Sylvie’s head appears as she climbs the last few steps and emerges onto my rooftop garden.
“I thought you were here.” She smiles and I scoot over and pat a spot next to me on the small marble bench. Sylvie sits and breathes out a sigh.
“I wanted to see the garden,” she says, looking around her with wide eyes. “C’est incroyable. I knew I could have a box if I wanted, but, ah, well . . .” She gives that totally French shrug that says so much without any words and smiles at me.
“Then it’s good that I came here to Nice,” I say slowly, in French, still whispering, always struggling to get the sounds to behave as they fight to get out of my mouth. “I help you learn new things.”
“Absolument,” Sylvie says, beaming. She puts her arm around me and squeezes my shoulders. For a few moments, we say nothing else. We simply sit in a companionable silence, only broken by the twitter of birds all around and the muted rush of traffic below.
“Ma chère,” Sylvie begins, pulling her arm away. “I want to talk to you about something.”
Coldness settles into the pit of my stomach and everything around me is devoid of all sound, as if the world is holding its breath, waiting to hear what Sylvie will say. I hold my own breath; terrified I know what her words will be. I remember the way she looked at her phone yesterday. She knows I lied about being an artist, and I have no idea what I can possibly say to her to explain.
“I, eh, ben, I want to say, we, uh,” Sylvie says in English, clearly struggling. Finally, she shrugs and says, “I must speak in French, d’accord?”
I nod, swallowing.
She begins, slowly at first, but speeds up right away. Her face is serious. I listen, my hands twisted together, trying to understand. The exchange students who stay with her are artists who come to study painting as well as to learn the French language. Sylvie was thrilled by the photos of the artwork I’d emailed with my application for the exchange program, but now my work is so different. I am hesitant, not confident as a painter.
“And so, you see, Rosie, why I wonder if something is wrong,” Sylvie concludes, her brow furrowed.
She’s worried? I stare into her face, hardly daring to hope. She doesn’t think I’m lying, but that something is wrong. I can work this.
“I, well . . .” my words trail off as I struggle to form them. Sylvie reaches out to squeeze my arm.
“Problems with your mother?” she asks.
Relief engulfs me. The world that was so silent a moment ago suddenly comes to life. I hear birds chirping and whistling all around; the breeze off the ocean rustling the leaves of the surrounding trees.
I nod, and Sylvie’s furrowed brow smooths.
“I wondered. She calls you so often, sends you messages all the time. She does not want her little girl so far away, I think.” Sylvie rises and walks about the garden, trailing her fingers along a dark green vine. Then, she whirls to face me. “I will call her, and say that you are well, and happy. That’s a good idea, no?” she says hurriedly, her face hopeful.
I leap to my feet and blurt, “No!”
Sylvie’s eyebrows shoot up to her hairline. My mind races. What do I say? Sylvie will need to know why I don’t want to go home at the end of the summer, and I’ve already been trying to figure when and how to tell her everything. I try to come up with the right words, but I’m stuck. I look helplessly into Sylvie’s dark eyes.
“It is not unusual that girls your age do not get along with their parents,” she finally says, slowly, as though she’s thinking about each word. “Things are difficult between you and your mother?”
My mood rises. She’s given me a starting point.
“Things are bad. Very, very bad,” I say.
“What do you mean?” Sylvie asks, her brow once more puckered.
I measure my words carefully. “She never lets me do anything,” I begin, then instantly regret it. I sound like any teenager, whining about parents who won’t let her go to a concert five hundred miles away or stay out late on a school night. It’s not like that at all.
“She worries about you,” Sylvie says, moving closer, “because she loves you.” She brushes a strand of hair off my face and tucks it behind my ear.
“She worries about me all the time,” I begin, desperate to find the right words. “Morning, noon, and night.”
“She is a mother, ma chère,” Sylvie says. “Even when my Ansel was grown, I thought about him all the time. You never stop loving your baby.” She looks down, and the expression on her face is so sad it hurts me. I close my eyes and turn away. How can I explain that my mother’s love for me isn’t like Sylvie’s love for Ansel? Mom’s love is a kind of prison that I have to escape from. My life has always been one of confinement. Locked doors and bars on windows. Ansel’s life was one of freedom. Sylvie and émile never tried to keep him wrapped in cotton and tucked carefully away. There’s no lock on the outside of his bedroom door.