Paris, 7 A.M.

by Liza Wieland

  Just think about what you have to do next, Clara told her earlier. Just the one next thing.

  The lights on the masts might be stars. Dominique reaches for the infants—Elizabeth’s first, then Clara’s. He holds both babies and steps back so they can climb over the gunwale. Elizabeth’s arms, empty now, feel as if they might float upward. Her teeth chatter, so she clamps her jaws shut, but then her whole head trembles.

  Dominique hands the infants back, then turns to the motor. Elizabeth worries about the low rattle of the boat’s engine, but everywhere in the harbor there is some sort of mechanical purring. Clara climbs below, lights an oil lamp. Clara talks softly as she unwraps the babies’ swaddling. Inside this first blanket is another, and inside that, a layer of cloth diapers. Elizabeth watches from the companionway. The babies stare up at Clara. They both have halos of black curly hair. Their silence and stillness are almost alarming, but not quite because it is such a relief to have brought them safely on board. Elizabeth wonders if the babies have been given some kind of drug, a drop or two of brandy on their gums. She recognizes their peaceful state, envies it now.

  Clara shows Elizabeth where their names are sewn in one corner of the innermost blanket. She calls them by their names, Rachel and Marta. Maybe there is a flicker of response.

  Dominique has rigged a lee cloth above each berth, and Clara settles the babies inside.

  Do you think they’d like to be together? Elizabeth says. Are they sisters?

  I don’t know, Clara says.

  They look like twins.

  It’s possible, but babies at this age . . .

  I don’t think their hair has ever been cut.

  Or combed either.

  That would certainly make them cry.

  Léonie will do it. She likes to care for them that way.

  Don’t you? Elizabeth says.

  I’m not sure I can remember how to do most parts of it.

  And I never learned.

  Without comment, Clara moves Rachel from her lee cloth and settles her in with Marta. Their limbs crowd together. Rachel seems to nestle her head into Marta’s shoulder.

  That’s good, Clara says. That’s what they want.

  Elizabeth can tell the boat has left the harbor and is moving out into open water.

  Go up and sit with Dominique awhile, Clara says. So he won’t fall asleep.

  I can’t talk to him very well.

  Yes, you can. It doesn’t matter if he understands you. And really, puzzling over it will keep him awake.

  I guess I can point.

  In the cockpit, Dominique smokes and stares out ahead into the velvety night.

  Ça va? Elizabeth whispers.

  Dominique gestures behind them, back toward Dieppe harbor, and shakes his head. This could mean a great many things. He does not seem agitated or hurried, fearful, furtive, all those words Elizabeth knows only in English. No matter, because he is not any of these. What can she ask him? About the girls—are they twins? That they might be twins? Sœur is the word for sister, but out here there is no context. She could point below: The sisters? Dominique is watching the sky, and Elizabeth follows his gaze. The stars are broken pieces of heaven. Of glare. Les étoiles sont . . . Time is a star. The night is making her dizzy. The night and that quick walk down the alley with stolen children who are maybe freed now. How can that be possible, to be stolen, hidden, and so to be free? Will they ever be, now that they’re taken from their mother?

  The hell with it. All this cogitation. What on earth does that mean anyway, free?

  Dominique offers Elizabeth a cigarette. Too early, she says, and he laughs. He says a word that sounds like it might be the one that means never.

  Jamais.

  A faint flush appears along the horizon. Clara told Léonie they would return just after sunrise, so here before her is a kind of timekeeping. And then in a few hours, they will take the babies to Paris, to the convent. Maybe Margaret will be better, or at least more accustomed to her hand and its limits. Louise will be ready to go home and then to Key West. It’s time.

  And yet.

  Dominique explains in painfully slow French what she already knows, that the babies will go to Paris. Elizabeth nods. Syllable by excruciating syllable, he asks if she likes Paris. When she nods again, he asks why.

  Très belle, Elizabeth begins.

  Dominique puffs out air through his pursed lips.

  Might as well try in English. The art, she says. The history. Freedom. Clara’s apartment. Mrs. Miller’s apartment on île Saint-Louis. The light.

