by Amanda Dykes
Henry’s pencil would surely catch fire at any moment, he was scratching notes so quickly into his notebook. He paused, looking up and up at the tower, shaking his head in wonder. “Eiffel Tower,” he said. “They’ve turned it into a radio tower for the war, too,” he said. “Weapons all over it, bunker beneath it, antennae sending invisible messages all over the front.”
As we walked on, I started to distinguish sounds and movements, and the cacophony of the city began to sort into a symphony. In my forest, I would hear a rush of wings overhead, a shuffle of pine needles underfoot, the chatter of squirrels, and Papa whistling in the distance. It was music to me. The city, too, was music. Or rather, it could be, if I learned to hear it. So many languages, people come from faraway countries to work in the war factories, Henry told me. The sound of pigeons as they ducked about in their funny bobbing way. Children giving chase around a postbox, a ball bouncing, the hooves of horses pulling carts, the engines of motor cars tripping into life.
We passed narrower streets, with homes stretching each length in grey stones marbled with light and dark with age, iron-laced balconies holding life, so much life, inside. I breathed out slowly, the number of people swimming about in my head. So many, so many, all in one place.
“Here it is,” Henry consulted his notes, written after asking an officer on the street. He looked up and down the narrow way to confirm. “Jour de Soleil Motherhouse,” he said. He shuffled his feet, unsure. “You . . . want us to come in?” He looked dubious, unsure whether a sisterhood of nuns would want them in their midst. Though from what Celia had told us, they made it their business to help the sick, the soldiers, and everyone in between. To bring care to those who needed it.
Henry looked over his shoulder. “I was going to stop in at the land registry office to see what we might find out about your family’s house. . . .”
I smiled. There was a twinge of hope in his voice for this academic mission, but that he was even willing to step so outside of his realm here at the motherhouse made me smile despite the tremors inside of me.
It was a humbling thing. I had come from a place where all the world, it seemed, was mine to roam. To live off the forest, cut wood, light fires, cook meals, plant and harvest food. A good life with Papa and Grand-père, we three believing it was up to us to care for others.
And now, here I stood upon ground of cement, where I could harvest not a thing. No forest for wood, no food to cook. I was the one in need of help.
I swallowed. Matthew met my eyes and took my hand. “All will be well,” he whispered. And then, to George and Henry, he spoke of a plan to meet, after we finished here and they at the land office.
I wished to believe all would be well. I prayed to believe it. The kind woman inside, in her dark habit and gentle smile, welcomed me with such warmth. She surely must have had ten thousand questions of this pair who showed every mile of their journey by the dust of their clothing. Who spoke words such as husband and wife with so much tentative wonder they sounded spun of glass. But she only wrote down the address Henry had found for the château, lighting up and declaring we were nearly neighbors with one of their lodging houses.
We left with the promise of a Sister Marion who would come the next day to assess my health and help me prepare for the bébé précieux, and who would check in very often with supplies while Matthew was away.
She spoke it as if she knew he would only be gone a short time. As if this were only the beginning of our story.
And I left with hope in my heart.
Hope that carried me into the young evening as we met back with the other men and journeyed on, the streets growing less crowded in this new area. More trees, less people. More birds, less talking. Henry, offering in his quietly assured way what he had learned from the cadastre at the land registry: the chateau belonged, officially, and in wording he had learned was sometimes customary, to “heirs of Franz-Christophe Fontinelle.” A great-great-grandfather I had never known. Whether that was me or this great-aunt Sophia, or perhaps someone else entirely, I did not know. It seemed that nobody knew. But it was our family home, come what may . . . and for this, I was thankful.
And then we stopped. Henry flipped backward in his notebook, looking to a pen-and-ink sketch he had copied by hand from a library book in Épermay, and up to the sight before us. The sketch showed a grand villa, bedecked in brick and pillar, with precisely trimmed shrubbery, women with parasols, men in top hats strolling down the path leading to it.
The sight before us . . . was not so. It was a rusted gate, grown over with ivy and flanked by trees.
“Right!” George said. “Looks like she’s been waiting for us. Shall we?”
I swallowed as he creaked the large iron gate open.
Matthew made to step through, his being on high alert. He did, and after making a circle around the outside he reported back that all seemed quiet—all was empty.
The emptiness he spoke of unfurled tendrils reaching out, wrapping around me like the ivy that clutched its walls. Drawing me in. All three men waited for me to take the first step.
And I did. Into a world far apart from the city we had just traversed. A place full of hush and memory, sleepy and weary. As if it had been waiting, just as George said, to be awakened.
I approached with care, making my feet fall silent, just as I had done in the forest. Just as I had when I had approached the injured soldier to help him. Just as I had before everything had changed.
I stopped. Felt my breath come quick and short. This is not the same.
“Everything alright, love?”
I startled. The accent. Pulse skittering.
Turning, I saw George’s kind face, the way he smiled like a buffoon. This is not the same.
The sickness came over me as I remembered. Please, God. Deliver me. From the memory. From summoning it in sleepy houses and well-meaning friends.
