When von Groth saw Adalyn and realized he’d been tricked, he was so furious, he shot her in the chest. He and his men arrested everyone else. Geronte died in a cell in Gestapo headquarters. Luc, Marcel, Pierre-Henri, and Raphael were tortured and eventually deported to a concentration camp in Germany called Buchenwald. By the time the Allies liberated it in April 1945, Luc was the only one of them still alive, and barely so.
When Luc chose to skip over the details of what happened in the camp, nobody pressed him.
“So the Gestapo never went for your families after the attack?” I ask him.
“No,” he says. “Thankfully, they became distracted.”
“By what?”
“D-Day. The Allies invaded France a week later.”
Of course. I read somewhere that when our troops landed at Normandy, the Germans weren’t as prepared as they could have been. They’d been led to believe that the Allies would invade somewhere else—a place in the north of France called Pas-de-Calais.
“Did you ever try to find Adalyn’s family when you got back to Paris?” I ask Luc.
“As a matter of fact, I did,” Luc says. He’s more talkative now that he’s gotten so much off his chest. “I remembered where they lived from the time that I walked her home. I went to the building, but a neighbor—a woman named Emmeline Blanchard—told me they didn’t live there anymore.”
Paul and I look at each other at the exact same time, and I know we’re both thinking the same thing.
The apartment.
“Did Emmeline say what happened?” Paul asks.
Luc rubs his chin. “Yes, she said that shortly after D-Day, the parents left Paris to hide at a relative’s in the south. This was when the tides had turned, and the French were hunting down any possible collaborators in their midst, including women who went to the sort of parties Adalyn and her mother attended. She had expected them to return to Paris eventually, but they were caught in an Allied bombing raid, and they didn’t survive.”
I feel sad for them, especially that they died without knowing the truth about their daughter.
“Did she say anything about Adalyn’s sister? Chloe?”
“Yes. I found out I missed her, too. That summer of 1944, she met an Allied soldier and they fell in love. She disappeared to be with him.”
So that’s how the home became abandoned. Adalyn was killed by von Groth. . . . Maman and Papa slipped out of Paris with plans to come back at some point, only they never made it. . . . And Gram basically disowned her family, met a soldier—Gramps—and moved to America to start a new life with him. It all makes sense now. Except . . .
“Didn’t Adalyn’s parents wonder why their oldest daughter just disappeared?” I ask.
Luc chuckles wistfully. “The neighbor said something about Adalyn joining some school friends on a summer vacation,” he recalls. “I knew it wasn’t true. I suspect it was a lie Adalyn told her parents in case something went wrong, and they believed her. She loved them. She wouldn’t have wanted them to worry.”
I take a second to absorb everything I’ve just learned. In my head, I run through everything I wanted to know about Adalyn and check off all the boxes, making sure nothing goes unanswered. It all adds up, but there’s still one thing I want to ask Luc.
“Luc,” I say as delicately as possible, “you said earlier that you felt like Adalyn’s death was your fault. Why do you think that?”
He lets out a long, slow sigh and hangs his head. “Because the attack was my idea in the first place,” Luc says miserably. “If I’d never brought it up, she would have lived.”
“You don’t know that,” Corinne points out. “It could have happened some other way. She was doing dangerous work, Luc. You all were. You can’t blame yourself for that.”
“I do,” he says, blowing his nose.
And then I have an idea. I unzip my backpack and dig past the photos and a sweatshirt, down to the very bottom, where I find the book. “I think you should read what she wrote the night before the attack,” I say as I pull out Adalyn’s diary.
The writing is too small for Luc to manage, so Paul reads it out loud to the group. I ask him to repeat the last line with extra emphasis: Whatever happens, I sleep tonight knowing the risk will be worth it.
“You see?” I say to Luc. “You’re not responsible for anything. Adalyn knew the risk involved, and she wanted to take it. She said that whatever happened, it would be worth it.”
Everyone chimes in with words of encouragement and pats Luc on the knee. I want him to accept the truth so badly. He’s been carrying around this guilt with him for so long, and it doesn’t have to be this way.
