I miss you, but letters have to be enough for now I think. If you do come, you can stay as long as you want. How much time do you have at Christmas?
Cecile says hello and thank you for sending the Vegemite. She is the only one in the family who eats it. I still do not like it – I still do not forgive you for making me try it in Sydney. My father was brave and he tried it. He says it tastes like bouillon. My mother would not try it. Her face! She made the funnest face when she smelled it. And she eats anchovies from the tin!
I kept all the Tim Tams for myself. Most of them were broken—lots of small pieces, but I invented a new way to have them. I put the small pieces in a glass of milk. Delicious. You can try it. If you like it, call it the Jean-Luc after me. Ha ha again.
Please say hello to Karen and Ron and Sarah for me—my Aussie family. I know I will see you all again one day. Maybe they can come for Christmas too.
Gros bisous!
J-L
“That was nice,” said Lou. Nice? It was confusing more than anything.
The whole time I was reading aloud, my mind vacillated between Jean-Luc the boy from the photo and Jean-Luc the man I’d kissed in Rome. But the Jean-Luc who’d written the letter, the one who was apparently in love with me, had been somewhere in between. A young man, a man-child.
I scanned back over the letter looking for the clues. “And he told you the other night he was in love with you when he wrote it?” Jae asked.
I nodded. “Mmm, yes.”
“Huh.”
It was exactly what I was thinking. I looked up from my phone. “Am I missing something? I’m not seeing ‘I’m in love with you.’”
“Well, he does sign off ‘gros bisous’—that’s just for loved ones,” said Dani.
“And there’s the part about the cute girl from Australia,” added Lou.
“I guess.” I scanned back over the letter. Since the night with him in Rome, I’d been anxious for Mum to send the letter, thinking there’d be some glaring reveal, something I’d missed all those years ago. But at most, there was some mild flirting. Had he always flirted with me? And if he had, how did I not remember that?
“Give it,” said Jaelee. I handed her the phone and watched her face as she reread the letter. A couple of times her eyes narrowed as though she was scrutinising a particular line. When she was done, she handed back the phone. “He may have thought he was hinting in that letter, but if he was, he did a bad job of it.”
“What about in other letters? You said you guys wrote all the time,” said Dani.
“I don’t know. I don’t remember anything like, ‘Hey, I love you,’ so I don’t think he ever declared it or anything.”
“The most important thing is what he said the other night,” said Jaelee.
“You think so?”
“Yes.”
I considered it. “So, he sees me fifteen years later and—”
“And tells you he’s in love with you,” cut in Dani.
“Well, that he was. Once.” Jaelee was being pedantic and I did not find it particularly helpful.
“What about your last letter to him? Do you remember what you wrote?” asked Lou.
“More or less.”
“And?” asked Jae, impatience in her tone.
“It was horrible. Especially knowing what I know now. I said it had been fun being his pen pal.”
“Ouch,” Jae said with a grimace. Dani raised her eyebrows and hid behind her cup of bubbles, and Lou’s lips disappeared into a thin line. There was a moment of silence while we all considered how much I had screwed up—well, how much younger Cat—Catey—had.
I wanted to defend her, to say that she hadn’t known how Jean-Luc felt about her, but I knew it was rubbish, because our friendship was far more than “pen pals”. It was awful that I’d assigned such an insipid label to it, as though we were strangers who exchanged polite letters from time to time.
“Is that how you really saw him?” asked Lou, reading my mind.
No.
My stomach churning, I stared at the passing walls of the crumbling buildings and conjured up memories of young Jean-Luc—us lying on my bed, head to toe, reading for hours, us riding our bikes to the beach so we could beachcomb, returning hours later with a haul of shells and smooth rocks, us staying up most of the night watching DVDs and eating an impressive array of junk food. Jean-Luc was the one who’d added Coco Pops to our popcorn, transforming it into CocoCorn, our signature dish.
Hours and hours we’d spent together, sometimes talking, sometimes reading or watching something, but always together. And our letters had been an extension of that. I could tell him things I couldn’t tell anyone else, except maybe Sarah. Things I couldn’t even tell Scott.
When Jean-Luc left, I missed him terribly—even years later when I was in a relationship with Scott.
Scott and I never had long conversations, or went beachcombing, walking side by side and talking about anything and everything. And we certainly didn’t read for hours, content to just be together, because Scott didn’t read—ever.
When I’d cut Jean-Luc out of my life, I’d lost something I’d never really replaced. I met Lou’s eyes. “No. He wasn’t just a pen pal. I loved him.”
“Like, in love?” asked Dani.
“I don’t know,” I whined, hating the sound of my own voice. “Maybe. I did love Scott, but we never had the same kind of connection I had with Jean-Luc.
“Looking back, I think I loved the idea of Scott more than I loved him. He fit the picture of what I thought I was supposed to want—get married, house in the suburbs, two-point-four kids, barbecues at the weekend …” I trailed off. “Does that make sense? I mean, doesn’t everyone think they want those things when they’re young and stupid?”
“Well, I wanted those things,” said Lou. “I still do … someday.” Oh, God, I’d stuck my foot in it—again.
“Oh, Lou. I’m so sorry.” She shrugged, but that made me feel worse. There I was whinging about a relationship that had ended a decade before, and her wounds were so fresh.
“But it turned out you didn’t want that?” prompted Jaelee.
“No. I didn’t,” I replied, tempering my tone. “Scott wasn’t a bad guy.” Well, he was a cheater and a liar, but I left that part out. “But we should never have been together. We wanted different things.”
“And Jean-Luc?”
“I guess we wanted similar things—back then anyway. You know, usual teenage stuff—make a difference, see the world, get all those stamps in our passports.”
“That sounds like you now,” said Lou, being kinder than I deserved. I gave her a grateful smile.
“So, more compatible than you and Scott?” cut in Jaelee. She kept pressing me to go deeper, clearly wanting to get to the bottom of my mess.
“Definitely. Way more, but I obviously didn’t think like that at the time.”
“If you could go back, what would you do?” asked Dani.
“But I can’t, Dan.”
“But if you could?” Lou the dreamer.
I knew the answer. I also knew I needed to say it aloud, make it real. “I’d dump Scott when he asked me—sorry, when he told me—to break it off with Jean-Luc. I’d save myself five years of being with the wrong person.”