Darkness fell before they reached Paris, and though Elise wanted nothing more than to get to Mathilde as quickly as possible, she couldn’t argue with Bernard, who pointed out how dangerous the damaged roads would be in the blackness. They slept in the truck, hot and restless, and set out again at dawn, fueled by a canteen of water, a hard loaf of bread, and some potatoes Madame Roche had packed for their journey.
It was just past ten in the morning when Bernard steered the truck north from Issy, crossing one of the twin bridges over the sparkling Seine. As they approached the capital, the streets took on a festive feel, with the tricolor waving from balconies and flying from rooftops. American and British soldiers lined the roads, talking and laughing. Here, for the moment, these boys who had risked their lives to turn back the Germans were enjoying the fruits of their labors. Paris was free.
“Shall I bring you straight to your friend’s bookstore?” Bernard asked, glancing at Elise. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the joy, the celebration.
“Please.” The closer they drew to Juliette’s street, the harder it was for Elise to breathe. There was evidence of fighting here, bullet holes in walls, burned buildings, pockmarked streets. But Boulogne-Billancourt was still standing, having survived the worst. Elise’s heart thudded in anticipation.
“Bombs,” Bernard said after a while as he steered the truck carefully around haphazardly parked automobiles and overturned scooters. Somewhere in the distance, a crowd sang “La Marseillaise.”
“Pardon?”
“Bombs,” he repeated, his eyes never leaving the road. “This area has been hit.”
Elise swallowed a sudden lump in her throat. “Recently?”
“It’s difficult to tell.” He paused and scanned the neighborhood as he waited for a woman and child to cross the road ahead of them. “No. I don’t think so. But there was a lot of damage.”
“The Renault factory,” Elise said. “It was struck in March of ’42, before I left.”
The concern didn’t slip from Bernard’s face.
“You don’t think the Allies hit it again, do you?” Elise asked.
“I don’t know. It depends whether the factory went back into service, I think.”
Elise could hear the fear in her own voice as she said quickly, “The bookstore is nowhere near the factory.”
“That’s good, then.”
But as they drove west and then north through the suburb, Elise began to notice signs of ruin that weren’t there before: charred trees, broken pavement, buildings with jagged bites taken out of their roofs.
Finally, the road ahead of them ended abruptly in a pile of rubble so thick it appeared that a truck had simply dropped a load of shattered cement, concrete, and bricks in their path. They both sat staring at it for a few seconds before Elise spoke. “The bookstore is just ahead, I think, a block or so down.”
Without looking at her, Bernard put the truck in reverse. “I will find a way around.”
But Elise was filled with a sense of sudden desperation. “No. I’ll get out. It’s only a short walk from here.”
“I will come with you.”
“No.” Elise looked at him, an unexpected sadness sweeping through her, mingling with her panic. “You’ve already done so much.”
Bernard frowned. “And if the bookstore is closed?”
“Then I will ask around until I find someone who knows where the family has gone.”
“And if—”
Elise cut him off, unwilling to hear whatever he was about to say. “I will find them, and then I will bring my daughter home.”
Bernard watched her closely as she opened the truck door and climbed out, closing the door lightly behind her. “Be well, Leona.”
“Elise,” she said through the open window. “My real name is Elise.”
He smiled. “Elise, then. I am Fran?ois.”
“Fran?ois,” she murmured. “It is nice to meet you.”
“And you.” And then, with a nod, he backed up, turned the truck around, and was gone, cleaving the past two years of her life away, as if they had never happened at all.
She watched until his truck vanished around a corner, and then, squaring her shoulders, she set down the path that had been cleared to the right of the rubble. She had the strange, disorienting feeling, as she wove her way around a bend and over a pile of jagged stone fragments that dug into her shoes, that she was on another planet. The destruction here was so complete, civilization so obscured by the mounds of ruin, that she couldn’t recognize it as any version of earth she knew, never mind a familiar suburb of Paris. Dust kicked up with her every step, swirling into the air like devastated clouds, but then there was light on the other side of the ruin, and her heartbeat quickened. She was almost there, almost to Juliette’s street, where she would find the bookshop standing, and Mathilde safe and sound within its walls.
