The screaming of the planes gave Papa terrible flashbacks. His whole body trembled and he struggled to breathe, so we stopped to comfort him for quite some time. My poor, sweet Papa. Before, I had only seen him like that around fireworks.
Eventually we continued our march, but he was still shaken up. Then, as we got closer to where the airplanes had attacked, I had to run off the road to be sick. There were bodies with their insides spilling out. Grown-ups screaming like animals. I will not go into more detail because I might be sick again. I despise this war, and I despise the Germans.
I need to pause for a second to remember how to breathe. I’d never heard of this mass exodus out of Paris, but it’s the most sickening thing I’ve ever read. So is that how the apartment became abandoned—when the family fled the city for Uncle Gérard’s? No . . . that doesn’t seem right, because Adalyn’s diary ended up back in her bedroom somehow. The family—or Adalyn, at least—must have come back to Paris.
I turn to the following page of the diary. Adalyn’s next two entries are shorter than the first, and this time, her handwriting is messier. There’s a sense of urgency in the lines of text darting across the page. I need to know what happened next. I press my glasses into the bridge of my nose and start typing.
June 14th, 1940
Today Paris fell to the Germans. The men who killed all those innocent refugees are marching unopposed down the Champs-Élysées. I don’t know what is to happen. Papa is hardly speaking these days. I suspect his memories of the Great War are haunting him terribly. He lost three of his fingers at Passchendaele, but that was the least of it. He also lost his younger brother, Mathieu. Gérard says things will get worse for France. Maman is hopeful things will get better. Chloe is very afraid. She fears that our home will not be there when we return. I am afraid, too, but I am trying not to show it. I love our apartment. I love our beautiful city. I must go—Chloe is stirring in her sleep and says she wants me to lie down with her.
June 17th, 1940
It is over. France is surrendering to Nazi Germany. Marshal Pétain spoke on the radio tonight. (He is running the government now.) He said it is his duty to alleviate France’s suffering. He said it is time to stop fighting.
Maman is relieved. She trusts in the Old Marshal. Now no more men have to die for this war, she says. I am trying to see where she is coming from, but I cannot. It feels like the world is disintegrating. How could Pétain make peace with the Germans? Why are we not defending ourselves against this force of evil?
After the broadcast, Chloe and I helped each other climb back up to our room. We lay together and wept for a long time before we finally fell asleep.
Now I feel guilty for all the times I complained to Gram about having too much homework—look at what she was going through at my age! All I want to do is reach through the pages of Adalyn’s diary and comfort my grandmother. I want to tell her it ended up okay in the end. She found Gramps, and they had Mom, and she had me. But then I come back to the same questions as before: What happened to Gram’s family? What happened to Adalyn? Clearly, she and Gram were as close as two sisters can be. What changed? What could have possibly happened to make Gram go the rest of her life without ever mentioning Adalyn to her own immediate family?
And most importantly, did Gram want me to find the answers?
A warning appears on my laptop screen saying I only have 10 percent battery life remaining. I glance at the time, and I’m stunned to find I’ve been here for nearly two and a half hours. I’ll squeeze in one more entry, and then I’ll go back to the rue de Marquis to keep exploring. I type the first sentence into Google Translate, expecting another gut-wrenching piece of news.
But it’s the opposite.
June 18th, 1940
I take back what I wrote yesterday: It is not over. There is still hope. I can hardly keep my hand from shaking!
A French general named Charles de Gaulle made a speech on the BBC tonight. He vowed that the enemy would someday be defeated, and he called on men to come join him in London. At the end, he said the most unforgettable thing: “Whatever happens, the flame of the French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.”
Tonight, Chloe and I shall hardly be able to sleep from excitement.
Do you hear that? The fight is not over!
I could jump up and cheer right now, except I’d obviously never do something like that in public. But still, I feel like I’m there with Adalyn, sharing in her excitement. I brush my fingertips against the brittle page, yellowing at the edges, and I imagine a current of electricity flowing from Adalyn through the paper to me.