Luc asks, “May I hold it?”
He’s pointing at the diary.
“Of course,” I answer.
I hand it to him.
He holds it against his heart.
And finally, he smiles.
Chapter 20
Alice
“Mom! Dad!”
I burst through the door of the Airbnb with my hair flying in every direction, my backpack sliding off my shoulders, and at least one of my shoelaces untied.
After Paul and I exchanged information with our new friends and said our goodbyes, promising to speak again soon, I sprinted home so I could tell Mom and Dad everything I’d learned before they went to bed.
“Are you okay?” Dad asks from the couch, where he and Mom are watching some Netflix comedy special.
“Yes, yes, I’m fine. I’m great, actually.” I drop my backpack on the floor and stand on the living room rug, in between my parents and the TV. “I have so much to tell you, I don’t even know where to start.”
“Breathe, Alice,” Dad says.
I tie my hair up to let the heat off the back of my neck. Then I take a deep breath. “I know what happened to Gram’s family. I know why the apartment ended up abandoned! And Gram’s sister, Adalyn—you’re not going to believe this. She was a spy for the French resistance!”
Mom is stone-faced. I know she doesn’t like apartment talk, but there’s no way I’m keeping this a secret. Dad fumbles for the remote so he can turn the volume down.
“Sorry, just a second,” he says.
I can’t wait. I’m talking at a mile a minute and I can’t slow down. “I finally found somebody who knew Adalyn. He told me everything. Her story is incredible. She started off distributing these anti-Nazi flyers, and then she—”
“Hang on, I’m just going to pause this,” Dad says. Why are they acting like I’m inconveniencing them with this information?
When the show has been paused, and Mom has spent a sufficient amount of time arranging the blanket over her lap, Dad motions for me to proceed. I realize, for everything to make sense, I need to start further back; I need to talk about all the research I did. All this time, they probably assumed that Paul and I were running all over Paris doing normal teenager things, not reading about life under the Nazi Occupation. So I tell them the full story, from finding the diary and learning about Gram’s family fleeing Paris, and seeing the newspaper clipping that made me think Adalyn was a Nazi sympathizer, to learning the truth about her relationship with Ulrich Becker III. Next, I launch into everything I just learned from Luc. I show them the photos from the Museum of National Resistance and name each one of Adalyn’s friends. I tell them about the attack on the Gestapo and how it all went wrong. I go through every single detail, right up through the explanation of how the apartment essentially became a time capsule.
By the end of it, I’m wiping my fogged-up glasses on my T-shirt again, but my parents aren’t having the same reaction. Mom has merely pulled the blanket up closer and closer to her chin, and Dad just looks tense, his eyes darting from me to Mom.
They’re really not going to like what I have to say next.
“. . . I’ve thought about it, and I don’t want to list the apartment,” I say at last. “I want to keep it. It’s a part of my history—of our history.”
Dad exhales through purs
ed lips. That’s not a good sign.
“Alice, Mom and I appreciate all the research you’ve put into this,” he says, even though he and Mom haven’t said a word to each other. “That being said . . . all those things happened a long, long time ago, and I think there’s value now, today, in the three of us moving on from this difficult period and starting fresh.”
I open and close my mouth like a goldfish, searching for words, but finding none. I can’t believe what I’m hearing.
Except no, maybe I can, because this is the way my family is. This is the way we’ve always been, for as long as I can remember. We don’t deal with any of our actual problems. We just cover them up however we think is easiest. But look at Mom, hiding under a blanket right now. What we’re doing isn’t making anything easier.
“It’s not going to work!” I shout. “We’re not just going to be able to start fresh! How are we going to move forward if we have this big—this big—this weight tied to our ankles?”
“Alice, what are you talking about?” Dad asks impatiently. “What ‘weight’?”
“I’M TALKING ABOUT MOM!”
Both of them look horrified. There’s nothing but dead silence in the living room, followed by the sounds of laughter and applause coming from the TV.
