Starlight on Willow Lake

by Susan Wiggs

  He looked down to see that his shirt and pants were shredded, and somehow he had lost one shoe. The Place St. Michel was a war zone now, not the heart of the Latin Quarter. The cafés, only moments ago filled with students, seethed with terrified people. Cars rammed into one another, coming to a standstill as the drivers abandoned them. It was totally surreal, seeing the faces of the crying and wounded without being able to hear a thing.

  He thought of Katia and silently thanked the guy who had whisked her away on his scooter. Then he thought of the others—Taye, Malcolm, Lisa—and fear iced his veins. They’d gone to the train platform ahead of him. Christ, what if...

  Ambulances and fire engines lined the embankments of the Seine. Bright red civil defense helicopters circled overhead. Police barricades were assembled, sealing off streets and alleyways while crews rushed to aid the wounded. He recognized the black protective clothing and Darth Vader helmets of the French antiterrorist squad, rushing toward the tunnel.

  A paramedic in a bright green vest approached him and spoke. Mason pointed at his ears and shook his head. The medic spoke again, but then someone rushed forward, holding a woman in his arms. Mason’s eye was caught by the smoldering end of her fluttery pink scarf. Merci, eh? He recalled the way she had smiled at him, the swagger in her walk. Now one of her legs was gone, the bloody bone and sinew dripping from where her knee should have been.

  Mason couldn’t feel his feet touching the pavement as he walked away. He could feel the vibrations of sirens and car horns and helicopters in his gut. Shards of glass and debris littered the pavement. At one point, he found a sandal in the gutter. He stuck it on his bare foot and kept going.

  Beyond the immediate area of the explosion, things seemed weirdly normal. People went about their business, stopping at the boulangerie to pick up a baguette for dinner, or sitting at sidewalk cafés over a chilled glass of pastis or citron pressé. Some became aware of the mayhem, shading their eyes to look up at the helicopters and billowing smoke. Shopkeepers came out and stood on the sidewalks, scratching their heads in confusion.

  Mason became aware of sound again—the muffled roar of traffic and a constant two-toned wail of sirens. He crossed the river at the Pont Royal and followed a shady boulevard to his dad’s apartment building. Passersby regarded him strangely, and one woman crossed the street to avoid him.

  When he reached for the keypad at the entryway, he scarcely recognized his own hand, covered in soot and flecked with bloody cuts.

  As the elevator rose, his heart rate sped up so fast he thought his chest would explode. Would it feel like the explosion in St. Michel? Would his skin feel as if it were on fire, his eardrums sucked out of his head?

  The elevator door swished open to the sound of a French crooner warbling about “L’amour de l’ame.” His dad was in the kitchen with a dark-haired woman. She laughed as he pulled her into his arms and kissed her on the lips. A little boy sat on a bar stool, making something out of LEGO blocks.

  The scene before Mason was as blindsiding and incomprehensible as the metro explosion had been, a shock that sent him reeling.

  “What the hell is this?” he asked loudly.

  The woman gave a little yelp of alarm and jumped back, planting herself directly in front of the little kid.

  His dad’s face drained of all color. “Mason? My God, what happened to you?”

  “What happened to you?” Mason asked, his racing heart flaring into a burn of fury.

  Dad murmured something in rapid French to the woman, but Mason didn’t stick around to hear. He stomped to his room and slammed the door.

  The sound of the slamming door shattered him into a million pieces. He fell to his hands and knees and puked all over the floor.

  Part Five

  “What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?”

  —E. M. Forster

  17

  The oxblood-red covered bridge that spanned the Schuyler River came into view as Mason’s car rounded a bend in the road. Faith realized the drive up from the city had sped by, virtually unnoticed. She blinked like an awakening dreamer. The miles had ticked away while she’d been mesmerized by Mason’s story.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “What a horrific thing to witness, especially for someone so young. You were the same age Cara is now. It must’ve been awful.”

  “It’s strange, talking about it now. That was a different life for me. I was a different person,” he said. “Surviving the explosion changed me completely, in ways I’m still discovering. There was nothing to do but put it in the past and move on. That’s what I thought, anyway.” His hands flexed and unflexed on the steering wheel.

  She knew a person couldn’t simply move on from the kind of trauma he’d suffered on that summer evening in Paris. Turning sideways on the seat, she studied his profile, clean and handsome and troubled. A lock of hair spilled down his brow, and she felt a sudden and surprising urge to brush it out of the way. She tucked her hand under her thigh.

  “What caused the explosion?” she asked. “Did you ever find out?”

  “Oh, hell, yeah. It was huge news back when it happened. It was a terror attack. The bomb was planted under a seat in the sixth carriage of the southbound train. It was a big cooking gas canister filled with explosives and shrapnel, like nails and screws.”

  “It sounds horrible. Who would do such a thing?”

  “A fringe group of extremists. They wanted France to end its aid to Algeria. There were eight or ten deaths that night, I don’t remember. A hundred or more injured—limbs blown off, burns, blunt trauma, internal injuries...”

  “It must’ve been such a nightmare,” she said quietly.

