“Lucie!” she called, choking on the lump of grief and hope that had lodged itself in her heart, and then she was pulling her little girl from the rubble, and it was indeed her, her hair matted, her face gray with ash, her arm streaked with blood, but she was here, and she was alive, and there was hope for them both, and Juliette had a reason to live.
“Maman!” Lucie kept saying, over and over, and Juliette pulled her close and buried her face in her brown curls and breathed all the hope and the life and the love she’d had for the others into the living body of her one remaining child.
“Lucie, it’s going to be all right,” she lied. “Maman will make everything all right.”
And then, though her throbbing leg shouldn’t have supported her own weight, let alone the weight of two, she pulled herself up and hoisted her daughter into her arms and stumbled her way across the destruction, past the hand of Mathilde still reaching up from the rubble, toward the shattered front of the store, where a door still stood, a door to a life beyond this hell, beyond these ruined walls. The grief of losing Paul, Claude, and Alphonse would break her, the guilt of losing Elise’s daughter would bow her, but Lucie was still here, a gift from God, and Juliette knew in that moment that they would both go on, even if the future ahead of them was something they wouldn’t recognize, something they couldn’t bear. They would do it together, a mother and daughter, emerging from the ashes like a pair of phoenixes, though Juliette feared grief would tether her to the ground no matter how wide she spread her wings.
* * *
An ambulance arrived at some point and brought them to the hospital, where both Juliette and Lucie were forced to stay for months. Juliette’s leg had been broken, and her head injury was significant; the doctors couldn’t figure out why sometimes she fainted out of the blue, and sometimes she couldn’t sleep at all, for days on end. Lucie had broken an arm and a collarbone, and once she was healed, the nurses let her sleep by Juliette’s bedside, where the nights were punctuated by screams from her recurring nightmares.
Paul, the boys, and Mathilde LeClair were buried alongside Antoinette, in the cemetery on the southern end of Boulogne-Billancourt, and after she and Lucie were released from the hospital, a priest from the Paroisse Sainte Cécile performed a funeral mass that no one else attended.
For the first year, Juliette and Lucie went every day to visit the graves, but by April 1944, a year after the blast, there was no longer a place for them in Paris. The government had no interest in supporting an American-born widow and her daughter, and there was no money to help rebuild the store.
Juliette finally wrote a letter to her father’s estranged older sister, her aunt Sally, who lived in New York. She wired them some money, but it was only enough to rent a small room in a farmhouse outside Paris. They were always on the verge of starving, and slowly, slowly, Juliette came to hate the France she had once loved, the place she had thought of as the embodiment of all her dreams. It had taken everything from her, and now, in her most desperate hour, it refused to give anything back.
After the Liberation, she’d had no choice but to write to her aunt again, begging her to take them in. She couldn’t bear the thought of leaving Paul, Claude, Alphonse, and Antoinette behind, but it was only their bodies here. She knew that now. Their souls were with her always, and lately, she’d been hearing Paul’s voice in her head, urging her to make something of her life, for Lucie’s sake.
“Begin again,” he’d been whispering to her. “Begin again for her.”
When she’d told her doctor that her dead husband had suggested she return to America, he had replied by recommending a psychiatric evaluation. But it wasn’t crazy to believe that the love of her life was still with her, or that she could hear the voices of her children every time she closed her eyes. Paul had promised never to leave her, to always keep her safe, and he had always been a man of his word. Why would he abandon her now, when she needed him most?
And so, just as Paul had urged her to do, she and Lucie climbed aboard an ocean liner bound for New York Harbor to begin a new life, leaving the ruins of their bookshop of dreams behind them forever.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Mathilde.
It was all Elise could think about as she rode in the passenger seat of Monsieur Léandre’s borrowed truck, the first week of September 1944, with Bernard at the wheel, the wind whipping her hair. Mathilde. The word rang again and again through her head like church bells on a wedding day, a sound of joy, a sound of hope, a sound of a future beautiful and bright. Mathilde would be there. Mathilde would be waiting. Mathilde would be in her arms again, safe and sound.
The war still raged in the east, and there was still fighting in the south, but Paris had been liberated the week before, and the Germans were gradually retreating from the rest of France, too, pushed back at every front by the unstoppable Allied advance that had begun in June with the landing at Normandy. Elise had never imagined that the war would last this long, but as 1943 had turned cold and bled into 1944, she had felt some of the light go out of her. She had helped to protect hundreds of children who came through Aurignon, but each one had reminded her anew of her distance from her own daughter. Would Mathilde remember her?
She had imagined their reunion so many times, the feel of Mathilde’s heart beating against hers, the familiar scent of her, the way Mathilde would have grown from a toddler into a child by now. It had been nearly two years, each day of distance almost unbearable. There would be so many things to share, so many stories to tell, though Elise knew she would only recount a fraction of what she’d gone through. She would never tell Mathilde about the Resistance fighter who died in her arms from a wound she couldn’t patch, or the woman she’d seen shot in the face in the streets of Aurignon by a German whose hand trembled as he pulled the trigger. She would not tell her of the blood she had helped scrub from the church floor after a man took his own life there, nor would she tell her of watching Père Clément dragged away and thrown into the back of a transport truck. He was surely dead by now, and she prayed for his soul every night.
But the war in France was over, and Bernard was driving her north to Paris, to a life where she would reunite with her daughter and return to her apartment and try to become Elise LeClair again.
“You will see your daughter soon,” Bernard said without looking at her as they drove. His eyes were on the road, which was shredded and lined with stalled cars and the occasional body. Though the devil had receded with the occupiers, the trail of his destruction remained.
A car honked behind them, urging them to hurry, and Elise wanted to beg Bernard to drive faster, too, but she already knew that was futile. Now, as he narrowly missed steering the truck into a bomb-hewn ditch, she understood why. This wasn’t the France she and Olivier had driven through years ago on their way back from a rare holiday in Vallauris. This was a hellscape out of a nightmare, something she couldn’t have imagined before seeing it with her own eyes.
“Will she remember me?” Elise asked after a time, once the impatient driver at their tail had attempted to whiz around them and had instead wound up veering off the road and sideswiping a tree.
“A child always remembers,” Bernard said. They were quiet for a moment more, and then he added, “My mother died when I was eight. I remember her still, every curve of her face.”
“I’m sorry.” Elise knew how lucky she was to still be alive. God had shown her favor, had spared her, and she knew that it was because she was meant to return for Mathilde.
Bernard waved the condolence away. “Your daughter will know you.”
“But she was so young. It’s been two years, Bernard. I don’t know if I would have strength enough to bear it if she were to look at me like a stranger.”
“Your daughter will know you,” he repeated. “And you’re stronger than you think.”
She wished she could feel as confident about the future as Bernard seemed to be, but surety eluded her. The only thing she knew was that Mathilde was still out there, and she would find her, and nothing else would matter. “Bernard,” she said after a while. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
He glanced at her briefly and then returned his gaze to the shattered landscape beyond the windshield. “What for?”
“For believing in the future when I cannot seem to. For taking me home.”
He didn’t answer, and she didn’t speak again. Instead, she wrapped the silence around her like a blanket, muffling the world that rolled by outside the windows.
* * *