The Nightingale

Isabelle stood at attention. She needed to stand up straight for roll call. If she gave in to her dizziness and toppled over, they would whip her, or worse.

No. It wasn’t roll call. She was in Paris now, in a hospital room.

She was waiting for something. For someone.

Micheline had gone to speak to the Red Cross workers and journalists gathered in the lobby. Isabelle was supposed to wait here.

The door opened.

“Isabelle,” Micheline said in a scolding tone. “You shouldn’t be standing.”

“I’m afraid I’ll die if I lie down,” Isabelle said. Or maybe she thought the words.

Like Isabelle, Micheline was as thin as a matchstick, with hip bones that showed like knuckles beneath her shapeless dress. She was almost entirely bald—only tufts of hair grew here and there—and she had no eyebrows. The skin at her neck and along her arms was riddled with oozing, open sores. “Come,” Micheline said. She led her out of the room, through the strange crowd of silent, shuffling, rag-dressed returnees and the loud, watery-eyed family members in search of loved ones, past the journalists who asked questions. She steered her gently to a quieter room, where other camp survivors sat slumped in chairs.

Isabelle sat down in a chair and dutifully put her hands in her lap. Her lungs ached and burned with every breath she drew and a headache pounded inside her skull.

“It’s time for you to go home,” Micheline said.

Isabelle looked up, blank and bleary-eyed.

“Do you want me to travel with you?”

She blinked slowly, trying to think. Her headache was blinding in its intensity. “Where am I going?”

“Carriveau. You’re going to see your sister. She’s waiting for you.”

“She is?”

“Your train leaves in forty minutes. Mine leaves in an hour.”

“How do we go back?” Isabelle dared to ask. Her voice was barely above a whisper.

“We are the lucky ones,” Micheline said, and Isabelle nodded.

Micheline helped Isabelle stand.

Together they limped to the hospital’s back door, where a row of automobiles and Red Cross lorries waited to transport survivors to the train station. As they waited their turn, they stood together, tucked close as they’d done so often in the past year—in Appell lines, in cattle cars, in food queues.

A bright-faced young woman in a Red Cross uniform came into the room, carrying a clipboard. “Rossignol?”

Isabelle lifted her hot, sweaty hands and cupped Micheline’s wrinkled, grayed face. “I loved you, Micheline Babineau,” she said softly and kissed the older woman’s dry lips.

“Don’t talk about yourself in the past tense.”

“But I am past tense. The girl I was…”

“She’s not gone, Isabelle. She’s sick and she’s been treated badly, but she can’t be gone. She had the heart of a lion.”

“Now you’re speaking in the past tense.” Honestly, Isabelle couldn’t remember that girl at all, the one who’d jumped into the Resistance with barely a thought. The girl who’d recklessly brought an airman into her father’s apartment and foolishly brought another one into her sister’s barn. The girl who had hiked across the Pyrenees and fallen in love during the exodus from Paris.

“We made it,” Micheline said.

Isabelle had heard those words often in the past week. We made it. When the Americans had arrived to liberate the camp, those three words had been on every prisoner’s lips. Isabelle had felt relief then—after all of it, the beatings, the cold, the degradation, the disease, the forced march through the snow, she had survived.

Now, though, she wondered what her life could possibly be. She couldn’t go back to who she’d been, but how could she go forward? She gave Micheline a last wave good-bye and climbed into the Red Cross vehicle.

Later, on the train, she pretended not to notice how people stared at her. She tried to sit up straight, but she couldn’t do it. She slumped sideways, rested her head against the window.

She closed her eyes and was asleep in no time, dreaming feverishly of a clattering ride in a cattle car, of babies crying and women trying desperately to soothe them … and then the doors opened and the dogs were waiting—

Isabelle jolted awake. She was so disoriented it took her a moment to remember that she was safe. She dabbed at her forehead with the end of her sleeve. Her fever was back.

Two hours later, the train rumbled into Carriveau.

I made it. So, why didn’t she feel anything?

She got to her feet and shuffled painfully from the train. As she stepped down onto the platform, a coughing spasm took over. She bent, hacking and coughing up blood into her hand. When she could breathe again, she straightened, feeling hollowed out and drained. Old.

Her sister stood at the edge of the platform. She was big with pregnancy and dressed in a faded and patched summer dress. Her strawberry blond hair was longer now, past her shoulders and wavy. As she scanned the crowd leaving the train, her gaze went right past Isabelle.

Isabelle raised her bony hand in greeting.

Vianne saw her wave and paled. “Isabelle!” Vianne cried, rushing toward her. She cupped Isabelle’s hollow cheeks in her hands.