“No, Maman, I did. It’s—it’s you,” Lucie said as her mother continued to stare at the painting. “You’re saying Elise LeClair is here? Mathilde’s mother? In New York?”
But her mother didn’t answer. She picked up the painting and gazed at it, and when she looked up again, there were tears in her eyes. “You painted them,” she whispered.
“They’re always with you, aren’t they?” Lucie bit her tongue, but the next words rolled out anyhow. “It’s not my fault, Maman. I didn’t get to choose. I had nothing to do with them dying.” Her mother made a noise under her breath, but she didn’t dispute Lucie’s words. For a second, Lucie thought that was a good thing, and so she pressed on. “May I meet her, Maman?”
“Why would you want to meet Elise LeClair?” Her mother’s voice was strangely flat as she lifted her gaze.
“I—” Lucie hesitated, for wasn’t the answer obvious? The more layers of the past she peeled back, the less sense it all made, but her mother refused to talk about anything. She just needed someone who had known her before the explosion, someone who could fill in the missing parts that her mother refused to discuss, for the more the puzzle came together, the more Lucie realized she was missing all the vital pieces. “Because maybe,” she said at last, “she can help me understand everything.”
Her mother’s silence felt ominous. The grandfather clock ticked loudly behind her. “What on earth is it that you feel you need to understand?” her mother asked. “You are clothed. You are fed. You are alive. What part of that do you have a quarrel with?”
“It’s just that the more I remember, the more confused I feel.” Lucie searched herself for the right words. “I—I just want to know who I am.”
“Who you are?” Her mother was on her feet, her face red, the transformation having happened in the space of an instant. “Who you are? You are my daughter!” Spittle flew from her mother’s mouth, landing on Lucie, and alarmed, she stood, pushing away from the table. Her mother stepped closer, her eyes gleaming with an anger that Lucie couldn’t understand. “You are the daughter God saved for me. For me, Lucie. For me!”
“No, Maman, I am myself,” Lucie said quietly. “I am your daughter, but I am also myself.” When her mother simply stared at her, she took a deep breath and went on. “I am myself, and I am a person who grieves the life you refuse to talk about. I grieve my brothers and my father and the baby sister I never knew. And I also grieve Mathilde.” Her mother gasped and stepped back like Lucie had slapped her, but Lucie went on. “She was my friend, Maman, and she died that day, too. None of it was her fault, nor was it mine. And I want to tell Madame LeClair that her daughter was happy and loved and cared for, just like I used to be.”
The words felt like a release, for Lucie had never said them before, had never pushed back at the black cloud that followed her, the coterie of ghosts pointing their fingers at her. Would her brothers have blamed her for living? Would her papa have hated her the way her mother did? She had spent her whole life since the day the bombs fell paying the price for a mistake that wasn’t hers, absorbing like a sponge her mother’s overwhelming grief and anger. Over time, that sadness and rage had become a part of her, a burden that she could barely shoulder.
But these past weeks of unleashing everything inside her with a paintbrush had done something to her. She was swimming up from the deepest part of the ocean, and with just a few more kicks, maybe she could break the surface and breathe again. Just last week, she had painted what little she remembered of the day their world had been destroyed, and though it had been painful to see the fire and ash and destruction on canvas, it had been cathartic, too.
“How can you hold Mathilde and her mother blameless?” Lucie’s mother asked, her voice quiet.
“Because Mathilde was just a child. Because her mother couldn’t have seen the future. And because she has lost a great deal, too.”
Lucie wasn’t sure how she expected her mother to react, but she didn’t expect her lips to curl into a sneer and her eyes to narrow at that. “Is that why you’re trying to become a duplicate of the LeClairs?” Her mother took a few steps toward Lucie, moving around the table until she was standing just inches from her daughter. She reached out and touched Lucie’s long hair. “You even look like her,” she said, and Lucie fought the urge to recoil. “You look like a goddammed LeClair, like you’re trying to spite me.”
“I—” Lucie couldn’t formulate an answer.
“Just go, Lucie.” Her mother stepped back, her eyelashes fluttering rapidly. Once again, Lucie wondered if she should call a doctor, but she suspected that all her mother needed was to retreat back to her solitude so she could speak to Papa and the boys. The ghosts were always able to reach her in a way that Lucie never could.
“Maman,” she tried one more time, but her mother was no longer listening. She was staring at the canvas Lucie had painted, a woman in a downpour, surrounded by ghosts.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
As Elise knocked on the door to an apartment on the Lower East Side, on the third floor of a building that housed a kosher butcher, a pizza parlor, and a Chinese restaurant at ground level, she began to doubt her decision to come. After leaving the bookshop, she had returned to her hotel and tried calling Ruth, but there was no answer. After thirty minutes of pacing her room, she had gone downstairs and asked the concierge for subway directions to the address south of Houston Street where Ruth lived, and the concierge had recommended a taxi instead. At first, Elise had hesitated, weighing the cost, but then she’d realized that if she could manage to track down Constant Bouet, she would be a very wealthy woman. Certainly one of the most renowned wood-carvers of the twentieth century could afford cab fare.
But now, as she waited for Ruth to answer the door, she wondered why she was here. Perhaps Elise needed to let the past go in order to fully embrace the future, or she’d risk getting stuck in her grief, like Juliette. Then again, maybe she was already sinking; after all, had she not stayed in the same apartment for almost twenty years, sculpting a long-dead daughter over and over? What if she was just as unbalanced and unmoored as Juliette?
But then the door opened, and it wasn’t Ruth standing there. It was Suzanne, now in her twenties, and something inside Elise cracked. She could remember Suzanne playing with Mathilde in the bookshop when the children were young, but she could also see clearly in her mind’s eye the very moment she spotted Suzanne and Georges at the orphanage just after the war, when she hadn’t known if they’d lived or died. She could remember holding Suzanne as she cried, comforting her when nightmares woke her, and feeling an overwhelming blend of joy and loss when their mother returned. Ruth and her children might be a piece of her past, but they were also her family, and she couldn’t escape that. Nor, she realized with a start, did she want to. There was a difference between honoring the past and being trapped by it.
“Madame LeClair!” Suzanne exclaimed, her eyes filling with tears as she stepped forward and embraced Elise. After a startled second, Elise hugged her back, squeezing the child who had become a woman in Elise’s absence. Where had the years gone?
“Suzanne,” Elise whispered, pulling back to look at her. Her hair was styled in a smart bouffant, and she had filled out with the curves of a woman. Elise could remember so clearly how thin and frail Suzanne had appeared after the Liberation, how the lack of nutrition during the war years had made her hair stringy and lifeless, the lines of her face as sharp and pronounced as a jagged cliff side. But here before her was a rosy-cheeked, healthy woman, and Elise glanced skyward for a second and thanked God. “Look at you, my dear,” she added. “You’re absolutely beautiful.”
Suzanne blushed. “Well, I could stand to go down a dress size or two.”
Elise met her eye. “Don’t you ever say such a thing. I was just thinking how happy it makes me to see you healthy and well.”
Suzanne’s blush deepened, turning the swells of her cheeks into little apples. Elise smiled at her and thought she might try to carve her from wood one day; it was time she tackled something other than the ghost of her daughter. Maybe this was the beginning of a way forward.
“Was my mother expecting you, Madame LeClair?” Suzanne asked, moving aside to let her in. “She told us you were here in New York, of course, but I’m afraid she must have forgotten if she had plans with you today; she went out to the store.”