While she was there, she saw the day’s paper. In contrast to Le Figaro, it was understated (Exposition Has an Unexpected Exhibit). Two witness quotes were provided, as were three quotes from other visitors about the Palais des Beaux-Arts or the Exposition as a whole. She knew what M. Patenaude’s editorial direction had been and applauded him for it through Arianne when she turned in her article.
On the way home from Le Petit Journal, she pressed herself up against the window of an omnibus and sighed. The jasmine-scented woman next to her was constantly reaching in her red satchel for something, like a magician preparing for his next trick. All it achieved was the throwing about of elbows and hips that landed in Nathalie’s side. With every inadvertent poke (followed by an absent-minded apology), Nathalie made herself smaller. Any more and she’d be part of the interior. Not to mention, jasmine was a most unpleasant scent.
Then, as if she weren’t in enough discomfort, Nathalie was sweating far, far more than the climate in the omnibus warranted.
She watched through the shoulders opposite a carriage go by, something ostentatious with a heavily made-up woman inside, probably a duchess or baroness or some other -ess; she couldn’t remember which frivolous relic of nobility was which. The carriage itself captivated her nonetheless, with its two pristine white horses and the gold trim framing the mural painted along the doors.
The opposite of the omnibus, noisy and rattling and drawn by tired, overworked horses.
The omnibus. Nathalie looked around, and as she did, her fingers and toes tingled. The sensation crawled up her arms and legs like a quartet of vines, wrapping itself around her neck and torso. She wiped sweat off her forehead and jerked her hand away as if stung. Her skin was cold. Shouldn’t it be hot if she were sweating?
Nathalie looked around again. This was not possible. Was she dreaming?
She’d boarded a steam tram going to Passage des Panoramas to browse the shops and watch people. It had been pouring, and she almost slipped as she got on, nicking her shin.
Nathalie turned around to stare out the window. Bright and sunny. She then noticed her clothes, dry without a hint of moisture. Her dress was the light blue linen one, though she was certain she’d chosen the daffodil-colored cotton one that morning.
The buildings, the street signs … they were all wrong. Her heart sped up. How could she think she boarded a steam tram and end up on an omnibus in another part of the city? Not just any route, but the one—
No. That didn’t make sense, either.
Swallowing hard, she lifted her dress up a few centimeters to inspect her shin. A healed-over laceration.
What is happening?
A woman with a needlessly bulky red satchel was seated next to her.
“Pardonnez-moi, Madame. Do you speak French?”
“Oui.”
“I was daydreaming.” Nathalie touched her temple. Her skin seemed even colder than before. “What is our next stop?”
“Boulevard Voltaire.”
Nathalie’s initial thought was accurate, the improbability of it notwithstanding; this didn’t make sense. But here she was, on the omnibus route home from Le Petit Journal. She must have turned in an article—for a trip to the morgue she didn’t remember.
She shivered. Why was it so cold on a sunny day?
Other passengers stole glances at her. She recognized the stealthy, fleeting “what is wrong with her?” looks; she’d received them often enough at the morgue.
Nathalie pulled her journal out of her bag and opened it to the last page of writing. Tuesday, 4 June, 9:30 p.m.
The date did not make sense.
Today was the third. It had to be.
8
Nathalie turned to the woman beside her again. “Madame?” There was no way to ask this without sounding foolish, but she had no choice. She attempted a modest laugh that ended up sounding more like something had caught in her throat. “My days are all amiss. What’s today’s date?”
The woman, who emitted an off-putting plume of jasmine, replied to her without looking. “Wednesday. The fifth of June.”
Yet in her mind it was June third. A Monday. In several hours, she, Simone, and Louis were supposed to undertake one of their favorite excursions of late, investigating abandoned shops and buildings. Inspired by a trip to the Thermes de Cluny, the ruins of Roman baths in the 5th arrondissement that were now part of a museum, they’d begun their own adventures. (Both those open to the public and those that required something of a hunt, usually initiated by Louis.) Today, they were to explore an abandoned shoemaker’s shop; Jules was at Rue du Chocolat and couldn’t join them.
