Elise and Jack had stayed at the crash site until the rescuers had pulled most of the dead from the wreckage, and a policeman had physically forced them back behind barricades and snapped at them that they were impeding the investigation.
“But Lucie,” Elise had whispered, and though the policeman’s face had softened with sympathy, he hadn’t moved to let her through. “She’s missing.”
“Ma’am, if this Lucie is still here, we’ll find her. But it’s better you’re not here if we do.”
Jack had suggested going back to the gallery then, to start calling around to the hospitals, and Elise had allowed him to lead her away. But when the cab had neared midtown she’d asked if they could stop at her hotel instead. She had something she needed to show him.
“Here,” she said now, unlocking the door to her room and pushing it open as Jack followed, a gentle hand on her back to steady her. Elise’s throat was raw from smoke inhalation, her face so blackened with soot that she hadn’t recognized her own reflection in the window as they entered the hotel lobby a moment earlier. “It’s just here.”
She crossed the room and picked up the bust of a grown Mathilde—the way Elise had been imagining her for years—and turned around to show Jack. This was the one she had carved just a few nights before, the one that had felt so alive to her, though she’d carved hundreds, perhaps thousands, of versions of the same things over the years.
Jack stared at it, and she knew he was seeing exactly what she had seen earlier that day. “But… that’s Lucie Foulon,” he said. He looked up at her in confusion. “You said you hadn’t seen her since 1942.”
“I hadn’t.” Elise set the bust down and stared at it. “But I’ve spent nearly two decades sculpting exactly what I thought Mathilde would have looked like at every stage of her life. These are my husband’s eyes, Jack.” She touched the carving of Mathilde just below the brow. “And the shape of her face was mine. I could see it even when she was a baby. Her lips were always like this, a rosebud bow. These were the features of my daughter’s face, the pieces of my husband and me that came together to make her. I’m certain of it. How can this be Lucie Foulon?”
Jack stared first at the bust and then at Elise. She could see him tracing the lines, angles, and curves, putting the pieces together. Finally, he stepped forward and touched Elise’s chin, tilting her face toward his, and he stared at her for a second, taking her in like a piece of art. “Elise,” he said, his voice choked. “She looks just like you. I don’t know how I didn’t see it before.”
And then Elise’s tears fell, because she wasn’t crazy, she hadn’t been seeing things, she hadn’t let the past seep through the cracks and cast the wrong light on reality. Jack could see it, too. “But what does this mean?” She couldn’t put words to the thought that was bubbling up inside her, for it made no sense at all.
Jack looked at her for a long time. “Let’s go to the gallery,” he said instead of answering her question. “Let’s look at what else she has painted. She said that the more she painted, the more she felt like she was beginning to understand where she’d come from. Maybe there are some answers there.”
Elise nodded, though exhaustion and grief were doing a familiar tango through her bones. When Jack put an arm around her, she gratefully leaned into him, accepting his support as they left the hotel room and headed out toward the gallery.
Ten minutes later, Jack was unlocking the gallery’s front door and snapping the lights on. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go upstairs.”
Her whole body felt like it was breaking as Jack guided her up the steps to the second floor and led her down the hallway to studio number six, the small space that had given Lucie a place to paint. She placed a hand on Jack’s arm before they went in. “Thank you,” she said, “for this.”
His eyes filled with tears as he unlocked the door. Elise took a step forward to enter, but then she stopped short.
There were a dozen canvases propped up against the walls, but they weren’t what made Elise’s heart thud in recognition. It was the fact that the ceiling was saturated in color, an all-encompassing rendition of a starry twilight hour in the Bois de Boulogne, the branches reaching for the heavens, the walls lined with intricately painted trees, perfectly detailed leaves. It wasn’t exactly the same as the sky Elise had painted for Mathilde when she was a baby, but the differences were in the artistic rendering. The feeling was the same, though; standing in the center of the room made one feel nestled into the safety of the wood, but also a part of the endless universe stretching above.
And on the far wall, painted in script, was the phrase that Elise had repeated to her daughter every night as they sat in the room of trees and sky and looked up at the painted heavens: Under these stars, fate will guide you home.
She put her hand over her mouth. “Jack, this is…” Elise said, trailing off, and then there was a noise behind them, and she and Jack both turned at the same time. Elise gasped.
In the doorway was Lucie, or the girl who had grown up as Lucie, her face streaked, her hair black with soot. There was a gash on her forehead, a dried bloodstain on her neck. But she was here, alive, standing in a room that looked just like the one Elise had painted for her all those years ago.
“She—she told me you were dead,” the girl said, and Elise had never heard a sound so sweet. “She told me my memories weren’t real. But they were always here.” She tapped her forehead. “Until they were here.” She gestured around them, and Elise understood. The walls were wisps from the long-vanished past, brought back to life with the tip of a paintbrush.
Elise couldn’t speak. Her tears were coursing down her cheeks like rivers. “My love,” she finally managed to say.
“I—I think I’m Mathilde,” the girl said. She took a step closer, her eyes never leaving Elise’s face. “I’m Mathilde, aren’t I?”
“Yes,” Elise whispered. “Yes, my dear girl. You are Mathilde. And under these stars, fate has brought you home.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Juliette was dimly aware of people hovering above her as she drifted in and out of consciousness. The ambulance had brought her to Methodist Hospital; this much she knew, for the kind nurse who had stayed by her bedside the first night told her. “You’re lucky to be alive,” the nurse had said, though Juliette gave no indication she could hear her. She couldn’t seem to move her limbs. She caught snippets of conversation. Significant head trauma… Possible spinal injury… The little boy from the plane is dead.
Yes, there had been a plane. She remembered that now. But it hadn’t dropped bombs on them, as Juliette had expected it to. Instead, it had come crashing down, the tail splintering from the body with a giant crack, the rest of it bursting into flames. It hadn’t been the same as having a bomb whistle through the ceiling of her store seventeen years ago, but it had been close.
Ruth Levy, the nice woman who used to frequent her store in Boulogne, had been there sometime during the night, and so had Arthur. He had murmured to her that he needed her to wake up, that Lucie needed her. But he didn’t know yet that it had all come unraveled.
Juliette had never meant to hurt anyone. At first, she’d been so deep in her grief that she’d truly believed the girl who’d survived was Lucie. After all, it had to be Lucie, for if it wasn’t, what did Juliette have to live for?
Later, there had been clues, things about Lucie that reminded Juliette of Elise, but she had pushed them away. And then Paul had begun whispering to her, and it was easier to look back than to look forward, easier to spend time with his ghost than it was to look Lucie in the face and acknowledge to herself what she’d done.
But the girl she’d saved from the rubble hadn’t been Lucie after all. She knew that now with a great, sad certainty, for Lucie was here, in this room, bathed in white light, waving at her, looking just as she had on that day in April 1943, before the world exploded. Her hair was in pigtails, her pink dress a bit too small, her white knee socks slipping down her shins, her black shoes scuffed.
“Lucie?” Juliette said in disbelief, and she heard the voices above her again, murmuring about how she was conscious after all, and wasn’t it a miracle. She recognized Elise’s voice, and for a second, she considered trying to rise to the surface long enough to apologize. There was so much to say. But then there was warm breath on her cheek, and her friend’s voice was in her ear.