Starlight on Willow Lake

by Susan Wiggs

  For some reason, the memory made him sad. When he thought about it, he realized how seldom the five of them had traveled places together. Then he reminded himself again how cool it was to have his dad all to himself.

  Cancale was a surprise, one of those little towns that wasn’t overrun by tourists. It was mostly locals, fishermen in flat caps, farmers and ouvriers in their coveralls, many with a smoldering cigarette butt glued to the lower lip. The cottage was an old stone-built structure with a tiled roof and whitewashed walls, perched on a rocky cliff above the English Channel. Flowers bloomed in window boxes, and there was a little well-tended garden surrounding it. Inside, the furniture was simple. No TV, just a CD player and shelves crammed with books in English and French.

  The garden overlooked a bank of rocks. Beyond that was a craggy coastline and then the aqua-blue Atlantic. Mason felt his chest expand just looking at it. “How’d you find this place?” he asked.

  “Through a friend.”

  “Which friend?” He didn’t think about his dad having friends here. He only thought about his dad working here. Now he realized his dad had built a whole life around being in Paris and France.

  “Check out the view.” Dad handed him a pair of binoculars. “Those two islands out there—Jersey and Guernsey.”

  Mason studied the view through the lenses. “Like the cows. Cool. How far is it to the beach?”

  “About a hundred meters straight down. We can go for a swim right now. Go get your trunks on.”

  It was an epic afternoon. He and his dad scrambled over boulders and down a ravine to a beach. Lounging on the battered rocks, they had fresh baguette, cheese and bottles of Orangina that Dad had brought in a backpack. They spent hours in the waves, laughing and paddling around, warming themselves on the grainy brown sand, poking around tide pools.

  Mason liked this playful side of his dad. Usually he was so busy working or traveling he didn’t have time to mess around. The next couple of days were great. He tasted some wine but didn’t much like it. He ate an oyster for the first time. They listened to music and read books, and at night he dreamed about Katia.

  The house felt strangely familiar, and he wasn’t sure why. “Have I been here before?” he asked his dad. The brief holiday was over, and he was packing up to leave.

  “No,” said his dad, “but I hope we get to come back.”

  As he was loading things into his backpack, he knocked over a small bookcase in his room. Muttering, he set it upright and put the books back. One of the books was splayed open on the floor, revealing a photograph tucked between the pages. He picked it up and studied the image. It showed a young woman he’d never seen before, standing next to a little boy against the backdrop of the sea. There was nothing remarkable about the photo...except that the boy in the picture...there was something peculiar about him, as if Mason had seen him somewhere before. Actually, the kid looked strangely like Mason.

  And that, of course, was impossible, because Mason had never been here before, and he had no idea who the woman might be.

  “Ready to roll?” asked Dad, poking his head into the room.

  “Who are these people?” Mason showed him the picture.

  His dad glanced briefly at the print, turned it over, then shrugged. “Dunno. Where’d you find it?”

  “Fell out of a book.” He picked up the book—Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

  “No idea.”

  “The kid looks just like me as a kid,” Mason said. “Check it out.”

  Dad shook his head. “I don’t see the resemblance. Let’s go, sport.”

  Part Three

  “For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.”

  —Vincent van Gogh

  15

  Mason pulled off the throughway to a charging station. As he maneuvered the car into place, Faith studied his profile, trying to picture the boy he had been. Young and earnest, determined to do good in the world. Swept up in the excitement of Paris. Falling in love for the first time. And discovering a new, hidden facet of his father.

  He must have sensed a disturbance deep in the heart of the family he thought he knew. For a kid, the sensing but not-quite-knowing was a terrible feeling.

  She felt an impulse to reach out to that boy. To give him a hug. To tell him everything was going to be all right. But she couldn’t say that, could she? Because he hadn’t told her everything yet. And she had a feeling he was leading up to the moment everything had gone terribly wrong.

  “That’s some summer you had,” she said. “So did the seaside cottage belong to Celeste, or...?”

  “Yes. Her family, I think, although I didn’t figure that out until much later.”

  “Did you ask your father for details?”

  “Not at that point.” He connected the car to the charging port. “This will take about fifteen minutes. Do you want a cup of coffee or something to eat?”

  “No, thank you.” She liked talking to him. She could listen to him all day. And she couldn’t figure out why. They were so entirely different. His was a world of high finance and international travel, while hers was kids and clients. Maybe the source of the feeling was their mutual concern about Alice.

  No, Faith had to admit it was more than that. This guy intrigued her on so many levels. But first and foremost, he was the key to figuring out what was going on with Alice. Faith checked her messages on the phone Alice had issued her—a smartphone that actually worked. A text message from Lena assured her that Alice was fine.

  “That’s probably the most exotic story of first love I’ve ever heard,” she said, reprising the conversation with Mason. “Paris, a girl from a foreign land, sneaking around...”

  He studied her for a moment. He had a way of looking at her that was unsettling, but not in a bad way. “Who was your first love?”

