“Okay. I’ll make some dal,” Jolie said. Newly married to Gabriel Delange, the famous chef at whose restaurant Layla and Matt had eaten the night before, she looked and even smelled like something sweet and buttery fresh out of the oven, her golden-brown hair pulled up in a ponytail.
“The soup’s almost ready,” Tante Colette said. Its scents of herbs and chicken broth filled the kitchen.
“The cookies are coming,” Allegra said, busy blending butter and sugar with a wooden spoon. “Those are good therapy.” She gave Layla a brightly inquisitive glance. “Why do you need therapy? I love pretending I’m a therapist.”
“You can take some of the soup back with you for Matthieu, in case he needs therapy, too, right about now. He responds very well to being fed,” Colette said, double-checking it on the stove.
“Does he?” Propped against the wall in one of the kitchen chairs, Layla smiled down at her guitar strings, sliding her fingers lower for a deep, deep bass, trying to nurse a growl out of that guitar. “You know, I’ve seen all kinds of homegrown therapy in my line of work—from mushrooms and marijuana to incense and yoga—and I think chocolate chip cookies and soup is my favorite. Reminds me of my mom and grandparents.” With her grandmother, it had been more baklava and ma’amoul, but her mother had loved making chocolate chip cookies with her. Maybe Layla could get a phone today and call her mom. She hadn’t talked to her since she’d drowned her own phone. Maybe Matt had WiFi she could hook up to and Skype.
If he didn’t, he’d probably figure out a way to fix that for her. She smiled, caressing that deep bass sound.
“Your own choice of therapy seems like a good one, too.” Colette nodded to her guitar.
Now it was Layla’s turn to snort. “This isn’t therapy, this is the problem. I’m always sticking my heart out there, bare-assed naked for everyone else to spank. I hate it.”
“Oh, so that’s why you do it,” Colette said thoughtfully. “I’ve known some people like that. Who always do what they hate the most. It’s a powerful force, masochism.”
Okay, now she sounded as if she really did need therapy. “I don’t hate it all the time,” Layla admitted. “I mean, I love it when I’m doing it—writing the song, performing the song. It’s afterward, when I realize how damn naked I am among a crowd of clothed people passing judgments on me, that I always…I don’t know…wish I was better at keeping covered up.” Maybe that was why she had started feeling so dried up, unable to produce.
Maybe you’re just not getting enough fertilizer, the thought whispered through her brain. Not giving yourself time to pull in enough nutrients and life between blooming periods.
Like…those plants of Matt’s. There’s all this other stuff to them besides their blooms. Whole bushes of existence. If they tried to be all bloom, all year, they wouldn’t be anything at all.
“Yes,” Colette agreed matter-of-factly, stirring her soup. “The people who don’t do things and don’t take risks are always much safer than those who do.”
Layla looked a moment at the old, old woman who had fought against terrible evil and snuck children across the Alps, and who had probably known plenty of people who ducked their heads and let it happen while they tried to keep safe.
It was kind of…strengthening, to know that this old Resistance hero identified her as one of the people who was willing to take risks. Although Layla strongly suspected that if she herself had had to live in this country during World War II, she would have crawled into a cave and curled up in a fetal position until it was all over. There was courage, and then there was…courage.
She wondered if there was any song in the world that could ever capture her great-grandmother and her adoptive great-grandmother and that kind of heart.
“Have you thought about stopping?” Jolie asked.
“Well…I came here to take a break,” Layla said. To escape from pressure, but she was kind of embarrassed to say that in front of the adoptive great-grandmother whose idea of pressure was the Gestapo. “Sheltered by a valley, far from any media, no Internet—even surrounded by medieval walls.” She gestured to the stone of the house to suggest the walls beyond. “And I still found a way to stick my heart out there naked.” She frowned down at her guitar and slid her fingers back up to higher notes. “That’s what I mean—I have a problem. Who does that to herself?”
Allegra tasted some of her own cookie dough. “Maybe you felt safe.”