meanwhile, I’m exhausted.” She rubbed her scraped elbow from Gerard’s dumping and grimaced. “Body-worn, jet-lagged and ready to sleep.”
“Will you be ready to see Mother and Dad by this weekend, do you think?”
“That should be fine.” Elise yawned and stood up from the couch. “You really don’t have to give up your bed to me, Maggie. The couch would be fine. God knows, I’ve slept on worst.”
“Don’t be silly,” Maggie said, as she stood up, brushing her trembling hands against her jeans. “I’ll get an extra blanket for you.” Elise shuffled across the floor to the bedroom door and then turned.
“Find me something pretty to wear and I’ll get my hair cut or something...”
“Combed?”
Elise laughed. “It’s a thought, anyway. “
Maggie snapped off the living room lamp and went to the hall closet for extra blankets.
“Oh, Maggie?”
“Yes, Elise?”
“See if you could find something with some color to it, would you? Maybe pink? I’m so sick of black I could die.”