Aix Marks the Spot Read online

  Copyright © 2020 by Sarah E. Anderson

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the author, address: [email protected]

  First Printing, 2020

  Sea Breeze Books

  ISBN:

  978-1-7344495-0-1 (Ebook – EPUB)

  978-1-7344495-1-8 (Paperback)

  978-1-7344495-2-5 (Hardback)

  Editing by Cora Corrigall

  Cover Design by Sarah Anderson

  Interior Formatting by We Got You Covered Book Design

  www.seandersonauthor.com

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Sarah Anderson

  About the Author

  For my Mom and Dad

  Who chose Provence

  You always told me that the first time I came to Provence, it would feel like coming home; instead, it felt like an exile.

  It was never supposed to be like this. You were going to be the one to show me the places you fell in love with when you first came here, all those years ago, and dad would take me to the spots he discovered as he grew up beneath the pines. But neither of you were with me now. Instead, I spent eight hours crammed into the tiny economy seat on the back of a full flight, on my way to meet a woman neither of you had spoken to for the entirety of my existence, trying not to think about Jazz as she now lived out our of summer of fun on her own.

  Having hours alone to reflect in the flight from Philadelphia – not to mention remembering every vivid detail of the accident that put me on this plane in the first place - did wonders to one’s mood. Having to wait another five in a crowded airport, all to willingly cram myself back into another metal sky canister, now that was just masochistic. To make my day even worse, I would be spending the next hour or more in a tiny car with a complete stranger who didn’t speak a lick of English.

  He said I would recognize him by the old straw hat he wore, but that had been an understatement: it was easily the rattiest panama I had ever laid eyes on. In thick jeans and a light blue shirt, it was almost as if I had never left the states. He looked exactly like a farmer from any commercial I had ever seen for fresh juice.

  He stood before an absolutely tiny red car, which I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said it hadn’t been driven since WW2. It was even more ancient than a Volkswagen bug. The cherry on top of this ever-growing cake was that it was a bright, ladybug red.

  “Jamie?” he asked, the name rolling off his tongue like a bad stereotype. He sounded like he was asking how I liked my PB&J’s - Jammy.

  “Jamie,” I said, insisting on the long ‘a’ sound, holding out my free hand to shake his, but instead he plucked the cigarette from his mouth and pressed his cheek to mine, smacking his lips, and repeated the same with the other cheek. My eyes went wide.

  “Jean-Pascal,” he took a drag from his cig, grinning wide. “Enchanté, ma belle. T’as besoin d’un coup de main?”

  “Eh…”

  “Ah, no French?” the grin faded, but only for an instant. I could understand the confusion: every email he had ever sent me I had fed through a translator and written my reply right there in the same box. Every email he or Mamie received had been in French: just not my French.

  “Help… you?” He made a gesture, as if to reach for my bag. I nodded, pressing the handle of my suitcase into his hand. He rolled it to the back of his tiny car, stuffing it into the surprisingly large trunk. He then took a long look at my carry on, shrugged, and threw it on the back seat.

  “You ‘ave ez-ry-ting?” he asked earnestly, and again I nodded. He indicated the passenger side of the car with a sweeping gesture of his hand, tossing the now used up cigarette into a nearby ashtray, because of course those were everywhere. “En route, alors.”

  He pulled out of the flashy new carpark of the Marseille airport and around the multiple roundabouts that stood between us and the highway. Surprisingly, the tiny little car was doing quite well, and roared to life on the freeway.

  “Iz not far,” he said, still keeping that jovial smile on his face. “Did you ‘ave good trip?”

  I nodded again, before realizing he couldn’t see me. A little, muffled “Oui” was all that I could muster.

  “Ah! Ze girl speaks!” he let out a light laugh. “Iz zis your first time in France?”

  “Oui, Désolé, mon Français c’est… très mal…” I blurted out, my hands digging awkwardly into the foam of the seat cushion. I didn’t want to have to talk to the stranger. After Mamie had agreed to let me stay, she still passed me on to this friend of hers for airport pickup. She was much too busy with who knows what to actually pick me up herself.

  “My English, your French…” he didn’t have to finish for me to understand where he was going. We were doing the best we could: we may have needed to translate each other’s emails, but we had still managed to find each other at the airport, so all in all, we probably were not doing as badly as we thought.

  Conversation didn’t matter anyway: within a few minutes of smooth driving on the highway, even with the wrinkled stranger in his ratty hat, I had still drifted off to sleep, rocked by the slow rhythm of the old car.

  I hadn’t been one of those girls dreaming of going to France all my life, and if I had, I would have picked Paris as my destination of choice: all those art museums waiting to be discovered, the beating heart that connected all the things that I loved. I hadn’t wanted to see the south, and certainly not in the dead of summer. From what I heard, no one had introduced this country to air conditioning yet.