“Sorry,” Dad mumbles. “It does that if you leave it paused for thirty minutes. . . . Let me just pause it a—”
“WILL YOU JUST TURN IT OFF, DAD?”
He inhales sharply, then lets the air out through his nose. He presses the power button, and the light from the TV goes off. We’re in the dark.
“Okay, Alice.” He’s pulling out his rarely used Don’t Test Me voice. “What were you just saying about your mother?”
“I’m saying that, Mom, you’re clearly not okay, and I don’t think we’re doing a good job at helping you!”
At that, Mom pulls the blanket up over her face, and we can hear her whimpering underneath. Dad looks panicked. He throws his hands up in frustration. “Alice, this obviously isn’t helping either!” he cries.
He wants me to give up. He wants to go back to our polite pretend-life. But I won’t. I climb into the space between them on the couch and put my arm around the soft bundle that is Mom. I can feel her crying. Her body goes stiff for a moment, and I prepare for her to try and wriggle free, but then, to my surprise, she allows herself to melt into my side. The lump of her head comes to a rest on my shoulder.
“Mom,” I ask gently, “can you hear me?”
The lump nods. Now is the time. As soon as we got home from that awful night at the seafood restaurant, I started doing research on how I should talk to Mom, since I didn’t have any clue how to go about it. I typed in her symptoms—everything I could remember since I was little—and all of the websites came back with the same answer: depression. They completely explained Mom’s dark phases; apparently, some people go years feeling fine and then suddenly experience symptoms again—sometimes randomly, and sometimes because of a specific situation. The death of a family member, for instance.
I read about how to talk to someone with depression, all the things you should and shouldn’t say. The latter sections sounded a lot like me and Dad. This time, instead of writing a poem and stuffing it into a drawer, I wrote out a speech to say to Mom, and I’ve been practicing it in my head ever since.
I say it loud and clear so Dad can hear it, too:
“Mom, I love you so much, and I hate to see you in pain. I want to understand how you’re feeling, and then I want to help you get through it. Whatever it is, it’s normal. And I want you to know you’re not alone . . . okay?”
Please let this get through to her. Mom’s shoulders gradually stop shaking, and she pulls the blanket off her face. She tilts her head and looks at me with bloodshot eyes, and I mean really looks at me. She isn’t inside her glass box anymore. For the first time in months, I see the Mom that I know.
She wipes her eyes.
“Okay,” she says back.
Chapter 21
Alice
My family’s first language is small talk. It isn’t easy to learn a new language when you’ve been speaking one way your whole life, but it’s something we’re working on. I’m over the moon that we’re finally opening up to each other, even if it’s hard to do. The only time I’ve regretted it, though, is right this very minute, in the back seat of the cramped rental car, as Dad bombards Paul with question after question through the rearview mirror.
“So I’m curious to know, how do you kids define your relationship? Are you ‘official,’ as they say these days?”
Oh my god. Can’t we just go back to meaningless pleasantries? Ask him about sports or something! I wish I had an eject button to launch myself out of the car right now, except then I’d be stranded in a random French suburb in the middle of December, wearing a cocktail dress. Not ideal.
“Yes, Mr. Prewitt, we are official,” Paul says with a laugh. He’s been handling the conversation so well. “I feel very lucky to be Alice’s boyfriend.”
My god, this is mortifying. Very sweet, but mortifying. As I dig my nails into the leather, Mom peeks into the back seat and mouths, to both of us, I’m so sorry. Everyone but Dad dissolves into a fit of giggles, but pretty soon, even he’s laughing, too.
In August, when we got home from Paris, I took the lead on signing us up for family therapy. On top of that, Mom started seeing a therapist of her own again. I say “again,” because it came up in one of our sessions that when I was in the first grade, Mom attempted suicide. After all this time, I never knew, but it explained all the doctor’s appointments and the time I spent at Gram’s. For a while, she was getting help, but then she stopped going, because she was too ashamed—and she was feeling a lot better, anyway. Dad didn’t press. He figured it was a one-off.