  Another dismissive pffft from Dominique. Les gens, he says.

  The people. Oui, Elizabeth says, les gens.

  Les femmes, he says then.

  Why, Elizabeth wonders, does the word for women catch in his throat like that?

  Yes, Elizabeth says, though she wonders if he is talking about herself and Clara or the babies or something entirely different.

  Now there is a fine pink line along the horizon, deepening perceptibly.

  Les gens qui font le jour comme la nuit, Dominique says.

  Elizabeth has heard this phrase before. Sylvia used it to talk about herself and Adrienne Monnier.

  People who exchange day for night.

  * * *

  Elizabeth sees Léonie on the dock before she sees them. She waits at the very end, her shoes half over the edge as if she’s about to dive or fall, her whole body hanging forward, listening. When the boat rounds the promontory and comes fully into view, she appears to take a step back. Elizabeth wants to bring the babies up from the cabin, raise them into the sky. Then they will all sleep, and afterwards someone—Clara—will explain how the next part is to be managed: babies in their arms and four hours on a train.

  The sun breaks through a low cloud, and Elizabeth can see that Léonie is smiling, her feet pattering a little dance of anticipation. The water, illuminated this way, shudders, uncertain, as if the light is asking questions that must be dodged. Then Léonie stops moving. Elizabeth hears Clara on the companionway. She doesn’t have to turn around to know that Clara is holding at least one baby and maybe both. They all four stand still as statues—Dominique, too, even as he guides the Sirène to Léonie’s dock.

  They have arrived. The boat meets the dock with a softness, like a kiss or the tail of a shooting star. Léonie asks quietly if all is well.

  Presque sans faire tomber l’ancre, Dominique says. Almost without dropping anchor.

  Clara calls to Elizabeth and nestles Rachel in her arms, then disappears below, returns with Marta.

  Sisters, she says, as she turns toward Léonie, who nods as if she has known this all along.

  The babies change hands—it is like armfuls of gold—and then they make an orderly, careful procession toward the blue door, the older women ahead, Elizabeth carrying the extra blankets and diapers, Dominique shadowing them.

  It is either too early for whiskey, Elizabeth says, or too late.

  Nonsense, Clara says. We’ll have it in our coffee.

  Rachel begins to cry. You’re all right, Clara whispers, you’re all right. You’re all right.

  She repeats the words over and over, as if she cannot say them enough, did not say them enough. Her voice is warm and low, a tone Elizabeth has never heard.

  Rachel’s head lolls as if she will dive backward out of Clara’s arms. It might happen. She might think she wants to go back. She might be experiencing a spark of memory, a visitation from her mother. Rachel did not ask to go anywhere. Rachel did not ask to be saved. Clara turns suddenly—it must make the baby dizzy.

  I don’t know if you can have a story out of this, Elizabeth, she says. In fact, you really ought not to.

  I know, Elizabeth says.

  The skitter of gravel in Dieppe, the lee cloth, Dominique’s cigarette. The streak of white light on the horizon. Without the word horizon. Without the word child. That is the work to be done.

  Not plot but description. Let the scene and the moment make
discoveries. Miss Moore said that. The blue door, the silvery wavering light, the women. It’s almost as if I’m not here. That’s the trick of it, to observe without comment. Not to be tentative or interior. Risk the unprotected, Miss Moore says. And then her old refrain: You can’t see the world by withdrawing from it. The water in this light looks as if it’s milling about—the glare is blinding. She can’t see Clara, Léonie, or Dominique. A human figure doesn’t have to be included to notice a scene or really say any more about it.

  Léonie washes the babies one at a time in the large kitchen sink. The warm water delights them, soothes them toward sleep. Léonie cuts their hair. Elizabeth sweeps up the black curls into a dustpan, and Léonie tells her to carry it outside, let the wind take it. Elizabeth stuffs one silky ringlet into her pocket.

