“Your parents died? I mean, before you did?” I asked, the hole in my heart beginning to ache again. We began strolling past a long line of houseboats that were moored to the riverbank.
Charlotte nodded. “It was World War Two. During the Occupation. My parents ran a clandestine press out of our apartment near the Sorbonne, where my father taught. The Germans found it and shot them. Charles and I were at my aunt’s house that night, or they probably would have killed us, too.
“We were proud of our parents and wanted to continue in their footsteps. So when we began hearing about the roundups . . .” She paused, then explained, “When the police rounded the Jews up to send them to the concentration camps.” I nodded to show her I understood, and she continued, “We hid some friends from school and their parents in our apartment, in a room with a false wall, where the printing press had been concealed. We secured enough ration cards to feed and clothe the six of us for over a year before a neighbor caught on and reported us.”
I stopped in place. “Who would ever do such a thing?” I said, aghast.
She shrugged and continued, taking my arm and forcing me to move again. “We were able to get the family safely to another hiding place, but Charles and I were caught the next day and shot.”
“I can barely believe that was happening right here in Paris.”
Charlotte nodded. “They say that thirty thousand of us ‘resisters’ were shot during the course of the Occupation. At least, that’s the official number. Some were actually lawbreakers. But others were innocent bystanders who were taken hostage and killed to revenge their countrymen’s acts of resistance.”
“That was so brave of you and Charles to help that family.”
“Well, wouldn’t you have done the same? How could we have acted differently?”
We neared a stone bench and sat down.
“I don’t know,” I responded finally. “I would hope I would have acted like you did. But there must be very few people who are actually that brave. Maybe that’s why you became one of them. I mean, a revenant,” I said.
“That’s what Jean-Baptiste thinks. That saving lives was preprogrammed into us. That it came naturally. Who knows?” She paused thoughtfully. “What I do know is, now that I can spare others the pain I went through when my parents were killed—by saving lives—it makes the continual trauma of our existence easier to bear.”
I nodded, and watched as she pensively picked at her fingernails. “So what’s up with Charles?” I asked finally.
“It’s all part of the same story,” she said. “He’s had a hard time dealing with his failure to save that little girl’s life in the boat accident. For the last couple of weeks he’s been . . .” She looked like she was weighing how much to tell me and settled for, “. . . obsessing about it.”
“Will he get over it with time?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I finally told Jean-Baptiste about it this morning. He’s going to have a talk with Charles.”
“Maybe that will help,” I offered.
She shook her head, as if unconvinced. “Let’s change the subject.”
“Okay,” I said, grasping for a new topic of conversation. “So what’s so bad about living with a houseful of hot men? Excluding Gaspard and Jean-Baptiste, that is, who I guess could be called ‘hot’ in their own way . . . ,” I trailed off.
She burst out laughing. “Definitely not hot,” she agreed. “There’s so much testosterone packed into that air, I’m surprised I haven’t grown a mustache just from breathing it!”
Now it was my turn to laugh. It felt foreign to me, as if I were suddenly speaking Chinese. It didn’t feel natural, but it didn’t feel bad.
Charlotte shot me a wry grin, proud that she had cracked through my armor. “Honestly,” she conceded, “they’re all like family to me. We’ve lived together for decades.
“The revenants out in the countryside have to constantly relocate so that the locals don’t recognize them once they’ve died saving someone. They’re always on the move from one of Jean-Baptiste’s country homes to another. It suits most of them just fine, but I couldn’t do it. These men are all the family I’ve got, and I could never leave them.”
“Have you ever . . .” I paused, unsure of how probing my questions could be.
“What?” Charlotte asked, intrigued.
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
Charlotte sighed. “It would be just as hard for me to have a boyfriend as it is to have girl friends. I guess that in the beginning I could make excuses for vanishing three days every month, but that wouldn’t work for long. And then disappearing for a few days every time I died. No, it just couldn’t work. And I can’t do the casual relationships like Jules and Ambrose do. When I fall in love, it sticks.”
“So you’ve been in love before?”
She blushed and looked down at her hands. “Yes. But he doesn’t . . . he didn’t feel the same way.” Her words were almost inaudible.