The Nightingale

“It wasn’t.” The admission slips out, surprising me.

And suddenly we are looking at each other, mother and son. He is giving me his surgeon’s look that misses nothing—not my newest wrinkles or the way my heart is beating a little too fast or the pulse that pumps in the hollow of my throat.

He touches my cheek, smiling softly. My boy. “You think the past could change how I feel about you? Really, Mom?”

“Mrs. Mauriac?”

I am glad for the interruption. It’s a question I don’t want to answer.

I turn to see a handsome young man waiting to talk to me. He is American, but not obviously so. A New Yorker, perhaps, with close-cropped graying hair and designer glasses. He is wearing a fitted black blazer and an expensive white shirt, with faded jeans. I step forward, extending my hand. He does the same thing at the same time, and when he does, our eyes meet and I miss a step. It is just that, a missed step, one among many at my age, but Julien is there to catch me. “Mom?”

I stare at the man before me. In him, I can see the boy I loved so deeply and the woman who was my best friend. “Ariel de Champlain,” I say, his name a whisper, a prayer.

He takes me in his arms and holds me tightly and the memories return. When he finally pulls back, we are both crying.

“I never forgot you or Sophie,” he says. “They told me to, and I tried, but I couldn’t. I’ve been looking for you both for years.”

I feel that constriction in my heart again. “Sophie passed away about fifteen years ago.”

Ari looks away. Quietly, he says, “I slept with her stuffed animal for years.”

“Bébé,” I say, remembering.

Ari reaches into his pocket and pulls out the framed photograph of me and Rachel. “My mom gave this to me when I graduated from college.”

I stare down at it through tears.

“You and Sophie saved my life,” Ari says matter-of-factly.

I hear Julien’s intake of breath and know what it means. He has questions now.

“Ari is my best friend’s son,” I say. “When Rachel was deported to Auschwitz, I hid him in our home, even though a Nazi billeted with us. It was quite … frightening.”

“Your mother is being modest,” Ari says. “She rescued nineteen Jewish children during the war.”

I see the incredulity in my son’s eyes and it makes me smile. Our children see us so imperfectly.

“I’m a Rossignol,” I say quietly. “A Nightingale in my own way.”

“A survivor,” Ari adds.

“Did Dad know?” Julien asks.

“Your father…” I pause, draw in a breath. Your father. And there it is, the secret that made me bury it all.

I have spent a lifetime running from it, trying to forget, but now I see what a waste all that was.

Antoine was Julien’s father in every way that mattered. It is not biology that determines fatherhood. It is love.

I touch his cheek and gaze up at him. “You brought me back to life, Julien. When I held you, after all that ugliness, I could breathe again. I could love your father again.”

I never realized that truth before. Julien brought me back. His birth was a miracle in the midst of despair. He made me and Antoine and Sophie a family again. I named him after the father I learned to love too late, after he was gone. Sophie became the big sister she always wanted to be.

I will tell my son my life story at last. There will be pain in remembering, but there will be joy, too.

“You’ll tell me everything?”

“Almost everything,” I say with a smile. “A Frenchwoman must have her secrets.” And I will … I’ll keep one secret.

I smile at them, my two boys who should have broken me, but somehow saved me, each in his own way. Because of them, I know now what matters, and it is not what I have lost. It is my memories. Wounds heal. Love lasts.

We remain.



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book was a labor of love, and like a woman in labor, I often felt overwhelmed and desperate in that please-help-me-this-can’t-be-what-I-signed-up-for-give-me-drugs kind of way. Yet, miraculously, it all came together in the end.