The Nightingale

Antoine was somewhere, trying to build a cradle out of whatever scraps of wood Vianne hadn’t burned during the war. It was obvious to everyone that Vianne would be going into labor soon; she moved slowly and seemed always to have a hand pressed to the small of her back.

With closed eyes, Isabelle savored the beautiful commonness of the day. In the distance, a church bell pealed. Bells had been ringing constantly in the past week to herald the war’s end.

Sophie’s voice stopped abruptly in the middle of a sentence.

Isabelle thought she said “keep reading,” but she wasn’t sure.

She heard her sister say, “Isabelle,” in a tone of voice that meant something.

Isabelle looked up. Vianne stood there, flour streaking her pale, freckled face and dusting her apron, her reddish hair bound by a frayed turban. “Someone is here to see you.”

“Tell the doctor I’m fine.”

“It’s not the doctor.” Vianne smiled and said, “Ga?tan is here.”

Isabelle felt as if her heart might burst through the paper walls of her chest. She tried to stand and fell back to the chair in a heap. Vianne helped her to her feet, but once she was standing, she couldn’t move. How could she look at him? She was a bald, eyebrowless skeleton, with some of her teeth gone and most of her fingernails missing. She touched her head, realizing an awkward moment too late that she had no hair to tuck behind her ear.

Vianne kissed her cheek. “You’re beautiful,” she said.

Isabelle turned slowly, and there he was, standing in the open doorway. She saw how bad he looked—the weight and hair and vibrancy he’d lost—but none of it mattered. He was here.

He limped toward her and took her in his arms.

She brought her shaking hands up and put her arms around him. For the first time in days, weeks, a year, her heart was a reliable thing, pumping with life. When he drew back, he stared down at her and the love in his eyes burned away everything bad; it was just them again, Ga?tan and Isabelle, somehow falling in love in a world at war. “You’re as beautiful as I remember,” he said, and she actually laughed, and then she cried. She wiped her eyes, feeling foolish, but tears kept streaming down her face. She was crying for all of it at last—for the pain and loss and fear and anger, for the war and what it had done to her and to all of them, for the knowledge of evil she could never shake, for the horror of where she’d been and what she’d done to survive.

“Don’t cry.”

How could she not? They should have had a lifetime to share truths and secrets, to get to know each other. “I love you,” she whispered, remembering that time so long ago when she’d said it to him before. She’d been so young and shiny then.

“I love you, too,” he said, his voice breaking. “I did from the first minute I saw you. I thought I was protecting you by not telling you. If I’d known…”

How fragile life was, how fragile they were.

Love.

It was the beginning and end of everything, the foundation and the ceiling and the air in between. It didn’t matter that she was broken and ugly and sick. He loved her and she loved him. All her life she had waited—longed for—people to love her, but now she saw what really mattered. She had known love, been blessed by it.

Papa. Maman. Sophie.

Antoine. Micheline. Anouk. Henri.

Ga?tan.

Vianne.

She looked past Ga?tan to her sister, the other half of her. She remembered Maman telling them that someday they would be best friends, that time would stitch their lives together.

Vianne nodded, crying now, too, her hand on her extended belly.

Don’t forget me, Isabelle thought. She wished she had the strength to say it out loud.





THIRTY-NINE

May 7, 1995

Somewhere over France

The lights in the airplane cabin come on suddenly.

I hear the ding! of the announcement system. It tells us that we are beginning our descent into Paris.

Julien leans over and adjusts my seat belt, making sure that my seat is in the locked, upright position. That I am safe.

“How does it feel to be landing in Paris again, Mom?”

I don’t know what to say.

*

Hours later, the phone beside me rings.

I am still more than half asleep when I answer it. “Hello?”

“Hey, Mom. Did you sleep?”

“I did.”

“It’s three o’clock. What time do you want to leave for the reunion?”

“Let’s walk around Paris. I can be ready in an hour.”

“I’ll come by and pick you up.”

I ease out of a bed the size of Nebraska and head for the marble-everywhere bathroom. A nice hot shower brings me back to myself and wakens me, but it isn’t until I am seated at the vanity, staring at my face magnified in the light-rimmed oval mirror, that it hits me.

I am home.

It doesn’t matter that I am an American citizen, that I have spent more of my life in the United States than in France; the truth is that none of that matters. I am home.

I apply makeup carefully. Then I brush the snow-white hair back from my face, creating a chignon at the nape of my neck with hands that won’t stop trembling. In the mirror, I see an elegant, ancient woman with velvety, pleated skin, glossy, pale pink lips, and worry in her eyes.