Secrets of Paris_ A Novel - Luanne Rice [119]
It was just noon, early for lunch. Café proprietors stood outside their premises, smiling and nodding at passersby. Lydie and Michael stopped at each one, reading the menus set in metal frames by the doors. They chose a restaurant overlooking the old port. Across the boat basin stood the houses, ancient and askew, that Lydie remembered from their previous visit.
They sat side by side at a table near the back of the terrace, against the restaurant’s façade. Lydie smoothed the white paper cloth as Michael ordered the wine: Meursault.
“Meursault?” she asked, smiling. His choice was festive, significant: they always had it with shellfish.
“Let’s have a plateau de fruits de mer,” he said. “I feel like cracking shells.”
Lydie sipped the white wine, dry and flinty, understood that Michael was waiting for her to talk.
“A lot happened last night,” Lydie said, wanting to start off slowly.
“I’d like to hear about it,” Michael said.
“I know you would,” Lydie said, bursting to tell him, searching her mind for the words. What had seemed obvious, explainable, in the midst of an eighteenth-century château, could sound absurd in modern surroundings. Yet she believed, more strongly than ever, in the power of what had happened to her.
Michael was silent, watching her. “I was surprised you weren’t more upset to find me talking to Anne,” he finally said.
“I was upset, at first,” Lydie said, looking him straight in the eye. “I aimed a gun at both your heads.”
Michael said nothing, but held her gaze.
“Kelly stopped me. I wouldn’t have shot, but I didn’t want to put down the gun.”
“Why were you holding it at all?” Michael asked.
Lydie shrugged. Her heart pounded as it had last night. She wondered whether he would believe what she was about to tell him. “I had a vision,” she said.
“A vision?” he asked, frowning. “You mean like a religious vision?”
Lydie nodded, trying to keep her hands steady. “Well, I saw you and Anne, and of course I knew she was the one you had been with, and I went a little wild. Then, all of a sudden, I thought of my father. I can’t explain it.”
“What made you pick up the gun?”
“I’m not sure. I thought if I looked through the scope, I’d be able to see more clearly …” She paused, and Michael didn’t seem able to stand it.
“Tell me,” he said.
“I was thinking of how it was for him, how he had picked up that shotgun, pointed it … But Michael—I didn’t aim at you … I was looking down the gun barrel … God, this sounds weird.”
“At what?” Michael asked. “You were looking down the gun barrel at what?”
And then Lydie felt as calm as she had last night, at the instant she had lowered the gun. “I was looking into my father’s soul. As soon as I did, I understood him. I’ve kept myself from trying to ever since it happened. I had to see it my mother’s way—that he just went crazy—in order to be loyal to her. She can’t bear to understand that he really loved Margaret Downes. I guess I hate him for that. But he was my father, and I love him. And when I looked through the gun scope, I forgave him.”
“You did, Lydie?”
“Just holding the gun made my body feel different, like I had no control over my heart, my lungs, even my eyes. I realize how he must have felt. That second when he pulled the trigger, he didn’t have a choice.” Lydie heard her voice go up; she could imagine it stopping altogether. “I looked through the scope, and I saw you fighting with Anne. Just seeing you together made me want to kill you for a minute. Even though I could see that you didn’t want her there.”
“I didn’t.” Michael sat perfectly still, hanging on every word.
“My father didn’t know what he wanted,” Lydie said. “He loved us all—me, you, Mom. I know that now. But he loved her, Margaret, too. He couldn’t live