Madame Roche noisily chewed a mouthful of food. When she swallowed, she glowered at Elise. “Do you know what you’re doing?”
“I—I was an artist,” Elise said after a moment, and the words felt strange between them, because after that first day, when Elise had told Madame Roche she had a daughter, they had never spoken again about who or what they had been before the war. “I carved wooden sculptures, actually, but sometimes, I painted, too.”
Madame Roche looked at her for a long time. Perhaps it was Elise’s imagination that the woman’s stern face softened slightly. “We were all something else in our past lives,” she said at last. “I suppose what matters, though, is who we choose to be now. Just don’t do anything garish.”
That night, Elise lit a lantern and began to paint, just as she had in her studio on the avenue Mozart during the summer of 1941. First, the blue-black sky over the Bois de Boulogne, the particular hue that only Paris had, a magical glow born of the Seine and light and air. The next night, when the paint had dried, she began dotting the stars, white as a fire’s heart, across the sky, tears streaming down her face as she recalled lying with Mathilde on the floor, talking about the vastness of the heavens.
“Under these stars, fate will guide you home,” Elise whispered. When she’d said the words to Mathilde, in the room she’d painted for just the two of them, she had meant them as a meditation to soothe her daughter with a promise that God looked over them all in the vast universe. But now, as Elise looked up at the star-speckled sky, she hoped the words meant something else: that the stars, watching over them all, would bring Mathilde back to her, that fate, in all its mysterious ways, would save them both and put them on a road back to each other. “Under these stars,” she murmured again, because she had to find a way to believe it, “fate will guide you home.”
* * *
By the beginning of April, the attic was empty, but the sky over Elise’s room was full, the leaves of the Bois de Boulogne reflecting the clouds and the stars and a slivered moon back up at the velvet heavens. The most recent batch of refugees—a boy of twelve and two girls, ages three and eight—had been sent on with a courier to the next stop of their journey after receiving false papers, and now, she and Madame Roche had been told to expect four new children, who had been hiding in plain sight as the Christian nieces and nephews of a widow several towns over. Their identities had been betrayed by a classmate’s suspicious mother and they had been moved quickly, in the middle of the night, just hours before the Germans had arrived at the home of their protector. The soldiers had arrested the widow, and no one had heard from her since.
“How old are they?” she asked absently as she and Madame Roche swept out the attic and unrolled fresh blankets and bedsheets for the floors.
“The boys are eight and six, I’m told, the girls six and four.”
“Young,” Elise said.
Madame Roche sighed. “Too young. All of them are too young.”
“It will be a change for them, living in an attic.”
Madame Roche’s lips were compressed into a thin line when she turned to Elise. “At least they’re alive. Don’t forget that, Leona.”
Elise suppressed a groan and turned away. Even though she’d been here for months, Madame Roche still seemed to misinterpret everything she said as a criticism. “Yes,” she agreed after a moment, resisting the urge to explain that she only meant that she pitied the children. Madame Roche would simply say that she should save her pity for the ones who were dead, and then they’d argue, and Elise would politely back down while Madame Roche regarded her smugly. It had become a familiar dance.
“You will make a stew,” Madame Roche said when they were done tidying. “They’ll be hungry when they arrive.”
Elise nodded and headed down the ladder from the attic and into the kitchen, where Bernard stood, smoking a cigarette. He had been here more often since January, when he’d arrived one day looking as though someone had rearranged his face. Shocked, Elise had rushed to him and asked what had happened as she instinctively tried to blot away the dried blood on his cheeks and forehead. He had told her gruffly not to worry about him, that he’d met a man in the woods who didn’t like him much, a collaborator who was presently at the bottom of a riverbed.
“Bernard,” she said now, smiling at him. “What brings you here?”
“Chicken,” he grumbled, making the word—poulet—sound like it consisted of a single syllable. He gestured to the table where, spread on a strip of butcher’s paper before him, a dead chicken lay, more bone than flesh beneath its paltry feathers. “You are cooking?”
Elise nodded and crossed the room to reach for the chicken, but Bernard shot a big hand out to stop her. “I will pull the feathers,” he said. Without waiting for a reply, he began to pluck the bird.
“Thank you.” Elise went into the cupboard and emerged with several starchy Jerusalem artichokes, knobbier and more tubular than potatoes, and set to work boiling a pot of water. “You’re all right, Bernard?”
He grunted an affirmation, which she assumed was all she would get from him. He was a man of few words, and she had gotten used to his near silence. But now, it seemed something was weighing on him. “Your daughter,” he said, and she was so surprised that she almost dropped the knife she’d picked up to cut the vegetables. “Madame Roche told me you are a mother. Do you think of her often?”
It took her a moment to answer. She had never discussed Mathilde with either Bernard or Madame Roche. “Every moment of every day,” she said, returning to her chopping.
“You are good with the children,” he said after a moment. “I can see it. I know you are a good mother.”
Elise stopped cutting again and closed her eyes. “But would a good mother leave her child behind?” It was a question she’d been asking herself a lot lately, but to hear herself speak the words so plainly made her heart ache.
“Of course.” Bernard’s answer was instant. “All the children who come through, you think their parents were not good parents? No, those parents did all they could to save their children. It is why they are still alive.” It was the most she’d ever heard him say at once, and she felt mildly stunned by the conversation.
“But what if there was more I could have done? More any of these parents could have done?”
“Do you think we’d all be here if it was as easy as that?” Bernard asked. “No. That’s why we do what we do, Madame Denaes. To put it all back together.”
“To put it all back together,” she echoed. “Do you really think we can?” she asked after a moment. “Can we ever fix what is broken?”
“The world breaks all the time,” he said without looking at her. “And always, always, it is put back together again. You’ll find your way back to your daughter, and she will be waiting.”
The words replayed in her head long after Bernard had slipped the chicken, which he’d cleaved into quarters, into the pot and headed outside without saying another thing. She could hear him chopping wood outside the barn, and the rhythmic thwack-thwack of the axe was strangely comforting. For the first time in months, her fingers itched. How freeing it would feel to carve some wood, but here, there was so little to spare. It seemed indulgent to ask.
She was still lost in thought a few hours later, just past sunset, when she glimpsed through the kitchen window an old farm truck rattling up the lane toward the house. She recognized it; it belonged to Monsieur Léandre, the butcher from the next town over, a man who sometimes delivered batches of children. Their occasional emaciated chickens and sausages of questionable construct came from him, too; he gave Madame Roche whatever he could spare, since the children in the attic had no access to rations.