“I have only one request,” she said after a moment, having weighed her options carefully. “I had a bookstore in France. I would like to open one here.”
“That can be arranged,” he replied. “If you say yes.”
Less than a year later, she had a new husband, an apartment on the Upper East Side, and a bookstore on East Fifty-Sixth Street, which she had the budget to stock and design in any way she wanted. She had chosen the spot specifically because there was an art gallery owned by a Frenchman on the corner, as well as a French café on the same block, and she wanted to be able to walk to work and imagine—despite the yellow cabs rattling by, despite the brownstones and the wide, even pavement—that she was not in New York but back in France. Little Paris, the neighbors called their block, and she reveled in the title, in the idea that by sheer will, one could re-create a life anywhere.
And so, while Lucie attended kindergarten at a private school Arthur had chosen for her, Juliette spent her days in the bookstore, painstakingly rebuilding a shattered past. With every book she ordered from France, with every shelf she commissioned, with every angle she designed to look just like the old store, she could breathe a bit more easily. She harangued carpenters for making bookcases a bit too high, insisting that they cut them down to match her memory. She stood with her arms crossed at the foot of a ladder several days in a row as a man installed lights, urging him left and right until they hung just right. She even had a painter repaint the counter seven times to achieve exactly the correct hue of brown, but at the end, it was worth it; the interior was an exact duplicate of La Librairie des Rêves in Boulogne-Billancourt. In fact, the first time she brought Lucie to the store after the renovation, the girl began to shake.
“What is it, my darling?” Juliette asked as Lucie cowered behind her.
“It is—it is the scary place,” Lucie stammered, and Juliette had to blink several times to clear her tears before bending to the frightened child.
“No,” she said. “It is the beautiful place, the place where we spent our days with your father and your brothers before that terrible day. We will have only happiness here.”
But Juliette had known, even then, that she was telling lies. She didn’t know how to be happy anymore. She could hardly understand how she got out of bed each day and put one foot in front of the other. But she had become adept at pretending to be a doting mother, pretending to be a devoted wife.
Arthur was a good man. He gave her everything she needed and didn’t expect a bigger piece of her heart than she had to give. His presence ensured that Lucie would always be safe and fed. And if her only obligations were to smile at the right times, to dutifully join him each night for dinner at seven on the dot, and to lie on her back a few times a month, imagining she was elsewhere while his body moved on top of hers, she could do that. It was a small price to pay.
Lucie grew and grew, as children do, but it was difficult for Juliette to watch as the girl moved from being a child to becoming a young teenager. After all, Claude and Alphonse were frozen at eight and six, and it seemed rude of Lucie to sail right past them and keep going. Juliette knew that was an unreasonable thought, so she kept it to herself. But while Arthur, now retired, puttered around their sprawling apartment doing goodness knows what, and while Lucie attended school, Juliette spent every weekday in the bookshop talking to ghosts. Paul came to her most days now, and Claude and Alphonse were often playing in the back, their giggles wafting up from the floorboards. Though she knew intellectually that they were not real, it did not stop her from eagerly awaiting their visits. In fact, most days, she closed the shop for a few hours because she didn’t care about making a profit as much as she cared about making space for the past to join her.
Arthur didn’t mind. He had broached the subject of the store a few times, asking if perhaps it might be better to close it and try another venture, given that it lost money each month. But each time, Juliette burst into tears, and each time, he held his hands up in apology and admitted that he should not have suggested such a thing.
All was going as well as expected until the day in September 1960 that the past walked right through her door.
It was an unseasonably warm Tuesday, so pleasant outside that Juliette had propped the front door open to let the breeze in, along with the scent of baking baguettes from the French café down the street. She had found that when the wind was blowing in just the right direction, the odor wafted in and could transport her to France on wings of flour and yeast. This was one of those days, and so when she looked up and saw a familiar face gazing around with astonishment, it took her a few extra seconds to register that she was experiencing anything unusual. She was so accustomed to seeing Paul and the children here that Ruth Levy, though her hair was grayer and her face older, seemed to belong perfectly. But then Juliette realized how strange this in fact was, and she dropped the handful of books she was holding. The tremendous bang they made as they hit the floor seemed to snap Ruth out of her obvious shock.
“Juliette? Juliette Foulon?” Ruth said, and hearing the woman’s voice aloud, reverberating through the shop, was strange. Paul, Claude, and Alphonse only spoke to her in her head.
“Yes,” Juliette answered evenly, because perhaps if she pretended that this was normal, it would be. Suddenly, she was certain that Ruth was a ghost, too. That would make sense.
But then the woman stepped forward and took Juliette by the arms, and Juliette had to admit that she didn’t feel like an apparition. “Juliette Foulon,” the woman repeated. “It is me. Ruth Levy. From Boulogne. Don’t you remember me?”
“Yes, of course I do,” Juliette said.
Ruth blinked at her, and Juliette wondered if she’d said something wrong. “Juliette,” Ruth said a moment later. “This store. It is exactly like…” Her sentence trailed off.
“Like the original Librairie des Rêves, yes,” Juliette agreed. When she found Ruth still looking at her with concern, she added, “It is not the original store, of course. My husband allowed me to open a new one here, in New York.”
But Ruth’s confused expression didn’t clear. “Monsieur Foulon is alive?”
Juliette’s cheeks went hot with embarrassment and rage. “No. I am remarried.”
“Oh. Yes. I’m so sorry.” Then she amended, “I mean, of course, that I am sorry about Monsieur Foulon, but I’m very happy for you that you found love again.”
“I did not say that I found love,” Juliette said, but when she realized her voice sounded as hard as steel, she softened it. “But my husband, he is a good man.”
“Oh. How nice. And Lucie?”
Juliette forced a smile. “Lucie is very well, thank you.”
Ruth looked relieved. “Oh, I’m very glad. I’ve worried so many times over the years about the two of you. She is what, twenty now?”
Juliette had to think about it for a few seconds, and she pushed down her quick stab of anger. It wasn’t as though she could complain to Ruth about Lucie’s obstinate determination to keep growing older while her siblings stayed the same age. “Yes. That’s right. Twenty.” She followed the words with another polite smile.
Ruth seemed to be waiting for something else, but Juliette wasn’t sure what it was, so she kept quiet until Ruth said, “Georges and Suzanne are also well. Georges is twenty-eight now. Suzanne is twenty-six.”
“How wonderful,” Juliette said, hoping that rage was not flashing in her eyes. It wasn’t that she wished the Levy family ill. But Ruth had sent her children away instead of staying with them to protect them, as Juliette had done. How had all three of the Levys managed to survive intact while her family was ripped apart?
Ruth stared at her for a little while more before her eyes moved away. Juliette could see her gazing around the store, and she felt proud of what she knew the other woman was seeing. She was seeing a piece of her past, a past she thought was gone, but it wasn’t, because Juliette had kept it alive. Finally, Ruth’s gaze returned to hers. “Juliette, have you never reached out to Elise?”
It felt like Ruth had slapped her. Juliette took a step away, knocked backward by the blow. Her throat suddenly felt very dry, and the floor beneath her seemed to pitch and quake before settling. “Elise LeClair? Surely she did not survive the war.”