She skimmed the journal and found her account of the exploration.
Which she couldn’t recollect. At all.
Nathalie could remember nothing, not one thing at all, of the past two days. It was as if she’d gone to sleep on the tram and woke up on the omnibus.
What else had happened?
She continued reading and felt her jaw go slack when she got to the yesterday she didn’t remember, this gruesome yesterday full of shock and blood. Her own written words horrified her. For a moment, she wondered if this was fiction, a short story in the vein of Poe.
She’d touched a severed head in the Palais des Beaux-Arts, then another at the morgue, with visions unlike any she’d had before. A guillotine?
Such irony, to use it as a weapon. Poor Dr. Guillotin, who’d suggested a hundred years ago that a quicker, less painful means of execution be devised. Opposed to punishment by death, and yet his name came to represent it. He had to be shaking his fist from his coffin at Père Lachaise Cemetery right now.
Her mouth went dry as she read and reread her notes. In addition to the abhorrent murders, there was an entry about another murderer, who happened to now be Aunt Brigitte’s roommate. Véronique Didion. Murder and murderers were everywhere, it seemed.
And this, here. The memory loss she’d feared.
I sit here at the Fontaine de Coutan, not knowing if I’ll recall sitting here. That’s always true to some extent following a vision, but this? I don’t know what to expect. I hope the consequences aren’t as dire as the last incident of this sort, yet hope can only get me so far. I’m going to try not to think about it. Is that foolish? Probably. I shall make an attempt, anyway. Perhaps I will only lose minutes or hours.
What did it matter that she’d anticipated it if she didn’t even recall having the expectation? It was a waste of worry. She could not say if she’d held true to her own proposed plan. Was she fixated on it right up until the moment it happened? Or had she succeeded in pushing it to the side somewhat, like a heavy piece of furniture that could be moved just enough to reach behind?
Then she felt something else. Guilt, because a part of her found solace in the memory gap. She’d forgotten horrible events and was relieved to have forgotten them. She was distressed about the memory loss, about holes in her mind like a moth-eaten skirt. Yet she was grateful for a sliver of it, that sometimes losing something saved her.
Nathalie didn’t know what to do with dissonant epiphanies of that sort.
She disembarked, rubbing her arms to stay warm despite the early June sun beating down. Last time she’d touched a corpse, August 1887, the sensation of cold had been overwhelming. She’d worn winter clothes for days.
“Oh!” she exclaimed aloud, startling the woman with the red bag, who’d been in front of her.
The woman pursed her lips and shook her head before disappearing into the crowd. Nathalie took a few steps to the side and reached into her own satchel.
Voilà!
If a hand could express joy, hers would have done so as it grabbed a sweater.
Bravo, Nathalie of yesterday. You packed a sweater to go along with that anticipation.
Putting on the sweater didn’t alleviate the chill entirely, but it made the feeling tolerable. She continued home, buying a newspaper along the way. Indeed, Le Petit Journal had refrained from publishing a salacious account.<
br />
It didn’t stop the rumors. While waiting to cross the street, she heard a couple talking, with the man claiming the disembodied head at the Palais had sighed while the guard was fending off the crowd. Then for most of the walk home, Nathalie followed a group of friends—who reminded her so much of herself, Jules, Simone, and Louis—discussing all the places they’d heard the headless body might be.
“Hidden in Notre-Dame.”
“Sprawled out in the Catacombs.”
“In the sculpture gallery at the Louvre.”
“On a stairwell in the rare book section of Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève.”
Their conjecture reminded Nathalie just how big the city was, just how many places there were to hide the dead.
And a murderer.
