Paul smiled. “They’ll be very happy.”
Together, they ushered the children into the apartment for a late lunch, which they wolfed down hungrily. “My darlings,” Juliette said, casting a smile at Paul, as Alphonse, Claude, Lucie, and Mathilde looked up at her. “Your papa and I have a surprise for you. Would you like to go see the festivities at Longchamp?”
The room exploded in excitement, all four of the children leaping up and dancing around, hooting and hollering. Juliette laughed, tickled by their joy, and exchanged another look with Paul.
“Papa and I just need to wash the dishes. Claude, can you mind the younger children for a few moments?”
“Of course, Maman. We will play in the bookshop until you’re ready.” He led the other three through the door to the shop in an exaggerated horse trot. Alphonse and the girls giggled and galloped along as Juliette watched with a smile.
“We really are fortunate, aren’t we?” she asked. “Four children, perfectly healthy.”
Paul crossed the room and kissed her tenderly on the forehead. “And a perfect, beautiful wife,” he said. “We are lucky to have each other, Juliette.”
She tilted her face up to his, and their lips met. In that moment, she had nearly everything she could have wished for. The silence in the apartment felt magical, loaded with possibility, and as she pulled away from Paul and began to gather the children’s plates from the table, she was overwhelmed with gratitude for this life she’d been granted, even in the midst of chaos and pain.
And then, in an instant, everything changed.
Juliette wasn’t certain whether it was Claude’s scream of warning or the sharp knife of the air raid siren that cut through the quiet first, but suddenly, the world was filled with sound, too much sound, and as the siren shrieked its plaintive, deafening wail, Juliette pushed off from the sink and stumbled toward the door leading to the bookstore. “The children!” she cried, and Paul answered something unintelligible, his voice lost in the siren’s swell.
She could feel him behind her, his breath on her neck, as they pushed through the door. Panic rose in her throat when she didn’t immediately spot them.
“Claude! Alphonse! Lucie!” she screamed, her voice hoarse as she stumbled, in a panic, toward the children’s section.
“They’re in the children’s section!”
“What about the gas masks?”
“Forget them!” he shouted back as they hurtled through the store. “Just get the children to the cellar! Hurry!”
Just then, there was an explosion outside, very close, too close. The ground rolled, nearly throwing her off her feet, and over the din of the siren, she could hear the girls screaming, Claude yelling at everyone to get down, Alphonse calling her name. “I’m coming, children!” she screamed, and it seemed like time slowed to a crawl as she lurched around the corner, past their shelves of children’s books, Paul just ahead of her. None of it made sense; the warning had sounded less than a minute earlier. The Renault factory was kilometers away; what were the planes doing bombing a residential area again? And in broad daylight?
“Maman!” Alphonse called again through sobs.
“Juliette, get the boys!” Paul called at the same moment, and she saw him hoist Lucie and Mathilde, one in each arm, the three of them backlit by a sudden burst of light flooding through the window as another bomb exploded so nearby that their front window shattered, sending a spray of broken glass into the store.
This time, it was she who screamed. All she could think about was getting to Claude and Alphonse, shielding them with her body, making sure all of them made it to the cellar door. Paul was already running that way, the girls wailing in his arms. “Maman is coming!”
“Maman!” Alphonse’s face was splotched and streaked, his eyes wide with terror.
She was a millimeter away from grabbing his hand, a centimeter away from Claude, when a sudden whistling sound above turned to an urgent shriek, and in the millisecond before the world went black, she knew exactly what was about to happen, though there was nothing she could do to stop it. It was already too late.
In the instant that existed between light and dark, between life and death, between the before and the after, the roar grew deafening, the flash of light eclipsed everything, and Juliette’s bones felt as though they’d been reduced to dust as the world around her disappeared.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
By the time spring arrived in 1943, Elise had been apart from Mathilde for more than six months, and her daughter’s absence still felt like a gaping wound that would never heal. Was her daughter safe? Did Mathilde remember her? Was Juliette making her feel as loved as one of her own children? Elise worried for Mathilde every day, and once a week, she attended mass at the ?glise Saint-Alban and begged God to protect her daughter, and to spare her, too, so she could return for Mathilde.
During the days, she swept Madame Roche’s floors, did her best to keep two skinny hens alive, hidden, and producing eggs, and cooked meals for the children who moved in and out of the secret attic above Madame Roche’s bedroom. Once a month or so, new children arrived, some of them frightened, some resolute. Some had been recently separated from their parents; others hadn’t seen their mothers or fathers in more than a year. Many cried at night when they thought they couldn’t be heard; all of them had eyes darkened by the weight of the lives they now knew. None of them had come with their real names, and despite herself, Elise found herself feeling a maternal sort of tug toward each and every one. Perhaps if she cared for them, gave them a piece of her own heart, God would ensure that Juliette was doing the same for Mathilde, making her feel loved and whole.
It had become Elise’s job to queue for food in town and then, upon returning to the farmhouse each day, to climb into the attic to help the children with their lessons. Madame Roche was adamant that to let the children’s minds grow idle would be doing them a great disservice, and so Elise came up with exercises about math and history and literature for the oldest ones, and about letters and shapes and the world outside for the youngest. Madame Noirot at the bookshop in town had once been a schoolteacher, and she’d procured several textbooks for various ages. Perhaps it was futile to worry about an adequate education for the children when their attention should be focused mostly on surviving, but knowledge was everything, and besides, learning was a distraction from fear and loneliness.
At night, she had begun to paint again. She had mentioned in passing to Madame Noirot, on one of her excursions to purchase textbooks, that she had once been an artist. She hadn’t elaborated, hadn’t said that she was a woodworker, and certainly hadn’t mentioned that she had been married to a painter, for fear of betraying her own cover. The next time she’d come to the store, Madame Noirot had given her a box wrapped in tissue, and Elise had opened it to find a beautiful set of acrylic paints and brushes. “It is the least I could do,” Madame Noirot said with a smile, holding her gaze. “After all, look at what you do for us.”
Elise had thanked her profusely and walked back to the farmhouse feeling enormously grateful. Though she hadn’t painted professionally in years, she had filled Mathilde’s world with stars and sky and darkened trees, brought to earth with a paintbrush, and as she let herself into Madame Roche’s house, she knew suddenly that the way to bring Mathilde back to her, even when she was many miles away, was through bringing the heavens here, too.
“May I paint the ceiling of my room?” she asked Madame Roche that night over a simple omelet dinner. It was just the two of them sharing a silent meal, as it often was. Bernard, who slept in the loft above the barn when he was here, was mostly living in the woods with a group of résistants by now; he surfaced from time to time to offer help with manual labor but was otherwise scarce. And it was too dangerous for the children to be out in the main house, in case an unexpected visitor dropped by. So they took their evening meal in the attic, while Elise ate silently with her gruff host, who still hadn’t warmed up to her.
“Paint your ceiling? Whatever for?” the old woman snapped.
“To remind me of home.” Elise pushed her eggs around on her plate, her appetite suddenly gone. “I used to paint my apartment, for by the time my daughter was born, there was already a curfew, and we were not allowed to be outside at night. I wanted her to know the way the trees looked in the moonlight, the way the clouds were lit from within, the way the stars glowed like floating lanterns from another world.”