  But I deserved it. I deserved every kind of punishment you could throw at me: I almost killed you, so it made perfect sense you didn’t want to see me again. I would respect that, stay out of your way as you learned to walk again. Even if it meant living with the stranger dad once called his mother.

  I was woken up by a smell, rather than a sound. My eyes slowly fluttered open to see a completely empty road, lined with fields on either sides, grasses tall and jagged in mismatched colors. Beautiful sycamore trees shaded our drive, keeping the sun from my face. Jean-Pascal was slowing the car to a stop, which didn’t bother me at first, until I realized what the white things starting to drift into my vision actually were.

  Sheep. Or goats, I suppose, I never could tell the difference. The one thing I could tell you about them is that they smell so much worse than their picture book counterparts. The stench seeped through the windows and deep into the fibers of my skin.

  The car finally stopped,
the herd of goat things now crossing the road in full force. With the air suddenly stagnant, I could feel the heat of the day cloying at my skin, beads of sweat beginning to trickle from my brow, even down my back.

  “Tu peux bouger tes fesses?” my driver threw open his car door and yelled to the herd. “M’enfin!”

  At first, I was convinced he was speaking to the sheep, until a woman appeared out of nowhere, her blonde dreadlocks stuffed into a floppy sun hat, which she tipped to Jean-Pascal as she strode up to him.

  “Salut, vieux,” she said cheerfully, before going off on some tirade in French, the two of them playing off each other like old friends. She was incredibly young to be a shepherd, looking for all intents and purposes like a backpacking college student. But I hadn’t heard any stories of college students travelling Europe with herds of sheep.

  Or goats. I still wasn’t sure about what they were just yet.

  The herd was still crossing the road as she spoke, three large dogs keeping them steady as they moved from one pasture to the next. Across from us, two cars were also waiting for them to pass, though one of them had the driver leaning out, rapidly snapping pictures with his phone.

  “Bon, à plus!” she said, waving lazily at Jean-Pascal as she turned back to her herd. The last of them had made it across the asphalt, and the other stream of cars was slowly beginning to move again. “Ciao, Poulet!”

  Jean-Pascal laughed at this, closing the car door and shaking his head. He turned to me and let out a single, proud “Woof!” before hitting the gas once again.

  “Woof?”

  “Woof!” He contorted his face, obviously concentrating hard. “Farming. Woof! Do you see?”

  I did not see, but I also did not care. All I wanted right now was a hot bath, a hot meal, and a warm bed. But as I was starting to get warmer the longer I sat in this car, I was starting to question whether those priorities were lying.

  The car was making an odd noise as it drove, an overwhelming chirp chirp chirp, and I wondered if it was all that safe. I clutched the seat and held on tighter. I was exhausted, but there was no way I could go back to sleep now.

  We drove around a small little lake, one so tiny it could have been called a pond, then across a river, this one wide enough to deserve that distinction. The fields here were lush and green, the road still shaded by large sycamores, even this far from civilization. When we finally drove through towns, they too were barely large enough to be called that. It seemed everything was done smaller in France.

  “Almost there,” said Jean-Pascal, “Bientôt.”

  He waited for a response, his eyebrows raising playfully, urging me on.

  “Be-n-toe,” I repeated, and that smile of his grew tenfold. “Soon?”

  “Bravo!” he cheered, “Je te jure, tu seras bilingue quand j’aurais fini avec toi.”

  Not knowing a word of what he just said, I just smiled and said “oui.” He seemed to like this a lot.

  I knew the fundamental basics of French from you and dad: when both your parents are French lit professors, it would be embarrassing for their daughter not to. But the second it was actually up to me to open my mouth and speak, the words dried right up. All I could say to strangers were yes, no, please and thank you, and that was it. Not a great start to a conversation.

  The farmland fell away as buildings appeared on either side of the road. Somehow, with no transition at all, we had reached a village. The houses that lined the street were ancient, their stones crumbling beneath wooden shutters and clinging ivy that made entire walls burst green with life. These alternated with modern homes, though I wasn’t quite sure if they were all that modern, just not as old looking as the others. Ancient or modern, laundry hung out the windows, cars were parked in driveways, and they gave the distinct homey feel.

  And then, as we swung around a large road, my jaw dropped. Because there, right there, just a few feet away from me, was a castle.

  It didn’t have towers or turrets as I had been imagining since I was a child. In fact, it was more like a large house, simply ancient and made entirely out of stone, and still, somehow, undeniably a castle. Trees grew around the foot of the fortress, tall and majestic, cypress reaching for the sky as the pines spread out like parasols. A flag waved at the top, striped yellow and red, which I’m pretty sure wasn’t French at all.

