Mother sank to the rough-hewn floor and covered her face with her hands. I knelt beside her and begged her to look up. “I’ll come to you when the time is right,” I whispered when she finally met my gaze. “I’ll come when God tells me it’s time to leave Gatigny.”
Later that night, my father tucked his Bible pages into the burlap sack of clothing and food he carried on his shoulder, then he leaned down to kiss my cheek, wincing a bit at the pain the movement caused. “We’ll wait for you,” he said. “May God protect and strengthen you.”
Serge and I helped him through the window first, then we assisted my mother out. She seemed to have aged ten years in the hours that preceded their departure.
“Are you sure you’re strong enough to make it to the caves?” Serge asked again.
“I am not,” Father replied, honesty and bravery in his face. “But I’ll be with Constance. If anyone can see us safely into the hills, it is she, the strongest, most resilient woman I’ve known.” He smiled into her concerned eyes. “God knows what lies ahead. Of this I’m sure. He has gone before us, and if we’re caught . . . he’ll be there.” He glanced at me and gave me courage with his gaze. “He will be there.”
My parents draped dark blankets over their heads, and I had to keep from calling out when they turned to walk away, my father’s hand resting heavy on my mother’s shoulder.
The tears that had been threatening since I’d made the decision to stay finally fell. Serge let me return to the attic without a word, honoring the grief I’d chosen. We’d each followed a calling we sensed had come from God, my parents to their flock and me to my students.
I’ve spent the last few days fulfilling my promise to my sister—chronicling the events that brought our family to this point. I write for Julie and for Charles, for a community oppressed, for loved ones hung, for slaughtered innocents. I write for our descendants, for those who will not understand the cost of our survival.
Though we’ve been bowed, the Huguenot people have not been broken. Our faith breathes on in the bravery of belief and in the insurgency of prayer. Sobered by the danger threatening our future, trusting in the sureness of God’s unfailing promises, we will live out the vows embodied by my father: enduring with courage, resisting with wisdom, persisting in faith.
FOURTEEN
I’D MOVED OUT TO THE COURTYARD WITH A DINING room chair and some sandpaper on a particularly sunny afternoon. The wind was cold, but it barely reached me in the corner between the cottage and the barn. The sun on my face felt reviving, but a bank of dark clouds rolling in made me wonder how long it would last.
A farmer had delivered a tractor-load of firewood earlier that day. Grant was set up not far from me, splitting huge logs into smaller pieces with an ax, then piling them neatly against the barn’s wall. We hadn’t spoken much, and I was grateful for that.
“Hey, hey, hey!” Connor stood on the edge of the porch and cupped his hands around his mouth as if he were calling across a canyon. “You gotta come see my fort!”
“Be there in a minute!” Grant answered, the ax around behind his back, then bringing it down hard on the round of wood in front of him.
“Not you—Jessica!”
Something warm curled in my stomach as I sat on the ground, sandpapering the rungs of Mona’s chair.
Grant leaned on the ax and glanced at me. “She’s kind of busy, tiger.”
“But she’s right there!”
“He’s got a point,” I said, dragging my cramped body into a standing position and imitating Connor’s accent. “I’m wight here.”
Grant rested the ax against the pile of split wood and propped his fists on his hips. “Why does she get to see it and I don’t?”
“Because she’s Jessica, silly.” It was a perfectly logical reason to him.
Grant pulled off his work gloves and walked in my direction. “It’s okay to say no, you know.”
“I know.”
He smiled. “Let’s go check out his fort.”
We set off toward the manor house, and Connor yelled, “Yes, yes, yes!” pumping his fist in the air.
“Have you noticed how he says things in threes?” Grant asked from right behind me.
“I have, I have, I have.”
Connor’s fort was little more than an afghan draped over the couch and two chairs, anchored in place by stacks of old books. “It’s a fort and a pirate ship,” he declared, crawling inside. He sat cross-legged and looked at me with expectation. “You coming in?”
