Tell her, Paul repeated, but Juliette couldn’t move, couldn’t get her feet to cooperate with the voice in her head. As long as she stayed right here, rooted to the ground, nothing would change. Fate wouldn’t be altered. She wouldn’t have to do the thing she had come here to do.
She was dimly aware of a car pulling up to the curb behind her, the way the tires slung slush at her legs, the sharp slice of the slamming door, but she hardly noticed any of it until an incredulous voice cut into her thoughts. “Juliette?”
Slowly, Juliette turned and found herself face-to-face, quite impossibly, with Elise LeClair. There was a man who looked vaguely familiar standing a half pace behind her, and for a second, Juliette focused on that incongruous detail rather than the fact that everything was about to unravel, once and for all. “Who’s this?” she asked, nodding at the man, who was perhaps fifty, with gray-streaked sandy hair, green eyes, and a friendly face.
Elise looked thrown by the question. “This is Jack Fitzgerald. He owns the gallery down the block from you.”
The gallery, Juliette thought numbly. The gallery, which featured French art, had been the primary reason she’d chosen Fifty-Sixth Street for her bookstore. And yet somehow Elise knew one of the owners? She felt a rage slowly rising within her, anger at Elise for existing, and fury at the universe for continuing to push them together, even after all these years.
“Where is she?” Elise asked gently.
“Who?” Juliette asked, feeling suddenly dizzy. Tell her.
“Lucie.” Oddly, Elise sounded terribly sad. “I saw some of her work, and… I think it might help if I talk with her.” She hesitated. “Juliette, are you all right?”
Juliette opened her mouth to reply, but they were interrupted by a voice from across the street.
“Maman?”
Juliette and Elise looked up at the same time to see Lucie standing outside the Christmas tree lot, staring at them in confusion. Her eyes moved slowly from Juliette to the gallery owner before her gaze settled on Elise, and a strange expression passed over her face. Juliette could hear Elise’s sharp intake of breath beside her.
Tell her.
“Maman?” Lucie asked again, but she was no longer looking at Juliette. She was looking at Elise, and in that moment, Juliette knew that the life she had spent the past seventeen years carefully constructing, brick by brick, was about to come tumbling down.
Juliette closed her eyes, wondering if she could freeze time, but when she opened them again, Lucie was already moving toward them. Her eyes hadn’t left Elise’s face. It was as if already, Juliette had ceased to exist.
Drawing a deep breath, Juliette turned to Elise. Tell her, Paul was saying in her ear over and over. Tell her. Tell her! “Elise,” she began, nearly choking on the word, but Elise wasn’t paying any attention at all to Juliette. Her focus was only on Lucie, floating across the street like a ghost. “Elise?” Juliette tried again, but suddenly, there was a sound to the south, the sound of a blast. Juliette dropped to her knees in the snow, cowering, her hands over her head, before she knew what she was doing.
“Is it a bomb?” she cried, panicked, still covering her head, though no one else had reacted similarly. All around her, people were looking up at the sky with curiosity, but none of them knew how easily airplanes could swoop down from the heavens and drop explosives into their lives. “Are they bombing us?”
The man from the gallery bent beside her. “No, ma’am.” He pitied her; she could see it in his kind eyes. “There aren’t any bombs here.” She allowed him to help her to her feet, but she couldn’t look at him, couldn’t stand to see herself reflected in his gaze, so she turned back to her approaching daughter.
“Maman?” Lucie was almost across the street now. She came toward them, her eyes wide, and Elise took a step forward and then another, but as the sound from the south grew louder, Juliette knew that something was wrong, very wrong, no matter what Elise’s friend had said.
Lucie and Elise were staring at each other, so they didn’t see it, but Juliette did, and she knew with certainty now that she had finally lost her mind, for out of the gray sky, an airplane was shrieking toward them, here in a borough of New York City, just as one had seventeen years before, on an April afternoon in the suburbs of Paris.
Tell her! Paul was screaming now, but his voice was drowned out by the sound of whirring engines, by the cacophony of metal scraping brick, by the noise of the world coming down all around her. It was so familiar, so terribly familiar, and Juliette knew, in that moment, that everything she had done, everything she had tried so hard to believe, everything she had bent and broken and rebuilt, had caught up with her at last.
“Lucie!” Juliette cried. It was all she had time to say before the world came crashing down.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Lucie felt it happening in slow motion, the collision somewhere to the south, the boom that shook the sky. It stirred something in her, a memory she hadn’t been able to grasp, just out of her reach.
She’d been working the Christmas tree lot alongside Tommy, and she’d been thinking about other ways she might be able to help save the gallery. It was crazy, she realized now, to think that anything she painted would make a difference, and even if she sold a hundred trees a day between now and Christmas, it would barely make a dent in the problem. She would have to ask Arthur, even if it meant infuriating her mother.
She wasn’t sure how much money her stepfather actually had, only that she and her mother had never wanted for anything material. And when her mother had asked to re-create the bookstore she’d once owned in France, he’d simply written a few checks and made it happen. He was cold and detached, nothing like the father she remembered from her early childhood, and if his treatment of her mother was any indication, he sometimes confused money with love. Well, let him confuse it one last time for her.
“Tommy?” she’d asked, stepping up beside him as he handed a customer his change. “I think I have to—”
“Hey,” he’d interrupted, pointing across the street. “Is that your ma? And that man, what’s his name, from the gallery?”
Lucie had turned to follow his gaze and was shocked to realize he was right. Her mother was standing there with Mr. Fitzgerald. What on earth?
“Maman?” she’d called out, confused.
But then she realized there was a third person with them, a woman who turned and looked at her, and suddenly the world froze. Lucie knew her immediately, for she’d been dreaming about her ever since she’d started painting the walls in her studio above the gallery. But she hadn’t realized until now that the woman was anything but a figment of her own imagination.
The woman’s mouth opened in an O of surprise as their eyes met. “Maman?” Lucie asked again. She could hear her own voice cracking.
She stared for a second more and then snapped herself into action. She had to know what was happening. Maman’s face had gone as white as the snow, and she was looking at Lucie in horror as she began to cross the street toward them, but Lucie was barely looking at her. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the other woman. It was Elise LeClair, she was nearly certain, but Lucie was also acutely aware, with every fiber of her being, that she had never called her that, not when she knew her before the blast. She was almost all the way across the street when the sound of an explosion in the distance made the earth tremble and stopped Lucie in her tracks.
It made no sense. Bombs didn’t drop in New York City. Was she imagining things now that her past had inexplicably shown up here on a Brooklyn street corner? She took a step forward, and then another, but the air was electrified, and she could smell fuel burning, and the sound of distant screams, and suddenly, though she knew just where she was, she was somehow back in France, too, three years old again, the girl who had become her sister clutching her hand. They had been smiling, laughing about something, when they’d heard the warning sirens, then almost instantly, an ominous rumble.
“Maman?” she heard herself say now, her voice like that of a child again, but the word was lost in the thick, cold air as the sky filled with sound.