On one of those afternoons though, after he’s silently undressed me and pushed me back to the bed and we’re lying together with my head on his chest, he brings up a topic we haven’t discussed in a long while. “I want you to marry me,” he says.
I lean up on my forearms. “I hate to ruin an otherwise perfect moment by pointing out the obvious, but you’re already married.”
“I filed to have it annulled,” he says. “I’m not sure how long it will take to come through, but when it does, on the day it does, I want you to marry me.”
“Are you going to try to claim it wasn’t consummated?” My laughter is meant to sound lighthearted but comes out bitter instead. The truth is that even the most oblique references to Yvette bother me. “There’s some obvious proof it was.”
“We never once had relations after our wedding. And therefore, the marriage was not consummated.”
I study his face. They were married from March to October, sleeping in the same bed. It’s obvious Yvette was more than willing. “Not once?” I repeat. I want it to be true. The thought of them together is something that never stops eating at me.
“I told her I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of it because of the baby. Thank God she left before I had to come up with a new excuse,” he says with a relieved exhale. “So? Yes or no?”
Once upon a time it seemed too soon. Now it seems like I’ve waited forever for it. I smile and place my head back against his chest. “Yes,” I reply. “There’s nothing I want more.”
* * *
On the last weekend of November, all of us head to town dressed to the nines for the baptism of the newest Durand. Since Cece’s birth, Marie’s been attending mass alone. Cece is too fragile to be taken into crowds just yet, but that’s not the only reason Henri and I have been avoiding mass: in the aftermath of Yvette’s departure, Henri has become the man who threw over his pregnant wife for his own cousin, and I’m now the American who seduced her own cousin away from his pregnant wife. I could live with it, but I’m glad we’re leaving so I won’t have to.
Father Edouard, unlike the rest of the town, doesn’t appear to hold it against us. His main source of trouble this day, it seems, is Gerard—a friend of Henri’s from grade school who will serve as a godparent alongside Marie. Every time Gerard makes Marie laugh, offers her assistance or even stands beside her, Edouard’s square jaw flexes until I’m certain he’s going to crack teeth. At one point, most unpriestly of all, I catch him rolling his eyes.
The service begins and, after a few prayers, he asks who the parents are. Henri grips my hand and we step forward. “We are,” the two of us say in unison. Henri squeezes my hand and I truly feel, in this moment, that I don’t have a single regret. I’m a mother because of what happened. Might I have had my own children if it hadn’t? Perhaps, but it no longer matters to me. I couldn’t love Cecelia more than I do, and I wouldn’t trade her for a hundred children I might have had otherwise. The sun floats in through the stained-glass windows, and Cecelia, happy in my arms, smiles at me, as if she knew long before I did that this was exactly what was meant to be.
After the service we invite everyone back to the farm for a small party. Marie goes to the vestibule to get Cecelia’s pram, and Gerard follows, complimenting her smallest actions—you’re so good with the baby, so careful, I wonder if she’ll be as lovely as her aunt.
“He’s making a fool of himself,” Henri groans as we exit the church.
Edouard’s face has been strained for some time. He cuts a quick glance toward Marie and Gerard. “Yes,” he growls. “He is.”
“Well, he’ll need to work fast,” I reply, smiling to myself, “given how soon we move.” We are due to travel by ship from Calais to England in April, when Henri will next have leave and Cecelia will be big enough to withstand the trip. Once Henri gets us settled—a friend from Oxford has already found us something to let in the British countryside—he will join General de Gaulle’s London-based forces, though I wish I could dissuade him.
Edouard’s face jerks toward mine. “Move? Move where?”
“England,” I reply. I’m surprised Marie hasn’t mentioned it. “The countryside is safer there, until the war concludes.”
He looks at me with a hint of confusion and then—worry. “Most say the war won’t affect us,” he comments, watching my face. “But you feel otherwise.”
I hesitate. “People are putting an awful lot of stock in the Maginot Line and ignoring the many other ways the Germans could break into France. They’ve already taken over Poland. They beat us conclusively at Saar. It would be naïve to assume they won’t make every effort to take France. They need our ports if nothing else.”
“But surely moving so far...” He glances back at Marie, that worry in his eyes deepening. “Moving so far is extreme. Even if the Germans want the coastline, and take it, they’d have little use for a small town like ours.”
“Saint Antoine rests just between Germany and Paris, and just between Germany and the Normandy coast. And if the Germans do come, there are…other concerns.”
His brows come together for a moment, in confusion, and then he nods. “Because Madame Durand was Jewish?” he asks.
Henri stiffens beside me. “I’m surprised my sister chose to share that with you.”
Edouard frowns. “She didn’t. It’s been mentioned to me by others in town.” We all walk together in silence, letting that sink in. People in town are already discussing it, this meaningless piece of Henri and Marie’s past, though it nets them nothing. Which means that once Saint Antoine is occupied and those words have value—and can be exchanged to curry favor—people in this town will be lining up to share them.
