13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [77]
“That flower is crazy!” Garance says. “It will die immediately at the first frost. And still it tries.”
“You know,” Louise says without forethought while she looks at the girl’s limpid green eyes and wind-pinkened cheeks, “the boy I loved during the war used to press pansies into his letters to let me know he was thinking of me.” 48
“Oh… it was… not Henri?” Garance asks gingerly.
“His name was Camille.”
“What happened?”
“He died, of course.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right. It was a long time ago.”
“Sometimes time doesn’t matter.”
“That’s true.” Louise sighs. “How did you get to be so wise?”
“Must be all the music, I suppose.” Garance shrugs, as if this connection is evident.
Louise laughs, delighted at the girl’s matter-of-factness. “Well, aren’t you dreadfully modest!”
Garance turns back to the flower. “Look at that bold little thing. Isn’t it a shame that it will have to die before it withers on its own? It’s already getting colder.”
“Well, it should die for a cause, then,” Louise proclaims as she leaps over the fence.
“What are you doing?” Garance squeals.
“I would like to have it,” Louise answers breathlessly as she bends over quickly and plucks the flower with a sharp tug. Just as the stem breaks cleanly in her hand, she hears a shrill sound that almost knocks her out of her body.
“A gendarme!” Garance frets as she jumps madly in place, waving Louise on to leap back over the fence. “Run like hell!”
In a flash, Louise sees the angry man in his navy blue uniform running straight for her, his face a gleaming crimson as he puffs out his cheeks, blowing his whistle for dear life. She is in trouble with the authorities, yet the elation in her speeding heart makes her exploit take on an air of unreality, as if she is watching herself from a great height. She clambers back over the fence, much more awkwardly than the catlike bound she took over it the first time, still carefully holding the flower so as not to crush it. When she is safely over, she runs like hell, listening to Garance breathing fast and heavy between gusts of laughter as she runs beside her, neither looking back at the screaming man behind them.
The two of them shout in glee at the open blue sky together, Louise holding the fresh moist flower pressed neatly between her palms, her hands held flat against each other as if in prayer. She thinks of Xavier’s mouth pressed against hers; she thinks of her brother making funny faces at her in church; she thinks of the woman who gave her life so that she could be here today trespassing and committing this small act of thievery; she thinks of the jumble of all the days before and all the days after, yet somehow there is only this moment, only this moment as she runs toward home with this giggling girl who loves her so, only this moment that she will have to somehow preserve, for the record.
Off the Record
Paris, June
Josianne is sitting at her desk quite bored when a clerk from the mailroom comes up to her bearing an armload of envelopes. He looks slightly irritated at having trudged up the stairs for what he clearly considers an annoying errand. “Can you give these to the American?” he says as he hands her a stack of large yellow envelopes. “He never fetches his mail and his box is full.”
“Certainly.”
“Since I came all the way up here, I brought your mail too,” he announces gruffly as he drops a few small white envelopes on her desk, then leaves without waiting for her thanks.
Josianne looks over the packets for Trevor. She is vexed with him: he suddenly disappeared. After the love they made, once, twice, three times—then he was gone. She is stricken, disappointed. Is he scared? She wants to be indifferent to the packets waiting on her desk for him, but they are too mysterious: six of them, of uniform size and heft, all addressed neatly to Monsieur Trevor Neville Stratton at his office, bearing canceled stamps but no return addresses. There is something irresistibly compelling about them, as if they are radiating some faint exhalation of strangeness, like exotic objects brought from very