“It’s going to be okay, Charlotte,” Vincent whispered once his arms were around her. “You know it is.”
“I know,” she sobbed. “But that doesn’t make it any easier. . . .”
“Shh,” Vincent cut her off, holding her against himself in a powerful embrace, before letting her go and handing her gently to me. “Kate came to be with you. She can take you home in a taxi now if you want.”
“No.” Charlotte shook her head, simultaneously reaching out to grasp my hand as if it were a safety net. “I’ll wait until you guys get him in the ambulance.”
Vincent turned to me. Will you be okay? he mouthed. I nodded, and he left us to walk toward Jean-Baptiste. The two men approached a third ambulance that had just arrived. Ambrose stepped down out of the passenger side of the cab looking as strong and healthy as a model on a gym brochure.
Charlotte had slumped back down to the ground and was running her hand over Charles’s blanket as if trying to warm him up with the friction. “So,” I said gently, “if you don’t want to talk about it, just say. But what happened?”
She exhaled deeply, her drawn face giving me a hint of what she would look like if she were her true age. She raised a trembling hand and pointed toward the deserted tourist boat. “The boat. It was rented for a children’s birthday party. Charles and I were walking nearby, with Gaspard volant, and he let us know before the two children fell in. Charles jumped in and reached the boy just after he went under. He swam him over to me on the shore, where I gave the child mouth-to-mouth. Then he went back for the little girl as the motor was pulling her under. He tried to get her, but the propeller hit her first. And then it got him.”
Her voice was numb as she recounted the story, but as soon as she finished, she began crying softly again, her shoulders shaking against my arm. I felt tears well up in my eyes and pinched myself hard. Get ahold of yourself, I thought. Charlotte doesn’t need you crying right along with her.
I looked down the bank toward the water as two police divers emerged. The paramedic standing next to Ambrose noticed them too and walked briskly in their direction. It wasn’t until he got a few feet away and they held an object toward him that I began to guess what was going on.
Charlotte felt my body tense and looked up toward the divers. “Oh, good. They found it,” she said in a monotone as the paramedic reached for the plastic bag, half full of bloody water.
I couldn’t stop the tears this time, and through the blur I saw what it held. My body went numb and the breath left my lungs as violently as if I had been kicked in the stomach. In the bag was a human arm.
Chapter Twenty-One
IT WAS WHEN THE PARAMEDICS ZIPPED CHARLES into a body bag that I lost it. As I watched, the body bag replicated and then there were two. And now it was my own parents I was looking at in the bags, my body having flown across the Atlantic and backward in time to the New York City morgue not even a year ago.
They wouldn’t even show me my dad. But I had insisted on seeing my mom, who, with “only” a broken neck, was judged more presentable than my mutilated father. And now I was back in that room, staring at the coral-hued toenail polish on my mother’s naked toes. Georgia stood next to me weeping as I tore out strands of my hair and braided them in with my mother’s. I knew she would be cremated, and I wanted part of me to accompany her. At that thought, my memories came to an end, but I stayed in the scene, unwilling to leave my mother in the blindingly white room.
“Kate. Kate?” Strong hands turned me until Vincent’s face was inches from my own. “Are you okay?”
I nodded, in a daze.
“Why don’t you ride in the ambulance and I’ll bring the scooter home and meet you there?”
I nodded again and attempted to hold myself together as I wedged myself between Charlotte and the driver in the vehicle’s cab.
When we arrived at Jean-Baptiste’s house, Jeanne met us at the front door. She took Charlotte away from me, leading her upstairs toward her room in a familiar way that made it clear they had been through this before. Through the hall window, I saw Jean-Baptiste hand a wad of bills to the ambulance driver as Jules carried the unwieldy body bag through the front door and gently placed it on the floor. I succeeded in wobbling my way down the back hallway into Vincent’s room, where I threw myself facedown on his bed and let myself sob.