“Paul?” She could hear the panic in her own voice, desperate and raw now as the pieces began to rearrange themselves in her head, forming a picture she couldn’t bear to imagine. “Claude? Alphonse? Where are you?”
There was still no answer. The silence pressed down, and through her rising terror, the room gradually swam into focus. “Lucie?” she called, her voice cracking. Paul had reached the girls, hadn’t he? They had been in his arms. Surely they were all in the cellar, worrying about her. “I’m fine!” she called out, trying to make her voice bright. “Just hold on, my loves! I’m coming!”
But the store was as quiet as a crypt. “Children?” she called, once again choking on all the destruction in the air. Outside, the noises of rescue, men’s shouts and sirens, seemed to be coming closer, but they still sounded like they belonged to another world.
Her rising panic gave her strength, and with a grunt and a heave, her whole body throbbing, Juliette managed to lift the bookcase just enough to free her leg. It hurt so much that it made her dizzy, but she was so desperate now to get to the children that she didn’t care. She began to drag herself across the mound of rubble, toward the cellar door, moaning as pain radiated up and down her left thigh. “Children!” she called again. “Paul! I’m here! Please!”
It was at that moment, the plea still on her lips, when she saw the first sign of them: Alphonse’s shoe, tattered and too small for him. She had hated that she couldn’t buy him a new pair, that there weren’t leather soles to be found anywhere anymore. That was no way to live, but Alphonse had seemed to understand and had cheerfully insisted that he loved these shoes, even when his big toe began to poke out of his left one. That was the foot she saw now, the faded brown leather, a toe just visible. “Alphonse!” she cried, scrambling toward him. Why hadn’t Paul protected him? Gotten him to the cellar? The boy must be terrified. “Alphonse, Maman is here!”
When she reached him, she grasped his foot. “I will get you out!” she called. “Hold on, my darling.” But there was no reply. His foot didn’t move. Trembling, she pushed books aside, noting numbly that some were just covers, their pages blasted out. She put her hand on his little calf, and squeezed, but still, there was no response. He was cold, too cold, and she couldn’t understand what was happening. He didn’t feel like her little boy, not at all; he was stiff as a marionette, but that wasn’t possible. “Alphonse!” she cried out, and some part of her must have understood, because already, her throat was closing, and she was choking on the grief, the horror, the disbelief. No, God, no.
She clawed through the pile now, no longer aware of her own pain, her shattered leg, the screaming ache in her head, the way her vision was still blurred. The only thing that mattered was getting to Alphonse, pulling him out of this hell, breathing life back into his lungs.
But then, there were his shoulders, and then his little head, turned to the side, his sandy brown hair mussed, and as she pulled him up, her own limbs shrieking in protest, he was cold, his skin too gray, his lips the color of the Seine’s waters on a dismal day. “Alphonse!” she screamed, pulling his limp body toward hers and shaking him, because this was impossible, this couldn’t be happening. “Alphonse, breathe!” she commanded, but he wasn’t listening, because he wasn’t here anymore.
She parted his cold lips, his little body flopping against hers, and blew her own breath into his lungs, willing his chest to rise, willing him to wake up and come back to her. But when she took her mouth away, he was silent, still. “No!” she cried to the sky, to God, before breathing once again into him, trying to give him life, trying to turn back the clock, trying to deny what she already knew. She put a hand on his neck, feeling for a pulse, then, when she couldn’t find one, to his wrist. When there was no motion there either, she moaned and lifted him up, pressing her head to the left side of his chest, searching for a heartbeat she already knew wasn’t there. “Alphonse!” she screamed, crushing him to her own chest. “Come back!”
But it was too late. His soul had flown, taking all his laughter and joy with it, and she thought for an instant of the flock of wooden birds Elise had once shown her, rising to the sky, grief and hope in their wings as they lifted toward the heavens. Just as quickly, just as fleetingly, she felt a hot surge of anger toward Elise. Could Paul have saved Alphonse if he had grabbed him rather than Mathilde, a child who wasn’t his? But then the anger was gone, vanishing into the rubble, as Juliette gently lowered Alphonse’s body back to the floor, his resting place a pile of pages. “Paul?” she called out, but the panic had drained from her, and all she felt now was grief as the realization slowly dawned on her. There was a reason for the silence, the stillness here. They weren’t in the cellar, were they? Paul would have heard her. He would have done all he could to reach her, to reach Alphonse.
Still, the truth was too terrible to face.
Slowly, she dragged herself through the rubble, pulling her limp leg behind her. She saw a hand beneath a pile of books, and sobbing, retching, she moved toward it, already knowing it was Claude’s, already knowing he was dead. She grasped it and found it cold and still, with no pulse. How long had she been unconscious? How long had it taken for all the warmth to leave her sons? How long ago had their souls left their bodies? Was it day? Was it night? She had no sense of time, little sense of place. How could their safe, beautiful bookstore have been transformed into this hellscape?
Howling, she dug through the rubble until she could see Claude’s face, his eyes open, his lips parted. Had he called for her? Had he died with fear in his heart, believing she had abandoned him, or had he gone instantly, without pain, without terror? “Claude,” she whispered, but when she pulled him up and pressed him to her breast, where he’d nursed as an infant not so very long ago, he was just a shell, just an empty vessel that had once held the soul of a boy who was supposed to have a beautiful life.
Near the cellar, Juliette could see another form in the darkness, and after guiding Claude’s lifeless body back to the floor, she crawled toward the shape, pain still radiating up her left leg, all the way to her broken heart. It was Paul—she could see him lying on his back before she got there. He was splayed out like a snow angel, piles of rubble on either side of him, his empty eyes looking up at the darkness, his skin unnaturally pale, his mouth just slightly open. Juliette pulled her body beside his and laid her head on his chest, listening for a heartbeat she knew wasn’t there. “Paul, please, come back to me,” she begged, but he was gone, and she wondered about spirits and souls and whether he was with the boys, if he was holding their hands wherever they were, telling them it would be all right, which was a lie. It would never be all right, none of it.
But Lucie. Where was Lucie? If Lucie had survived, Juliette would go on. She couldn’t simply close her eyes in this terrible hell and wait for death to reunite her with her family. “Lucie?” she called in the darkness, and there, just to the right of Paul, she saw another hand reaching out from the rubble, a tiny hand, with tiny fingers and tiny nails, and suddenly, as she dragged her own body toward it, she was desperate to remember which of Paul’s strong arms had held Lucie and which had held Mathilde, but then she was squeezing the hand in anguish, and it was just as cold as Claude’s had been, just as devoid of life, and she wept as she dug through the rubble, trying to reach the girl entombed beneath, though she could already feel that her pulse was forever gone. Was it Lucie? Juliette would die if it was; she was certain of it. But just as she found a cold, lifeless leg beneath the books that had once sustained them, there was a noise behind her, a rustling, and then a cough.
“Maman?” whispered a tiny voice in the darkness, the most beautiful sound Juliette had ever heard. It was Lucie. The other girl’s hand, which she was still clutching though it was cold and lifeless, belonged to Mathilde, and she let go of it instantly, shaking off a ghost. Her heart lurched in pain and guilt for a skip of a second, but the crushing weight of her own loss was unbearable, and there was not room enough on her shoulders for regret over not protecting her friend’s child when she could not even save her own. What mattered now was that Lucie was still here. Her daughter was alive; her daughter was calling for her; her daughter was still on this earth.