* * *
Stanley was in the window as she approached the apartment building, and then waiting for her at the door. The last time she saw him, he had been catching a mouse that Papa said to let him eat. (Nathalie did not; she ushered the unfortunate creature back to its hole and plugged up the opening with a rag.) Maman had been making jam and Papa was tending to bills and paperwork. No one was home now except Stanley, who must have registered her cold skin, judging by his uncharacteristic squirm when she picked him up.
She examined her shelf of keepsakes to see if she’d deposited anything there in the last few days, something to anchor her memory. But no. Nothing new. The bird skeleton (one of Stanley’s catches) and the porcelain cup from Aunt Brigitte filled with a few of Nathalie’s baby teeth and Stanley’s shed claws. The mourning brooch with her grandmother’s hair and Silvain, her stuffed rabbit from childhood, along with the more recent additions of a gargoyle coin, an Egyptian pyramid figurine from the Rue du Caire last week at the Exposition, and a tiny metal Tour Eiffel.
Her eyes lingered, as they so often did, on another possession. The sand and shells from Agnès. Nathalie had been delighted by the gift that day Agnès gave it to her in Le Canard Curieux and made her promise to bring it back to the ocean when they’d go together. Since Agnès’s death, the sand had become so much more. Her last gift. A symbol of the summer together they never had, but might have had the following year, if things had been different.
Her grief over Agnès’s death hadn’t taken a straight path. It started out that way, acute and shattering and filling her nights with restlessness and torment. Then Nathalie was consumed by, or perhaps channeled her grief into, the focused pursuit of the Dark Artist and his vile companion, whose name she’d stopped saying long ago.
Since then, the grief had meandered, a trail with branches in lost woods where everything blended together indistinguishably. And from which there was seemingly no exit. Almost two years had passed, and still the sights of a knife tearing Agnès’s throat and then Agnès on a slab at the morgue stamped themselves onto the backs of her eyelids, like a press printing out a newspaper again and again.
She’d even trade that imagery for the events she witnessed yesterday, as atrocious as they must have been. Anything to get rid of Agnès’s death. She couldn’t undo the murder, but she’d settle for undoing the sight of it.
Outside, someone screamed. A boy. She ran to the window, only to see him laughing. He was with some other children in front of the apartment across the way, playing a game.
Nathalie shut the window, annoyed at herself for being skittish. Couldn’t she tell the difference between screams of joy and screams of terror?
9
No, she couldn’t. Not anymore.
Nathalie took some winter dresses out of her wardrobe, deciding on a brown velvet one. She slipped it on, grateful for the warmth.
Her life had changed since Agnès’s death. She wasn’t a novice Insightful anymore; she understood her unusual gift. It was so deeply embedded in her that if it weren’t for the record of her journal entries from years ago, she’d hardly remember what her perspective had been before the discovery of her power. She was a more experienced morgue reporter, too. She’d learned, she’d grown some, and she’d found affection in her relationship with Jules.
But Agnès hadn’t grown in that time. She remained and would always remain sixteen years old, never again able to enjoy a trip to the pâtisserie or the sound of a violin or the flirtatious grin of a suitor. Agnès wouldn’t be a wife or a mother as she’d hoped. And Nathalie grieved this as well. Not just for Agnès but also herself, for how connected would she feel to Agnès at age thirty-two, when a lifetime separated them? Would she miss Agnès as much, or would her childhood friend seem too much like a child to properly miss and relate to any longer?
In a strange sense, Nathalie mourned what might be the eventual loss of loss itself.
She worried about Agnès fading from memory as other memories filled her head. She also wondered if her Insightful ability might interfere. Until now, it had stolen her immediate memory, with random onset and relatively random duration, except when she touched a corpse. What if the arms reached further back into her past? What if that last day she’d spent with Agnès, something she visited in her mind a thousand times over, was one day erased? She had no reason to think it would happen, but there was no governance to Insightful power, no rules or laws or anything resembling permanence or certainty. So Nathalie had written it all down. An entire notebook was dedicated to Agnès, full of everything Nathalie could remember as well as her meditations on grief and loss.
