That night, after she’d dutifully admired the corner of Sterling Place and Seventh where Tommy and Domenico would set up their lot with their two friends next week, Lucie came home early and opened her window. It was freezing outside, the last of the autumn leaves making their final descent from skeletal trees. She breathed in the crisp evening air, spiked with the scent of smoke drifting from chimneys nearby. Arthur was holed up in his study, oblivious as usual. Her mother was still at the bookstore, where she’d likely be for at least the next few hours; she’d been coming home later and later since Madame Levy’s visit to the store, as if the collision with the past had accelerated her growing obsession with pretending Lucie’s father and brothers were still alive. She thought that Lucie hadn’t noticed, but of course she had; her mother talked to them aloud now, even when Lucie was right there. Lucie had tried telling Arthur that she was concerned, but he had barely looked up from his newspaper. “Whatever makes your mother happy,” he had said, waving a hand.
There was no one here to catch her in the forbidden act of painting, so she set up quickly, using an eight-by-ten piece of heavy linen paper clipped to a textbook as a makeshift easel. She imagined her Parisian sky much bigger, filling the ceiling above her head, but she was relatively certain that painting a room-wide mural would not be quite as secretive as she needed it to be. She pulled out her Liquitex paints, which she had been buying tube by tube for months now, and several brushes, and she set to work.
She painted from memory and imagination, as she often did. When she was starting out, she had attempted still lifes, trying to capture the things she saw in front of her, their shadows and lines. But she learned over time that when she painted that way, her work always looked forced and flat. Instead, she preferred to think about her project for days ahead of time, sketching the work in her head again and again, erasing lines here, shading curves there, until the image she held in her mind came alive and felt fluid, three-dimensional. Then, and only then, could she commit it to paper, trusting her brush to move swiftly enough to keep up with what she could already see. One of the many questions she would have asked Olivier LeClair if he were still alive was whether he did the same thing. Was it a sign that she was thinking like a true artist? Or was her brain as broken as her mother’s?
She had been thinking for weeks now about LeClair’s painting of the rooftops of Paris, and for the last two nights, she had dreamed of flying over the city, one with the clouds, as twilight fell. So that’s what she began to paint now, roughing out Haussmann buildings with balconies and tumbling roses, treetops in the breeze, slender chimney pots in shades of copper and terra-cotta.
She worked quickly, adding a cat on a balcony, the shadow of a woman in a window. There was the moon, hanging bulbous over a Paris twilight, and there were the mansard roofs. In the distance, the tip of the Eiffel Tower scraped the clouds, and the towers of Notre-Dame hulked, promising a carol of bells. She had lived in the suburbs as a girl, but she knew that before the arrival of the Germans, her mother had taken her for strolls in the city. She had foggy impressions of Paris even after the Occupation had begun, the landscape rolling by outside her baby carriage as she stared in wonder, taking it all in. Paris was gray and solemn, she knew, but it was also filled with color and life, and it was that juxtaposition she aimed for now as she painted smoky shadows of a couple dancing cheek to cheek in one apartment, a pop of red from a window box, the amber glow of a candle burning in a window, the deep cobalt of the sky losing the sun. It was color and light and life, and when Lucie finished, she sat back, breathing hard, and let her eyes rove over what she had created.
It was only a small sheet of thick art paper, but it held a piece of Lucie’s world, one that felt long gone, and as she stared at it, her heart pounded. There was room for improvement—the lines of the building on the left were slightly off, the shadows of the roof left of center leaned at the wrong angle, she hadn’t captured the exact red of a French rose in the spring—but this was the best thing she’d ever painted.
The longer she looked at it, the more a dangerous thought began to take shape in her head. What if she gave the painting to her mother as a gift? Juliette’s heart was still in France, so much so that she had desperately tried to build a duplicate of the old store on this side of the Atlantic. She thought that Lucie didn’t care, but of course she did—and perhaps this would be the proof. “You have re-created the store, and I am trying to put my memories on paper,” Lucie imagined herself saying. “We’re one and the same after all, don’t you see?” Maybe her mother would understand, at last, why art meant so much to Lucie, why she needed this.
The more she thought about it, the more logical it felt. After all, her mother spent her days speaking to the dead. But this, this was real. This was solid, tangible, here. Maybe if Lucie could give her this, she could give her back the here and now. She could remind her that there was beauty out there, that this very same Paris still existed, that her mother could even one day return there without feeling the need to travel in time to a lost era.
She was so caught up in imagining her mother’s reaction and the bridge it could build between them that she didn’t hear her bedroom door open. Only a second later, a shadow fell across the canvas and she froze. She’d been caught.
“Lucie, what are you doing?” It was Arthur standing there, not her mother, which was a relief. “Hasn’t your mother forbidden you from painting?”
“Yes, but she’s wrong.” Lucie felt suddenly emboldened. “I miss Paris, too! I remember the past we left behind, too. But we don’t need to live in it, don’t you see? If I give her this, she’ll understand. I know it.”
Arthur pinched the bridge of his nose. He was twenty-five years her mother’s senior, which made him an old man. Though he went to the barber each Monday to have his beard and mustache perfectly trimmed, he never seemed to notice the white hairs sprouting from his ears and his nostrils, and she supposed the barber must be too polite to point them out. He always dressed formally, with crisply ironed trousers, a pressed shirt, and an expensive leather belt, even when he was simply lounging in his study, and his eyeglasses seemed to get thicker with each passing year. Now he stepped closer and studied her painting through his Coke-bottle lenses before turning to her with sympathy in his eyes.
“I’d hate for you to upset your mother, Lucie,” he said.
“But what if it doesn’t upset her?” She hesitated. “What if it helps her to finally see me?” She hadn’t realized until she said the words how much she longed for that. But there it was. Lucie was losing Maman day by day, and she didn’t know how to get her back.
Arthur put his hand on her shoulder. “Lucie, it’s beautiful, dear. But your mother already sees you. She’s very proud of you. You can’t understand the grief of losing someone as she has, though. It can’t be fixed with a piece of art.” He gave her shoulder a squeeze and then strode out, leaving Lucie alone once again.
But he was wrong. He had only known her mother after the war, but Lucie still remembered the woman who had cared for her before the blast, a mother who sang and smiled and laughed, a woman full of joy and wonder. That person was still in there, in the shell that had become the modern-day Juliette Foulon, and Lucie wouldn’t rest until she had figured out how to bring that version of Maman back—or until Maman realized that Lucie had been right here all along.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN