“Elise, when I first met you, you took chances. You followed your heart. Your passion. Your art.” Olivier still hadn’t shifted his weight, and now, his nose was just inches from hers. She could taste the whiskey on his breath, could see the dilated blackness of his pupils. “What happened to that woman?” he whispered.
“She became a mother—and she realized there was more to life than trying to make a mark on the world.” She twisted away, but Olivier pulled her back, his eyes flashing, and pressed his lips to hers again until she relented and kissed him back. She always did, and somehow, their arguments always ended with them falling into bed, the only thing they seemed to do well together anymore, the only way she knew to cross the widening gulf between them.
Afterward, with Olivier snoring, Elise crept into her studio, and by the light of an oil lamp, she gazed around her. The shelves were stacked with her carvings, but behind them, the walls were bare.
This room had never felt like hers, because she was most at home surrounded by trees and sky. It was why she still ventured to the Bois de Boulogne when she could, often bringing Mathilde there on their way to Juliette’s bookshop. She wanted her daughter to know, as Elise did, that she would always be at home under a canopy of nature, the trees living and breathing around her. But it was the star-speckled sky, stretching to infinity, that had always moved Elise the most, for it reminded her that God watched over them all wherever they were. They’d been living under curfew orders for Mathilde’s whole life, and her daughter had never seen the stars. Elise missed the grounding force of standing outside on a clear night and simply breathing in and out as the sky twinkled above.
All at once, Elise knew what she had to do, for both herself and Mathilde. First, she moved the shelves out from against the wall. Then, she crept quietly into Olivier’s studio, where she selected several jars of paints and some brushes, large and small. Before she’d met him, she had dabbled in painting, too, and though she had never been as adept with a brush as he was, she had enjoyed it. When she had dared to paint canvases a few times in their first year of marriage, though, Olivier had laughed at her work, telling her—like they were on the same side of an inside joke—that she should stick with wood and clay. It had hurt her, but they had been too new and fragile for her to say anything, and gradually, she had simply stopped painting.
Now, as she touched a broad brush to the vibrant colors and then to the wall, she realized she had missed it. And as she began to fill the walls with a forest of her own making—the old-growth oaks and chestnuts that surrounded her each time she walked through the Bois de Boulogne—she felt a little lighter, and the more she painted, the more the weight lifted from her shoulders. As the minutes, and then the hours, ticked by, she roughed out wood and painted the narrow veins of individual leaves, gradually bringing the holt of bark and branch alive. She stood on chairs to reach all the way up the walls, and then on the top of her workbench to reach the ceiling, which she painted in the beautiful deep twilight hue the French called l’heure bleue, the blue hour, the short period at the end of the day when the last of the light was fading from the sky and the stars were peeking through. She dotted the heavens with tiny pinpricks of light, sparkling like a faraway dream, and when she was finished, she climbed from her workbench and stared around at all she had done.
It had been six hours, maybe seven, since she had started working. But in that time, Elise had brought the world inside, turning her studio into a glimpse of the heavens. She sat down on the floor, light-headed from the paint fumes, and gazed up at the ceiling. Once the paint dried, she would bring Mathilde here each day to remind her of the world outside their doors, and of the beautiful night sky, even though they were forbidden from seeing it now. “Under these stars,” she murmured, “fate will guide you home.”
It was something her father had whispered to her once when she was young, when he had taken her outside with his prized telescope to stare at the sky. The heavens over Kansas were deep and endless, and Elise had asked him if he ever worried that they would get lost in a universe so vast. “On the contrary,” he’d said, putting an arm around her. “The universe always leads you to exactly where you’re meant to be, for though it may be endless, there is a place in it for each and every one of us.”
When the oil lamp finally burned out, Elise put her head in her hands. She stayed that way in the darkness until Mathilde, just waking up, began to call out for her, and reality came marching back in.
* * *
The walk the next day to Boulogne did little to clear Elise’s head, for the heat remained oppressive and sticky. Before the war, she and Olivier had left Paris in the summers, seeking relief in the countryside. But now, there was no thought of holiday, of escape. An invisible boundary pinned them all in place, making it hard to breathe.
“Maman?” Mathilde hurried along beside Elise, her little legs pumping quickly beneath a cotton frock, her glossy walnut curls bouncing around her tiny shoulders. Her cheeks were pink from exertion, but she was determined to walk herself, though Elise knew she would eventually end up picking her daughter up and carrying her the rest of the way. Now, though, the little girl’s attention was on a huge poster that took up most of the outer wall of the building to the left of them. “Qu’est-ce que c’est?” she asked in French, adding in English, “That?”
Mathilde was just learning her words, but she understood and spoke both her mother’s native tongue and her father’s. It hadn’t been a deliberate decision on Elise’s part at first, but as the war had inched closer to France, and as Olivier had slipped further away from them, Elise had begun whispering to her daughter in English, knowing that one day, God willing, they might leave this country behind and return to the States.
Elise’s eyes followed her daughter’s to a ghastly illustration of an enormous, emaciated buzzard, his claws like curved daggers, poised over the body of a man. The words Fran?ais! Au Secours!—Frenchmen! Help!—screamed over the bird’s head, and the Star of David around its neck left little doubt as to the purpose of the image. She resisted the urge to cover Mathilde’s eyes but instead tightened her grip on her daughter’s hand and quickened their pace. “It is nothing, my darling,” Elise said. “Just a drawing by bad people.”
“Star?” Mathilde asked, craning her neck to look over her shoulder at the poster disappearing behind them. “I like stars.”
“I like stars, too, my darling,” Elise said quickly.
Mathilde’s nose scrunched in confusion as she turned back around to focus on the road ahead. “Bad bird.”
Elise wiped a tear away with one hand and pulled Mathilde close with the other. “The bird isn’t real, my sweet girl. It is something drawn to scare us.”
“Bad bird,” Mathilde repeated solemnly.
“Sometimes, art is used to bring good into the world,” Elise said, perhaps more to herself than her daughter. “And sometimes, it is used to do bad things. Artists have the power to influence the way people think and feel, and sometimes, they don’t use that power responsibly.”
Mathilde looked up at her, perplexed, but Elise glanced away, because she didn’t want her daughter to see the tears in her eyes.
Twenty minutes later, they walked through the doorway to Juliette’s shop, and it felt like a bit of the weight had lifted. Elise always felt freer here, her shoulders loosening, her hands unclenching. How was she more herself in this bookshop than she was in her own home, or in her studio, where her art was supposed to be an extension of who she was? The problem was, she wasn’t quite sure who that was anymore. But here, she knew. She was a friend. She was a mother. She was a person who wanted nothing more than to see all the people she cared about survive.
“Maman?” asked Mathilde, tugging at Elise’s hand. “Where they?”
Elise looked up and realized with a start that Mathilde was right; Juliette was normally in the store this time of day, as were the children, but today, it was so quiet and still that she could hear the sound of her own breath. “I don’t know.” She tightened her grip on Mathilde’s hand and pulled her quickly toward the door at the back, which led to Juliette’s apartment.
“Juliette?” Elise called as she pushed the door open a crack. “Are you there?”
There was noise from inside the apartment, and then Juliette emerged, her face white. “Elise. I didn’t know you were coming today.”
“Is everything all right?”