For the past two years, Rosalyn had been putting one foot in front of the other, like a good soldier marching off to war.
The directive had kept her upright and working, with only intermittent sessions on the bathroom floor, gazing at the medicine cabinet. One foot in front of the other kept her functioning while she settled Dash’s estate and came to understand the full extent of her disastrous financial situation. It kept her going while she represented Hugh’s wine selection to restaurants, grocery outlets, and liquor stores; pretended to enjoy an occasional get-together with friends; and now landed in France on a trip most would envy.
One foot in front of the other had kept her marking time. Feeling more and more isolated with each passing day, not only from her life with Dash but from the world as a whole. From herself.
Rosalyn had practiced meditation and breathing exercises and yoga. She had hiked in the redwoods and strolled by the ocean. She had tried journaling but stayed away from art projects—it was too raw, too emotional, to return to the creativity that had once sustained her but now served only to remind her of what it had been like to be happy.
She had stopped going to therapy when the counselor mentioned—tossed off in an almost passing way—that “In this life, pain is not optional, but suffering is.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” had been the response screaming inside Rosalyn’s head. Suffering is optional? She had rolled the concept around in her mind for a few days but couldn’t absorb the meaning. It felt too much like blame.
Rosalyn canceled her next appointment and didn’t go back.
The truth was that there was no remedy to losing a loved one. No way to reframe it, no matter how talented the therapist. No one could say anything to make it better; nothing could be done about it. It was just there, hunkering down, a malevolent, unbearable weight she was forced to carry.
“I’m still alive, aren’t I?” Rosalyn felt like saying to anyone who suggested she wasn’t coping well. It was just that . . . mere survival didn’t feel like enough anymore.
One foot in front of the other.
Chapter Six
Lucie
In the before time, the time of sweet oblivion, we had no idea what was to come.
I recall once I threw quite a fit of pique because the pink of my ribbon was not the right hue. I had wanted the ashes of roses of a woman, not the brash, rosy pink of a little girl. After our home was destroyed, I found the length of ribbon in the ruins and used it as a tourniquet on a young soldier whose leg had been blown off by a mortar.
I am quite certain he did not mind which shade of pink was the ribbon.
After war was declared, my father insisted I finally accept an offer of marriage, and so I acquiesced to a young man from a fine family. Like everything else, he was taken away by the war. He rarely writes, or if he does, the letters don’t come through. It is hard to imagine him on a battlefield; he had soft hands and an easy, dandified way about him. He is now an officer with the army, but when here in Reims, he had enjoyed parties and dancing and dressing just so.
In the before time, we couldn’t believe our German neighbors to the north would decide to take possession of us. It would be like someone in the house next door, a friend and colleague, coming by and announcing: “This is now my house. You will stay and serve me, or you will die.” The invasion seemed just that absurd.
Under whose authority does a country, a people, a government, decide such things? Back when my father taught me lessons as I idly spun the big globe in the corner of his study, he would explain that war was terrible but was sometimes necessary.
Father was wrong. This war is indeed terrible, but it is in no way necessary.
I remember the first shell that smashed through the walls of our house. I had been descending the stairs—the massive spiral stairs of which my father was so proud—and the clock on the wall was chiming to tell us it was nine o’clock. It had struck only four chimes when the world exploded.
My ears rang, and I saw but could not hear the tinkling of the shattered windows, shards of glass raining down upon me. I fell several steps down, covered in the white plaster dust of a wall that had disappeared.
Concussion is so . . . odd. It leaves one feeling sure one is dead, even without showing any apparent injury. I could not believe I remained whole.
Later, my nose would bleed and my head would ache, perhaps from injury, or maybe my mind itself was damaged and scarred. Later, I would muffle my cries in a pillow while Maman carefully picked out the hundreds of tiny splinters of glass embedded in my skin. Later, she would apply her special salve of thyme and lavender, telling me my young flesh would heal with very little trace of the wounds I had suffered.
Much later, I realized that I had survived a shelling, probably by inches. Had I been one step higher or lower on the stairs, I might have lost my legs, or worse.
But at the time I could think only: Am I dead? Have I died this easily?
* * *
Papa was too old and frail to join our boys who went to fight; our sweet Henri does what he can, but he, too, was rejected by the military as unsuitable.
So we all remained at our poor, wounded house—a home once so fine it had its own name: Villa Traverne. Several refugees helped us to cover the gaping holes with tar paper to protect us from the rain, and we stayed living there, as though in a giant dollhouse, pretending it was normal to mount stairs that no longer had a wall.
Ours was not the worst on the block. What had once been an esteemed neighborhood now lay open and vulnerable like a stripped carcass, its streets clogged by piles of masonry and broken furniture, and even the bodies of friends and neighbors.
Our homes, our haven, our Reims, in ruins.
In September of 1914, the Germans shelled us for half an hour even though they had already taken control of the city. They wanted to frighten us, make us small. And they did. The streets looked like an artist’s conception of hell: iron girders contorted into tortured angles, massive wooden beams splintered into kindling. I am still haunted by the doors and windows that remained, even when all around them had been destroyed. Naked stairways leading into the sky, into the void.
My father begged us to evacuate, but my mother refused.
Maman is unusual for a woman of station. Eugénie Dubois was raised as the daughter of a farmer in the hills outside of Besançon, and learned from her own very humble grandmother how to make salves and ointments from herbs and oils. Though she took on the airs of a fine lady after marrying my father, war changes things. She started knitting sweaters and scarves for the children when the first war refugees arrived in Reims; later, when our neighbor’s son showed up on our doorstep in need of care, she took him in and tended to his wounds.
Word spread quickly, and soon enough our once-fine Villa Traverne became a makeshift clinic, providing refuge to those unable to fight but not so gravely injured as to be evacuated to the military hospital.