I’ve heard of the French resistance. Mr. Yip covered it briefly in our World War II unit in European History. I remember they blew things up, like German trains and certain buildings where the Nazis had taken over. I recognize Charles de Gaulle’s name, too, but only because the Paris airport is named after him. It’s pretty bold that he went on the radio the day after Pétain and told the people of France to do the very opposite of what their government was mandating. How would I have reacted if I were there at Uncle Gérard’s farmhouse with Gram and Adalyn, huddled around the radio during those days of uncertainty? Would I have put my faith in Pétain, like their mother, or would I have rallied around de Gaulle, like Gram and Adalyn? If I had been there on the road out of Paris—if I had seen the terrible things they saw—I know where I’d stand.
I’d want to keep fighting.
Back inside apartment five, I finish my grand tour with the master bedroom at the end of the hall. It’s a very elegant room, bigger than Mom and Dad’s back home. There’s a wide four-poster bed and a set of dressers and an old-fashioned vanity with a round mirror. On every surface, I find more framed photos of the family, and I take them in one by one. I stare into Gram’s black-and-white face, missing her more with each passing second. But now that I’ve read Adalyn’s diary, I feel a small connection to the dark-haired girl, too. We’re similar, in a way. For starters, we both loved Gram. And we both tried the best we could to hold our families together.
When I’m done taking in the photos on the vanity, I open the topmost drawer. Unexpectedly, I find myself looking at a stack of magazine clippings. They must have been cut from the society pages, because they all have photos from fancy parties, and underneath, they list the names of the guests and the designers they’re wearing. I pick out Adalyn’s smiling face in every single one of them, surrounded by other young people in expensive-looking clothing and jewelry.
Well, I guess my great-aunt and I had our differences, too. I’m not saying that Hannah, Camila, and I are at the bottom of the social hierarchy, but we also aren’t anywhere near popular enough to get invited to the parties at Katrina Kim’s mansion in Short Hills. We spend our weekends trying to replicate recipes from The Great British Bake Off.
I sit down at the vanity to sift through the clippings. They all seem to be dated in the late thirties and early forties, which means some of these must have been printed after the Germans occupied France. That’s a little odd. Adalyn’s diary made it sound like France’s surrender was the absolute end of the world, but judging by this photo of her and her friends at a party in October of 1942, she wasn’t entirely miserable during the War.
The photos are all pretty similar, and I start to flip through them more quickly. But then, toward the bottom of the stack, I come upon a photo that almost makes me fall out of my chair.
This can’t be real.
I don’t understand.
I don’t want to.
This photo was clipped from a newspaper. In it, Adalyn is sitting at a table in what looks to be an upscale restaurant. There’s a white tablecloth and fancy-looking silverware. Accompanying her are six men in military attire . . .
. . . and they’re all wearing Nazi armbands.
What’s more, my great-aunt looks like she’s enjoying their company.
I feel like I’m going to be sick.
Leaping to my feet, I d
rop the clippings as if they’re on fire and slam the drawer closed. My brain is in overdrive trying to process what I just saw. What . . . ? How . . . ?
This must be the explanation. This is why Gram went her whole life without telling anyone about Adalyn. She was ashamed of what she became. How long had it been since they’d seen each other, or even talked? Did they go to their graves without—
Wait a second. I’m assuming Adalyn is dead, but that isn’t necessarily the case.
Gram turned ninety this year. We had a party in her condo building’s multipurpose room. Judging by the family photos, Adalyn was a few years older, so that would make her, what, ninety-two? Ninety-three? It’s a major long shot, but it isn’t completely unrealistic. Hannah’s great-grandmother is 103 years old and still with it, for the most part. For all I know, Adalyn could be living right here in Paris . . . and she could be the only person left in the world who could tell me what happened to her family. My family.
Still, something doesn’t feel right about this. I pace the floor with my arms crossed, thinking. Even if Adalyn is alive, do I really want to spend my summer searching Paris for a Nazi supporter? A voice in my head says maybe I should leave this alone—that maybe Adalyn was out of the picture for a reason. Gram loved her family; she adored Gramps, Mom, Dad, and me. If she was willing to cut ties with her own sister, then it’s probably safe to assume that Adalyn was downright terrible.
