Free The Other Story by Tatiana De Rosnay

arrive by post at the rue Pernety. They got there on a rainy day. A day Nicolas would never forget.
    The first certificate read “Emma Van der Vleuten, born March 18, 1959, Edith Cavell Clinic, Uccle, Belgium. Father: Roland Van der Vleuten, born Charleroi, 1937. Mother: Béatrice Tweelinckx, born Liège, 1938.”
    Then he read “Fiodor Koltchine, born Улица Писарева , Leningrad, USSR, June 12, 1960. Mother: Zinaïda Koltchine, born Leningrad, USSR, 1945. Father: unknown. Died: August 7, 1993, Guéthary, France.” There was a fine handwritten sentence at the bottom of the certificate and an official stamp: “Adopted by Lionel Duhamel in 1961; from now on known as Théodore Duhamel.”
    A pit opened up somewhere in his stomach. Nicolas sat there, incredulous, frozen, staring down at the piece of paper. He did not pick up the telephone. Instead, he marched straight to his mother’s apartment on the rue Rollin. He got there out of breath, wet, and anxious.
    “You need to explain,” he said, shoving the birth certificate under her nose. Sitting in the large armchair by the fireplace, a startled Emma Duhamel had stared down at the paper, then back to her son with those fog-filled eyes.
    “Oh!” she gasped.
    “Well?” he grunted, still breathless.
    Silence.
    “Nicolas, its a long story,” she said at last, nervously fingering her bead necklace. “Please sit down.”

     
    A CCORDING TO THÉODORE DUHAMEL, the Atlantic Ocean was the king of all seas. Little did he know that it would one day claim his life. He had never enjoyed holidays on the Riviera, where his parents owned a villa overlooking Cannes. For him, the Mediterranean Sea was a cesspool full of impotent septuagenarians flaunting tans, face-lifts, and diamonds. He despised the smooth, glassy water and the lack of tides. In the late sixties, a classmate invited him to the Basque country one summer, where he was smitten by the rolling, frothy waves, the green mountains, the humid wind, the unpredictable weather forecast. He did not seem, at first glance, the rugged outdoor type, but he was more of an athlete than he appeared. He learned to surf as a boy in Biarritz with a bunch of young local surfers, of whom he was the youngest and probably the most enthusiastic. Nicolas remembers that as a young boy he would sit on the beach with his mother—pale and stoic, her nose buried in a book—while Théodore Duhamel rode the waves with his surfer friends. He stayed in the water for hours on end, wearing a black wet suit, which gave him the slinky appearance of a seal, and by the end of the summer, his chestnut locks had turned gold, bleached by the sun and the sea. “Surfer widow,” Emma’s friends dubbed her, mocking her for her endless waits on the sand with her son, and there was no way they could ever have suspected that their affectionate nickname would, one summer, ring horribly true.
    For the first ten summers of Nicolas’s life, his parents rented a poky apartment overlooking the Côte des Basques. It had a grandiose view over the ocean, facing south, and one could glimpse Spain creeping out along the coast like an outstretched arm. Every morning, Théodore Duhamel rose early and stared out to sea like the Ancient Mariner. Nicolas liked to watch him stride down the long and winding path to the beach, surfboard tucked under his arm. With binoculars, Nicolas could then observe his father on the sand, waxing his board with sure, precise movements (he can still remember the smell of that wax, and its name: Sex Wax, although it had nothing to do with sex, as he one day discovered.)
    Nicolas made Margaux Dansor’s father into a skier. But the two sports were linked in his mind. They were both action sports that involved gliding on a natural surface; they were both risky, the participants in search of the highest wave, the steepest slope. In the summer of 1990, when Nicolas was eight years old, Théodore Duhamel bought a catamaran, a black Hobie 16