My Grape Escape (2 page)

Chapter 2

It was ten days later when, hand in hand, Franck and I walked through the frosty vineyards to meet our new nephew.  

I couldn’t believe that Franck’s younger sister Stéphanie was actually a mother. She was only
my
age, twenty-five. Until then I had been the one to sally forth into new experiences: university in Montréal, volunteering in Nepal, law school at Oxford. But she had trumped me with this motherhood thing.

Stéphanie was one of the first people I met in France; she had orchestrated that initial blind date between Franck and I. She’d been telling me for months that I needed to meet her older brother
,
but I kept protesting that I was seeing someone else. This “someone else” was actually a guy
I made out with furtively at every opportunity even though he didn’t want us to be publicly known as boyfriend and girlfriend. Still, I had my pride, dammit. Only desperate people agreed to be set up on blind dates.

Stéphanie plunged ahead regardless of my protests and organized a
soirée
at a local
discothèque
with her brother, our mutual friend Sandrine, and one or two other friends from their village. I almost didn’t show up at the appointed time on the main street of Nuits-Saint-Georges. The day before, I had come down with a sore throat and a runny nose. Seducing a total stranger was not high on my list of priorities.

Stéphanie leapt out of the car with her habitual verve, cigarette in hand. When she swung her shiny black hair out of her face and kissed me, I couldn’t mistake the mischievous expression on her face.

Franck followed closely on her heels. His cheeky smile struck me first. He seemed to know that I would have preferred to stay at home (at that time I was living with a host family right beside the church in Nuits-Saint-Georges) but he was having none of such spiritless behaviour. He hadn’t uttered a word
,
yet his eyes gleamed with a dare to join them.

I gave him the traditional
bises
on each cheek. He was cleanly shaven and his olive skin smelled vaguely of apples and wood chips. I hadn’t expected Stéphanie’s brother to be so handsome.
Devilishly
handsome. The cliché popped into my head out of nowhere, but I had to admit that with his lean muscles, chiselled facial bones and those flashing, almond shaped eyes it was accurate. My pride bolstered me up even as my heart sank. Men like Franck were invariably bad news.

I stepped back and cocked an appraising eyebrow. “I’ve heard a lot about you,” I said.

Franck’s brows flew up for a split, but gratifying, second. He laughed. “
Bon
. I guess I have a lot to live up to.”

“I guess you do.”

Franck took my hand and pulled me down into the backseat of the car beside him.

We had all changed in the past eight years. Stéphanie had dropped her prodigious smoking habit and her wild ways and was now the mother of a little boy named Tom. As for that daring girl I had been, I missed her.

Tom’s birth had been rough - a protracted labour followed by an emergency C-section. Stéphanie and Tom had just been released from the hospital that very morning. I still found it odd to be descending on new parents for a drink, but Franck insisted that it was an absolute obligation to “
arroser la naissance du petit
” with a
kir
.

“Stéph must be exhausted,” I said as we passed a tiny chapel housing only a statue of the Virgin Mary strategically positioned in the vineyards mid-way between the two villages of Magny-les-Villers and Villers-la-Faye. “Surely they just want some privacy?”

Franck cast me an odd look that made me realize, even before he spoke, that my view was the polar opposite of how a Burgundian would think.

“It’s good luck to drink to the baby’s health. They would be disappointed if nobody showed up.” Franck’s index finger twitched on his right hand – his smoking hand. He’d given up his daily package of cigarettes ten months ago but I could always tell from that finger twitch when a craving struck. “When we have kids we’ll probably be in England, so you won’t have to worry that everyone will reciprocate.”

He didn’t quite manage to hide the longing in his voice. Children. Franck was ready for them and had been for at least two years. I wanted them too - eventually - but I still had so much climbing to do before we embarked on that journey.

We walked up the gravel path to Stéphanie and Thierry’s house. The steeple of Magny-les-Villers’ church was painted silver with frost. Its bell reverberated four times as it rang the hour. The more delicate bell of the village hall echoed it a minute later.

Stéphanie opened their front door. Her green eyes sported dark circles and her hair hung limp down her back
,
but a deep sense of contentment glowed underneath the fatigue. A wave of jealousy washed over me. I longed for the bliss she was feeling – the bliss I
thought
I had earned by finishing my final exams.

I kissed both her and Thierry, stuttered out my
felicitations
, then quickly took a spot on a floor cushion in front of the roaring fireplace.

Thierry, his face red with a mixture of pride and the drinks with the numerous visitors who had apparently beaten us to the punch, poured us all a celebratory
kir.
Stéphanie brought Tom over and settled in on the couch near us by the fire to nurse him, promising we could hold and admire him after he had been fed. Thierry hopped up to stoke the fire so neither of them would be cold and Stéphanie laughed at his fussing. My own life, steeped in the stress of grades and academia, seemed so sterile in comparison.

