The Nightingale

And there it was. She could tell him about Beck, even that she’d killed him, but she could never tell Antoine she’d been raped. This child in her belly would be born early. Children were born a month early all the time.

She couldn’t help wondering if this secret would destroy them either way.

“I could tell you all of it,” she said quietly. Her tears were tears of shame and loss and love. Love most of all. “I could tell you about the German officers who billeted here and how hard life was and how we barely survived and how Sarah died in front of me and how strong Rachel was when they put her on the cattle car and how I promised to keep Ari safe. I could tell you how my father died and Isabelle was arrested and deported … but I think you know it all.” God forgive me. “And maybe there’s no point talking about any of it. Maybe…” She traced a red welt that ran like a lightning bolt down his left bicep. “Maybe it’s best to just forget the past and go on.”

He kissed her. When he drew back, his lips remained against hers. “I love you, Vianne.”

She closed her eyes and returned his kiss, waiting for her body to come alive at his touch, but when she slid beneath him and felt their bodies come together as they’d done so many times before, she felt nothing at all.

“I love you, too, Antoine.” She tried not to cry as she said it.

*

A cold November night. Antoine had been home for almost two months. There had been no word from Isabelle.

Vianne couldn’t sleep. She lay in bed beside her husband, listening to his quiet snore. It had never bothered her before, never kept her awake, but now it did.

No.

That wasn’t true.

She turned, lay on her side, and stared at him. In the darkness, with the light of a full moon coming through the window, he was unfamiliar: thin, sharp, gray-haired at thirty-five. She inched out of bed and covered him with the heavy eiderdown that had been her grandmère’s.

She put on her robe. Downstairs, she wandered from room to room, looking for—what? Her old life perhaps, or the love for a man she’d lost.

Nothing felt right anymore. They were like strangers. He felt it, too. She knew he did. The war lay between them at night.

She got a quilt from the living room trunk, wrapped it around herself, and went outside.

A full moon hung over the ruined fields. Light fell in crackled patches on the ground below the apple trees. She went to the middle tree, stood beneath it. The dead black branch arched above her, leafless and gnarled. On it were all her scraps of twine and yarn and ribbon.

When she’d tied the remembrances onto this branch, Vianne had na?vely thought that staying alive was all that mattered. The door behind her opened and closed quietly. She felt her husband’s presence as she always had.

“Vianne,” he said, coming up behind her. He put his arms around her. She wanted to lean back into him but she couldn’t do it. She stared at the first ribbon she’d tied to this tree. Antoine’s. The color of it was as changed, as weathered, as they were.

It was time. She couldn’t wait any longer. Her belly was growing.

She turned, looked up at him. “Antoine” was all she could say.

“I love you, Vianne.”

She drew in a deep breath and said, “I’m going to have a baby.”

He went still. It was a long moment before he said, “What? When?”

She stared up at him, remembering their other pregnancies, how they’d come together in loss and in joy. “I’m almost two months along, I think. It must have happened … that first night you were home.”

She saw every nuance of emotion in his eyes: surprise, worry, concern, wonder, and, finally, joy. He grazed her chin, tilted her face up. “I know why you look so afraid, but don’t worry, V. We won’t lose this one,” he said. “Not after all of this. It’s a miracle.”

Tears stung her eyes. She tried to smile, but her guilt was suffocating.

“You’ve been through so much.”

“We all have.”

“So we choose to see miracles.”

Was that his way of saying he knew the truth? Had suspicion planted itself? What would he say when the baby was born early? “Wh-what do you mean?”

She saw tears glaze his eyes. “I mean forget the past, V. Now is what matters. We will always love each other. That’s the promise we made when we were fourteen. By the pond when I first kissed you, remember?”

“I remember.” She was so lucky to have found this man. No wonder she had fallen in love with him. And she would find her way back to him, just as he’d found his way back to her.

“This baby will be our new beginning.”

“Kiss me,” she whispered. “Make me forget.”

“It’s not forgetting we need, Vianne,” he said, leaning down to kiss her. “It’s remembering.”





THIRTY-SIX

In February 1945, snow covered the naked bodies piled outside the camp’s newly built crematorium. Putrid black smoke roiled up from the chimneys.

Isabelle stood, shivering, in her place at the morning Appell—roll call. It was the kind of cold that ached in the lungs and froze eyelashes and burned fingertips and toes.