Okay. . . . But why leave me the apartment, then? If Gram really wanted Adalyn out of the picture, why would she give me the keys—literally—to finding out who she was? And also, what about Adalyn’s diary? How could the girl in that photo be the same person who witnessed the German bombers attacking innocent refugees? How could it be the same person who wrote in her diary that her world was disintegrating? The two things just don’t add up. I stop pacing in front of a photo of Gram and Adalyn when they were little, no more than ten years old, their arms wrapped tightly around each other’s waists. She could still be alive . . . and maybe even close by. . . . If I found her, I could get all my answers about Gram. . . .
My head feels like it’s going to explode. I massage my chest to work out the tension that’s accumulated there in the last few minutes, but I can’t relieve the stress.
I was just seriously thinking about trying to find the person in the Nazi photo.
Even though I’m desperate to learn about Gram, and about this ancient apartment that somehow belongs to me now, I’m not ready to go there. At least, not yet. I should get what I can out of Adalyn’s diary before I consider more drastic measures.
Life is so weird. Just when you think you understand something, you realize it’s way more complicated than you ever could have imagined.
Chapter 3
Adalyn
“Girls, are you finished getting dressed? I suspect you’ll want jackets; it’s cool outside.”
Maman’s gentle voice has a sharp edge to it. She has been waiting for us in the foyer, coat on, for five minutes now, and I know she wants to hurry up and get to Madame LaRoche’s dinner, now that we have to be home before curfew. I would be ready to go, except that I’m standing in the doorway of Chloe’s bedroom, watching as my fourteen-year-old sister takes as long as she possibly can to locate her stockings.
“Could they be under the bed?” I ask.
“No,” she replies.
“Maybe you accidentally put them in the wrong drawer.”
“I doubt it.”
“Are they really lost, or is that you don’t want to see Maman?”
Silence.
I had a feeling. I know Chloe better than anyone else in the world, and in any case, my sister is about as subtle as a firecracker. She’s never been able to disguise her emotions, and she often blurts out exactly what she’s thinking at any given moment. We’re complete opposites, she and I: People complain that they always know what’s on Chloe’s mind; they complain that they never know what’s on mine. I guess I like to calculate the risk before I end up doing or saying something I’ll regret.
I motion for my sister to join me on the edge of the bed, and she does, wrapping her knees up against her chest. Her blond hair falls into her face, and she blows it away with a huff.
“This is about the soldier,” I say delicately. One wrong move, and she could explode.
“She shouldn’t have gotten so mad at me,” Chloe grumbles.
Since we returned home from Uncle Gérard’s, she and Maman have been clashing even more than usual. Maman, who went to finishing school—who always knows just the right thing to say in any social situation—has always been the person most offended by Chloe’s unfiltered behavior. The war has only magnified their differences. Maman seems to be trying to make the best of our new reality, while Chloe seizes every opportunity to show how fiercely she rejects it.
As usual, I’m caught in the middle.
A couple of weeks ago, Chloe barged into my bedroom with a fire blazing behind her eyes. She was brandishing a crumpled piece of paper she had found on a café chair, and she wasted no time in getting to her knees and smoothing it out on the hardwood floor for me to see. The title at the top said “33 Hints to the Occupied,” and what followed was a long list of ways in which ordinary people could make life more difficult for the Germans.
IF ONE OF THEM ADDRESSES YOU IN GERMAN, ACT CONFUSED AND CONTINUE ON YOUR WAY.
IF HE ADDRESSES YOU IN FRENCH, YOU ARE NOT OBLIGED TO SHOW HIM THE WAY. HE’S NOT YOUR TRAVELING COMPANION.
IF, IN THE CAFÉ OR RESTAURANT, HE TRIES TO START A CONVERSATION, MAKE HIM UNDERSTAND, POLITELY, THAT WHAT HE HAS TO SAY DOES NOT INTEREST YOU.
