The boys vibrate until their engines shut off one after the other, and she carries one on her back, the other on her front, huffing all the way home.
She puts them to bed upstairs and doesn’t bother to turn on the lights in the house. She likes the gloomy dim through the curtains downstairs. She also wants to steer clear of the seagulls, the way they shouted down the sunset the day before.
She looks at her empty notebook until its emptiness is seared into her brain, and then she opens one bottle of burgundy and drinks it and then opens a second, because why not.
The neighbors are having dinner in their courtyard. She imagines it full of bougainvillea, bird feeders, a long antique table. Silverware that’s heirloom silver but mismatched. They are talking about the migrants from the war in Syria. She has to concentrate: their French is rapid-fire and muffled with food.
An infestation, someone says. Someone else chuckles. Disgusting, those Arabs, do you see the way they treat their women? someone says. Stone them to death if some uncle molests them. Sell them off to be fucked by old men when they’re eight years old. Barbaric.
She finishes the second bottle and tries the wifi again but there is none, and she can’t figure out the television and the books she brought are full of Guy and she is in no mood for his bullshit tonight, not after dealing with étretat.
She’ll go to bed, she decides. She stands. But her eye falls on the door, and she sees in the glass behind the curtain the silhouette of a man. His arm is moving.
Maybe she hasn’t locked the door, she thinks. She can’t remember. She is pretty sure she hasn’t.
She holds her breath, and her body goes into a crouch behind the sofa. There is a single soft knock on the door, and she listens to the silence afterward.
She stares at the knob, a curled lever, and keeps seeing it move, but the movement is in her eyes, not in the knob; the knob stays where it is.
After a while, the man moves away. There is an elaborate whistling, sharp footsteps. The neighbors’ voices have lowered, and she can no longer understand them. She no longer wants to listen.
She locks the door, then puts one of the kitchen chairs under the handle. She shuts all the windows. Her children’s faces in the darkness are featureless pale blots. She stands over them until one complains in his sleep about the hallway light, then she crawls up the spiral to her bedroom, where there is still sun in the skylight, which she blocks out by pulling her duvet over her head.
All night she wakes with a start to see an outline in the middle of the floor, which always turns out to be her own dress drying on the back of a chair as soon as she fumbles her glasses onto her face, and at last she gives up and just sleeps with them on, and in the morning she has a pink welt from temple to ear that is tender and aches to the touch.
* * *
—
After three days, they brave the water. The cold is not terrible, at least as soon as breath returns. Refreshing! she shouts, coaxing the boys in, until they start saying Refreshing! to describe all the mildly unpleasant things they have to bear before they get to have any fun. Their evening warmish shower over the gritty tile. The mushy buttery carrots and peas she bought only because the jar was beautiful. Pasta again, as vegetarianism is tough in this town. The long wait in the morning until the boulangerie opens at dawn.
After every dip, they huddle together under the wicking travel towels she brought and wait to stop shivering.
The older boy, who has taken to reading Astérix in the tin shack that is a free library, makes a menhir of the beach stones. These stones, she learned, are called galets. She likes best the chalk ones that look like bone cracked open to reveal gray flint marrow inside.
The little boy wanders over to a girl his age, making friends as usual.
The mother lets the sun shine on her spotted skin. Every once in a while, she checks in on her younger son, then goes back to dozing. There is something not right with her head, as if in sleep a cloud had descended through her ears and now refused to burn off in the sun.
The last time she checks on the little boy, he has moved away from the girl in her silly ruffled suit and is talking to the parents.
She stands to fetch him back. The other parents are British, she hears, when she comes close. The woman is dark-haired, gamine, emphatic. The father is charming, with a jaw too big for his head. They both wear such tiny swimsuits that the mother has difficulty looking them in the face. She hasn’t spoken more than a few non-commerce-related sentences to an adult in so long that she is also having trouble coming up with something to say.
She stands there in silence for a few breaths longer than is normal.
Hullo, the father says at last. Your boy is entertaining us.
Hi. That’s him, she says. The entertainer. I hope he wasn’t bothering you.
Not at all! the dark-haired woman says. He’s a funny little one. He asked us an interesting question. He asked us if time will stop when the universe stops expanding.
The mother has to think about it. Will it? she says.
Space-time is a single fabric. Just warp and woof, the man says.
So. The answer is yes? the mother says, but the other two just smile, whitely.
The mother waits for them to say more, but when they don’t, she says, Weird question for a four-year-old, for sure. I wonder where it came from.
Oh, the father says. I told him that I’m an astrophysicist. Four-year-olds tend not to know what that means, so I just said that I study space. Stars and black holes and things, I said.
I don’t know what an astrophysicist does, the mother says jokingly, but the couple look at each other. Then she wants to say that, oh, Christ, of course she knows, the condescension Europeans shower on Americans is not always warranted; she’s a novelist, which is tantamount to being a one-woman card catalogue for useless knowledge. She could teach them a thing or two. But she knows she’d sound even more pathetic to these two silky people than she already has. The three adults watch in silence as the children go back to their game, which involves using gray stones to smash the chalk off white ones.
She thinks she could perhaps salvage the situation; she has ideas of being invited over to their house for teatime, scones and clotted cream and the children running around their garden in search of something ineffable—ghosts, fairies, the last gasps of cultural imperialism—and so she introduces herself and says that she and her boys are in Yport because she is researching Guy de Maupassant for a writing project.
A writer, for a certain layer of society, is catnip. Apparently not this layer. They don’t offer her their names. Instead, the father says, Oh, is that it. We were wondering how you ever came to be here. We’ve holidayed in Yport for ten summers straight and had yet to meet an American until today.
Not missing much, the mother jokes. But he says, Indeed!
She gives up. She calls the little boy’s name and says it is time to go up to the house for lunch. He hands his hammer stone to the little girl, who takes it gravely.
You know, the other woman says in a low voice, tenting her eyes with her hand against the sun. Your little boy seems a bit anxious. Of course, you must be aware.
Anxious? the mother says, surprised; her youngest son is so full of light. Not this one, she says. She gestures at her other boy, scowling in concentration, his stone sculpture larger than he is. I mean, the older one, for sure, but this little guy’s pretty happy, she says.
Oh? the father says. You know him best. It’s simply that he asked us what would happen if a tsunami came in the middle of the night.
We said we hoped very much a tsunami wouldn’t come! the other woman says.
Then we explained that most of the houses are well above the average sea-surge level and that in all likelihood, only the boardwalk and carousel and some of the restaurants would be underwater, the father says. But nobody lives at sea level, we said. So nobody would be hurt.