She picked her way with effort over a final mountain of rubble, breathing hard, and as she descended the other side, she stopped short, her heart squeezed by an icy fist of fear. “No.” The word escaped her lips, a choked sound of grief, as she stared.
Ahead of her, the row of buildings where the bookstore had once stood now loomed like jagged, angry teeth against a gray sky, roofs missing, walls collapsed inward, sharp edges scraping nothingness. Gone were the bakery, the hat store, the antiques store. Gone was the green door across the way with the crooked 10 listing to one side, the geraniums in the pots that bloomed in the spring. In place of all that was familiar, there was only waste and ruin. The rubble she had just clawed her way through, she realized with a sudden jolt of horror, was the detritus of the world she’d once known, the world she’d assumed would be waiting when she returned.
Shaking, Elise spun around in a circle, searching for something she recognized. Surely she was on the wrong block. Bernard had dropped her in the wrong place, or perhaps her memory had been faulty after all the time away. But there, at the end of the street, was the familiar bell tower of the Paroisse Sainte Cécile, and perpendicular to the ruined lane was the still-standing butcher shop that had belonged to Monsieur Lychner.
Elise put one foot in front of the other, her whole body shaking as she approached what had once been the bookstore. There was no door to push open, so she stepped over the ruined threshold and gaped at the emptiness. Gone were the shelves, the books, the desk Juliette sometimes worked behind, the children’s area where Mathilde had played with Lucie and the boys. Bile rising in her throat, Elise took a few more steps inside, noting the sky above her where the ceiling—and the apartment above it—had once been. In the middle of the room that was no longer a room at all, on a pile of rubble, lay a splintered piece of wood with the letters Li in faded blue and gold—all that was left of the Librairie des Rêves sign that had hung just above the door.
Elise’s stomach lurched, and she folded in two, her body rejecting what her eyes were telling her. She allowed herself a brief moment of collapse before she wiped away the tears and stood, scanning the devastation. Breathe, she reminded herself. You would feel it if your daughter was dead. But would she? Or had that connection been severed the day she walked away from Mathilde, the day she entrusted her child’s life to someone else? She moaned and fell to her knees, still gazing around in disbelief at the wreckage of the store. In the far corner, she could make out the icebox that had once lived in Juliette’s apartment, the armchair where Paul read his books at night, now flattened to a pancake.
“Madame?”
The voice came from behind her, and Elise spun around to see a tiny, stooped old woman standing there, her dress gray with dust. “It is not safe,” she said. “You can’t be in there.”
“What happened?” Elise whispered. “To the bookstore owners? To their family?”
The woman glanced behind Elise, as if waiting for Juliette and the children to emerge from the rubble, and then she refocused on Elise. “The Allies bombed the Renault factory on a Sunday last April. There were several bombs that missed. They had terrible aim, you know. Imagine missing by so many kilometers!”
Elise’s throat was dry. “But there was enough warning for everyone to get to safety, yes?”
The woman shook her head slowly. “Less than a minute. In broad daylight. By the time we understood what was happening…” Her voice trailed off.
“The children? What happened to the children at the bookstore?”
The woman didn’t meet her gaze. “The husband died.”
“Paul. My God, Paul.”
“And three of the children.”
“No.” A dark tide of foreboding rolled through Elise. “My God, no. Which ones?”
“There was a fourth child here, too,” the woman went on. It was like Elise’s panicked questions were simply sailing over her head. “The little girl of Monsieur Foulon’s cousin, I believe, an orphan already. Sweet little soul.”
“Yes, Mathilde.” Desperation clawed at Elise’s throat. “Mathilde survived? Please, you have to tell me! Is Mathilde alive? Is Juliette alive?”
“Madame Foulon lived, yes.” The woman sighed and gestured toward the bookstore. “I have never seen someone so broken. Her daughter was the only one of the children to live.”
“No.” Elise was struggling to put together what the woman was saying, though it was already clear. “Do you mean Lucie? Not Mathilde? Lucie?”