The Nightingale

“Good God.” Vianne crossed her arms. “Is there anything I can say to stop this foolishness?”

Isabelle looked at her. “You believe me? You believe I would cross Nazi-occupied France on a lark?”

“This is not like running away to see the circus, Isabelle.”

“But … you believe this of me?”

“Of course.” Vianne shrugged. “So foolish.”

Isabelle looked oddly crestfallen. “Just stay away from Beck while I’m gone. Don’t trust him.”

“Isn’t that just like you? You’re worried enough to warn me, but not worried enough to stay with me. What you want is what really matters. Sophie and I can rot for all you care.”

“That’s not true.”

“Isn’t it? Go to Paris. Have your fun but don’t for one minute forget that you are abandoning your niece and me.” Vianne crossed her arms and glanced back at the man in her yard who was supervising the looting of her house. “With him.”





FOURTEEN

April 27, 1995

The Oregon Coast

I am trussed up like a chicken for roasting. I know these modern seat belts are a good thing, but they make me feel claustrophobic. I belong to a generation that didn’t expect to be protected from every danger.

I remember what it used to be like, back in the days when one was required to make smart choices. We knew the risks and took them anyway. I remember driving too fast in my old Chevrolet, my foot pressed hard on the gas, smoking a cigarette and listening to Price sing “Lawdy, Miss Clawdy” through small black speakers while children rolled around in the backseat like bowling pins.

My son is afraid that I will make a break for it, I suppose, and it is a reasonable fear. In the past month, my entire life has been turned upside down. There is a SOLD sign in my front yard and I am leaving home.

“It’s a pretty driveway, don’t you think?” my son says. It’s what he does; he fills space with words, and he chooses them carefully. It is what makes him a good surgeon. Precision.

“Yes.”

He turns into the parking lot. Like the driveway, it is lined in flowering trees. Tiny white blossoms drop to the ground like bits of lace on a dressmaker’s floor, stark against the black asphalt.

I fumble with my seat belt as we park. My hands do not obey my will these days. It frustrates me so much that I curse out loud.

“I’ll do that,” my son says, reaching sideways to unhook my seat belt.

He is out of the automobile and at my door before I have even retrieved my handbag.

The door opens. He takes me by the hand and helps me out of the car. In the short distance between the parking lot and the entrance, I have to stop twice to catch my breath.

“The trees are so pretty this time of year,” he says as we walk together across the parking lot.

“Yes.” They are flowering plum trees, gorgeous and pink, but I think suddenly of chestnut trees in bloom along the Champs élysées.

My son tightens his hold on my hand. It is a reminder that he understands the pain of leaving a home that has been my sanctuary for nearly fifty years. But now it is time to look ahead, not behind.

To the Ocean Crest Retirement Community and Nursing Home.

To be fair, it doesn’t look like a bad place, a little industrial maybe, with its rigidly upright windows and perfectly maintained patch of grass out front and the American flag flying above the door. It is a long, low building. Built in the seventies, I’d guess, back when just about everything was ugly. There are two wings that reach out from a central courtyard, where I imagine old people sit in wheelchairs with their faces turned to the sun, waiting. Thank God, I am not housed in the east side of the building—the nursing home wing. Not yet anyway. I can still manage my own life, thank you very much, and my own apartment.

Julien opens the door for me, and I go inside. The first thing I see is a large reception area decorated to look like the hospitality desk of a seaside hotel, complete with a fishing net full of shells hung on the wall. I imagine that at Christmas they hang ornaments from the netting and stockings from the edge of the desk. There are probably sparkly HO-HO-HO signs tacked up to the wall on the day after Thanksgiving.

“Come on, Mom.”

Oh, right. Mustn’t dawdle.

The place smells of what? Tapioca pudding and chicken noodle soup.

Soft foods.

Somehow I keep going. If there’s one thing I never do, it’s stop.

“Here we are,” my son says, opening the door to room 317A.

It’s nice, honestly. A small, one-bedroom apartment. The kitchen is tucked into the corner by the door and from it one can look out over a Formica counter and see a dining table with four chairs and the living room, where a coffee table and sofa and two chairs are gathered around a gas fireplace.