“Please, it’s behind the bar, in a hollow post. I watched Gaspard hide it.”
“I’m sorry, but it is no longer a café.”
“We were going to toast the end of the war. Gaspard, my father, and I.” I tried to peer over her shoulder. “Another day conquered.”
“You’ve missed the end, monsieur.” She stepped back and reached for the door. “Bonne journée.”
“Wait!” I wedged a shoulder in the door. Her eyes widened. “He hid it for me. We were going to toast to victory. Please let me go look for it. I know exactly where it is.”
But she wasn’t listening. She held the broom across her body, a trembling quarterstaff.
I let go of the door. “Bonne journée.”
I stumbled away. I didn’t belong out here, on the streets of the city, among the decent citizens. I needed to get back to the apartment, to my sanctuary, and lock myself away. I hurried past all of the open stares and whispered comments, losing myself in the maze of narrow streets. The literature of Paris was full of monsters. Hugo’s Quasimodo. Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera. I read all of the stories; I just never thought I would be numbered among them.
When I stopped to take a breath, I was on the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. My feet had made a decision for me. Across the street there was a building set back, fronted by a courtyard and high black fence. I recognized it. I had stepped through that gate only yesterday.
Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs was quiet and I crossed it, ice crunching beneath my feet. The fence surrounding the house was set into stone ledges. Bare rosebushes spilled over the top of the fence. One of the two gates, iron and almost twice as tall as me, was ajar. Beyond, down a narrow corridor, I could see the airy little courtyard, a crooked tree holding up the center. The scent of tobacco lingered in the air, as though someone had put out a cigarette seconds ago. I leaned against the fence until the cold metal pressed against my cheek. I couldn’t see anyone.
“Monsieur?” a voice asked, quite close.
It was a woman, older, dressed neatly in a deep blue coat and hat. She stood behind me on the street. Over an arm she carried a shopping basket filled with paper-wrapped parcels and little brown pears. “Can I help you?” She straightened a pair of spectacles but didn’t look away. “Are you here to see Madame Ladd?”
I took a step back, and caught my foot on a stone. “No.”
“Are you sure? I can walk you in, if you’d like.” She nodded down at her basket. “Or if you’d just like to come in and warm up? I have fresh coffee, real coffee.”
“My apologies.” I straightened my collar, tucked my face down towards it. “This was a mistake.”
She touched my arm. “Monsieur, I don’t believe you are one to make mistakes.”
I pulled away. “Then you do not know me, Madame.”
And I hurried away.
I couldn’t keep still all the next morning, watching the door, wondering if he’d walk back through. For years I thought I’d never see him again, and now, I hopefully counted seconds.
“You can’t keep your mind on anything today.” Pascalle, one of the other artists, reached across me for the tin of white enamel. “I’ve never seen you so restless.”
“There’s just a lot to do,” I said.
“Then why have you been spending so much time on that one drawing?”
Beneath my fingertips, Luc’s face took shape again and again. I drew, smudged, erased, and tried again. Trying to convince myself that I’d made a mistake, that the man who’d been in here, broken and tense, wasn’t the same boy who sang jazz songs as he hiked through the Fairy Woods. Even when Mrs. Ladd showed me the letter, the handwriting familiar, the Luc René Rieulle Crépet written as plain as anything, I was still sure I had it wrong. My Luc, the Luc who sent me pictures, who told me fairy tales, who sketched in the woods when he thought no one was looking, he wasn’t here, he couldn’t be here.
All of these years, as I tried to ignore the news articles about each fresh battle, to ignore the too-long casualty lists, to ignore the stories the men on leave told in whispers, I had to think that Luc was somewhere else. Walking the grounds of Mille Mots on his mother’s arm. Eating mushroom soup with his father in the rose garden. Leaning beneath the old chestnut tree with sketchbook in hand and a smile on his face. I had to tell myself he was there, safe and whole. Because, oh God, I couldn’t picture him anywhere else.
Pascalle leaned over my shoulder. “He was a looker, wasn’t he?”
Unexpected tears filled my eyes.
“Clare?”
“It’s all a mistake.”
“Oh, no.” She hauled me to my feet. “Out with you.” Holding tight to my arm, she steered me out of the studio, down the stairs, and into the courtyard.
It was icy cold out there. Pascalle made sure the door was closed tight and pulled me across the yard near the fence.
“Okay, go,” she directed.
I swallowed back the tears. I’d had so many years to practice. “No, I’m fine.”
“You are not. And the one thing you can’t do in there is cry. Not in front of those soldiers. You know that.” She pulled a blue package of Gauloises from the pocket of her smock.
I glanced around, but the brown branches of wild rose twined around the fence and kept us from view. I took an offered cigarette. “No, really, I’m fine. I wasn’t going to cry.”
“What did you mean, it was all a mistake?” She tucked a strand of her bobbed hair behind her ear and lit one for herself. “You said that in there.”
“I…” I exhaled. “The soldier in the picture. I know him.”
She leaned forward. “Really? The looker?”
“That’s the mistake. It can’t be him, must not be him.”
Smoke curled around Pascalle’s face. “But you have proof, no?”
“The letter he sent to Mrs. Ladd. It’s his handwriting, his name. His face looking up from my sketchbook.” The cigarette burned, but I didn’t bring it to my lips. “Pascalle, I know it’s him.”
“Then there is no mistake.”
“I wish there was.” I leaned back against the fence, ignoring the thorns and the icy metal bars. “It’s been years since we’ve written and even longer since we’ve seen each other.” I pulled my sweater tighter. “He grew up surrounded by so much beauty. A romantic château, roses, art, parents who loved him to overflowing. For one summer, he shared all of that with me. He doesn’t know how to deal with all of this ugliness. Not his face—you know I don’t mean that—but the war, the death, the mud, the grief. He’s not made for any of that.” My eyes stupidly filled again. “He won’t come back!”
With a cluck of her tongue, Pascalle took the cigarette from me. “You’re going to burn your fingers. Off for a walk with you.” One-handed, she draped her scarf around my neck. “If he remembers you like you remember him, he’ll come back.” And she gently pushed me through the gate onto the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs.
I did remember him. But how did he remember me? That summer, I was fifteen and naive, unwilling to accept that my mother was never returning, unwilling to acknowledge that my father had loved me. What had Luc seen? A girl hiding tears, hiding everything. A girl who crept at the edges of friendship. A girl who didn’t even know herself.
I wasn’t the same, of that I was sure. All morning, looking down at my sketch, I saw the boy in him, but the girl in me—she’d grown up. I’d been across the world. I’d lost family and found family. I’d redefined “home” a dozen times. I wanted to be an artist so badly that, in Glasgow, I played it like an expected role. I wore my bright skirts and paisley head scarves like some bohemian uniform, I lived alone in a chilly garret, I lived on tea and wine. In Paris, though, I truly became an artist.