  Jean-Pascal slowed the car for me, all so I could gawk at the castle through the windshield. He was grinning again, and I could almost feel the excitement pulsing through him.

  “Welcome to Lourmarin,” he said, proudly, “welcome home.”

  Sadly, the castle wasn’t going to be home for the rest of the trip. Jean-Pascal got the old car moving again as people caught up behind us on the road, and he drove away from the beautiful castle, buggy chirping as we went. He looped back around, and I realized he had only driven us by the castle for my benefit. It hadn’t actually been on our way, but even in my tired state, I was glad to know it existed.

  I had only seen my grandmother in a single picture before. In it, she was in her very early twenties, her long brown hair down past her waist, a bouncing baby boy in her arms: my father. Her husband stood beside her, beaming, built like a lumberjack but dressed like a fisherman. It was the only image I had of the woman, or my grandfather for that matter, who passed away a few years after it was taken. My father didn’t have any other pictures of them in the house.

  We were now outside of the village, coming up on a gate – imposing wrought iron with rock walls on either side - and Jean-Pascal was slowing, not to mention casting more furtive glances my way, indicating without words that this was the big moment.

  The gate groaned as it slid open, and Jean-Pascal turned up the gravel path, driving along a tall rock wall as the road slowly sloped upwards. At the top of our climb was a single old stone fountain, about the size of the car itself, dry, dark under the shade of a circle of trees. Jean-Pascal rounded the fountain, parking the car facing down the hill.

  As the car shut off, the sound of chirping stayed in my ears. For a second, I wondered if my tinnitus was back: after the accident, I had heard ringing for days. Jean-Pascal opened his car door and stepped out.

  “Tu connais… do you know the chant des cigales?” He asked, waving his hands at the trees. I shook my head. “Chirp chirp chirp!”

  I hadn’t been imagining the sound, though it hadn’t been coming from the car, but from all around us, a restless, endless wail of chirping. Like the crickets on a hot summer’s night, when I visited my other grandmother in her house in the suburbs. Only this was during the day, and so loud I could barely hear myself think.

  “A cigale? What is that? Is it an alarm?”

  “Is bug,” he replied, “Ci-cah-dah, I tink!”

  Jean-Pascal grabbed my suitcase from the trunk, gesturing that I should get my bag from the back seat. We stepped out of the trees, and there it was: my grandmother’s house, the one I had heard so much about from my father as he regaled me with stories of growing up in Provence. It was much larger than I imagined: three floors - none of them straight - built back into a cliff face, surrounded by trees almost as large as it was. The outside was the same old stone as the village houses, with bright green plants clinging to the sides. The shutters were painted a faded sky blue, casting a sharp contrast against the bright pink buds that blossomed from bushes on either side. The walls looked stained in places where the stones had been replaced, like someone had spilled coffee before the paint had dried.

  A woman came flying out of the house, door slamming behind her. I didn’t even have time to see her before she scooped me up into a tight hug, her tears falling into my hair as she held me close. I dropped my bag, and, without thinking, hugged her back.

  The woman who threw my father out of his home, his entire country. The woman who had never spoken to me until two weeks ago. The woman who hadn’t so much as written a letter in the seventeen years I was alive. My Mamie.

  A Mamie who was certainly not crying like
a woman who wanted nothing to do with me.

  “Ma chérie, mais comme tu es belle!” She said between tears, holding my face in her soft hands and taking a step back to look at me. For a split second, I thought someone was making a joke, that someone had thrown wrinkles and a wig on my father. The resemblance was uncanny: I could see right where he had gotten his nose, those familiar smile lines under his eyes. But then that second flickered away, and I was back to looking at my grandmother. Her own eyes were a vibrant shade of blue to match the deep sky above us, unlike his wooden brown. Her once chocolate hair was now silver white, and unlike my gran, she hadn’t taken to dying it.

  She smoothed my hair away from my face. So that’s where I had gotten it from. It was strange to see my own straight hair on a complete stranger. Your hair had always been wavy and beautiful in way I could never replicate. She touched it delicately with her long fingers, realizing this at the same time I was.

  She stepped back, holding me out now at arm’s length, moving her hands to my shoulders but refusing to let me go. This time she took me in a little more questioningly, sweeping her eyes over my entire face, picking out my baggy grey shirt from U-Penn, and my favorite blue Levi’s which I had found in a goodwill years ago and was certain were imbued with comfort magic.

  She herself was wearing loose fitting white trousers and a black tank top, which showed off her trim figure. Another difference between me and her: I had inherited your curves while she seemed to have been plucked straight out of a patch of string beans.