SHOW AN ELEGANT INDIFFERENCE, BUT DON’T LET YOUR ANGER DIMINISH. IT WILL EVENTUALLY COME IN HANDY.
“Isn’t it fantastic?” Chloe exclaimed. “There are people out there who want to resist, too!”
It felt wonderful to know we weren’t alone. Some of the girls at school kept remarking on how courteous the German soldiers were, not to mention handsome—how you could see their muscles bulging under their gray-green uniforms. Yes, we’d all been deprived of young men to look at for quite some time, but I was never going to trust our invaders, no matter how polite or attractive they were. Not after the horrors I saw on the road. I traced my fingers across the “33 Hints,” hardly believing the paper was real. Without thinking, I murmured, “This is ingenious.”
I should have known my reaction would embolden my sister. Yesterday, Chloe, Maman, and I were riding the metro back from the post office with another box of vegetables from Uncle Gérard when a blond-haired soldier stopped us and asked for directions in German. Before Maman and I even had time to react, Chloe stepped right up to him, planted her hands on her hips, and replied, in French, “We don’t understand a word you’re saying, and we don’t care to, either.”
The first part was a blatant lie, because Chloe and I have studied German in school since we were young. The second part, of course, was completely true. The soldier seemed to recognize that Chloe had insulted him in some way, and the polite smile disappeared from his face. He was beginning to look angry—and instead of backing down, Chloe took a step closer to the man, as though daring him to fight her. Would he do it? Would he arrest her for threatening him? I was a second away from lunging forward and grabbing her when a train finally pulled into the station. Maman, the blood drained from her face, pointed at it and shouted at the soldier in German, “There is your train, sir. We are very sorry!” Then she grabbed us each by the arm and yanked us in the opposite direction.
Maman sent Chloe to her room as soon as we got back to the apartment, and she didn’t come out for dinner. They probably would have gone on not speaking to one another for much longer, had Madame LaRoche not invited us to her dinner tonight.
I place my hand on Chloe’s knee.
“Maman was just trying to protect you. She didn’t know how the soldier would react.”
“She was trying to accommodate him!”
I sigh, because Chloe
isn’t entirely wrong. Maman could stand to be a little less friendly to every German officer we pass in the street. But at the same time, Chloe needs to stop letting her one-track mind get in the way of her better judgment. Sometimes I want to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. She would run into so much less trouble if she learned how to be subtle every now and then.
“Just try to be more careful, okay?”
Chloe groans. “You don’t understand, Adalyn.”
“I don’t understand what?”
“How desperate I am to fight back in some way. It’s like I can’t sit still. I have to do something.”
I resist the urge to defend myself against Chloe’s accusation. Of course I want to fight back. Of course I want to do something—in fact, I have done something. I just had the sense to go about it discreetly, unlike Chloe’s careless performance on the metro.
Uh-oh. I just heard the unmistakable sound of Maman’s high heels click-clacking down the hallway. Quickly, I take Chloe by the arm and whisper, “I’m on your side, Chloe. Always. Now let’s just try and get through this ridiculous dinner without any issues.”
Just then, Maman’s head appears around the doorframe. Her cheeks are flushed from waiting inside with her coat on for so long.
“Girls, I feel dreadful making our friends wait for us. Chloe, where in heaven’s name are your stockings?”
I squeeze Chloe’s arm. Begrudgingly, she goes over to the dresser and procures a pair of silk stockings from the same drawer she’s kept them in her whole entire life.
“Found them,” she announces.
As Chloe and I pull on our jackets, Papa shuffles out of his study to see us off. His whiskers are rough against my cheek when he kisses me goodbye. There was a time when Papa would join us on a night like tonight, but my father hasn’t left the apartment very much since we returned. He’s taking an indefinite leave of absence from the university, where he used to be chair of the history department. He also hasn’t laughed much, or even talked much; he’s a shell of his old self.
The Paper Girl of Paris Page 3
