Page 167 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

It is Thierry who concerns her. Thierry, who perhaps on some dark primordial

level, senses that he was unexpected, unintended, uninvited. Thierry is prone to
wounding silences and narrow looks, to fussing and fiddling whenever Pari asks
something of him. He defies her for no other reason, it seems to Pari, than
defiance itself. Some days, a cloud gathers over him. Pari can tell. She can
almost see it. It gathers and swells until at last it splits open, spilling a torrent of
cheek-quivering, foot-stomping rage that frightens Pari and leaves Eric to blink
and smile miserably. Pari knows instinctively that Thierry will be for her, like
the ache in her joints, a lifelong worry.
She wonders often what sort of grandmother Maman would have made.
Especially with Thierry. Intuitively, Pari thinks Maman would have proved
helpful with him. She might have seen something of herself in him—though not
biologically, of course, Pari has been certain of that for some time. The children
know of Maman. Isabelle, in particular, is curious. She has read many of her
poems.

“I wish I’d met her,” she says.
“She sounds glamorous,” she says.
“I think we would have made good friends, she and I. Do you think? We
would have read the same books. I would have played cello for her.”

“Well, she would have loved that,” Pari says. “That much I am sure of.”
Pari has not told the children about the suicide. They may learn one day,
probably will. But they wouldn’t learn it from her. She will not plant the seed in
their mind, that a parent is capable of abandoning her children, of saying to them
You are not enough. For Pari, the children and Eric have always been enough.
They always will be.
In the summer of 1994, Pari and Eric take the children to Majorca. It’s
Collette who, through her now thriving travel agency, organizes the holiday for
them. Collette and Didier meet up with them in Majorca, and they all stay

together for two weeks in a beachfront rental house. Collette and Didier don’t
have children, not by some biological misfortune but because they don’t want
any. For Pari, the timing is good. Her rheumatoid is well controlled at the time.
She takes a weekly dose of methotrexate, which she is tolerating well.
Fortunately, she has not had to take any steroids of late and suffer the
accompanying insomnia.
“Not to speak of the weight gain,” she tells Collette. “Knowing I’d have to
get into a bathing suit in Spain?” She laughs. “Ah, vanity.”

They spend the days touring the island, driving up the northwest coast by the
Serra de Tramuntana Mountains, stopping to stroll by the olive groves and into