Even then, her memories were confined to words, fixed in whatever prose Nathalie used to describe those memories. This was true for Agnès and for all of Nathalie’s memories committed to paper for fear of being lost (and particularly so for those that were).
Her thoughts were interrupted by the squeak of the apartment door. She hadn’t locked it behind her.
“Nathalie?” called Papa, his footsteps crossing the parlor.
“Yes, I’m home.”
She waited. Would he want to talk, expect her to come out? She didn’t want to speak to anyone just yet and hoped she’d be afforded some privacy.
When she heard the sound of his chair settling, she knew he was likely preparing his pipe and getting ready to read.
Good. She’d talk later. Not yet.
Nathalie wiggled her toes; her feet were still cold. She opened a drawer and found some wool socks, making sure not to glimpse at the small, somewhat distorted mirror Papa had brought back once from Venice (he claimed to have won it in a card game). “I must look preposterous,” she said to the reflection she refused to see.
She fingered the spines of her notebooks. How many more would she fill up in her lifetime? Papa’s goodbye when he went to sea last April. Maman’s fortieth birthday last September 28. Her second kiss with Jules. They’d been struck from her memory, as if someone had gone into her mind and crossed out lines from her inner narrative. All she had to go by was whatever she’d written down or what others could tell her. Still, it didn’t feel like her own. No matter how many times she read the words or her description, she couldn’t bring back the memory. It was like reading an autobiography written by another self.
Stanley moseyed in, tail in a question mark, and leapt onto the bed. “Good idea,” Nathalie said, taking a notebook off the shelf at random. She took an extra blanket out of her wardrobe and got under the covers as Stanley curled up at her ankles.
She opened the notebook, part of which included this past February and the first time she’d gone out with Jules as more than friends. They’d walked through several galleries of the Louvre.
We stopped to admire the Winged Victory of Samothrace, and when it was time to move on, I took a step. “Wait,” said Jules. “I have something for you.” He reached into his coat pocket and produced a small bundle. I took it from him with a smile and opened it—a delicate chocolate, shaped like a dove. “I started an apprenticeship with a chocolatier this week, and this was from my first batch.”
I’m certain I blushed. I thanked him and asked if he’d like me to enjoy it now or later. He insisted it was up to me, s
o I took a bite. It was luscious and melted just perfectly. “Délicieux! Shall I call you mon bonbon?” I said with a laugh. I did, for the rest of the day, and Jules seemed rather to enjoy the sobriquet. Perhaps I will continue to refer to him as such from time to time.
After we’d taken in two hours’ worth of art, we went outside to the Jardin des Tuileries. The plants, shrubs, and flowers all had their brown winter coats on, dusted with snow. Our two pairs of footsteps were all the life the garden needed.
Sleepiness overtook her, and the next thing she heard was Papa’s voice.
“Ma bichette?”
Nathalie’s eyes fluttered open. She was surprised to find herself chilly and in bed in the middle of the day. After a moment, she shook off the mantle of slumber, awareness trickling back.
He stepped into the room, smelling of sandalwood and smoke. “Are you not feeling well?”
“It’s happened.” She hugged the blankets, inviting their warmth. “Two days this time, not three. I can’t remember anything between being on a steam tram on Monday and sitting on an omnibus this afternoon.”
Although Papa’s face was never as readable as Maman’s, Nathalie knew there was a mélange of feelings behind that docile canvas. “I am sorry this happened, ma bichette. I hoped … I don’t know,” he said, his hand gripping the doorframe. “I hoped last time was an accident of circumstance, something that wouldn’t ever be repeated.”
“Me too.” She rolled onto her back. “I’m cold and exhausted. And sad.” And weak. Like this ability is ultimately too strong for me.
Papa kissed her on the forehead. “I know.”
“Do you feel tired sometimes? From being an Insightful?”
He paused before replying. “Most of the time.”
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