  For a few minutes, in the applewood crib, the babies fidget and complain, but then settle. Dominique leaves the house. He will rest in the boat, Clara says, and take us back later. One by one, the three of them fall asleep. First Clara, then Léonie, then Elizabeth, who watches the other two, the flutter and giving way of eyelids. She recalls Mrs. Miller telling them one night about watching Margaret fall asleep when she was four or five. Mrs. Miller’s pleasure in this moment—why was that?

  A mother’s pleasure is mysterious, Mrs. Miller said, even a mystery to me. I don’t know why I loved that time with Margaret.

  She described the scene in great detail (Mrs. Miller could wax poetic when she talked about her daughter): the light coming in from the hallway at a bright slant because it reflected off the glass on a photograph on the wall outside Margaret’s bedroom. Margaret’s profile, the perfect little upturned nose. Mrs. Miller on her side, watching, taking note. The white blanket, the shadow of the wooden mermaid hanging above the bed. And then the eyelids go, closed, then open, closed, then half open. The evening out of breath, a faint whistle, almost singing. Maybe it’s that her little mind was finally still, Mrs. Miller said. Maybe because I knew for a while I wouldn’t have to worry. A short while. Then I would come up with something new to keep me awake.

  Sometimes, if we were at Jennings Beach, the sound of the ocean would fill the house.

  Here Mrs. Miller had said something that seemed to shock her: It felt to me that Margaret’s breathing, that whistly song, was keeping the whole world alive.

  Just before falling asleep herself, Elizabeth has the feeling that she can almost—but not quite—understand what Mrs. Miller meant. But then the sense evades her, like a butterfly. Like the Spinoza she’d tried and failed to grasp in college. Ideas floating over her head, but then drifting downward again, closer, almost in reach. Her head, though, too heavy to lift, filled as it was with other barely grasped ideas. Then, this thought, half vision: There is a kind of bird who reaches into her own breast with her own sharp beak and plucks out her own feathers in order to build a nest. The kind of bird who stays with one of her young who is injured or slow to sing or fly.

  Elizabeth dreams that she is on a windswept street in Paris, just where another street meets it, and the corner makes a dark cave. There is a kiosk, which no one seems to be tending. The shelves are bare except for a few old newspapers. The giant headlines are indecipherable but terrifying all the same. The wind grows colder and stronger, blowing people back into their apartments, then blowing the doors open again. Suddenly, two angels appear, their faces chalk white (Chinese white, a color she loves). Their open mouths are round black holes. The angels are carrying piles of newspapers. They shout one word, War! over and over.

  In the dream, Elizabeth turns. She is with someone else, but she can’t see who it is. Margaret? Sigrid? Louise? They see a street that stretches all the way to Africa. Lions survey them from the savannah. A bloodred sun is setting, dipping below the horizon. The lions seem to be guarding a fountain. Elizabeth realizes that this is the fountain at the Spanish Steps in Rome, then it is the place de la Concorde. The fountain fills and spills over onto the sand, not with water, but with blood.

  The angels continue to cry War! War! War! The sound of it wakes her.

  The babies are hungry.

  Rachel and Marta have one more journey by boat, to Port-en-Bessin. This passage is carefully timed for the train to Paris from Caen—complicated maneuvers made easier by money. Elizabeth finally understands. Money is why Clara is necessary, for her money and her connection to Pierre Laval.

  It happens at first like a film running backward. Almost exactly as they entered yesterday, Elizabeth and Dominique leave Léonie’s house, walk down the dock, board the Sirène. Clara follows, carrying Marta. Léonie is last, holding Rachel. Dominique busies himself with lines and fenders, the engine. He is wearing a cap that makes a sort of fleur-de-lis at the top. No one appears to hurry. Clara hands Marta in to Elizabeth. Her blanket spills open to reveal the lace giraffe stolen from the blue crib, clutched in Marta’s little fist.

  Very clever, Elizabeth whispers. Now you have a souvenir.

  She wonders if Rachel has the other animal, the creature of indeterminate species. Clara steps aboard and turns to receive Rachel from Léonie. Then Léonie unties the dock line, throws it into the cockpit. Dominique reverses away from the dock, turns, motors toward the mouth of the cove. Léonie raises her hand high into the air, part wave, part salute.