I looked up to see Stéphanie thrusting Tom into my arms. She didn’t notice how badly my hands were shaking. I clutched my nephew against my chest, certain that I was going to drop him otherwise. He lay there like a limpet, undisturbed by the confusion roaring underneath my breastbone. His clearly etched half-moon brows were the same colour as his thatch of black hair.

“It suits you to have a baby in your arms!” Stéphanie said. “When are you going to give him a cousin?” She planted a kiss on Thierry’s mouth. Tom began to squirm and chirp like a discontented bird.

Stéphanie leaned over me and plucked him out of my arms. “Are you hungry again
petit monstre
?” I didn’t realize how much I enjoyed his warmth and weight against me until it was gone. Without Tom to distract me, the panic began to crush me beneath its heel again. Now that all the hard work of my law degree was completed, where was my contentment?

The next morning I didn’t wake up with the sudden courage to veer off the planned course of my life. By the time I went to sleep that night, however, I was – much to my surprise - forty thousand dollars richer.

It all began with a phone call to my parents. I wasn’t even calling about money. I was calling because I thought I was going crazy.

My anxiety was something I had never accepted in myself. It was not a face I wanted to show to anybody, especially not my parents, but the panic attacks had been as relentless as pounding waves over the past few days, eroding everything solid except the precipice of sanity I teetered upon. It was with a mix of desperation and dread that I picked up the receiver.

My father answered. After a few minutes of beating around the bush, I broke down and it all came out in a torrential rush: how I was sure I was going insane, how I was certain it must be deathly serious if I felt this bad, how I knew something was terribly wrong.

As I confessed my misery, cords of guilt tightened around me. My parents had supported me, not only financially but emotionally, through my two years at Oxford. I had no right to be such a mess.

Dizziness forced me to pause for breath.

“Laura,” my father said, “I have felt like you are feeling right now.”

I had already written and directed a scenario in my head where my father demanded to speak to Franck and then convinced him to haul me off to the nearest psychiatric facility; I had not expected this.

“You have?”

“Yes. In fact, I’m probably the one who is responsible for the tendency towards anxiety in your DNA.” I grabbed this like a life preserver. “Sorry about that,” he added.

“I feel like I’m going to die or something awful is going to happen. ”

“You’ve just been chronically stressed for a long time.”

“What should I do?”

 “Go to the doctor,” he said. “Tell him exactly what you just told me. Ask for some Valium and take them as prescribed. Try to relax and find a new project. Trust me, you
will
feel better. ”

My relief was so overpowering that I had to sit down on the floor. All of a sudden reality snapped back into place. Everything lost its distorted, menacing edge. It was like finding the exit from the fun house after having been trapped inside for far too long.

“You promise to go to the doctor tomorrow?” he pressed.

“I promise,” I said, even though I could already understand the temptation not to follow through. Everything seemed fine now.

“Promise to call me when you get back from seeing him?”

“I promise.”

“Oh, I almost forgot,” he said. “Your grandfather just gave forty thousand dollars to your sister to help them finish off their renovations. He wants to give you the same amount so things are fair. His cheque is here at the office waiting for you. Do you want me to invest it somewhere safe until you decide what you want to do with the money?”

“Forty thousand dollars?” I had never received such a windfall before.

“That’s right.”

“No strings attached?” That did not sound like my grandfather.

“That’s what he said,” my father answered. “But knowing your grandfather, he’ll let you know loud and clear if you put it somewhere he doesn’t like. Do you want my advice?”

“Sure.”

“Real estate. He’ll love it and it’s always a good investment.”

“An apartment in Oxford?” I wondered out loud, but even as I said it every cell in my body rebelled against the idea.

“I don’t think you’d be able to buy a dog shed for that price in Oxford, or here in Victoria for that matter. Anyway, there’s no rush. Take care of yourself first. The money isn’t going anywhere.”

I got off the phone feeling, maybe not one hundred per cent, but definitely one hundred per cent
better
than when I had picked up the receiver to call him.

“Forty thousand,” Franck murmured as we lay in bed that night, my head nestled in the curve of his shoulder. “That’s not the kind of thing that happens every day.”

It was a complete windfall. Part of me was deliriously happy, but another part felt uneasy. Such good luck made me conspicuous. It made me stick out just a little bit farther in destiny’s Rolodex. I wondered if fate would notice me now, scrutinize my card, and think, “Laura needs something nasty to happen to her to even things out.”

Behind that thought, though, an idea began to percolate.