“I don’t know quite how to explain it, Elise, but this was not the Juliette you and I once knew.” She hesitated. “Physically, she appeared fine. But she seemed angry. Or perhaps that isn’t the right word. She seemed shaken to see me, unsettled that I spoke to Lucie, put out that I asked her to write you a letter.”
“And did she?” Elise leaned forward, still trying to puzzle out how the woman she had once known had become the woman Ruth was describing. “Did she write me a letter?”
“It is why I have come, Elise.”
Elise could feel her heart thudding. Ruth had sailed across the ocean to bring her a piece of mail? “Did you read it?”
“It was not mine to read, my friend.”
Indeed, when Ruth withdrew an envelope from her handbag, the name Elise LeClair scrawled across the front, it was sealed. Elise took the letter and held it in shaking hands, simply staring at it.
“Would you like me to leave?” Ruth asked. “To give you some privacy?”
“Of course not.” Elise wiped a tear away and tried to smile. “This is just very difficult, you see. I’ve been wondering for so many years what happened…”
“And now you will know,” Ruth said. “Take your time.”
The world seemed to close in around Elise as she ran her index finger beneath the seal and split the envelope open. The single piece of paper crackled beneath her trembling fingers as she struggled to unfold it. Did it take only a single sheet to explain her daughter’s fate, the end of her young life? It seemed impossible. She took a deep breath and began to read.
Dear Elise,
It is with regret that I notify you of the death of your daughter, Mathilde, on the 4th of April, 1943. I understand that you already know the circumstances of the errant bomb, and its subsequent destruction of the bookstore. Perhaps it will bring you some comfort to know that Mathilde died in my husband’s arms. Your daughter did not suffer.
Sincerely,
Juliette Foulon Wolcott
Elise read the brief, impersonal letter twice before looking up at Ruth with tears in her eyes. “This is it? After seventeen years? This is all she tells me of my daughter’s life and death?” She handed the letter to Ruth and watched as the other woman scanned it and then shook her head.
“I was afraid of this,” Ruth said. “I’m very sorry, Elise. You can see what I mean about Juliette having changed. Does it bring you some comfort to know that Monsieur Foulon was holding Mathilde, at least?”
“It does.” Paul had been a nice man, the kind of person Elise wished she’d chosen for herself instead of choosing Olivier. But if she hadn’t married Olivier, Mathilde wouldn’t have existed in the first place, and a world without Mathilde would have been like a world without birds or flowers or music. No, Mathilde had lived, and because she had, the world would always be a bit brighter, even if Elise’s existence had grown as dim as a candle about to burn away. It made Elise’s heart ache with gratitude that the man who had taken her child in without reservation had died trying to protect her. “It does,” she said again. “And to know that she had Lucie’s friendship in those days means a great deal, too.”
But she and Ruth both knew the words were empty. The letter had been sparse and cold, and Elise understood, as perhaps only a mother who had lost a child could, that Juliette had forever been changed at her core, just as she had.
“And Lucie?” Elise asked after a moment. “You saw her, Ruth? How was she? I’ve worried so much about her over the years. I’ve wondered how she has coped with being the only one of the children to—” She stopped abruptly, unable to complete the sentence.
“To be honest, I’m not certain. She seemed… sad. It was as if Juliette was gazing right through her, right past her, like she hardly existed at all.”
“Poor Lucie,” Elise murmured. “Poor Juliette.”
“They both seemed… so lost, Elise.”
Elise didn’t say anything for a few moments. Her heart ached for her old friend, for the way grief had seemingly transformed her. The coldness that had seeped from the single-page letter chilled Elise, and it made her wonder about the life Lucie had, growing up with a mother who had changed so.
“She asked about you, you know,” Ruth said after a while.
“Juliette?”
“No, Lucie. She seemed interested to hear that you are an artist.”
Elise glanced in the direction of the peacock carving she’d been working on and frowned. “Am I?”
“Of course you are.” Ruth leaned forward to pat her hand. “Lucie said she’d like to meet you.”
Elise blinked back tears. “Meet me? I knew her once, so well. She was my daughter’s best friend. Doesn’t she remember me?”
“She was so young, Elise.”
Elise thought for a moment, a feeling of dread and certainty settling in the pit of her stomach. “I must go to New York, mustn’t I?” She nodded to herself. “I have to find out what happened to Mathilde. What her last months were like. Who she had become. And…” She hesitated. “I have to see Lucie. I have to make sure she’s all right.”
“Lucie?”
“I promised, you see. When I left Mathilde with Juliette, I promised that I would find a way to pay her back one day, that I would always look out for her children the way she was looking out for mine.” She blinked back tears. “I have thought of that promise every day, Ruth. I have prayed to God that one day I would find her.” Elise turned to study the carving of Mathilde. “I think I must try,” she said without looking away from her daughter’s face. “I think it is the least I owe to Juliette.”
Ruth looked troubled. “That would be a great kindness, Elise. I’m scheduled to return in three days’ time. Shall we see if there’s an extra berth on the ship?”
Elise looked at her hands. “No. I think—I need to spend some time with my thoughts before I’m ready. But I will come, Ruth. I will. And then, perhaps, once I’ve learned about Mathilde’s final moments, once I’ve repaid the debt to Juliette by making sure that she and her daughter are safe and well, I’ll be able to live again.”
“Elise…” Ruth began, her brows arching in sadness, but Elise waved her away. She knew Ruth worried often about Elise’s withdrawal from the world, her reluctance to leave Paris. But Ruth’s two children had come home, and the three of them were together. Despite all she’d been through, there was no way Ruth could understand what it felt like to have her whole world taken away forever. Her family had been through hell, but they had survived.
“So,” Elise said brightly, clapping her hands together and forcing a smile. “Tell me everything. I want to hear every last detail of your life in New York, and especially what Georges and Suzanne are up to these days. You said in your last letter that Suzanne has a nice boyfriend?”
Ruth looked uncertain, but after a moment, she began to talk haltingly about how embraced she felt by her adopted city, which was filled with glaring billboards and exhaust fumes and immigrants from everywhere, and how readily she had managed to pick up English after all.
As Ruth spoke, telling her first about the young man Suzanne had met at the law firm where she worked as a secretary, and then about Georges’s new job, Elise’s gaze moved back to the bust of Mathilde on the table, one of her countless feeble attempts to ask herself what would have been if her daughter’s life had not been lost to an errant bomb.
But Mathilde was gone. She had died on the fourth of April, 1943, in the arms of Juliette Foulon’s kind husband. She had died without her mother there to protect her. And no amount of chiseling her face from wood would change that.
That night, when Elise went to bed, Ruth snoring loudly in the guest room, sleep came to her easily, and for the first time in years, she dreamed not of the lines of her daughter’s face but of the terror Mathilde must have felt in her final seconds, held tight by a man who died trying to save her, with her own mother hundreds of miles away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Lucie couldn’t exactly put a finger on what she loved so much about art, but she suspected it had a lot to do with the fact that her mother was so adamantly against it. She wasn’t sure what that said about her. Was she subconsciously trying to make her mother’s life miserable? Or was she just desperate to be some version of herself that wasn’t dictated by her mother’s grief?