The child kicked within, reminding me. Life. Life had come from that darkness.
I took another step, and another. Willing my lungs to open. To take in breath. For my child. For me.
Matthew was beside me, wordlessly stepping with me. Not saying a single word and understanding too much. I felt that, in him.
Soon, the château stood before us in full view, unmasked of the growth at the gate.
I could see it: the way such a place must have glowed at night, with strains of music slipping from its windows. I could picture Grand-père as a young man, dressed as the proper people of Paris many years before, brass-buttoned and top-hatted. Perhaps chasing after my own father, so young then, he would have toddled through hedged paths and jabbered nonsense.
What would they have thought? If they could have stilled time, skipped decades, and found me here? Bedraggled of the journey and holding them in my heart, staring here into a happy place.
A place they had left. To find a future, a simple life, a safe place for generations yet to come.
I cradled my middle. Desires I knew so well.
The front door hung off its hinges. Henry looked at me for approval, then pushed it open. It scraped against something—rubble, perhaps, from years of neglect.
“It’s a wonder,” he said.
I stepped inside, and in that, felt the marking of something momentous. The beginning of something, righ here in the echoes of a past I’d not known of.
Henry was right. This place . . . the frozen glass of the windows, the pale yellow upon the walls that seemed to offer fragrance of aged sunshine. “A wonder,” I echoed.
“A place like this . . .” he continued. “The way most structures like this are going, it should be full of soldiers.”
“Soldiers?” I looked around at my three sojourners. “I suppose we have remedied that, then, haven’t we?”
He laughed. “Most structures like this have been commandeered for quartering or taken over for hospitals. They’ve even done so with an old abbey outside the city.”
“Ah,” I said. “You mean very full of soldiers.”
“Quite!” George chimed in. He plinked a few keys of an old piano in the corner, releasing a woefully hollow off-key sound in addition to a cloud of dust. He picked out a tune and beckoned Henry over, who set to examining the instrument. I could nearly see the gears in his mind turning, finding how to tune it, thinking up a way to write of it as some bit of metaphor to his adoring readers, even as George tromped on with a jolly song. They would be occupied for hours if left to their own devices. Which they should be. They deserved it, after everything. The gift of a broken piano—something they might fix—to hearts weary of a war they could not fix.
There was only Matthew, now, who had not spoken.
“And . . . what are your thoughts, Matthew? What is running through that stormy mind of yours?”
The grave look vanished a moment, his mouth pulling into a smile. “It’s . . .” He shook his head. “Amazing.”
Tucked into his pause was something more, but this man who hid so many of his thoughts would not speak it, I knew. Unless invited to.
“But?”
“You see too much, Mira.” He laughed, and the slow roll of it tumbled through me. I tried not to think that soon that laugh would have to leave. Along with that smile, and the grave look, and the unspoken thoughts that ran so deep. I tried not to think that all of those things, held in this man, would be headed into battle.
“Well?” I said, trying to keep my tone light.
“It is amazing. But . . .” He looked up into the vaulted space above us, where light shone through and fell upon a chandelier that held no candles. And he looked to me, then, as if all of the light from those once-upon-a-time candles had landed inside of me instead. Lifting his hand, he fingered a piece of my hair with tenderness. “Not amazing enough.”
I looked around. Plaster fell from walls in patches, cobwebs draped corners as much as my own bedraggled hair draped me, after drying in clumps from the river. But though the place was worn and forgotten, it was unmistakably grand.
“I think you are puzzled,” I said.
He tilted his head. I had the wrong word.
“Confused,” I tried again. “Yes, I think you are confused. I am barely fit to be a maid scrubbing the floors in such a place.” I laughed, the sound bubbling up and lifting my spirits as I pinched my torn skirt and held it out as proof. “This . . . is a palace.” Falling apart and showing the wear of years empty and abandoned, perhaps. But a palace, still.
“Mira.” He bent close, his voice low. “You have always lived in a palace. One with leaves for a roof and branches for walls. Fresh air as a cloak and sunshine for your crown. Nothing could ever hold a candle to that.”
His words made me ache for my little forest house. My home. I had not been able to give words to it, but he had. I had le mal du pays—I was homesick.
Matthew, my wordless Matthew, looked amused. “Come,” he said. “Let’s see your palace.”
He offered his hand and I took it, the two of us stepping onto the wide stair that narrowed and then split into two branches halfway up. He stopped there, at the landing. “It branches, here.”
“So it does.”
“When you’re missing your own branches, maybe you can come here. See?” He pointed to where one of the windows was broken, a straggling branch reaching in from the outside. “It knew you were coming.”
We turned, he to the left and I to the right, climbing the separate wings of the stairs. Slowly, eyes locked, taking each step together and yet apart. I could nearly feel his heartbeat across the expanse between us. It pained me . . . and filled me. This would be our lives soon. Apart, yet together.
My hand easily found its way back into his as we ventured down the hallway. This place, so broken, filled through its cracks and missing panes of glass with the sounds of slow evening breeze and birdsong. The hallway was strewn, its chinked marble floor a scattered carpet of leaves, twigs, and dust. A forest floor, laid down like a carpet for a queen.