  Before the boat reaches open water, Clara and Elizabeth settle the babies back into the single lee cloth.

  I’ll stay with them, Clara says. You can go up.

  On deck, Elizabeth sees that Léonie is still standing at the end of the dock. Again, from this distance, she looks very young, a girl, as if time were receding with the Sirène. Elizabeth tries to think how to ask Dominique when the next baby will arrive, but she can’t puzzle it out. Anyway, he is probably not allowed to tell her. Or perhaps he doesn’t know until he’s summoned—and how does the summons arrive? She settles into the cockpit and watches him steer. Beyond him, the world is divided into pieces by the line of the mast: two-thirds sky, one-third sea. The mast itself rises like a marble pillar. The geometry is stark and odd, almost flat, since the sail is furled and the boat runs level. The sun splinters on the surface of the water, the clouds skein out above and behind. I miss the slant perspective of a heeling boat, Margaret said once, and Elizabeth had said, Yes, like the view from the bed when you first wake up and you don’t quite remember how you got there.

  How did I get here? What series of accidents? And the hardest part is still to come.

  Dominique and the Sirène are a monument to stillness, to steadiness, discretion, valor, secrecy, sleight of hand. To something that hasn’t happened yet but is contained inside her, in her galley-belly. The opposite of a gravestone but curiously the same, marking what is below, sheltering what’s not intended to be seen.

  Elizabeth feels a quietly rising terror, a heaviness gathering in her body, like the morning after drinking too much Pernod. Mal aux cheveux. My hairs ache. It would be very difficult now to stand up and stay standing. Time takes on the same weight. Did they leave Léonie’s dock five minutes ago, or twenty-five? The mouth of the cove appears no closer.

  And then, a moment later, they come through, into open sea. Léonie on the dock is a speck, the blue door slightly larger, a lozenge. Suddenly, it’s as if the sound has been turned on, the volume turned up. Gulls cry from behind, from the rocks at the mouth of the cove. Some riddle of acoustics: the narrow opening of the cove must have muted the birds before. The motor chugs along, steady, healthy, sounding relieved. The gulls’ cries change, as if they’ve flown closer, down inside the boat. It’s Rachel or Marta, wanting something. Wanting someone. How does the baby sense that Clara is not her mother? Would it be by touch, by smell, the same way animals know when humans are afraid?

  The only movement in Dominique’s entire body: his eyes, scanning the horizon. His hands stay still, as if the tiller is moving them and not the other way around.

  Elizabeth, come down here, Clara calls. I want to give you a holding lesson.

 
Dominique nods. He says the word that may mean sea or may mean mother.

  Not holding really, Clara says as Elizabeth climbs through the companionway. You’ve had enough of that. It’s time to learn carrying. It’s a question of balance. No better place to learn than a ship at sea.

  All right, Elizabeth says.

  But first, the lifting. Slide your hands under her head and bottom. Like so. You have to look as though you’ve been doing it for some long time.

  * * *

  The plan is this, Clara says the next morning. Elizabeth and Dominique will stay on the boat in the harbor at Port-en-Bessin while Clara walks up to the hotel. She will go to their rooms, where the luggage has already been assembled, take a last look, then call for a porter. Downstairs, she will arrange to have their things sent ahead to Caen, to the train station, deposited there with baggage for the one o’clock train to Paris. Then she will have the hotel staff call a taxi to the harbor. The taxi will take them to the train station in Caen, where they will board the one o’clock train, on which Clara has reserved two seats, one for herself, and one for a friend who is the young mother of twin girls. The woman’s name is Mme Évêque.

  Évêque? Elizabeth says. How did you come up with that?

  Check your Larousse, Clara says.

  It’s in my suitcase.

  When you get back to Paris.

  Elizabeth wonders for a moment why Clara doesn’t just tell her, but then she is too preoccupied with holding and carrying Marta and following Clara off the boat. She almost forgets to say goodbye to Dominique. She hears him wish her good luck, and even though she is afraid to turn around, she manages. Clara, she sees, has already handed Rachel to the surprised taxi driver.