Marie’s friend Jeannette waits at the house when we arrive with Lucien and Charlotte in tow. A widow since the Saar Offensive, she looks much thinner and older than she did when I left a year ago. Worry lines crease her lovely face and her smile flickers out now as soon as it’s begun. The children, thank God, are unaffected as yet by the change of circumstances, and have both grown so much—Luc now an adorable, rosy-cheeked toddler, walking on unsteady legs through the house, knocking things over. Charlotte, age five, is as graceful as a princess when she holds Cecelia for the first time, but her face breaks into a wide grin, one that’s missing several teeth, when Cecelia burps.
The sight of it squeezes my heart so tight it hurts. We’ve found ways to help them with money and food, but we cannot convince Jeannette to leave. She, like everyone else, believes this war will come to nothing, and refuses on the most ridiculous bases: she can’t leave her mother and grandmother, though she only sees them once every few months, and she wants to stay close to people she knows—even though we are the only people here with whom she’s friendly; and being a practicing Jew, most of this town will turn on her the minute the Germans arrive.
Today I try to convince her to get the children passports, which she insists is unnecessary. I suggest she could bring her mother and grandmother with her to England, and she laughs.
“They’d never go. The English don’t practice good hygiene, you know,” she argues. “Covered with lice during the war.”
I sigh. “Don’t you think, maybe, they were covered with lice because they were in the middle of a war?”
“No,” she says very seriously. “My mother still talks about it. They just refused to bathe.”
I feel despair as I watch Lucien and Charlotte run around the room. No one, no one, is taking the threat of Hitler as seriously as they should.
Gerard emerges from the bathroom, asking us all where Marie went. Jeannette and I exchange a quick glance—both Marie and Father Edouard are absent, suddenly, and there’s no good reason for either of them to have snuck outside alone on a bitterly cold November afternoon.
Gerard goes in search of them. Henri, playing with the children on the floor, notices nothing, which is for the best since Marie and Edouard both look dazed and unsteady when they return a moment later with Gerard. Edouard takes h
is leave, but the whole time he’s congratulating Henri and myself, his eyes are on her...different than they’ve ever been before.
“So, where did you and Edouard go this afternoon?” I ask later in the day, when the guests are gone and Henri isn’t listening.
She blinks and a flush colors her cheeks. “He just wanted to see the orchard.”
I raise a brow. “In November?”
Her gaze rests on her hands rather than on me. “Yes, that’s what I said too,” she murmurs.
I hesitate, torn between pushing and letting her have her secrets. I finally decide to let her keep them for now. If something did happen, she has a lot to think about. As much as I did that first time Henri kissed me, certainly, and I wasn’t ready then to mull it over aloud.
The truth, I figure, will come out in time. I just hope she doesn’t make a mistake she can’t undo before then.
27
SARAH
Early in December, Henri and I take the truck out to the woods and chop down a fir. In truth, he deals with the tree and I stand by, worried it will fall on him. He laughs at me. “Is that what people worry about in your time?” he asks with a crooked smile.
No, it’s what I worry about. Now that I have him again, I can’t help but think about the ways I might one day lose him. But it’s not the time for my depressing thoughts, my anxiety. I return his grin. “Now I hope the tree falls on you just to teach you a lesson.”
“And if the tree breaks my back, how will you carry me to the truck?”
“What makes you think I’d bother?” I reply. “I’ll just take your keys and drive into town to see if Luc is free.”
He rises, pacing toward me with a light in his eyes, amused and dangerous at the same time. He pulls me against him. “Say that again,” he growls, his mouth an inch from mine. He takes my lower lip between his teeth and gives it a small nip.
It’s a dare, a challenge, and my heart thuds hard in my chest. “I said that I will drive into town,” I reply, meeting his gaze, “and go find Luc.”
His fingers go beneath my coat, to the button of my trousers. My mouth falls open. “You wouldn’t,” I say.
He pops the button, and his hand—cold, calloused—slides down the soft skin of my torso. “Tell me again how you’d seek out Luc,” he hisses against my mouth. His long fingers slide between my legs. “You’re so wet and warm here. For him or for me?”
I gasp as his fingers push inside me. “You.”
His mouth lands on mine. I arch toward him, toward his flickering fingers, wanting more and more from him, as excited by the unexpectedness of it as I am the ferocity of him right now, the way jealousy and possessiveness strip him of his normal civility. I come with a sudden, sharp gasp and he turns me around, pinning my hands to the trunk of the tree as he shoves my trousers down to my knees.
The air is so cold it bites into my skin, and I don’t care. With one arm he hooks my waist, pushing my ass toward him. With the other he frees himself from his pants and then he is there, pressing between my legs.
“This is mine,” he says against my ear as he shoves inside me. “Mine and no one else’s.”
His thrusts come sharp and fast, and my face is pressed to the trunk of the tree but I hardly notice it with him inside me, slick and hot and pulsing. He’s barely started and I can already feel that cord in my abdomen, the one that seems to pull tight just before I come.
“I dreamed of this when we were apart,” he rasps against my ears. “Every place I set foot that year, I pictured you. Bent over or on your back.”
“I’m coming,” I gasp, and he thrusts faster, the tendons of his arm pressed hard to the tree, taut with the strain, and the moment my shoulders settle he pushes me to my knees and I open my mouth for him.
“This,” he hisses. “I dreamt of this too.”