Grant stood in the kitchen doorway drying his hands on a towel. “It might be a little tight in there for two.”
Connor ignored his uncle and kept his frowning gaze on me. “You coming in?”
That’s when a clap of thunder shook the air so violently that the windows rattled. Connor yelped and scooted far back into his fort as my body lurched with an instinctive fear, then froze. I tried to tell myself that it was only thunder, but I stood anchored to the spot, immobilized by a sound that had felt too much like terror.
I heard Mona say, “Better clear the courtyard,” as she exited the kitchen and headed for the front door.
“Stay with him?” Grant said to me as he fell into step behind his sister.
I shook my head to clear the static the sudden thunder had set off in my mind, then looked around to anchor my reality to the living room of Mona’s home. I could hear her and Grant dragging things to safety in the courtyard, pouring rain muting their voices.
“Help me with the tarp?” Grant’s steady voice.
“Be right there.”
I took a deep breath as lightning flashed and thunder rolled again, tamping down the fear that threatened.
“You wanna come inside?” Connor asked me, peering around the edge of the afghan. His tone was more urgent this time. “I’ll scooch way back so you have more room.”
The look in his eyes and the tremor in his chin brought the moment back into focus. I crawled into his makeshift fort, where the blanket hung so low that I couldn’t sit up straight. Connor scooted back, his frightened gaze on me, his arms wrapped tight around his legs. He inched over when I adjusted my position to rest my back against the couch. When the thunder rolled again, he scrambled so close that his freckled face pressed against my arm. “I don’t really like storms,” he said in his broken little voice.
“I don’t either,” I whispered as some of the tension eased out of my limbs. There was something about his need that made me feel stronger.
“My teacher said it’s because someone stepped on a ladybug.”
“The storm?”
“No, the rain. Someone stepped on the bête à bon Dieu and now he’s crying.”
Another clap of thunder shook the ground. Connor started, then hunkered down against me. I tried to occupy my mind by translating the phrase the shaking boy had said. “God’s bug” was as close as I came.
“So ladybugs are God’s favorites?” I said, hoping to distract him.
“And it rains when somebody hurts them.”
“That’s what your teacher said?”
Connor nodded against my arm. “And then the ladybug turns shiny and . . . and whooshes up.” He made the sound of wind blowing and raised his arms. “Like this. And then she disappears.”
“Your teacher said that too?”
“No. Me. She doesn’t know about the shiny thing.”
“What kind of shiny are you talking about, Connor?”
He held out his hands, palms up, as if he were explaining something obvious. “You know—shiny. Like your friend.”
“Like my friend?”
“Your yellow-hair friend. Shiny like that.”
I felt my breath catch. “What yellow-haired friend?”
His cheek brushed against my arm as he raised his face to look at me. “Your friend that came in the car. He’s a ladybug, right?” he said. “A shiny ladybug ninja with bright-yellow hair.”
“Connor . . . there was nobody in the car with me.”
&
nbsp; He looked at me again. “When you got here?”
“Right. I drove here all by myself.”
He frowned, then a look of suspicion crossed his face. “Are you being silly?” he asked.
“No, I’m . . . I’m telling you the truth.”
“You’re being silly,” Connor said with a gap-toothed giggle, for a moment forgetting the threat of the storm.
My mind flashed back to the night he’d turned up on the cottage doorstep in his Cozy Coupe and asked if my friend liked stew too. It hadn’t surprised me then—I was still living with the illusion of Patrick’s survival. But this little boy with the earnest eyes had leaned around the doorframe to see if Patrick was there. Elation and grief stunned me in that moment. I didn’t know what to say.
Another clap of thunder shook the house, and Connor pressed closer. “I really don’t like storms,” he said, lisping the last word.
“Connor, are you sure you saw my friend?”
He nodded. “He was a shiny ladybug ninja.”
I blinked back tears and wrapped an arm around his tense little shoulders. “He wasn’t a ladybug.”