“Not so very different from home, after all,” I said. At the end of the hall, one door stood open. Or rather—the door had long ago gone missing, somehow, and we discovered the source of the leaves that had summoned us hence.
Before us was a round room with shelves upon shelves upon empty, empty shelves. Many a broken window, one of them in colorful shards of stained glass.
“A library,” Matthew said.
“Once upon a time, yes?” I said. The books, but for a scattered few, were long gone. I approached a shelf and ran my hand along it, stopping when I came to a single volume, ruffled by time and raindrops blown in from passing storms outside. Yet even in its aged, bourgeoning state, it was familiar.
As if it had been waiting for me, always. Faded blue spine with once-gold letters.
I picked it up, holding it. Finding a lost part of myself that I had never even known, returned in full to me. The book grew heavy in my hands, and that heaviness wrapped me in safety.
“This is it,” I said. “Grand-père’s book.” I shook my head slowly, running my palm over a page petrified in rumpled form, knowing just how it felt. “Incroyable,” I whispered.
Matthew leaned in to see.
“It is . . . it is incredible. Out of all of the things that have been taken from this house since he left it so long ago, with only his courage and his son. That this would somehow be waiting for me.”
“You . . .” Matthew said, sliding his hand beneath mine, to help support the book. “With all of your courage. And with your little one.”
I do not know what it was. I do not know if it was that picture in my mind— Grand-père leaving, driven by war, son in his arms, for a chance at life. Or the way it made me see a picture of myself, as if I had watched from above as I approached this château, driven by war, baby in my womb, for a chance at life. I do not know if it was because he was gone—buried in quiet peace beneath the wreath Matthew had created. Or if it was because of those same wreath-laying hands now holding mine. Or if it was because of Papa—Papa always, always in my heart and in my mind, never willing to pry my fingers loose of their hold on him. Never willing to let him be a memory and not a hope.
Perhaps it was one of those things—or perhaps it was all of them. But there in this room, with a book in my arms that had waited for me since a lifetime before I was born . . . I finally fell. Right to my knees, right in the forest floor that was there upon the marble, and right into the arms of the soldier who had seen me. Listened to me. Learned me. Dared to know me, right down to the shadows of life. And I wept.
I do not know how long we sat that way, me wrapped in him and him with arms that felt as if they had been searching for me—little me, in this big room, in this wide world—all his life. But it was dark when the current of tears slowed to a trickle and the trickle slowed into uneven breaths raked over my ribs and grief and hope.
The moon was high, the house silent. Matthew stroked damp strands of hair from my face, behind my ears. His hands all the gentler for the calluses they bore, and the care they took with me because of it. It made me think of another pair of scarred hands that had given all to hold me.
And so it was that in a decrepit mansion where all fell apart on the obscure outskirts of Paris, I fell into the sleep one only finds in the safest, dearest of homes.
I fell into sleep in the arms of my husband.
38
Matthew
I meant not to sleep that night. I meant to drink her in, imprint every bit of her in my mind. Most soldiers carried a picture of their wife or sweetheart with him to remind him why. To bring him comfort, offer hope. I would have no picture. There wasn’t time, I knew, and even if there was, I wouldn’t want to invite some stranger into it. I would blockade the world away and soak in Mireilles for as long as I could, if she would let me.
And so I determined not to sleep, knowing that would be easy. A man falls out of the habit when he’s gone so long without. But tonight . . . tonight it would be different. It would not be keeping eyelids open until they
hurt to avoid nightmares that hurt far worse. It would not be evading screams and scenes emblazoned on the mind, memories that pulsated only in darkness, when my consciousness could not keep them away.
Tonight it would be to savor. To etch her onto my being the same way I etched landscapes onto a spent shell, hoping to redeem some shred of beauty into vessels of destruction. I knew too well that I was a vessel of destruction. And in the searing pain of catching her tears, I wondered if God was etching some semblance of goodness onto such a soiled canvas as me. And the source of that goodness . . . was Mira.
And so I watched her. All through the night, holding her. My wife. Aching for her, for her courage, for the little life who dwelled so safely inside of her, kept from this war and its atrocities by her willingness to bear them instead, for both of them.
I watched, and etched, and blinked, and fought those blinks until I could fight no more, for the goodness of it all. Until finally those etchings grew deep, into trenches I would refuse to dream of . . . and I slipped into sleep.
There is a darkness that is so complete, it is pure rest. Absolute nothing, as if all the sleep one has been missing for all the weeks before has been gathering, mounding weight to cover you with when you finally find it, there in the land of oblivion. It covered me that night. And in it I knew, for the first time since coming to the shores of France—and probably a lot longer—peace.
But it was not to last. Somewhere in that velvet black cloak of deepest rest, in that place where dreams vault up and mimic reality to perfection, up shot a star shell. The sort of shell meant to illuminate no-man’s-land and expose whatever transpired there, so that artillery fire could soon follow. That life could soon be pierced.