Page 98 of Pieces of Ash
“I’ll be just downstairs,” he says.
“Can you stay, Julian?” I whisper. “Just for tonight?”
He gives me a half smile and nods, placing his phone face down on the bedside table. His fingers slide to Tig’s journal and rest on Marilyn’s smile for a moment. “Your diary?”
“No,” I say, picking it up. “My mother’s. I’m getting to know her.”
Julian adjusts the pillow behind him, then sits back, beckoning me to join him. I plump another pillow and put it beside his, leaning back beside him.
“You didn’t know her?” he asks.
It’s nice, sitting side by side like this, though part of me misses the intimacy of half lying on him, with my cheek resting on his chest, over his heart.
I shrug. “She was a lot of different people. I don’t think I knew her very well at all.”
“I didn’t know my mother very well,” Julian says with a sigh. “But my dad was amazing.”
I’m warmed by the tone of his voice, full of love and admiration. “Was he?”
“Yeah. He was a good man, you know? He’d listen to these old French records—this music from the sixties called yé-yé.”
“Yé-yé?”
“Mm-hm. It was sort of this mix between English rock and, I don’t know, maybe…bossa nova? Soft, but still with a lightrock beat. Mostly women singers. Started in France and swept through Europe. There was this one singer, Françoise Hardy. She had this voice like butter.” He chuckles softly. “My father used to say, ‘Elle est si belle qu’elle me brise le coeur.’”
“What does that mean?”
He looks down at me. “She is so beautiful, she breaks my heart.”
I know he’s translating his father’s words, but I also sense that he’s speaking to me. The expression in his eyes is so tender, so intense, I can’t bear it, and I look away. I put Tig’s diary back on the bedside table and lean my head on Julian’s shoulder. I like listening to him. And it feels safer than looking directly into his eyes.
“Tell me m-more,” I say through a yawn.
“Hmm. She sang this song called ‘Dans le monde entier’—‘All Over the World.’ And this song…it was beautiful. Sad and beautiful. My dad played it all the time after my mom took off.”
“Do you have it?” I ask. “On your phone?”
He reaches over me for his phone, swiping at the screen a couple of times, and suddenly the darkness of the room is filled with the low, soft, mellow voice of a woman singing in French. And Julian’s right. It’s so beautiful, I just want to stay here forever, leaning my head on his shoulder, hidden from the world, in a beautiful farmhouse, in the middle of the nowhere, with a sixty-year-old love song playing just for us.
“What’s she saying?” I murmur.
“She’s apart from someone she loves, and she wonders if he’s forgetting about her. It’s breaking her heart.”
“Did your mother break your father’s heart?”
“I don’t know,” he says, pressing his lips to my head and kissing my hair. “Maybe.” He sighs. “It’s sad.”
I’m not sure if he’s talking about the song or his parents. Or maybe, it occurs to me, he’s talking about himself too.
“Have you ever loved someone like that?” I ask.
It’s an incredibly personal question, but there’s something about being here with Julian that makes me feel like there aren’t any rules. We say what we need to. We ask what we want to. I know he will answer me honestly.
“No,” he says. “I haven’t. You?”
“No,” I whisper, feeling unexpectedly pleased by his answer. “Not yet.”
The song ends, and Julian swipes the screen before reaching over me again to place it on top of Tig’s journal.