  “Totally impossible to describe. It remade my life in about ten seconds.”

  “Remade your life. In what way?”

  “It was a turning point for me. I was forced to see the world differently, not as a safe place anymore.”

  She remembered their conversation on that starlit night, when she’d told him about her grandparents’ deaths. His story of shock and terror took her back to that December day when the call had come about her grandparents, killed by a plane falling out of the sky as they were sitting down to dinner. The Lockerbie horror was a different incident, but some of the images Mason had described—the terror and confusion, the injuries, the shock—seemed eerily familiar. A haunting wave of memory swept over Faith. She had survived, and Mason had survived. But they both bore the scars.

  That look he’d given her that night. Now she knew why he’d been so understanding. And she understood his reaction to the motorcycle victim. The blood and mayhem that day must have awakened the Paris horror.

  Every instinct she possessed compelled her to reach out to him. It was what she did—soothed people who were hurting. But she didn’t touch him, because if she was being honest with herself, she wasn’t sure he was the needy one.

  “I hate that you had to go through that,” she told him. “And then to go home with that burden...”

  He nodded. “I was forced to see my family differently.”

  “It wasn’t safe anymore, either.”

  “That’s a little dramatic, but yeah. I wasn’t afraid for my safety. I just stopped trusting what I thought I knew. My parents weren’t the parents I knew growing up. My dad was a liar and a cheater, and my mom... She was someone I felt I had to protect from finding out what was going on. I found myself in a lousy position, not wanting to be the one to tell her... I just kept my distance after that.”

  A family, shattered. “Tell me more about the woman and the boy with your father,” she said.

  Mason nodded, slowing the car to troll through Avalon’s main square. It looked particularly peaceful and calm, a summer afternoon filled with shoppers and vacationers, people
strolling through the park.

  “The woman—Celeste—and the kid named Simon took off and Dad drove me to a clinic. The hospitals were jammed but he found a clinic in Neuilly, a little bit away from the city.”

  “You were injured.”

  He touched the crescent scar on his cheek. “Cuts and burns.”

  “Your father must have been beside himself.”

  “The whole city went into panic mode. There were paramilitary sweeps through the Algerian neighborhoods, security everywhere. I was supposed to give a report to the police, but I never did. I just wanted to get the hell out of there. My dad and I had it out, that very night. I yelled at him to take me straight to the airport. I didn’t even know how to begin processing everything.”

  “Did your mother know about Celeste?”

  “No. Never. Well, maybe there was a time that I wondered if she did know, but let herself be duped.” His jaw bulged as he clenched his teeth. “Now it’s pretty clear she was clueless about my dad’s secrets until Celeste contacted her.”

  Faith hated secrets. Dennis had kept his worsening health from her for far too long, thinking he was protecting her. Instead, he had robbed her of the chance to help him, maybe even save him, or at least keep him with her longer.

  Mason glared over the arch of the steering wheel. Tension hardened his jaw and the grip of his hands. “Dad was full of excuses. He claimed they were just friends, he and Celeste. Of course he would say that—the standard line of a cheater. He offered some bullshit story about how she was going through some hard times and he was just comforting her.”

  “You said you saw them kissing.”

  “Yeah. Not the comforting kind of kiss. But I was just a dumb kid. I bought right into the story because it was a way to believe nothing was wrong. There was a part of me that wanted to believe him. I let him convince me that what I’d walked in on was an isolated incident. My dad... He had a way of knowing what a person wanted to hear, and a way of saying it just so. He used every cliché in the book, whipping them all out as if he carried them around in his wallet. Like, ‘It’s not what it seems. We’re just friends. I swear I won’t see her again. Your mom can’t know because she wouldn’t understand.’ That sort of thing.” He flexed his hands on the wheel. “And I lapped it up like a starving dog.”

  “It’s understandable. I think a boy would want to believe the best of his parents.”

  “He manipulated me, and I let him.” He let out a long, frustrated breath. “In the clinic that night, my father told me three lies. He said the friendship between him and Celeste was over. He said he didn’t know who Simon’s father was.”

  “And the third?”

  “He said if I kept my mouth shut, nothing would have to change for the family.”

  “Everything changed, didn’t it?” said Faith.

  “From my perspective, for sure. He made me believe it would be the end of our happy family if I told my mom what I’d seen.”

  Her heart constricted. “That’s a lot to lay on a kid.”

  “He didn’t order me not to tell. He said he would leave it up to me.”

  “Even worse. It put you in a terrible position.”

  He nodded. “I played my part. I guess we all did. What’s clear to me now is that I detached from both of my parents that night. I mean, it was going to happen anyway, since I was heading off to college.” He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “Needless to say, my summer in Paris ended abruptly. Dad and I managed to find seats on a flight to New York. At the airport, he went to a duty-free shop and picked out a Bulgari bracelet for my mom. I don’t recall saying one word to him on the flight home. I was on painkillers from the clinic, so all I remember is sleeping the whole way.”

  “Wow,” she said. “That’s some story.”

