“Good night.”
And now I was alone in my empty hotel room, lying on the bed, unable to sleep. Yellow light filtered through the shutters from the streetlamps, and the muted sounds of nighttime traffic. Over and over, I ran my fingertips back and forth across my belly. The Little Problem had been quiet ever since I decided not to go to Vevey. Probably figured she could take her ease and just grow, grow, grow until it came time for her to be born. Only then would she realize that the world was a cold place, and her mother had very little idea of how to give her a good life. Before Oradour-sur-Glane I’d at least had a fantasy idea, a magical equation where Charlie plus Rose magically guaranteed a happy future for everyone. Now I didn’t even have that.
“Sorry,” I said softly to the stomach that was still flat under my exploring fingers. “Your mama’s every bit as helpless as you, baby girl.” I don’t know why I thought it was a girl, but I did. Baby Rose, I thought, and just like that, she had a name. Of course she did. Another Rose. A Rose of my own.
A church bell chimed midnight. My stomach rumbled, the newly named Little Problem complaining that she hadn’t had dinner. Strange how bodies kept stubbornly functioning in the middle of grief or guilt or shock. “That’s one thing I do notice about you, Rosebud,” I told my stomach. “You might not be showing yet, but I already need the lavatory twice as much.”
I got out of bed, pulled a sweater around me, used the lavatory, then found myself padding down the corridor. No light under Finn’s door. I hoped he’d managed his apologies next door and come back to dreamless sleep. I wondered if he regretted what we’d done in the backseat. I didn’t. I hesitated outside his door, then tiptoed past to Eve’s. Light showed in a yellow strip—she was awake. I struck the door open without knocking, striding inside.
Eve sat at her windowsill looking down at the dark street. The dim light hid the ravages of her face—she could have been any age, tall and lean with a stark profile and long bare feet curled beneath her. She could have been the girl who went to Lille in 1915 . . . except for those maimed and terrible hands lying in her lap. It all came back to those hands. It had all started with those hands. I remembered how the gorge had risen in my throat when I’d first seen them, that night in London.
“Don’t you Yanks know how to knock?” Eve’s cigarette glowed at the tip as she raised it for a long drag.
I folded my arms. “The thing is,” I began, as though we were continuing a discussion already begun, “I don’t know what comes next.”
Eve finally looked at me. She raised her eyebrows.
“I had a plan, all broken down like a simple geometry problem. Find Rose if she was still alive, have my baby, learn to cope. I don’t have a plan, now. But I’m not ready to go home. I’m not ready to go back to my mother and start arguing all over again about how I’m going to live. I’m not ready to sit on a couch knitting booties.”
Above all, I wasn’t ready to lose this little trio that had molded itself around Eve and Finn and me in a dark blue car. Part of me had had enough pain for a lifetime, and that part wanted to pull up stakes and run home rather than take the risk that Finn would reject me tomorrow morning. But another part of me—small but increasingly demanding, just like the Rosebud—wanted to stick this out, whatever this was. I wasn’t sure exactly what had pulled the three of us together, or why it had turned out we were all chasing some variant of the same thing: legacies left by lost women in past wars. I didn’t have a destination anymore, or a goal at the end of this road, but we were headed somewhere and I wasn’t ready to abandon the journey.
“I know what I want, Eve. I want time to figure out what comes next.” I groped my way through this thicket as Eve sat giving me no clue if my words were sinking in. I looked at her hands, taking a deep breath. “And I want to hear the rest of your story.”
Eve exhaled smoke. I heard the honk of a horn outside, some late-night driver.
“You asked me at the café tonight if I had guts.” I heard my own heart pounding. “I don’t know if I do or not. At around my age you were racking up medals in a war zone; I haven’t done anything even remotely in your class. But I’ve got the guts not to go crawling home. I’ve got the guts to hear what happened to you, no matter how bad it was.” I sat down opposite those steady eyes that were afire with remembered pain and savage self-loathing. “Finish the story. Give me a reason to stay.”
“You want a reason?” She passed me her cigarettes. “Revenge.”
The pack was slippery in my hand. “Revenge for who?”
“For Lili’s arrest.” Eve’s voice in the dark was low, graveled, ferocious. “And for what happened to me, the night I was caught.”
And as dark wore on to dawn, Eve told me the rest of it.
CHAPTER 30
EVE
October 1915
It didn’t matter what she said or didn’t say. Whether Eve insulted René, answered him civilly, or refused to answer at all, he brought down the bust of Baudelaire in a sharp, precise movement and broke another finger joint. Even in the throes of agony, Eve could look down at her hands and count.
She had twenty-eight finger joints in total.
René had so far gone through nine of them.
“I am going to give you to the Germans.” His metallic voice was level, but she could hear the emotions running taut below the surface. “First, however, you are going to talk to me. You are going to tell me everything I want to know.”
He sat opposite, one finger tapping the dome of Baudelaire’s head. The once-pristine marble was now flecked with blood. He’d broken her first few joints without skill, clumsy at it, flinching at the noise of shattering bone. He was getting better at it now, though the blood still made his nostrils flare in distaste. You’re as new to this torture business as I am, Eve thought. She had no idea how much time might have passed. Time had turned elastic, molding itself around the pulse of her agony. The fire flickered, and the two of them sat in leather armchairs with the table drawn between them, as they used to sit playing chess before retiring to bed. Only now Eve’s hands were tied flat to that table’s surface with the silk cord from one of René’s robes. Tied so tightly it hurt, so tightly she had no hope of pulling free.
She didn’t try. Escape wasn’t a possibility now. The only things possible were to remain silent, and show no fear. So she kept her back straight, much as she wished she could curl over her hands and shriek, and she managed a smile for René. He would not know what that smile cost her.