  “Billy Banner, fifth grade,” she said, surprised at how quickly she could recall the memory. “He had long hair down into his eyes and he rode a skateboard like he was the Silver Surfer. He took me to the movie Hook with Robin Williams and we held hands. Ever since, I’ve been a fan of comedians who are also good actors, like Robin Williams was, or Bill Hader now.”

  “Okay, that’s puppy love,” Mason said with a laugh. “That’s not the kind of love I’m talking about.”

  She flushed. “Oh. Then what kind of love are you talking about?”

  “The real thing. I want to know the first time that crazy feeling grabbed you and wouldn’t let go.”

  He certainly had a way with words.

  “I didn’t even know what it was the first time I experienced that with Katia,” he went on. “She was the first person I felt completely myself with. I could let my guard down and show her exactly who I was. I wanted...God, everything. That feeling changed the way I looked at the world.”

  “Wow. That’s some first love,” said Faith. He had no idea how romantic he sounded. For some reason, it left her feeling flushed. “This is a really personal conversation. How did this turn into such a personal conversation?”

  Mason didn’t reply but simply waited, another of those comfortable silences that seemed to hover between them sometimes.

  Faith leaned back against the car. “My first real love was also my last. Dennis.”

  Mason regarded her somberly. “I’m sorry for your loss. Really.”

  She studied the pavement, fissured by weather. “It’s been a few years. I still miss him. Did your mother grieve hard for your father?”

  “We all thought she did. Now, I guess, she’s dealing with a different kind of grief.”

  For Alice, loss had shifted to betrayal. “We’ll help her through it,” said Faith. “I swear.”

  She noticed Mason looking at her again. Staring. Again, with oddly softened eyes.
“What?”

  “You’re really different from other women I know, Faith.”

  Folding her arms, she glanced down at her washed-out jeans and sneakers. The women she’d glimpsed at his office had been like Regina—polished and sophisticated. On her best day, Faith could never be considered sophisticated. She was far too practical—and too broke—for makeup and wardrobe upgrades.

  “And I mean that as a compliment,” he said.

  She frowned. “Different in what way?”

  “You do your job like it’s more than a job. I mean, you don’t just show up. You bring your whole self to this work. I saw that right from the start. You connected with my mom—”

  “And by ‘connected,’ you mean we butted heads.”

  “I had my doubts at first that you’d last. She tends to boss people around, play the sympathy card, and you cut right through the BS. So yeah, you’re different. In my world, I see people come to work even though they don’t want to be there. They leave part of themselves behind.”

  In his world. “We have very different jobs.” Faith wondered how he would adjust to taking a more active role with Alice. First things first. She wanted to get to the bottom of Alice’s suicide attempt. “What about your mother? Do you think she and your dad were deeply in love?”

  “Right up until that summer, I believed it. When I started to have my doubts, it felt like a punch in the gut. So I can only imagine how it felt to my mom.”

  Like a total loss of security, Faith speculated, though she didn’t say so. She remembered that feeling when she’d lost her grandparents, and then her mother. A rug had been pulled out from under her. She’d lost her footing in the world.

  Mason walked over to a nearby shop and returned with two frosty cobalt blue bottles. “Mineral water from Wales,” he said, handing her one.

  She glanced at the price sticker. Definitely the first six-dollar bottle of water she’d ever had. “You’re not like anyone I’ve ever met, either,” she said.

  “In a good way, or a bad way?” he asked with a grin.

  “I’m still deciding.” She took a sip of the crisp, bubbly water. It was the perfect drink for a day like today. The afternoon sun dappled the parking lot, and the sky was a cloudless blue infinity. She wondered with a wave of sadness what the weather had been like on the day Alice had driven herself down the stairs. Did it matter? Did a person notice the weather when shock turned her world upside down?

  “Sounds like you picked up some clues about your father when he took you to that cottage by the sea,” she said to Mason.

  “Sure, I guess. But remember, I was a kid. I was hot for this exotic new girl and it kind of gave me tunnel vision.”

  “Did you say something to your father?”

  “I probably planned to at some point, but then something blew it wide-open. Literally.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “July 25, 1995.”

  “Is there something special about that date?”

  “It probably wasn’t a big deal in the news here in the US. Given what happened later, it should have been.”

  In the summer of 1995, Faith had been working at a part-time job and taking care of her mother. She couldn’t recall any big news event. “Why should it have been?”

  “Because it was a terror attack.”

  Part Four

  “The human heart is a frail craft on which we wish to reach the stars.”

  —Giotto di Bondone

  16

  Paris, July 1995

  Mason and the other interns worked long hours at the NGO. His job title was “policy assistant” but he was really just a bean counter and general office boy. He didn’t mind the delivery errands because he was able to do it as a bike messenger, delivering documents from office to office. It became a high-stakes game to dodge the traffic, weaving in and out of lanes on his bike with the messenger bag on his back. Within a few weeks, he learned whole sections of the city. His French became more natural, especially l’argot—slang. Before long, he could curse and hurl insults like a native when a thoughtless driver cut him off or failed to yield.

