Four Decades

Grandparents, south of France

Grandparents are critical in the raising of a child, Marine knew that. Wynn had been a fortunate kid, she had Richard in love with her, making her very own nursery in the mansion and spending as much time as he could with her. Everybody knew that if Emma were alive she would also be an amazing grandmother, but since she wasn't, Hurley's uncle Silas was always present in Wynn's life, and he had been since day one an important presence. And Patty was also like a grandmother figure, always cooking and by her side.

Marine couldn't help to compare this much happiness that her daughter was born surrounded by her barren early childhood. Richard's mother, Beatrice was long dead before Marine was born, but his father had twin sisters younger than him, aunties Cassia and Sylvia, and they had been a conscious presence in her life and Marine was grateful for it, but they weren't grandmothers, at least not hers, for they did have their grandchildren. Everything changed when Vivien showed up that year.

Turns out that the main reason she came back was that her lover of the time ditched her and left her penniless, forcing her to ask for her parent's help in France. It was a tricky thing to do because she hadn't seen them in 10 years and they were furious at her for some reason, but she still went to their farm and asked for forgiveness, which they decided to give if they could see their granddaughters, it was their right, and they would fight for it. So of course the first thing she does is take them to their house.

So Vivien took the girls in the summer of 1982 to their little farm that stayed just 45 minutes outside of the city of Toulouse. It wasn't Marine's first time in France, Arthur's late mother was also french and they spent some weeks back in Nice where his side of the family lived, but she never went there without Richard and Arthur. She also had the worst French in history, she learned just the basics from Arthur's family and when she was there she almost spoke only in English, so she was indeed very scared.

It must have been terrifying for Minerve, she hasn't spoken in french since she was 6-years-old and she cried like a baby when Richard said they were going with Vivien. She cried so much that she would shake all over and he almost called off the trip. But they had a long, thoughtful private conversation and she agreed to go but with some conditions: It would be just a week, Richard would call twice every day and they set up the secret phrase "I started reading The Outsiders" to sign that something was wrong.

The travel itself was very easy, Richard went with them to the airport in Paris and then they separated, Richard and Arthur got a plane to Nice and the girls got a plane to Toulouse where Vivien would pick them up. The farewell of them was quite possibly the most emotional they ever had, it was the first time in almost 8 years that they would be separated. Minerve hugged Richard for almost 10 minutes, then she hugged Arthur for almost longer, he was so little and tried to hold his tears back as much as he could.

After lots of hugging and crying they manage to separate and follow their paths. When their plane landed they still had to wait 30 minutes until Vivien showed up, dresses very nicely for that hot day, in an old and dirty blue Ford Truck. She smiled the whole way to the farm, with the radio loud on some french station, and ever so in a while she would point at someplace in Toulouse and say things like "I use to go shopping there" and even "My first work was on this same theatre". On that day she looked so excited for having her daughters over that Marine felt like she was on the path to heaven.

Her grandparent's farm was pretty wide, full of fields for their cattle and hay, Marine had never even seen a farm up to this point. Right in the middle of the landscape, there was a very old and traditional french cottage, with an exterior of stone surrounded by some olive bushes. The kitchen opened up to a stone patio that received the shade of a beautiful fig tree that was full all summer long.