The thought terrifies her. Henri is a taciturn man who had moved back to France after Anton’s mother died, retiring to a small town about thirty miles north of Marseille. She and Anton had one awful visit with him in France. It was a few years after the publication ofThe Last Cyclamen, a time when she and the rest of the world thought a follow-up novel was imminent. The month-long trip to the South of France was a chance for the twins, who were small, to spend a good chunk of time with their grandfather, as well as an opportunity for Anton to do some research on his new book. The whole trip went poorly. The crumbling seventeenth-century house that Henri lived in was not child-friendly, and Gwen spent the first two weeks chasing after the boys, barely three at the time, making sure they didn’t crack their skulls falling down stone steps or cut themselves on the rusty metal scraps in the overgrown garden. George and Rafi failed to live up to Henri’s expectations about how little boys should behave, and Gwen felt judged and embarrassed. Anton abdicated any parental responsibility on the trip, as if being in a foreign country absolved him, spending his days driving around the countryside solo “for his book.” His father had never approved of Anton’s choices—to study literature instead of something practical, to abandon his Catholic faith, to pursue a careeras a writer. Marrying Gwen was just another bad choice. Henri didn’t consider his son a serious person.
At the beginning of the third week, Gwen witnessed a blowout between the two men. The fight in the kitchen started with yelling and hurled insults. It was the sound of broken pottery that sent her scurrying outside with Rafi and George. She took them on a long walk into the village to get treats, only to arrive just as the town’s bakery and sweet shop had shut down for their customary two-hour lunch. When she returned to the house bedraggled, Anton had packed their bags. They were leaving immediately, he said.
He never told her what had led to the break with his father. He made it seem like it was a long time coming, but not about anything specific.
And now she had to phone Henri and tell him his son was dead.
Ignoring the empty wine bottle and dirty glasses, Gwen makes coffee. She is both sad and grateful that the boys aren’t here. It’s as if her mother cast a magic spell on her by suggesting she was a mess, and now she has to become one. She takes her coffee into Anton’s office and sits at his desk. It is five hours later in France. When is a good time to call and tell a man that his son is dead? Murdered? Isn’t there someone else who could do this for her?
She picks up her phone and dials her mother.
“Sweetie, I’m so glad to hear from you.”
“How are the kids?” Gwen asks.
“Wonderful. They’re at the club with Daddy.”
“They have school tomorrow.”
“I thought I would drive them home sometime tomorrow. We can break the news to them together. How does that sound? Do you think you are up to that?”
“What about school?”
“Gwen, honey, you’re not thinking straight. Their father is dead. They’re going to be missing some school.”
She feels chagrined. She had heard it was good to keep routinesgoing for children when they experience a trauma, that their whole life shouldn’t be disrupted. But maybe she had remembered that wrong. Her mother seems very confident.
“I guess you’re right. I’ll be here. I’m not going anywhere.”
“I don’t want to bring the boys back to the house and find you in your pajamas, or drunk. Not that you don’t deserve to be both things, sweetie, but we must remember to put on a brave face.”
“I need you to call Anton’s dad.”
“Henri doesn’t know yet? Gwen!”
“I couldn’t do it yesterday.”
“Give me the number, I’ll take care of it. I always liked him.”
Gwen scrolls through her phone for his number, feeling both relieved and disgusted with herself. As much as she rails against her parents, she has never really grown into a full adult, has she? She depends on them financially. Always has. She didn’t have the burden of college loans, and when she entered the working world, they subsidized her meager salary. Would she have been better off if they had told her no? She would have hated them for it at the time, but maybe she wouldn’t be where she is now. If she had developed some strength early on, she would have left Anton the first time he cheated on her, before they were even married, with another writer at his MFA program.
“I can’t find it,” she says. “I must have deleted it by accident.”
“You don’t have your father-in-law’s number?”
“I will find it and text you as soon as I do.”
“Don’t put this off, Gwen. He needs to be told.”
Gwen hangs up, trying to decide where to look for Henri’s number. The police still have Anton’s phone, but he has to have information on his dad somewhere. She opens a drawer to the right of the desk and finds a jumble of office supplies and a half-empty pack of Camels.
The one below it holds a random assortment of notebooks, magazines, stories ripped out of the newspaper. The detritus of awriter’s life, but no signs of information about Henri. She spots a photograph and pulls it out.
Her throat catches when she sees it’s a picture of the night they first met, fifteen years ago. A casual selfie taken at a party in New York City. Gwen had been living in the city, churning out press releases for a PR firm in Soho that specialized in luxury brands, when she bumped into a friend from college who was getting her master’s in fiction at Columbia. They had been in a creative writing class together, back when Gwen had flirted with the idea of becoming a writer.
But she didn’t have the confidence, and her parents insisted that she study something more practical, so she decided on marketing for her major.
Her friend invited her to a party, but Gwen almost didn’t go. It wasn’t only that the party was all the way uptown in Morningside Heights, at least thirty minutes on the subway from her apartment on a quiet street in Greenwich Village, it was the fear of seeing all these burgeoning writers embarking on a life she wished she could have had. If she only had the courage to say no to her parents. She was talented, but she had no guts.