When asked how she became a restorer, she gave different answers depending on her mood. Once I heard her say, “When I was young I worked for a very rich woman who liked to break beautiful things.” Which sounded like the opening line of a scary fairy tale.
My mother was similarly elusive when pressed for specifics about anything having to do with her life before she came to Paris. I knew only that she was adopted as a baby by a couple named Buddy and Flo and grew up in the woods outside what she referred to as a “flyspeck of a village” called Rangeley. Not knowing flyspeck meant fly shit, I asked her if it was “nice.” She answered with a smile and a hug and told me stories about the Adirondacks: lakes and waterfalls with Indian names, forests carpeted with wild orchids called lady’s slippers, black bears with a taste for blueberries, and a pet crow named Jimmy.
I pestered her to tell me more about this remote paradise I pronounced “Rang-e-lee”; demanded to know why Buddy and Flo never came to visit like my friends’ grandparents. And why, on those rare occasions when my grandmother Flo called, was Grandpa Buddy never with her? And why did my grandfather always ring up on a pay phone? I can still hear the clatter and clink of quarters going into the box every three minutes. My mother told me her parents didn’t have much money.
When I volunteered to forgo my allowance and all my Christmas presents so we could buy them tickets to come see us, my mother added that her parents didn’t like cities. When I refused to let it go, she grew exasperated and told me that even though they’d never been to France, my grandparents didn’t like French people.
Unable to stifle my enthusiasm for the Rangeley of my imagination, she finally gave up and bought me an old water-stained map of the Adirondacks she found in a flea market and we hung it on my bedroom wall. It was printed in 1757 during the French and Indian War, and what I liked most about it was that it was all out of proportion and full of inaccuracies. Lakes and rivers and towns were in the wrong latitudes. Mohawks was spelled “Mohoks.” And there were villages and forts that had vanished so completely they could not be found on Wikipedia.
I have a faint memory of her tucking me into bed one night and seeing her point to a blank spot on the map labeled “Parts but little known,” and hearing her say, “That’s me, Chloé.” But perhaps she only said that in a dream.
I lost interest in meeting my grandparents or Jimmy the crow or ever setting foot in the Parts but little known when my mother let it slip that my grandparents trapped and skinned animals for a living. But by then, Buddy and Flo had stopped calling.
When it came to questions I had about her life after she arrived in Paris, my mother was more forthcoming. She came to France in November 2001 to work for an art restorer named Jacques Clément. At the end of a dinner party in the Adirondacks three months earlier, Jacques had written his name and telephone number on the back of a matchbook and had offered her a job in Paris. All she knew about the man was that he was renowned for being able to salvage beautiful things others thought were beyond repair.
It must have been weird. My mother was seventeen years old and unable to speak a word of French when she knocked on his studio door. Jacques Clément was forty-one and had no memory of ever offering her a job. She started out as his unpaid assistant and slept on the couch. A month later she moved into his bedroom. A year later she was his wife. His name is still next to hers on the brass plaque attached to the studio door.
She told me that at first the marriage was just a way for her to work legally in France. When it became more than that, she was warned that Jacques Clément was a notorious womanizer, a hound of the worst sort, and not to take any of his promises seriously. My mother laughed when she told me all the awful things she heard about my father. It was said, when it came to his tastes in women, my father’s attitude was, “If it walks . . .” As it turned out, except for the time he fed her an oyster that gave her hepatitis, my father surprised her and everybody else by turning out to be loyal, loving, and devoted . . . until he deserted us.
I was six months old when he was run over while bicycling to meet us at the flower market. Except for that, my mother kept the sad parts of her life story to herself. But I always knew it wasn’t easy being her.
Strangers looked twice at my mother when we went out together, especially men. Tall, square-shouldered, she had hair the color of wild honey, even features and a mouth that turned up at the corners as if she were smiling at a private joke. If you were standing to her left, she had the wholesome glamour of a Grace Kelly, but when she turned her face, even people who know it’s not polite couldn’t resist staring at her.
Like most people, I thought that my mother had retreated into her studio and the world of broken things because of the birthmark she once had on her face—a port-wine stain that unfurled across the right side. More red than purple, the blood vessels were so close to the surface of her skin, it seemed to have its own pulse.
She waited until I was twelve to tell me that she fell in love with my father because he was the only man that ever made her feel beautiful. That was the year she had her birthmark removed with laser surgery. Men eyed her differently after that, seeing a simpler creature than I knew her to be. The trouble was, when she looked in the mirror now, she had trouble recognizing herself. But I didn’t know it wasn’t just the way people looked at her that made my mother wary of the world.
By the time I was fourteen, like most teenagers, I was more interested in the unfolding mystery of my own life than delving into the shadows of hers. I was creating a past for myself in the ways all young people do. On the night of January 6, 2018, I took off all my clothes and lay down in a narrow bed with a boy who was on my debating team. We didn’t go all the way, but I can still feel the warmth of his body in the darkness. When he walked me home in the rain that night, he told me he’d been in love with me since Christmas. The next morning, I woke up with a cold that wouldn’t go away. Ten days later, we knew that I had acute lymphatic leukemia.
A spinal tap gave us the good news—the cancer hadn’t spread to my brain. After explaining to me that the chemo would make me infertile, my oncologist asked me, age fourteen years six months, if I wanted to have children; and since I didn’t know, we harvested my eggs, which was weird. Then I got an intravenous chemotherapy cocktail of cyclophosphamide and methotrexate. For the next week, all I did was vomit, have diarrhea, and watch my hair fall out. My mother never left the hospital.
Nights were the worst. The meds made it easy to fall asleep, but failed to sedate my recurring nightmare. In the dream that played inside my head, I was already dead, yet somehow alive and trapped next to my corpse in a coffin lined with white silk, unable to escape or do anything other than watch myself rot.
I woke up terrified, gasping for air, drenched in sweat. My mother held me in her arms and told me it was just a bad dream. With an intensity that can only be described as ferocious, she swore to me, “You are not going to die! I promise you we can fix this!”
Because googling “acute lymphatic cancer” had told me 68 percent of girls between the ages of thirteen and nineteen with my “subtype of lymphocyte” survive, and because I was desperate for hope, but most of all because my mother was a restorer and could fix anything, I chose to believe she would find a way to make good on her promise.