“This is her in the painting, with my Mathilde, when they were little girls. They were dear friends.” Knowing that Lucie Foulon had become an artist, and a talented one at that, nearly broke her, for it was another reminder of everything Elise had missed with Mathilde. She thought of what Juliette had said about Lucie and Mathilde coloring together all those years ago. Would they have discovered their potential as artists together, encouraged one another, if Mathilde had lived? Elise would never know, but as she looked again at the painting, which screamed of grief and confusion and pain, she realized that one thing was clear: Lucie was struggling, too.
Of course she was. The girl had lost her father, her brothers, her best friend—and on top of that, her mother had withdrawn from the real world. Lucie had lived through not only those horrific losses but the traumatic event—a bomb falling from the clear blue sky on an April day—that precipitated them. And here she was, seventeen years later, trying to piece the puzzle together in her head by putting images of her past on canvas. It was exactly what Elise was doing each time she carved Mathilde’s face from wood.
She took one last look at the painting before turning her attention back to Jack. “Do you believe in fate?”
He tilted his head, curiosity sparking in his expression. “I do…”
“You said it was my carvings that convinced you to open this gallery. And then, years later, you wind up giving one of your studios to my daughter’s best friend, the girl who was beside her when she died. How could that be?”
“Lucie was beside her when…?”
Elise nodded, and Jack’s eyes welled with tears, surprising her. She wondered, suddenly, if he had sustained a similar loss.
“I think,” he said slowly, “that sometimes, the roads we don’t know we’re walking are the ones that lead us to exactly where we’re meant to be.”
In that moment, she knew that he was correct and that she was right to have come, even if Juliette didn’t want her here. Lucie needed to hear that it was all right to grieve the past, but also that she needed to let go of it in order to move into the future. It was a lesson Elise herself was only just beginning to learn, but she knew that something bigger than herself had brought her here to help the girl who had once been Mathilde’s dearest friend.
“Jack, I have to talk to her. Do you know where she lives?”
There was something new in his eyes as he looked at her. “No. But I don’t think she’s home today anyhow. Her boyfriend’s working a Christmas tree lot in Brooklyn, and she was going to try to pick up a few shifts to earn some money for the gallery. I told her she didn’t need to do that, but—”
“Where in Brooklyn?” she interrupted.
“Park Slope.” He paused, thinking. “Sterling Place and Seventh, I think she said.”
“I—I need to talk to her.”
Jack studied her for a second more. He couldn’t possibly understand what was happening, for Elise didn’t understand it herself. Still, somehow, he was with her yet the same. “Hang on,” he said. “I’ll grab my coat.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The fog was thick in New York, and it was already snowing when United Airlines Flight 826 lifted off from O’Hare Airport in Chicago that morning with a forty-six-year-old captain named Robert Sawyer at the controls. He’d gotten his job with United nearly twenty years before, on the second day of 1941, the same day that, across an ocean, Elise and Olivier had celebrated their daughter’s first birthday.
Sometimes, fate and circumstance come together in an inexplicable storm of destiny. On a bright April day in 1943, something had happened in the cockpit of an American bomber with instructions to drop a load of explosives on the Renault plant on the ?le Seguin, just across a narrow sliver of the Seine from Boulogne-Billancourt. The target should have been clear; it sat on an island, surrounded by the river on both sides. But instead, this particular bomber, as well as several others that had dropped beneath the clouds, missed their mark. One bomb fell on the Pont de Sèvres metro station. Others fell on the Longchamp racecourse as the horses prepared to run.
And one fell on the rue Goblet, on a little bookshop that held a family’s hopes and dreams.
People die during wartime; it is inevitable. That April day, the death toll from the errant bombs topped three hundred. In France alone over the course of the war, more than sixty thousand civilians lost their lives to Allied bombs falling from the clouds, many of them missing their intended targets.
But mistakes happen in peacetime, too.
