13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [63]
WHEN LOUISE GETS HOME, she does not waste a second. She swiftly packs a bag with a few of her clothes. She is breathing fast and deep. Her heart pounds when she opens her jewelry box, as if she is afraid that the thing she is looking for is not there. It is. She slips the hidden key into the pocket of her overcoat. She goes into her husband’s dresser and gets another key, this one to start up their motorcycle. This motorcycle they used to ride together on the country roads by his mother’s house now resides in the courtyard downstairs, unused and covered by a tarp against the elements.
She can drive it. Henri has taught her.
She picks up her bag and is about to fly out of the apartment when she pauses for a moment. She finds the pad of mulch paper on which she writes her grocery lists. With a pencil, she scrawls:
Henri—
I am gone for a couple of days to get some air. I will return. I love you. I’m sorry.
Your wife,
Louise
She leaves this note for him on the dining room table.
Downstairs, in the courtyard, she tears the tarp off the motorcycle, leaving it lying in a crumpled heap on the ground. She flings her bag into the sidecar. She straddles the thing and starts it up hard, and laughs when it comes to life immediately beneath her.
To ride this roaring machine alone under the clear uniform sky—how lovely!
The journey will be long. At some point she will have to refuel. Probably her back will get sore and her ears will ring with the thundering of the motor long after she shuts it off. Just the same, she is not worried; she knows the way. She explodes out into the street more determined than she has ever been in her life to wind her way out of this all-encompassing and beautiful city, to find herself nowhere, on her way to a place she is no longer welcome.
To trespass—without a doubt, one of her favorite crimes.
On her way out, she sees a streak of crimson on the edge of her dress sleeve. Oh, the stranger in the metro has bled on her a little. On this odd day, she wears his blood like an ornament, like a gift.
She thinks of the metro conductor, alone in his cabin all day, plowing into underground passages in a wailing machine full of faceless masses who never register his presence. He always sees darkness ahead, though he knows the shape of the path so well from taking it every day that his very body anticipates every curve of the rail. He is in numb harmony with it, and indeed the racket of the metro might even be a sort of white music to him.
Such is his daily work. He must have time to think. It musn’t be so bad.
When she gets to her destination, she will not even bother to change out of her bloody clothes.
The speed does not make her dizzy, and she is not worried that she doesn’t have a driver’s license. She knows nothing will impede her journey, and no one will halt her. No one will even see her and stop to wonder what a lone woman could possibly be doing on a weekday morning flying out of Paris on a motorcycle, the blast of wind penetrating her buttoned coat and swirling around inside her dress, against her thrilled and shivering limbs.
That confounded girl, she thinks one last time, and decides to push her out of her mind for the duration of the trip, as Garance is not her biggest worry. Conception is on her mind now—the possibility of illegitimate life, unplanned and unknown but perhaps not unwelcome.
THE LINDEN TREES THAT line the path from the road to the house are much taller than the ones at the Palais Royal garden, unshaped by the trimming blades of a composition-minded gardener. Their leaves have mostly fallen. The clear, cold, blue sky is visible through their outreaching branches.
She pulls in and parks the motorcycle in the courtyard in front of the