“You’ve had more dreams?”
She nodded gravely.
“Juliet again?”
She looked up at him and could feel the pain that Juliet had felt before she’d jumped into the Seine. He must have seen it on her face, because he took another step toward her and leaned down and kissed her forehead. “Juliet, is it you?”
She found that she was overcome. Tears began to flow down her cheeks and she stood—or Luke pulled her up, she wasn’t sure, but Nora wrapped her body around his and kissed him softly on the lips.
“Have you come back to me?”
“I have.”
“I’m so sorry, Juliet.” He held her face in his hands. “I behaved horribly.”
Nora knew what he meant. The memory and the pain were close to her like they’d happened not forty years ago, but hours ago. For all Nora knew, it could have actually happened yesterday. Nora was—and wasn’t—a different person. The lifetime of memories as Nora had put flesh on Juliet’s skeleton—had expanded Juliet’s experiences and both amplified and softened her pain. “I loved you, but you knew that. How could you not?”
“And I loved you, but I was terrified of it. I didn’t think we could be together. You will never know how ashamed I was after…” Nora could see the tears in his eyes and the tightness in his jaw. He was trying not to break down in front of her.
“After I died.”
Luke closed his eyes.
Nora pulled him toward her and kissed him. Then there were the stairs, his room, his bed. A long day into night and then into morning as if they had a lifetime to catch up on.
23
Nora Wheeler
Paris, March 1940
Paris was eerily quiet as Nora turned onto Rue des Écoles. She’d gotten used to seeing the sandbags, the missing statues, the trucks driving out of the city—always out of the city. The Parisians, so proud, were terrified their buildings would end up in rubble, so they’d begun quietly packing valuables and placing them in trucks that had been running south in a steady stream since the fall of 1938. The children were also gone, parks emptied of them, packed like treasures and sent to Burgundy.
And those who had remained in Paris had their eyes focused sharply on one thing—a line of fortresses and fortifications that ran from the north in La Ferté to the Rhine River. The Maginot Line promised to keep German forces from entering France… Paris. Whether the line would hold was the discussion at all the dinner parties. Paris had to hold, both the city and the way of life. There was something special about Paris to protect, so Parisians removed things and sandbagged, looking up for the sounds of anything coming. Over the past year, the dinner parties had gotten noticeably smaller, people turning down invitations because they were traveling south or to America to see family “only for a short time.” But no one ever returned. The quiet emptying of everything in the city was a silent vote of no confidence in the much-heralded Maginot Line.
Nora stopped in at the bookstore on Rue des Écoles. Each week more shops closed, and it was quite common for Nora to reach a store only to find it shuttered. She’d have to begin the quest to find something that was still open, even if in another arrondissement. When her memories of Juliet had come back, she walked the streets looking in at the windows, marveling at the changes. And for a long time, she stood at the Pont Neuf, trying to find the courage to look down. The girl who’d jumped felt so close to her in recent memories, yet Nora had lived another whole lifetime with different sadnesses carving indelible marks.
As she passed the newsstand, she eyed the cover of Le Figaro. Mussolini had announced that he was joining Hitler, and the British had not succeeded in an air raid in Sylt. They’d handed out gas masks last week, but she doubted she’d see that news in the paper. In the small English section, Nora spied Lillibet Denton. More accurately, it was Lillibet Denton who spied Nora. And that was a problem.
Standing on a stool, Nora was reaching for a Collected Works of Shakespeare edition that was just out of her grasp.
“It is you?” said a voice from below.
Nora looked down to see her friend smiling up at her. For a moment, Nora was overcome with joy, but then she realized that she couldn’t be recognized. The safe world she’d created with Luke was now shattered.
“It is you. They said you’d drowned.” Lillibet put her hand to her face and laughed. “Something about a party for me on a boat in Long Beach,” she continued. “Did you know that? As if I’d ever be caught dead in Long Beach. I thought it was all a bunch of bull shit.”
Nora smiled at her friend’s habit of cutting words in two. Bull shit. Where Nora, the girl from Akron, would have simply said bullshit. She’d missed her friend and realized how absurd it was that she, herself, had believed that Lillibet had invited her on a birthday cruise. Had Nora not been so despondent over Billy’s death, she might have been more clearheaded about the invitation.
“Well, I didn’t die,” said Nora, stepping off the stool to hug her friend.
“So it would seem,” said Lillibet, touching her hair. “I almost didn’t recognize you.”
“It’s my natural color,” said Nora. “Hair dye is getting harder to come by these days.”
“Yes,” said Lillibet. “I’m headed back to the States on a boat in two days. I’m hoping we aren’t torpedoed.” The woman stared at Nora like she was trying to absorb every line and pore on her face. “Nora Wheeler, what happened to you?”
“Oh, Lillibet… it’s a long story,” began Nora. “I was rescued from a very bad man.”
“They said you’d killed Billy. I didn’t believe it.”
“No,” said Nora. “I did not shoot Billy.” Nora felt the distinction was correct. She had killed Billy—or the curse had; she just didn’t pull the trigger. Clint had done that.
The clerk tapped Nora on the shoulder and told her that the Émile Zola translation she was looking for was not in stock. Nora smiled and asked when it might be in. The clerk put up a finger to check. Upon turning back to Lillibet, Nora found her friend’s eyebrow raised.
“Your French is quite proficient,” said Lillibet.
“Well, I live here now,” admitted Nora. “Paris is as beautiful as you described.”
“You have no trace of an American accent,” pushed the woman. “How odd.”
Nora knew she owed her friend an explanation, but honestly, how could she explain that she was actually a French girl from Challans who’d jumped off the Pont Neuf before the turn of the century? She couldn’t say that sometimes she visited the Louvre and sat in front of the paintings by Auguste Marchant just to look at herself as a young woman who’d posed almost forty-five years ago. The truth would not make anything clearer for Lillibet. The truth sounded crazy.
Pulling up the collar of her raincoat, Nora was concerned that Lillibet was drawing attention to her; this fear she felt in being discovered was visceral. And just as she’d felt a tingle in her finger before she’d played piano in Beverly Hills, now a tingle began at the tip of her tongue and began to flow through her. Remembering this feeling from the Pont Neuf the night a man had tried to help Juliet before she’d jumped, Nora knew what would happen next. Her mouth began to speak words that were not hers. “Lillibet. You don’t want to tell anyone you’ve seen me. Do you understand?” It was more of a request, a plea even, but Nora noticed the strange effect her words had.