  The bean counter work was more tedious, but seeing Katia in the office, draped in her veils, kept him almost too revved up to think straight. They didn’t talk or hang out much during the day, but the nights were theirs to meet in secret. She was a quick-change artist, throwing off the robes to reveal a lingerie-model body and a smile that was brighter than the sun. The fact that they could get in big trouble if they got caught only made it all the more enticing.

  At work, crunching numbers and proofing reports opened his eyes. It took funding to do good in the world. He learned the cost of medical supplies and transport. He learned that if it didn’t happen, people suffered.

  Mason started to care more and more about such things. While going over some mail Thierry had asked him to read, he came across a letter with two photographs attached. The first showed a woman with an infant suffering from malnutrition. The second showed the same woman with a plump, laughing little kid. The letter was filled with gratitude for the agency. The happy kid had been the sick baby.

  Mason hurried to show the pictures to his boss. Thierry studied them briefly, then smiled. “The best sort of letter to receive, no?”

  “The best,” said Mason.

  Thierry handed it back. “Perhaps you would like to work on the quarterly bulletin. We publish it so people can see the work we do. Testimonials like this are the best way to explain our mission.”

  “Sure.”

  Thierry gave his assistant instructions.

  The woman in charge of the newsletter offered him a thick file and a look of relief. “I would love to have your help with this,” she declared.

  That was how he found out how important this mission was. He’d come into this internship thinking it was going to be lame. Instead, he came to like going into the office, working on ways to account for every sou that came in or went out of the accounts.

  Most of all, he liked the secret meetings with Katia. He was nearly reeling with love for her. True to her word, she showed him around the city. Whenever she was able to escape her father’s vigilance, they took the scooter or the metro to go exploring. They checked out the big red rhino at the Centre Pompidou, dodging panhandlers trying to scam and pickpocket the tourists. They watched reggae bands, went to the Stade de France to see a soccer match, strolled along the Canal St. Martin and poked around the market there, went to the Musée d’Orsay to find the painting of Whistler’s Mother. They wandered around the hills of Montmartre to the Moulin Rouge in the footsteps of Toulouse-Lautrec, stopped in bustling bistros and explored parks and gardens.

  They watched street performers and gave a few francs even to the lame ones. They skipped the tourist crush at the Louvre, escaping instead to the quiet mansion and gardens of the Musée Rodin. He stared at Rodin’s signature work The Kiss and tried to figure out the best way to get a kiss from her.

  It didn’t seem to matter what they did, because what was really happening was that they were exploring each other.

  She teased him about his appetite. He was hungry all the time. Instead of searching out classic French dishes like escargot and steak tartare, they ate at budget Vietnamese joints and food carts at Clignancourt, and sampled more Maghrebi dishes in Belleville.

  There was a scare as they were poking around the Belleville neighborhood, looking at all the graffiti and trying to find the best place for vegetarian couscous. Katia shoved him into a doorway. “Duck,” she said. “I can’t let those guys over there see me.”

  Mason spotted two Maghrebis in cheap, tattered suits and worn-out shoes, smoking and gesticulating as they walked through a crowded market street. “Who are they? Do you know them?”

  “Kind of. My father knows them—they’re brothers. I
don’t want them to recognize me. They’re trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “They like to stir up rallies and protests, things of that nature. They’re part of a group wanting to bring the Algerian Civil War to France.”

  “Wait, what? What war?”

  She waited until the pair disappeared around a corner. “It’s been going on for a few years. The other day, some extremists killed an eighty-year-old guy, right here in Paris. It’s all the talk at my house. My father says there’s no chance of a peace settlement now.”

  “So are you saying those two guys were involved?”

  “I don’t know. They’re agitators. And they are... I think the term in the US is rat finks. If they saw me, they would report me immediately to my parents and I’d be...”

  “Dead meat,” he said. “That’s another American term.”

  “Exactly.”

  Mason felt a wave of protectiveness for her. It sucked that Katia had to sneak around, just to wear the clothes she wanted and hang out with her friends. He moved in front of her, making himself as tall as possible to shield her as the two guys passed by.

  To his relief, the two brothers seemed too intent on their conversation to notice a couple of kids in the doorway.

  * * *

  Mason knew he had to make his move. He had never known anyone like Katia, never felt this way about a girl before. They planned a day trip to the château at Fontainebleau, out in the suburbs. He wasn’t sure what she’d told her parents, but there she was at their usual meeting spot near the St. Michel metro station. She wore Western clothes, looking superhot in short shorts and a tank top, bringing along her traditional clothing in a backpack. They took a poky local train out to the town and wandered in the sunshine to the château. It was a fairyland of a place, surrounded by gardens and an impossibly beautiful forest. They bought bread and cheese and ripe cherries for lunch, and sat on a lush lawn beside a pond, eating and talking.