“Run!” she heard a deep voice shout, but her feet were rooted to the ground, because it was all coming back to her in waves, the whistling overhead, the rumble of an approaching engine coming too close, the cold finger of terror running up her vertebrae like the keys of a player piano, the hair on her arms standing on end.
“Miss, come on!” yelled another man, his accent thick and Irish, and then there were rough hands on both of her arms, and she was being shoved away from her mother, toward the building beside the tree lot. But she didn’t want to be inside, she realized. She had been inside a building the last time, the illusion of safety cocooning her just before the world exploded. She wriggled free of the stranger’s grasp and stumbled away, against the tide of people. Away from the Christmas tree lot, where “Jingle Bell Rock” hummed obliviously from a small transistor radio, its cheery notes drowned out already by the screams that split the morning. Against the current. Toward her mother.
And then she saw it. It made no sense, but there was a jet—a passenger jet—coming right for them, red, blue, and black on white, sliding through the clouds like the blade of a giant’s axe, its engines whistling, its glittering fuselage hurtling toward Sterling Place.
Then, in the next instant, it hit, one of its wings clipping the roof of the brownstone on the corner a frozen instant before the world exploded in a shower of shattered glass, slivered metal, and blasted concrete.
And in that split second before everything went black, in that balancing act between this world and the next, Lucie remembered. For the first time in seventeen years, Lucie remembered everything.
* * *
When she came to, Lucie was surrounded by smoke so thick she couldn’t see, flames reaching for the sky, someone’s suitcase open and spilling shirts and trousers onto the street. People were screaming, people were crying, a half-burned newspaper page was whipping violently in the wind.
But as Lucie’s eyelids fluttered and she tried to get her bearings, that world disappeared, and suddenly, she wasn’t in Brooklyn anymore, wasn’t trapped under a fallen wall dangerously close to the dying engine of a jet that had fallen from the sky. She was in the charred quiet of the beloved bookstore in France, smoke and dust filling her lungs. She wanted to cry out for her mother, for her father, but she couldn’t speak. She could see Papa’s hand reaching up from the rubble, but it was stiff and unmoving, and she knew. She knew he was buried somewhere beneath the fallen books and crumbled stones. The boys were gone, and the little hand that still clutched hers was cold and stiff. She pulled away and forced herself upright to look down at the girl beside her. Her face was still and peaceful, her brown hair splayed out around her like rays from a golden sun, her eyes closed, her lips parted ever so slightly. “Lucie,” she tried to say, but her voice made no sound.
And then, from the overwhelming silence came a voice. “Paul?” It was Maman. “Paul, what has happened?”
She tried to speak, to tell Maman that they were dead, all of them. But the words still wouldn’t come, and her body wasn’t cooperating.
“Paul? Claude? Alphonse?” Maman cried. “Where are you?”
“They are—” she tried to reply, and though she heard her own scratchy voice, Maman didn’t respond.
She could hear Maman moving around, screaming the names of the other children, but no one seemed to be crying out for her, so she lay her head back down, exhausted. Her own mother was certainly dead; the woman she was supposed to call Maman had told her many times. She’s gone, she would say, her tone soft and soothing. But don’t worry. You will always have a home with us.
Perhaps that’s why, when she finally mustered the energy to call out, she didn’t protest when Maman called her by the wrong name. “Maman,” she whispered, again and again. “Maman.”
“Lucie, it’s going to be all right,” Maman said, though her face was streaked with blood, her hair matted crimson. “Maman will make everything all right.”
And she had to believe that. She had to, because there was no other way. She understood, even then, that her entire survival rested in the hands of the woman who was sobbing and coughing as she pulled her from the rubble.
Later, she wanted to say something, to speak up. But surely Maman knew she was not Lucie, didn’t she? And Maman was so very angry at Mathilde, so very relieved that it was Lucie who had survived instead. So how could she tell her? How could she protest? She tried once, sixteen months after the bombs, when people were dancing in the streets, celebrating the liberation of Paris. She and Maman had been living in a boardinghouse by then, part of a heaving mass of refugees with nowhere to go.
“Lucie,” Maman said, pulling her close. “France is free.”
“Maman,” she had said quietly as a group outside their window sang “La Marseillaise.” “I am not Lucie. I am Mathilde.”
Her mother had pulled back and looked at her strangely. Was it possible that Maman was coming to the same realization, that she recognized Mathilde, too? But then, Maman’s expression had tightened into something cold and unrecognizable.
“That isn’t funny, Lucie,” Maman said. “I never want to hear such nonsense from you again. There will be no supper for you tonight.”
Later, after they were in America, Maman lay beside her each night and whispered to her, telling her that all her memories from the time before were just dreams. In time, Lucie came to believe it. Her first maman, who painted the ceilings of an apartment she barely remembered, her first papa pacing the parlor and giving fiery speeches about things she didn’t understand, those were just things she’d made up, like the stories Maman had once told the children at bedtime. And in time, she came to believe Maman, for what reason could she possibly have to lie?
But now, here on her back in Brooklyn, buried under brick and dust, with smoke clogging her lungs just like all those years ago, it was all coming back, and she knew exactly who she was. Perhaps it was too late to tell anyone, to stand up from the rubble and reclaim a lost life. But in the end, no matter how many days we spend living the lives we are told are ours, it turns out that we are only ever ourselves.
“Lucie?” She could hear a voice in the darkness, calling to her, but it wasn’t her name, was it? It never had been. And so she didn’t answer. Instead, she closed her eyes and waited for the light to come find her.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Elise stumbled toward her hotel room door, tearstained, soot-streaked, and more exhausted than she’d ever been in her entire life. She’d been up all night, searching the rubble with Jack Fitzgerald beside her, an ally she’d never expected. She had called Ruth at some point, and Ruth had immediately volunteered to find the badly injured Juliette, who was barely conscious when an ambulance took her away, and to call Juliette’s husband to let him know where she was. Elise didn’t even know which hospital she’d been taken to, but she took some comfort now in knowing that Juliette was likely not alone.
But Lucie was missing. And Elise still couldn’t understand what she’d seen in the seconds before the passenger jet fell from the sky, hurtling into a quiet city intersection.
“Maman,” Lucie had said, and she’d been looking straight at Elise. Had Elise imagined that? Had she imagined that the point of Lucie’s chin, the slope of her nose, the swell of her cheeks, the shape of her eyes, had matched almost exactly the face she’d been carving again and again for the past twenty years? Had she broken with reality for an instant, imprinted an image from her imagination on the face of a real girl? Or over the years, had she gotten the details of Mathilde’s and Lucie’s faces confused in her mind, somehow merging them into one person, whom she felt compelled to carve again and again, like an endless penance for something she could never repay?
The New York Times was reporting 127 confirmed dead, including at least three people on the ground, in a disaster that should have been impossible. Two planes, one apparently off its course, had collided. A TWA plane had come down in three parts in Staten Island, while a United jet had somehow wound up eight miles away, on a quiet street in Park Slope during a snowfall. More than two hundred and fifty firemen had responded to the seven-alarm blaze as the jet burned. A thirty-four-year-old sanitation worker who’d been unfortunate enough to be on the street was dead, the paper reported, as were two young men named John and Joseph, an uncle and a nephew who’d been working the Christmas tree lot. Missing were the ninety-year-old caretaker of a church and a twenty-year-old woman named Lucie Foulon, who’d been in the same Christmas tree lot as the two dead men, though her boyfriend, Tommy Barber, who’d also been there, had survived with only a broken leg. One passenger on the plane, an eleven-year-old boy, was fighting for his life in the hospital.