There were no signs that morning that Captain Sawyer’s DC-8 jetliner would veer slightly off course, just as an American bomber had done seventeen years before. The fog was thick, the wind picking up, but Captain Sawyer had flown this route often, as had his first officer, forty-year-old Robert Fiebing, and the flight’s second officer, Richard Pruitt, a thirty-year-old flight engineer. If you were flying from O’Hare to New York International Airport in the snow, these were the type of men you wanted at the controls—calm, intelligent, experienced. There were seventy-six passengers aboard, four young stewardesses. It should have been a routine day of travel.
At 10:22 a.m., Flight 826 radioed air traffic control. “If we’re going to have a delay, we would rather hold upstairs than down. We’re going to need three-quarters of a mile. Do you have the weather handy?”
“No, but I’ll get it,” a controller from New York Center radioed back. “There have been no delays until now.” A minute later, the man was back with a weather report. “Fifteen hundred feet overcast, half mile. Light rain, fog, altimeter setting 29.65.”
“We’re starting down,” came the reply from the flight deck.
Eleven minutes later, New York Center prepared to hand Flight 826 off to the airport’s flight control center as the plane approached. “Eight twenty-six, roger, and you received the holding instructions at Preston. Radar service is terminated. Contact Idlewild Approach Control.”
“Good day,” the flight crew replied before radioing Idlewild Approach Control. “United 826, approaching Preston at five thousand.”
“United 826, this is Idlewild Approach Control, maintain five thousand,” the control center radioed back. “Little or no delay at Preston. Idlewild landing runway four right. ILS in use. Idlewild weather: six hundred scattered; estimated fifteen hundred overcast; visibility half mile; light rain and fog; altimeter 29.63. Over.”
But the only reply was broken static and a sudden silence. United Flight 826 had already collided with another airplane, TWA Flight 266, a Lockheed Super Constellation with forty-four souls on board, over Staten Island. The wounded jet, one of its right engines missing, was now hurtling northeast toward Brooklyn.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
That morning, Juliette awoke in an empty bed with a feeling of dread in her stomach.
She’d had the same feeling on the morning of April 4, 1943, but she had dismissed it. Perhaps it had been something she’d eaten the night before, she’d told herself, or the onset of a minor cold. By the time she’d gotten out of bed that day, she’d felt better, and she’d continued to ignore the twist in her gut, the pain that told her something was wrong.
And now, she felt it again. She rolled over and looked at the clock. It was nearly nine. How had she slept so late? Paul would be wondering where she was.
She pulled on a robe and slid her feet into slippers, then padded into the bathroom and regarded herself in the mirror. She was always startled when she took the time to study her reflection, for it didn’t match the way she felt. Paul and the boys remained the same age, and Antoinette was forever a baby. It seemed incongruous, then, that she should continue to move forward in time, the years turning her hair gray, life placing line after line on her forehead. She splashed some water on her face, then dried it, applied her cold cream, tissued it off, and finished with her Elizabeth Arden Eight Hour Cream, which the beauty magazines had promised would erase the years. It hadn’t worked, but Juliette was a creature of habit, so on went the sticky cream, rubbed in until her face shone, followed by a dusting of powder. Blush, mascara, and a swipe of Victory Red lipstick made her feel like herself again.
Arthur was already at the breakfast table, the New York Times open in front of him, when she padded in. “Morning,” he said.
“Where’s Lucie?” she asked. Their conversations often went like this, an exchange of the barest pleasantries, the most basic facts. Most days, it suited her just fine, for she didn’t need a husband; she needed a place to live and enough money to raise Lucie and run the store. Arthur had given her that in spades; he didn’t need to provide conversation, too.
“Off with her Italian fellow, I think,” he said without lowering the paper.
“She’s still seeing that boy? Even after I told her not to?”
The newspaper came down, and Arthur peered at her over his bifocals. He looked like an old man, with white hair sprouting from every orifice. Sometimes she wished he would try a little harder. “Juliette, she’s a grown woman. You can’t control her choices forever.”
“I certainly can as long as she’s under my roof!” Juliette shot back.
“But it’s not your roof. It’s mine. And I, for one, think it’s nice to see a young lady figuring out who she is.”