“Then what was he?” He seemed disappointed and confused.
“He was just my friend.”
Connor didn’t speak of the “ninja” again. Every time I tried to broach the topic, he looked at me like I was crazy. “Ladybugs aren’t people,” he said one day when I asked if he’d seen my ladybug friend again. It was as if our conversation in his fort, as the storm raged outside, had never taken place.
But I carried the image with me—the ladybug ninja with the shiny golden hair and the tears heaven shed for the bête à bon Dieu.
FIFTEEN
I must write quickly. It is the twenty-fourth day of June. The dragoons are in the shop beneath me, incensed and drunk. They’ve threatened Serge, and I can hear in his voice that he may be badly hurt.
Moments ago, I lifted the children, Marguerite, François, and Annette, through a small hole we made in the forge’s roof. If they can get across to the Diderots’ house and down to their donkey’s stall from there, they’ll be able to hide until they can steal home unnoticed.
I’ve chosen not to follow them. With Serge suffering for my safety, I cannot bring myself to walk away. He has a wife and children. They will not lose their father because of me today. Once I’ve written these words, I’ll escape through the roof as the children did and climb down to the street, then surrender to the soldiers in the forge as if I haven’t been hiding here. I pray they’ll spare my rescuer because they’ve caught their prey.
I know this is the end. I sense it in my spirit, yet the peace I feel despite my fear can only be from God. His strength in me is greater than the vise grip of my terror, and it is sturdier than despair. My balm, in this moment, is the promise I perceived on the night our family parted. Though these may be my final breaths, I know in my heart that my Julie will be safe. She will live on to embody the kind of faith man’s cruelest ploys will not be able to destroy.
Though I cannot fathom what lies beyond this realm, I believe in the celestial place where grief and pain no longer reign. I am resolved to reach its shores with unsurrendered hope, having endured with courage, resisted with wisdom, and persisted in faith until I could no more.
Grant turned over the last page of Adeline’s notebook and I held my breath, hoping there would be more, but certain her story ended with those words.
“That’s it,” he said.
We sat there for a while in silence. “She died, right?” I finally asked.
“It sure looks that way. Death or—or something worse. She humiliated the dragoons by eluding them for so long, so . . .”
The silence stretched again. I didn’t know what Grant was thinking, but my mind reeled with scenarios that all ended in horror. “The children . . .”
“She said they got out,” Grant said, his expression grim. “Across the roofs.”
“But Serge . . . ?”
He leaned back in his chair and rolled his shoulders to release some tension. We’d put off work to finish the translation that afternoon, and the uninterrupted hours of concentration had taken their toll. “In my mind, he went down fighting.”
“They wouldn’t have let him go.”
“No.”
“So . . . they both died?”
“That’s what I’m thinking.”
I’d felt a darkening in my spirit as we translated the last increment of Adeline’s account. There was something about her unembellished storytelling that had compelled me from the start, and as her life turned into tragedy, her straightforward narration had forced my mind to fill in the details she’d left unspoken.
As I sat in the conservatory, wearied by the effort of translation and the story it had revealed, I felt vestiges of Paris stirring again. It was just a low hum at first. But as my mind reached for something else to focus on, it found only her agony.
The air around me felt saturated with Adeline’s brutal end. Claustrophobia gnawed at the edges of my consciousness. I stood up, anxious to escape into the cool air of the courtyard.
“You okay?” Grant asked, as Patrick had so many times. I felt the fabric of my resilience begin to tear.
“I’m fine,” I said, my voice unsteady. “I just need to—”
A tractor backfired in the lane outside the windows. It was a sound I’d heard nearly every day I’d lived in Balazuc, but this time it exploded against the backdrop of my memories, in a visceral remembrance of Adeline’s end and Patrick’s absence.
And it undid me.
I stumbled, sending my chair crashing to the ground behind me. I felt my control slip as terror surged into the loaded air.
“No, no, no . . . ,” I heard myself mumble. I closed my eyes and willed the images away.
