Charlotte stood and hugged Thomas tightly. “I’ll be very sorry to see you go. We will miss you very much.”
“I’ll miss you too. All of you.” Ruby could see tears in Thomas’s eyes, and that ripped the hole in her heart even wider.
Charlotte gave Ruby a quick peck on the cheek. “Are you all right?” she whispered.
Ruby could manage only to nod; to speak would have been to open the dam.
After saying good-bye to Lucien and Charlotte and closing the door behind them, Ruby turned slowly and found Thomas gazing at her with a sad smile. “What is it?” she asked.
“I was just thinking about what a beautiful future we’re going to have,” he said. “You and me.”
All at once, there were tears streaming down her face. “Thomas, we’re barely guaranteed tomorrow.”
He took a few steps toward her and pulled her into his arms. “We just have to believe, Ruby. We have to believe that things will work out just the way they’re meant to.”
“But how?”
He was silent for a moment. “Let’s talk about the life we’ll have,” he said. “Tell me about what it will be like for us in California.”
She pulled back to look at his face. “You’re saying you’ll come to California with me?”
“Unless you’d prefer to stay in Paris.”
She thought about that and shook her head. Everything she’d come for was gone. The only thing that mattered here was Charlotte, and she was confident that if Charlotte’s parents didn’t return, she would be able to officially adopt the girl and move her to America after the war. “No. But what about England?”
“We can go there too, if you’d like. Buy a farm, maybe, move to the countryside. But wouldn’t you rather go somewhere that hasn’t been ravaged by the war?”
“Yes,” Ruby whispered.
“Will your parents like me?”
Ruby laughed, wiping a tear away. “They’ll love you, Thomas. You’re exactly the kind of person they’ve always wanted for a son.”
“So tell me.” He touched her cheek gently. “Where will we live?”
She hesitated, because to speak her dreams aloud would surely be to jinx them. But what if, instead, giving them voice made them come true? “My parents have a big piece of land near Lancaster,” she said. “It’s about sixty miles north of Los Angeles.”
“So we’ll be rubbing elbows with all the movie stars? Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart will be around for dinner a few times a month?”
“Hardly! It’s worlds away from Hollywood. But it’s the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen. My parents live on the edge of a huge poppy field.”
“I remember. The photo in your old apartment. The one of you in the field when you were a girl.”
“Yes. The poppies bloom every spring, and it’s like the whole world has come completely alive. Sometimes, when I see sunsets here, I think of home, because the colors are the same: reds, oranges, yellows in every shade you can think of. It’s truly like nothing you’ve ever seen.”
“Poppies,” Thomas said, holding her gaze. “You know what they mean, don’t you?”
“Yes. Remembrance.” In Europe, after the Great War, poppies had become a symbol to honor soldiers who had lost their lives in battle. It wasn’t something she wanted to think about now.
“?‘In Flanders fields the poppies blow,’?” Thomas said softly, reciting the words to the famous John McCrae poem. “?‘Between the crosses, row on row.’?”
“My father used to read me that poem when I was small,” Ruby said. “He fought in the war, and he said once that he liked to look out at our fields and imagine a parade of his fallen brothers in arms. But the poppies always meant something else to me. When I was a little girl, I imagined fairies living among them, and even when I was older, I believed somehow in the flowers’ magic. I still do. It’s a very special place. My parents always said that if I wanted to come home, they’d give me a piece of their land to build my own house on. I think they were very disappointed when I moved here instead. But it’s not too late to fix that.”
“We could build a house together.”
“With a porch and rocking chairs.”
“And a fireplace with a big chimney for the nights when it gets cold.” Thomas paused. “Does it actually get cold in California?”
“It does sometimes.” Ruby smiled. “And we’d have big windows in our bedroom that overlook the poppy fields.”
“And plenty of room for our children to play in the yard.”
Ruby reached up and touched his face. “Children?”
“I want to have children with you someday, Ruby. If you want that too.”
“Of course I do.” She wasn’t sure she’d ever felt happier than she did in that moment.
“And if Charlotte’s parents don’t come home,” Thomas said carefully, “we’ll adopt her.”
“You’d do that?”
“In a heartbeat.”
Ruby smiled. “Of course that means we’d probably have to bring Lucien too. We’ll all live happily ever after.”
Thomas pulled her to him and kissed her. “We’ll all live happily after.”
They made love three times that day, staring into each other’s eyes, whispering about the future, making promises that they both knew they might be powerless to keep.
They fell asleep in the early afternoon, and Ruby woke a few minutes before four. Thomas still had his arms around her, and his chest was rising and falling in an easy rhythm. For a long time, she just watched, committing to memory the shape of his jaw, the color of his eyelashes, the constellation of freckles that dotted his collarbone. “I’ll see you again,” she whispered. “I know I will.”
She woke him at four-thirty, knowing that Charlotte and Lucien would be home soon. Already, the light that streamed in through the bedroom window was turning apricot. Evening was on its way, and there wasn’t enough time to say all the things she wanted to, but she knew there never would be. Perhaps that was what it was like to love someone deeply: to feel that no matter how many moments together you were granted, there would never be enough.
Thomas blinked at her a few times upon awakening, as if reminding himself that he wasn’t in a dream, and then he kissed her once more, softly, tenderly. “I was thinking,” he said, “that we should also have a white picket fence. Isn’t that very American?”
She laughed. “And maybe an American flag flying in the breeze.”
“And a British flag.”
“But of course.”
They smiled at each other. “Tell me more about the poppies,” he said.
And as they rose reluctantly from the bed and got dressed, Ruby did just that. She described the way the poppies soaked in the desert sunshine, blooming the color of clementines as far as the eye could see. She told him about the soft purple owl’s clover, the deep purple lupine, the tiny yellow wildflowers, and the buttery white cream cups that grew there too, a rolling field of watercolors stretching into the horizon. She told him about the mountains in the distance, the way everything looked carved out of the brilliant blue sky. “It’s like heaven on earth,” she concluded. “I can’t wait to be there again. With you.”
They heard Charlotte’s key in the lock, and Thomas pulled her to him once more. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for painting me a picture of the future. It will sustain me until the day I see you again.”
And as Charlotte came inside, followed by Lucien, both of them wearing expressions of regret, Ruby thought with a strange surge of hope that perhaps this wasn’t so senseless after all. Maybe this was the reason for the hell they’d all been going through. Maybe this was the life she was supposed to find all along.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
January 1944