The Cradle

“Stop her,” we are all crying at the same time.

“Where’s her daughter?”

“For God’s sake, call an ambulance!”

Everyone has something to add, but no one acts.

By the time she takes the stairs and leaves the building, fifteen of us, her neighbors, have gathered. We’ve always followed her with our eyes, spurred on by that mixture of envy and admiration. But this time, we walk slowly behind her, now silent, as if we’re afraid to break into her trance. She doesn’t see us. There’s not even that little wave of the hand she usually offers as she walks by. Not even the smallest nod of her head. No acknowledgement that she knows we are here, the expat community that has adopted the Cote d’Azur as its home.

She was a beauty even twenty years ago at 65 when she first moved to this marina on the Mediterranean coast. Once she explained. The sea called her with a voice full of birdsong and ship-soundings, and even with the occasional dolphin’s laugh. She had decided to throw away the land where she’d toiled long enough, collect her retirement and her dead husband’s money. It was by the blue-milk sea that she belonged.

If you saw her in those days, you’d fall in love—there was no other word—with her smile and her still athletic body in the two-piece suit. As soon as she reached the beach, she’d discard the top and let her breasts breathe, she would laugh, until they turned the color of the sun, the nipples blending into uniform bronze. You watched her lying on the rocky beach, ignoring the stones that stabbed all the others, making us dance like discarded rag dolls as we tried to cross them. They had rolled from the Alps, she once informed us. Broken and torn from the mountains themselves, and transported here by the rivers. Or cracked from those hidden peaks deep under the water, solid granite until the currents and time polished them into rounded galets. Each day she would glide over the stones into the turquoise water. To swim for hours.

Even twenty years later, she mesmerized us still—our own mermaid—who took to the water even in late November while the rest of us nursed our summer tans in the cafés that always faced south. Where we sipped our espresso and prayed for that phoenix summer to return. Then last month, she suddenly stopped leaving her apartment, her door opening only to admit her daughter—or her nurse.

On this day, even as the real estate agent lists her apartment in the glossy magazine, she surprises us all. Unwelcome and dangerous, the odor of her sickness slides under the doors of her neighbors.

“What’s happening? What’s that smell?” we all demand as if searching for the source of a fire that threatens to burn us away. To reduce our lives to ash.

We’re in the corridor, frightened and confused. We see her in the doorway, holding onto the frame and straightening her back. Her hair is gone; only white wisps rise like a premature halo. A disposable diaper stretches coquettishly across her angular hips. Her breasts are flattened against her ribs.

At the bottom of the stairs, she whispers, “Come with me,” and we cling to each other as if she could drown us with her siren song.

“Stop her,” the others cry. But they don’t move.

And she doesn’t listen. She has heard the sea calling and she won’t be late.

We watch from a distance as she sits on the stones. As she digs a kind of nest for herself. She sighs when she lies down—her arms stretched over her head, her legs out straight. We think she is sleeping. Then, with a quick gesture, she tears the diaper away, the sound of ripping tape against the plastic mixes with the cicadas’ death song in the pines. She turns her head towards the waves that roll the stones around like cherished marbles in a child’s metal box. She is naked now.

“Everyone will see,” the neighbors cry. Some turn their heads.

“She has gone mad.”

We wipe the tears away from our eyes. It’s the Mistral, we tell ourselves, that devilish north wind that makes us weep so.

We will talk for weeks. For years we will remember.

How she lies there all afternoon. How white the diaper is against the grey and black stones. How the sun finds her even with clouds crowding the sky. How the wind is moaning.

She sleeps for hours without moving. Finally, minutes before her daughter is found, before anyone has the courage to call others for help, we watch her diaphragm stop. We breathe out one long, last sigh with her.

And won’t we say later that we could feel the wind take her, lift her gently and carry her across the waves? No one will believe us. They will only blame us for not saving her. Disgraceful, her daughter spits in our direction.

But we know we’ve given our neighbor what she wanted. And she has thanked us. For the shape of her body lingers after months—a human shadow printed deeply on those stones.