Secrets of Paris_ A Novel - Luanne Rice [67]
The other, more important reason was Lydie’s profound belief that no two people could ever love each other the way she and Michael did. It went so deep, she actually groaned—out loud—to think she could have lost it. She had trusted Michael to love her forever because she had known she would love him forever. She hated herself for turning it into something banal: taking him for granted. She remembered how she had signed notes to him in the first years of their marriage: “Yours till the butterflies … yours till Niagara Falls … Lydie.” The memory made her cringe.
She forced herself to remember the day. She and Michael were cooking in their kitchen on West Tenth Street. He had been ominously upset ever since the night before, when Lydie’s father had taken him to some lumberyard in Yonkers.
“Tell me what happened,” Lydie said. She and Michael knew little about family intrigue, but he had been hinting about trouble with Neil ever since he’d come home.
“I think your father’s having a midlife crisis,” Michael said.
Neil Fallon was an extravagantly emotional Irishman, so this theory did not sound at all far-fetched to Lydie. “I’m sure he’ll survive it,” she had said.
Now, looking back at it from the Carré des Innocents in Paris, she couldn’t believe those had actually been her words. Had they? She wracked her brain, trying to remember. As if it mattered! Detectives had rung the bell just half an hour later. On a little card in his wallet, Neil had listed Michael and Lydie as the ones to notify in case of emergency. In a different case—an accident, or a heart attack—the police would have acted differently. Lydie could practically see and hear those other policemen: lowered heads, a sympathetic tone of voice. But Neil had murdered a young woman.
The detective had spoken harshly, asking strange questions that made Lydie think that she herself was suspected of a crime. After three or four questions, Michael had put his arm around her shoulders and whispered that she shouldn’t answer. “Tell us what happened,” Michael had said to the detective.
“Cornelius Fallon is dead,” the detective had said, almost as an afterthought. “It was a murder-suicide.”
The possibility of her father as a murderer was so impossible that Lydie had gasped and asked who had killed her father. When the detective told her the truth, she had turned to Michael. She remembered how carefully he watched her, as if he knew she was going to break and he knew he couldn’t do anything to stop it. She remembered the feeling of his arms around her shoulders and his voice calmly telling the detective he couldn’t ask her any more questions. And Lydie remembered knowing, even before the detective left her kitchen, that her father had given her up, had deliberately bargained her away. Because he would know, by his actions, that for the rest of her life Lydie would first think of him as a killer, second as her father.
This conversation lasted an hour, and it is impossible to repeat it all, but I certainly made myself very pleasant throughout this time and I can say without vanity that she was very glad to have someone to talk to, for her heart was overflowing.
—TO COULANGES, DECEMBER 1670
“SURPRISE!” PATRICE STOOD in Lydie’s doorway, holding out the magenta cotton parao she had brought as a gift. Keeping secret her return to Paris had not been easy; twice last night she had nearly called Lydie even though she had decided, on the plane from Saint-Tropez, that it would be more fun, more festive just to show up. She had given fifteen francs to Lydie’s concierge to let her up unannounced. But Lydie was not exactly taking it as Patrice had hoped. For one thing, she was frowning.