He flinches as he comes, crying out, holding my head in his hands. After a moment, his shoulders settle and his eyes open again, but at half-mast, as if drugged or in need of sleep. Slowly, his fingers unwind from my scalp and he helps me to my feet.
I have no regrets whatsoever, but something in the way he’s avoiding my eye makes me think he does. His fingers brush my cheek. “You’ve got a scrape there. Did I do that?”
I smile at him. “I think my cheek was pressed against the tree—it was well worth it.”
His shoulders sag. “I’m sorry,” he says, his voice earnest, as if we’re discussing a broken bone or stab wound instead of something so minor I didn’t notice it until he brought it up. “I should have been more careful.”
“Stop,” I command. “You should have. Don’t ruin it by taking it all back.” I can tell he’s still troubled, however. “What’s wrong?”
His hands palm my face. “I was too rough, Sarah,” he says. “There are times when it hits me, how much I’ve missed you and how desperate I was, thinking I would never see you again and…”
“And what?”
“And that you’re keeping secrets from me, and I don’t know what those secrets mean. I don’t know if they mean I’ll lose you again.”
I grow still. “What are you talking about?”
“You’ll need to go back to your own time again soon,” he says, averting his gaze. We haven’t discussed it much, but I know he’s right. If I want to maintain my ability to travel to the future, I’ll need to return sometime in the next year. “And when you’re keeping things from me, I have to wonder if the secret is something there. Something that might mean you don’t come back.”
“Of course not,” I reply. “When I go, it will be for as short a time as possible, and I’ll come right back.”
“That’s not all,” he says quietly. “It bothers me...that you’ve never told me what happened when you were gone.”
I look away, wishing he would just let it go once and for all. Why does he insist on revisiting this topic? “They’re ugly stories I don’t care to remember, and how could they possibly matter now anyway? It’s in the past.”
He pushes my hair back from my face. “It changed you,” he says. “In small ways, things I barely see now, but I know they’re there. And no matter what they are, I will love you. I will love you just the same, I swear it. But until you know that, it will always be between us.”
I meet his gaze, so open and full of love, and feel the ugliness of everything that lies inside me. He would never look at me the same way again, if he knew. He thinks he would, but only because he has no idea how dark this piece of me really is.
“I love you,” I tell him, “and there’s nothing more to say.”
He is still for a moment and then nods. I try to pretend I don’t see disappointment in the gesture.
* * *
Christmas in Saint Antoine is a quieter affair than I’m used to at home. Not that my mother ever made the holiday particularly festive, but there were always ample decorations in town, carols playing in the stores and a flurry of parties leading up to the event itself. I don’t miss any of it, however. It’s the first time I’ve ever been part of a family that actually wants me, and that alone makes this holiday the happiest I’ve ever experienced.
On Christmas Eve, Marie goes into town for mass and Henri, Cece and I remain behind. There’s been something fragile about Marie since the baptism that I can’t put my finger on, as if happiness has stretched her too thin, turned her into something that might shatter with the smallest provocation. Edouard has always struck me as a good man, a decent person. I was sure that if he made his feelings known to Marie, he’d offer some kind of commitment, yet nothing has changed. When I see her high color and the feverish glaze in her eyes now, I worry he’s going to break her heart, but I can hardly caution her about what she’s doing if she won’t admit she’s doing it. She practically skips from the house, and as soon as she’s gone, Henri pulls me by the hand over to the tree we decorated simply with some fine glass ornaments that have been in the family for decades and popcorn and cranberries strung together.
“Perhaps
this is a good time to exchange gifts,” Henri says, with a smile that strikes me as slightly mischievous. We agreed to exchange handmade gifts, a rule I broke in small ways and, based on the pile of presents Henri has unearthed from a secret hiding place, he broke in vast ones. First, he gives me things he purchased the winter before, a fact which makes my heart ping with a tiny ache. There’s a beautiful dress I will have few places to wear until the war ends, and lingerie I’ll wear a great deal. There’s a mink stole and muff, a hat from Givenchy.
For him, I’ve purchased a warm winter coat, heavy boots, the most recent book Evelyn Waugh.
I kiss him once our gifts are opened. “This has been my best Christmas ever.”
“It’s not over yet,” he says, producing a small black velvet box.
My eyes meet his. Jewelry, under the circumstances, would not be wise. We have a long voyage to another country and a war to get through.
“Open it,” he urges.
Slowly, I pop the box open to find a diamond ring that makes my breath stop, and I know, before I’ve even asked, that it’s the very one Yvette wanted so badly—his mother’s. It is no trinket, as I suggested to Yvette when she brought it up, but a large emerald-cut diamond set among smaller ones.
“But—” I stare at it. A ring like this will attract notice anywhere, but in Saint Antoine it will be the talk of the town. “I thought we wanted everyone to think we’re poor.”
“In four months, it won’t matter as much,” he says. “And if anyone asks in the meantime, we’ll just tell them you were forced to buy your own ring with your obscene American wealth.” He grins at this. Most of the town is now asking why I haven’t used my money to help the Durands fix up the farm, never dreaming that in truth I’m the one who’s got nothing.
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