Whenever Mom’s depression returned, Dad avoided talking about it because he didn’t want to upset her more, and I took my cues from him. That’s the way things stayed in our family. Until last summer, when Gram’s death sent Mom into the worst bout of depression she’d had in a long time, and I realized we couldn’t keep tiptoeing around the truth. Mom needed help. She still does. We all do.
Snow-covered trees whip past the window in a black-and-white blur. Every so often, there’s a gap where you can see the icy Marne River running along the side of the highway. The last time we made the trip out here, Paul and I had no idea what we were going to find. This time around, I have a much better idea of what we’re walking into. We talked about it with Ms. Richard for months, and this past week, we brought her some of the key items to put on display. Tonight, we’re going to see the new exhibit for the first time.
Dad parks the car, and we follow the shoveled walkway to the front of the Musée de la Résistance Nationale in Champigny-sur-Marne. There’s a sign on the door that says “Fermé pour un événement privé.” “Closed for a private event.” I signed up for French club this past semester, and I think I’m getting better.
We go inside.
Ms. Richard greets us in the lobby with a tray of champagne, which she sets down on the front desk. Then she hugs each of us one by one. “You’re the first ones to arrive,” she says. “Would you like to see it?”
“Yes please,” we say in unison—even Mom.
We follow her through the empty halls to the spot in the museum where Pierre-Henri’s photos are on display. They’re still there, but now, they’re just one part of a big display dedicated to Adalyn and her resistance group. The pages of Adalyn’s diary are reprinted and hung chronologically, along with photographs and other artifacts to show what was happening at the time. There’s the picture of Adalyn surrounded by Nazis—one of whom, I now know, is Walther von Groth. When I discovered it back in June, the photo made me sick. Now I look at it and beam with pride.
Ms. Richard has done an incredible job putting this together—better than I ever could have imagined. At my request, she even agreed to put Gram’s purple zazou dress on display. I’m not sure if I b
elieve in an afterlife, but if there is one, I hope Gram and Adalyn are looking down and seeing they were on the same side all along.
As I stare at Gram’s dress, Paul wanders over to my side. I take his hand, and we appreciate the relic together.
“I think she had a feeling,” I say.
“Who?”
“Gram. I think a part of her always wondered about Adalyn. That’s why she hung on to the apartment until the day she died but never said anything about it. She didn’t want to go digging up the past, because it was too painful . . . but she didn’t want to close the door completely, either. Just in case.”
“I’m glad she never let go.”
“Me too.”
As we marvel at the exhibit, the guests start to trickle in. Vivi nearly bowls us over, followed by Theo, Claudette, and Lucie moving at a slightly more relaxed pace. Paul’s parents, who I met the other night when they drove in from Lyon, arrive next; his mom presents me with a bouquet of flowers, and then the two of them get to talking to my parents. There’s Eugene and his wife, Sylvie, and Ruben and his wife, Isabelle. Luc brings up the rear, sporting an off-kilter black beret and holding on to the crook of Corinne’s arm for support.
Once he takes it all in, Luc simply says, “C’est parfait.” It’s perfect.
And sure enough, it’s a perfect evening. When everyone’s finished enjoying the exhibit, we move to an upstairs room for dinner overlooking the river. It’s beautiful to see the golden lights snaking along the water’s edge. During the meal, as everyone talks about Adalyn, I’m relieved to see that Luc seems to be at peace. He’s quiet, and somewhat serious, but I think that might just be his personality. As we finish our desserts, Ms. Richard asks him if he’d be interested in becoming a periodic speaker at the museum. After a brief hesitation—and some encouragement from the rest of the table—he agrees.
Just when I thought things couldn’t get any better, they do. Once the plates are all cleared, and some of the others are indulging in an after-dinner drink, I wander over to the window to get a better look at the lights along the Marne. After a few seconds, a hand comes to rest on my lower back. It’s Paul.
The Paper Girl of Paris Page 25
