“And have you had plenty of water? Sometimes false contractions are triggered by dehydration.”
She couldn’t actually remember the last time she’d had a drink prior to Madame Foulon’s older son bringing her water in the bookshop a few minutes earlier. She was just about to say so when another wave of pain began. The doctor must have seen it in her face and in the way her body suddenly tensed, because immediately, his hands were on her belly again, and as she fought through the uncomfortable spasms, he closed his eyes and felt around her midsection, pressing here and there. When the pain subsided, he was smiling slightly and nodding to himself.
“Just as I thought,” he said, stepping away from her. “Practice contractions.”
“Pardon?”
“You are not having a baby today.” His tone was firm, reassuring.
“Are you certain?” Elise struggled back into a sitting position, unsure of whether to feel relieved or dismissed.
“Quite. In fact, Madame LeClair, it means your body is preparing for the birth. Like calisthenics for the big event.” He brushed his hands off. “Have a few glasses of water and rest here for a bit, then you can be safely on your way home.”
* * *
Though Elise was disinclined to believe the simple explanation, she did feel better after finishing the first glass of water, and better still after drinking a second glass at the small dining table while Madame Foulon fluttered around.
“I’m very sorry,” Madame Foulon said after refilling Elise’s glass once again. “You were fine on your own, and I should not have intervened.”
“I’m glad you did.” Elise realized she meant it. “I was frightened. I still am, to be honest. Do you think the doctor was right? That it’s nothing to worry about?”
“I do, yes. I should have realized.” A shadow swept across her features as she hesitated. “You see, I lost a baby. I—I tend to overreact sometimes. But you can’t imagine what it felt like. I—I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”
“How did it feel?” Elise asked softly, but when Madame Foulon didn’t answer right away, Elise realized she’d said the wrong thing. Sometimes, she thought too much like an artist, fixating on feelings and how she could render them rather than remembering her manners. “I’m very sorry,” she added hastily. “That was terribly rude of me.”
“No, it’s all right. Nobody has ever asked me that before.” Madame Foulon finally looked up and met her gaze, her eyes damp. “It was the most helpless I’ve felt in my life.” She hesitated and glanced at the floor. “And the grief, it felt like a flock of birds, so many of them, taking flight with nowhere to go.” She looked back up. “Goodness, I sound mad, don’t I?”
Elise thought of the birds in the park, the ones whose movements she’d been trying to capture. Somehow, Juliette’s words brought them alive in a way her crayon hadn’t been able to. “Not at all. You sound like you’ve endured a great loss.” She felt something within her stir, an urge to pick up a chisel, to give form to the symbol of anguish. “I’m very sorry, Madame Foulon.”
“Please, call me Juliette.” She wiped away an escaping tear.
“Only if you’ll call me Elise.”
Juliette smiled. “Perhaps you could come back sometime, Elise?”
“I’d like that,” Elise said. “I’d like that very much.”
* * *
Juliette called a car, and after saying goodbye to the magical bookshop the family called home, Elise found herself in the back of a black Citro?n headed to her own apartment on the tree-lined avenue Mozart in the seizième. It was a quick ride, and she bore it in silence, staring out the window at birds streaking by overhead, wild and free. She heard Juliette’s voice in her memory: It felt like a flock of birds, so many of them, taking flight with nowhere to go.
Before long, the car pulled to a stop outside her building; Elise took the rickety lift to her sixth-floor apartment in silence. It was empty, Olivier likely out at one of his meetings, and Elise made her way into her studio, a tiny, windowless room in the back that had once been a large storage space. Olivier, of course, had chosen for his studio a bedroom that looked east over the sunbaked zinc rooftops to the Place Rodin, but he’d been reasonable when he relegated her to what was essentially an oversize closet.
“You don’t need the windows like I do,” he’d said. “Wood is wood in any light. I need the sun, though, Elise, to ensure that I’m capturing exactly the right blends of colors on the palette.”
Of course he was right, but sometimes, in this space that he never entered, she felt lost. If she never emerged, would he find her here, or would she simply disappear into the apartment itself, absorbed into its walls?
For the first time in a while, she was feeling something, really feeling something. Meeting Juliette had opened a floodgate she hadn’t known was closed, and now, as she pulled out a block of limewood the size of a pile of Juliette’s books, a current passed through her fingers. She breathed deeply and leaned into the wood, absorbing its leafy, nutty scent, and then, without conscious thought, she reached toward the carefully arranged line of tools on her workbench. The chisels, gouges, and rasps, all of varying sizes and shapes, were laid out in neat rows, the blades facing toward her, an old woodworker’s trick so she could identify the instruments by their shapes without having to stop and think.
Now she wrapped her left hand around the smooth shaft of a large, curved gouge and picked up her wooden mallet with her right. Standing with her legs bent slightly to brace herself, she positioned the gouge and used the mallet to drive it into the wood block once, and then again and again, removing big chunks at the edges, already seeing the shape it would take in her mind’s eye. Before she had learned to work with wood, she had always imagined that carving, like sculpting in clay, was primarily a job involving the hands as they found the shape in the material. But this was a task that required her whole body, and while she worked, her shoulders ached from the effort of slicing form from a shapeless hunk, and the muscles in her back sang from the exertion. It was cathartic, becoming one with the art she was making, and she felt alive in a way she didn’t in her daily life. Here, her whole body knew what to do. Here, there were no wrong moves.
She had worried when she first found out that she was pregnant that her growing belly would get in the way while she carved, but she had learned to work around it, and besides, her belly had nothing to do with the strength in her arms and shoulders. If anything, it was invigorating to know that she was capable of creating life in both wood and her own body at the same time. And strangely, the more exhausted the pregnancy sometimes made her feel, the more the exertion of carving seemed to revive her.
She paused now and then to adjust the angle of her arms, or to grab a differently shaped gouge, as the figures of tiny birds began to emerge from the wood. Eventually, she put down the mallet and worked only with the sharp tools, moving from one stroke to the next. Her blades zipped effortlessly through the blond wood as paper-thin curls fell away.
As the afternoon wore on, she lost all sense of time. Somewhere outside, the sun was tracking toward the horizon, but she was blind to it in this dark room with no view of the world beyond her doors. All that mattered was that for the first time in a long while, she was creating again. She could feel the emotions that had churned within her bubbling up, funneling into the tools, slicing into the grain, and when she finally finished and sat back to look at what she’d done, it felt as if a great weight had been lifted.
Birds, dozens of them, hewn from the forgiving limewood, rose up from a marshy riverbed, their wings spread wide, their faces turned toward the sky. But narrow sinews, threads to the ground, held them firmly in place, and she had found the sadness in their eyes, the shock in their beaks, as they realized they were forever bound to the earth. It was Juliette’s grief, spilling from Elise’s hands—a flock of birds, so many of them, taking flight with nowhere to go—and she knew she had, after a long drought, shaped something special. She felt, for the first time in a while, that everything might be all right.