“Jess?” Grant’s voice reached me from a distance.
Sights and sounds swirled as I was sucked into a vortex filled with the shattered remnants of my life before the Bataclan. I saw the concert hall, the crowds jerking to the strident music shrieking off the stage. The lights flashing and the bassist grimacing as he played.
Grant’s hand on my arm forced a measure of reality into my reeling thoughts. I tried to speak, but couldn’t. He hurried to the door and called for Mona. She was beside me quickly, her concerned face hovering in my fast-decreasing range of vision.
“Jessica, honey, what’s going on?”
Patrick’s face superimposed itself over hers, just as sincere. Just as earnest. “Use your words, Jess,” I heard him say from beyond the grave.
I sensed Grant moving, carrying an armchair from the alcove to where I stood. Mona tugged at my arm. “Why don’t you sit down . . . okay, Jess? Sit right here and try to take a breath.”
My legs buckled as I lowered myself into the chair. As my mind clung to the tangibility of these strangers enveloping me with their words and concern, the sights and sounds of the recent past launched themselves against the flimsy barriers that had kept memory at bay.
“Use your words, Jess,” Patrick said again from somewhere above me, from somewhere inside me.
I shook my head. “I can’t.”
“Jessica, what can’t you?” Mona’s face swam into focus again.
“You can,” Patrick whispered.
“I can’t . . .” I felt a wail surfacing and tried to silence it. What escaped instead was a long, low moan.
“Should we call Docteur Fabian?” Grant asked.
“Give her another minute. I’ll get a cool washcloth.”
I was vaguely aware of her leaving the room and of Grant crouching in front of me. He looked unsure but determined. “Jessica,” he said. I felt him grip my forearms and shake them, demanding my attention, my focus. “Jessica, look at me.”
I dragged my eyes from the carnage in my mind to the kindness in his gaze. “What are you seeing?” he asked, his voice firm.
“No . . .”
“Jess.” He shook my arms again and leaned sideways to in
tercept my gaze. “Jess, what are you seeing?” When I shook my head, he said, “Whatever you’re trying to control—Jess, whatever’s in there, it’s got to come out. It’s eating you alive.”
I opened my mouth to refuse again, to curl into the cowardice of numbness—of blankness. Every iota of my will begged for the solace of oblivion. I felt the past receding, the memories fading from red to gray, from shrill to muffled.
Then Grant said, “Jessica—use your words.”
My eyes snapped to his face. “What did you say?”
Mona held a damp cloth to my cheeks, my neck. I brushed her hands away and leaned toward Grant, who was still crouching near my chair. “What did you say?” I heard the shock in my voice and saw confusion in his face.
“Use your words . . . ?” he said again.
In an instant, the chaos howling though my thoughts was sucked into abeyance. The lucidity that followed was blinding and excruciating. Its substance settled, cold and clear, and words that had until that moment felt deficient converged and subsided into meaning.
Mona dragged a chair from the table to my side. “Jessica?” she said, perhaps sensing that this moment should not be let go.
“I was in the Bataclan,” I whispered. “Vonda and I. And Patrick. We were in the Bataclan.” I swallowed against the sobs lodged in my throat and took a breath. Then another.
I looked at Mona and saw kindness I could count on. I looked at Grant and saw courage I could borrow. And in fits and starts, with a rawness that shredded caution, I returned to a crowded concert hall, to rowdy spectators in a darkened room, and saw the night unfold again.
SIXTEEN
I WAS SKIRTING THE CROWD OF CONCERTGOERS, iPhone in hand, trying to get a clear view of the band. I’d left Vonda holding our spot at the front of the balcony to venture into the crowd packed around the stage, hoping for a good angle and a few snapshots I could text to Patrick.
I jumped a little when the first firecracker exploded, surprised that any sound could pierce the throb of electric guitars, drums, and strained vocals. I smiled at the yelps that followed the first blasts somewhere by the main doors and raised my phone for a shot of the stage.
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