  He flipped down the visor to deflect the afternoon sun. “We spent the rest of the summer at my grandpa George’s place in Montauk. I went surfing with my friends, just like I wanted to do all along.” Mason was quiet for a bit. “Of course, after what happened in Paris, I wasn’t much interested in surfing.”

  “What became of the girl? Katia?”

  He let out a long sigh. “We’d need to drive to Chicago in order for me to finish that part of the story.”

  The idea of driving to Chicago with him in this car had a strange appeal to her. “Another time, maybe.”

  He nodded. “We still keep in touch, the five of us—Taye, Malcolm, Lisa and Katia. Lisa lost an eye in the incident and went through three marriages. Now she’s single, and she’s the best corporate attorney I know. My firm uses her all the time. Taye’s an economic affairs officer in the UN. Malcolm designs shoes. And Katia...she became a trauma surgeon. Specializes in putting people back together after terror attacks.”

  “A trauma surgeon. Did you tell her about your mother’s accident?”

  “No. It wouldn’t be a bad idea, though. She works for an NGO that sends surgeons to help victims of terrorism, so she’s traveling constantly. I haven’t talked to her directly in a couple of years.”

  “I appreciate you telling me all of this. I had no idea whether or not there was a connection between your mother getting a letter from Celeste Gauthier and having the accident that same night.”

  He flicked a glance in her direction. “You’re the first person who has heard any of this.”

  “Seriously? You haven’t confided in your fiancée?”

  “Regina?” He shook his head. “It’s been twenty years. To be honest, it’s not something that’s on my radar every day.”

  “It’s a lot to hold in for such a long time.”

  “I didn’t think I had a choice. And when my father swore it was over with Celeste, I decided to believe him. I feel duped, too.”

  “I can understand why you’d pull away from your father. But your mother?”

  “She knew something major had changed for me when I got back from Paris, so I let her assume it was the bombing. But the woman...well, you know her by now. She’s pretty damned intuitive.”

  “My girls and I have noticed that about her.”

  “I didn’t want her to ask questions I wasn’t prepared to answer. I’ve always been a lousy liar, but I’m good at keeping my mouth shut. I finished high school and went away to college, and kept hoping my dad was right about nothing changing for my family.” As he turned down the driveway, he glanced over at her. “How long has my mother known?”

  “You’ll have to ask her.”

  “Awesome,” he muttered.

  “She needs you, Mason. She needs to not feel alone.” Faith knew the comment came from a place inside herself that she rarely showed people—the place where pain hid. Every once in a while, she yearned to let someone else in there with her, to be her soft place to fall, but she had no one. Alice did, though. Alice had Mason.

  “Right,” he agreed. “Whatever. It’ll be a relief to get it over with.”

  “It’s easier to speak the truth than to keep a secret.”

  “So you say.”

  “Secrets have a way of sneaking out.”

  “Or exploding,” he said.

  * * *

  Mason stood in the doorway of the big sunlit sitting room, observing his mother, unseen. She was staring at her hand as if it held all the secrets of the universe. Ever so slowly, almost as if stirred by a breeze, her first two fingers moved.

  “Beautiful, Alice,” said Deborah, the physical therapist. “You’re making good progress.”

  Mason regarded her, this woman who used to dive off cliffs and ride a mountain bike down the slopes of volcanoes. His heart cracked apart, and he couldn’t help but wonder—was her suicide attempt really due to finding out about Celeste?

  “Hey, Mom,” he said, striding into the room.

  She lifted her eyebrows. �
�Well, well. This is a surprise.”

  “I just couldn’t stay away,” he said, bending to kiss her soft cheek. He shook hands with the PT. “Good to see you again.”

  “Your mother and I were just finishing up. The woman wears me out.”

  Mason grinned. “That’s my mom.”

  Once they were alone, he sat down across from her, leaned his elbows on his knees and carefully touched the tips of his fingers together, aligning them just so. “I have no idea how to start this conversation,” he said. “So I’ll just dive in.”

  She simply waited, regarding him without expression.

  “You received something in the mail from Celeste Gauthier.”

  Still no expression. “And?” she inquired.

  “Did she say why she was contacting you?”

  “I imagine it was prompted by her learning that Trevor had been killed.”

  Mason’s mouth went dry. “What does she want?”

  “I’ll answer that in a moment. I take it you know Celeste Gauthier.”

  Faith’s words went through his mind—Is it easier to speak the truth, or to keep a secret?

  “No,” he said. “I don’t know her. I saw her and the little kid, just once, twenty years ago when I was with Dad in Paris.”

  Her breath stopped momentarily, the first indication of surprise. “The summer of the metro bombing.”

  “Yes. I saw her and her little boy with him the night it happened.”

  Her gaze iced over. “And you didn’t see fit to tell me what was going on between your father and Celeste.”

  “Mom, I didn’t understand a damned thing that night. I mean, come on. A bombing. I staggered from St. Michel to the apartment, and there they were, obviously not expecting me.”

  “But later. Once you were back home in the States. Did it ever occur to you that I might need to be told about my husband’s affair? Did it ever cross your mind that I deserved to know my husband kept a mistress and fathered a child?”