“No one would watch us the whole way.”
“Yet nor will they send word to let you know when they’ll be watching so you can set the child down before they see you carrying her. And it’s not only the French border patrol who might be watching. Free France is not so free as all that. The Kundt Commission—the Gestapo in France—have free rein over refugees, and like to make examples of those they find on the wrong side of the law.”
“Terrific,” Edouard said, a Nanée word, one of the peculiar choices that made the way she spoke so fresh and lively, so full of hope. But he said it sarcastically, with the opposite of hope.
Varian looked into the cold fireplace. “The Gestapo are as happy to make an example of a woman as of a man. Perhaps happier. And time is running out for refugees in France.”
Edouard looked to the clock on the mantel, the hands that never did move and yet at the moment were probably pretty close to right. Luki was just a child. Surely even the Gestapo wouldn’t subject a child to what they had done to Elza.
“I promised Elza I would keep Luki with me, always,” he said. A promise he’d already broken.
Wednesday, November 27, 1940
AMBOISE
Luki heaved open the heavy church door, careful not to get dirt on the white dress that used to be Brigitte’s and the blue cape Sister Therese had made her so she would be just like the Lady Mary, and the Lady Mary would love her more. Inside, she held Pemmy tightly, waiting until it wasn’t so dark anymore and she could see the window colors. She walked carefully along the center aisle, not looking up at the bleeding man with the thorns on his head. She crossed to the pew that faced sideways, to the stone Lady Mary, whose robe was chipped now from the noisy, scary, hiding-in-the-basement time when everywhere things were broken, houses and cars and the big bridge across the river, and Sister Josephina disappeared. She knelt in the pew and put her hands together, with Pemmy’s too, and closed her eyes. “Lady Mary,” she whispered, “will you please ask Papa to come get Pemmy and take her home?” You didn’t have to speak loudly in the church because God could hear you even if you were only thinking. And the Lady Mary was God’s mutti. Probably she would just tell God for you.
She was still praying to the Lady Mary when she heard a whisper.
“She’s an angel, isn’t she?” The Reverend Mother’s voice.
She opened her eyes, remembering to say “Amen” even as she pulled Pemmy to her. She knew she ought not to stare, but she imagined the Lady Mary, in answering her prayer, would understand and explain it to God.
“Mutti?” she said.
“Child,” Reverend Mother said gently, “your maman is with the angels.”
Luki touched Pemmy’s pouch where Joey should be. The photograph Pemmy wasn’t supposed to have, of Mutti and Papa and Luki from before Mutti went to live with the angels, was there with Flat Joey Letters, where Luki could always find them but no one else ever did.
The Mutti Angel stooped to her level the way Papa used to, and said, “I’m not your mutti, but I promise I will take you to your papa.”
Luki considered this. Maybe it was like with God, who was three people who were the same, and one of them was a father and one was a son who didn’t even look like his father, and another was a ghost Luki had never seen even in a picture.
The angel said, “Look, I’ve brought a letter from him.”
She smelled like a flower as she handed Luki an envelope. Luki put it to her nose. It smelled like the angel.
Her own name was on the envelope. Luki.
She held it right against her heart. Papa could write a letter to her. And when you went to be with the angels, you couldn’t write letters. Papa hadn’t gone to be with Mutti. Papa had stayed here, to be with her.
The tears poured out then. It was like with the pee-pee when she was hiding in the trunk when she still lived with Tante Berthe and Brigitte. She couldn’t stop.
“How come Papa doesn’t come?” she asked—the question she never said aloud because she was afraid Papa had gone to be with Mutti and hadn’t taken her with him; she was afraid if she said it aloud, it would be true.
“Oh, sweetheart.” Reverend Mother lifted Luki into her big, soft arms, and Pemmy, too, and sat in the pew. She smelled like the stew from lunch. “Your papa loves you so much,” she said. “He would come if he could. But he might get hurt on the way here, or taking you back with him. So he sent his friend. Now go ahead, open the letter.”
On the envelope, still: Luki. The letters shaped just like her name on Flat Joey Letters.
She carefully opened the flap, like she used to after Papa didn’t come to Paris and Tante Berthe would read letters to her, then let Luki read them one word at a time until she had each word inside her and she could take the letters out any time she wanted and read them to Pemmy.
Inside the envelope was a folded paper. Luki put the paper to her nose. It smelled like the same flower. She unfolded it carefully, not letting even Pemmy see.
It was a drawing of Pemmy and her on the dreaming log.
She remembered, then, the warmth of Papa’s arms, the tinny smell of chemicals on his hands sometimes when he touched her cheek, the songs they sang, with Mutti and the angels singing too in the splash of the sea.
“Mutti is with the angels,” she said. “They all sing to me.”
“Your maman is in heaven,” Reverend Mother agreed.
“But Papa isn’t with her?”
“Your papa is at my house,” the angel said. “He’s fixing up the bedroom right next to his for you. He’s looking out the window every minute, hoping you’ve come.”
She wondered if the house was in heaven, with Papa and Mutti both, and how they would get there. Was the long white thing at the angel’s neck her wings?
“Does Papa still sing at the dreaming log?”
Mutti Angel examined Papa’s drawing. “The dreaming log is too far away now, but we dance and sing together almost every night. We have another girl living with us too. Her name is Aube. She’s your age. And a boy named Peterkin.”
“Peterkin.” Luki giggled. “He sounds like he should be in a storybook!”
“We have a cow, too. A nice cow. Aube and Peterkin like to milk her.”
“Is it hard?”
“To milk Madame LaVache?”
Luki giggled again. What a funny name for a cow—Madame the Cow. “Could Pemmy milk Madame LaVache? Can you milk a cow if you don’t have fingers?”
The angel laughed, all tingly and every color of the church windows mixed together, like in Sister Therese’s kaleidoscope that she let Luki look into whenever she wanted because Luki was very careful with special things.
“I bet she could,” the angel said.
“So Pemmy can come too?”
“Of course. We would never leave Pemmy behind.”
Luki folded the dreaming log drawing back into the envelope and tucked it into Pemmy’s pouch, behind Flat Joey Letters and the photograph.