“Blessed be to God.” The woman crossed herself. “A miracle.”
“But the other little girl… Mathilde…”
“I’m afraid not.” The woman pressed her lips together. “The priest reminded the congregation that week that the orphan had gone to be with her parents, who had already departed this earth. Part of God’s plan, he said. He encouraged us all to find peace in that.”
The woman delivered the last words with a singsong note of hope, and if Elise hadn’t been so paralyzed by horror, she would have reached out and slapped her. “Mathilde is dead?”
She grieved for Paul and the boys, too, ached for Juliette’s loss, but she couldn’t process what the woman was telling her. Mathilde couldn’t be gone.
The woman looked at her more closely now. “Did you know the child yourself?”
“I am her mother,” Elise whispered.
The woman began to protest that it was impossible, and in some corner of her consciousness, Elise could hear her asking questions about why the Foulons had said Mathilde was an orphan, but she was already turning her back, already walking away, her feet carrying her down what remained of the street, right at the corner, and east toward the graveyard near the Seine where she knew Juliette’s first daughter was buried. Had she laid the others to rest in the same place? Had Mathilde been buried with them?
She felt like a dead woman herself as she staggered into the cemetery twenty minutes later. She had been here once with Juliette, to lay flowers on the lost baby’s grave, so she knew the general area of the Foulon family plot. Still, her vision was blurred by shock and grief, so it took another ten minutes before she found the familiar gravestone of little Antoinette Foulon, and beside it, four new headstones, their lettering stark and unmistakable.
Elise was aware, on some level, of the graves marked for Paul, born in 1897; Claude, born in 1935; and Alphonse, born in 1937. But it was the fourth headstone that brought her to her knees. Mathilde Foulon, 1940–1943. There it was, chiseled into stone. It was the final resting place of Elise’s daughter, and it didn’t even bear her real name.
Elise placed her hand on the cool grass in the headstone’s shadow and retched until her body was exhausted. She was hardly aware of the tears streaming down her cheeks, or the moans rising from her throat in the shape of her daughter’s name. She clawed at the earth, not caring that people were stopping along other paths in the cemetery to stare. She wanted to bring her daughter back, to hold her, to breathe life back into her. That’s what a mother was supposed to do, and she had failed. She had been many miles away, living a different life, when a bomb had fallen from the sky and ripped the soul from her daughter’s tiny body. How would she live with herself?
“Madame?” Strong arms wrapped around her and pulled her from the ground, and as she fell backward, the arms held her, not letting her go. It was a man, a stranger, and he didn’t say another word as she sobbed and screamed and cursed the heavens. He simply braced her with his own body and waited until, like a spent balloon, she deflated and fell limply forward, still in his grasp. “Are you all right, madame?” he asked when she went silent.
A laugh bubbled up in her throat. How could he ask such a thing? How could he imagine that she would ever be all right again? “No.” She pulled away and turned to look at him. He was perhaps ten years her senior, with a scar down his right cheek, and a closely trimmed mustache. His eyes were kind and full of pity that she didn’t deserve.
“Your family?” he asked, gesturing to the grave markers.
“My daughter.” Another tear slipped down her cheek.
“I lost my girls, too. Both daughters and my wife.”
Elise realized then that it wasn’t just pity she saw in his eyes; it was recognition. He, too, had a well of raw grief within him. “When?”
“March of ’42. The first bombing. I—I was at work at the factory. I was supposed to protect them, you see.”
“I’m sorry.” She searched his eyes again. “I’m very sorry. How do you move on? How do you… How do you believe it? That they’re gone? I don’t feel it, you see. I don’t feel it here.” She tapped her empty heart.
“I have a son. He needs me to return to life. There must be someone who needs you, too, isn’t there?”
“My husband is dead. Mathilde was all I…” Her voice trailed off into a sob.
“Still, you must go on, madame. There is no other choice. You must live to honor her.”
Elise didn’t say anything. How could she honor her daughter with life when all she wanted to do was curl up beside her grave and die?
“Can I help you home?” he asked after a time.
Slowly, she shook her head.
He studied her, perhaps evaluating whether she was a risk to herself, before nodding. He put a hand on her arm for a few seconds and then withdrew without another word, trudging out of the cemetery without a look back.
Slowly, Elise turned back to her daughter’s grave and traced the letters of her name—Mathilde—with a shaking hand before curling up on the cold earth and closing her eyes, praying that God would see fit to take her, too.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Elise slept atop Mathilde’s grave for two nights before the cemetery’s caretaker made his way over, his mouth turned down at the corners, to tell her that he would call the authorities if she did not move on. She had explained that her daughter was here, and that she could not leave her alone.
“This place is full of sons and daughters, madame,” he said, his expression as flat as his tone. “I can’t have people sleeping in my graveyard, though. Move along.”
And so she had dragged herself back outside the cemetery walls to a world that was still in existence, though she could hardly believe it. How could life go on without Mathilde? But her stomach rumbled, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten in more than two days, and finally, she began to walk east, back toward Paris, crossing the Seine on the Pont Mirabeau and making her way slowly up the avenue ?mile Zola.
It was strange how familiar Paris was, how undamaged, how much like its old self. In Boulogne, just across the river, hell had come to earth, but here, flowers bloomed cheerily from window boxes, and the women strolling the streets wore rouge, lipstick, and heels as they walked briskly along. Did they not know that the rest of France had been shattered? That people had lost husbands and wives, daughters and sons? That as she hurried along, Elise felt no sense of belonging, though not so long ago she had been one of them? She resented their happiness, the lightness of their expressions, the intact homes they were likely returning to with baguettes and sunflowers tucked under their arms.
She turned from the rue Jean de la Fontaine onto the avenue Mozart and found her old building just as she’d remembered it, white marble, gilded edges, a soaring mansard roof. A doorman she didn’t know stood in front of the door, blocking her way rather than ushering her in as he gazed at her suspiciously.
“Madame?” he asked, the word a question. He wrinkled his nose slightly.
“I live here.” She knew she looked a fright, but so would he if he’d just traveled from the south and learned that his daughter had died. His family was probably safe and whole, and she instantly hated him for it with a ferocity that surprised her.
He narrowed his eyes slightly. “I have never seen you before.”
“I have not seen you, either,” she answered reasonably. “I have been gone for two years, but a friend has been keeping my apartment.”
When he didn’t say anything, she added impatiently, “Monsieur, I am Elise LeClair. I live on the sixth floor.”
“And you have identification proving this?” he asked, still not moving. It was clear he did not believe her.
“Of course.” She dug in her handbag and withdrew her papers, only to realize just before thrusting them over that they identified her as Leona Denaes. She yanked them back before he could take them, and he raised an eyebrow at her.
“Perhaps your friend can vouch for you,” he said in a tone that clearly mocked her. “Until then, though, you’ll need to step away from this building.”
She wanted to spit at him, but that would do her no good. Instead, she whirled on her heel and walked away with as much dignity as she could toward Constant Bouet’s art gallery nearby. He would help her sort things out.
She was relieved to find it standing, the Galerie Constant Bouet shingle still hanging outside. In the window, among several paintings she had never seen, she spotted one of Olivier’s works, an abstract piece he had done the year they married. On it was a tag with a price that seemed unimaginable; it was three times what one of his paintings would have sold for two years earlier.
A man she’d never seen before emerged from the back of the immaculate gallery and looked at her the same way the doorman outside her building had. Before he could turn her away, she spoke. “I’m looking for Constant Bouet.”