The Nightingale(132)

“You know I will keep asking until you can’t stand it.”

He sighed and rolled onto his side.

“I think about you,” she said.

“Don’t.” His voice was rough.

“You kissed me,” she said. “It wasn’t a dream.”

“You can’t remember that.”

Isabelle felt something strange at his words, a breathless little flutter in her chest. “You want me as much as I want you,” she said.

He shook his head in denial, but it was the silence she heard; the acceleration of his breathing.

“You think I’m too young and too innocent and too impetuous. Too everything. I get it. People have always said that about me. I’m immature.”

“That’s not it.”

“But you’re wrong. Maybe you weren’t wrong two years ago. I did say I love you, which must have sounded insane.” She drew in a breath. “But it’s not insane now, Ga?tan. Maybe it’s the only sane thing in all of this. Love, I mean. We’ve seen buildings blown up in front of us and our friends are getting arrested and deported. God knows if we’ll ever see them again. I could die, Ga?tan,” she said quietly. “I’m not saying that in some schoolgirl-try-to-get-the-boy-to-kiss-me kind of way. It’s true and you know it. Either one of us could die tomorrow. And you know what I would regret?”

“What?”

“Us.”

“There can’t be an us, Iz. Not now. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you from the beginning.”

“If I promise to let it go, will you answer one question truthfully?”

“Just one?”

“One. And then I’ll go to sleep. I promise.”

He nodded.

“If we weren’t here—hiding in a safe house—if the world weren’t ripping itself apart, if this was just an ordinary day in an ordinary world, would you want there to be an us, Ga?tan?”

She saw how his face crumpled, how pain exposed his love.

“It doesn’t matter, don’t you see that?”

“It’s the only thing that matters, Ga?tan.” She saw love in his eyes. What did words matter after that?

She was wiser than she’d been before. Now she knew how fragile life and love were. Maybe she would love him for only this day, or maybe for only the next week, or maybe until she was an old, old woman. Maybe he would be the love of her life … or her love for the duration of this war … or maybe he would only be her first love. All she really knew was that in this terrible, frightening world, she had stumbled into something unexpected.

And she would not let it go again.

“I knew it,” she said to herself, smiling. His breath skimmed against her lips, as intimate as any kiss. She leaned over him, her gaze on him, steady, honest, and turned off the lamp.

In the dark, she snuggled against him, burrowed deeper under the blankets. At first he lay stiffly against her, as if he were afraid even to touch her, but gradually, he relaxed. He rolled onto his back and started to snore. Sometime—she didn’t know when—she closed her eyes and reached out, placing a hand in the hollow of his stomach, feeling it rise and fall with his breathing. It was like resting her hand on the ocean in summer, when the tide was coming in.

Touching him, she fell asleep.

*

The nightmares wouldn’t let her go. In some distant part of her brain she heard her own whimpering, heard Sophie say, “Maman, you’re taking all the blankets,” but none of it wakened her. In her nightmare, she was in a chair, being interrogated. The boy, Daniel. He’s a Jew. Give him to me, Von Richter said, shoving his gun in her face … then his face changed, melted a little, and he turned into Beck, who was holding the photograph of his wife and shaking his head, but the side of his face was missing … and then Isabelle lying on the floor, bleeding, saying, I’m sorry Vianne, and Vianne was yelling. You’re not welcome here …

Vianne woke with a start, breathing hard. The same nightmares had plagued her for six days; she consistently woke feeling exhausted and worried. It was November now, and there had been no word about Isabelle at all. She eased out from beneath the blankets. The floor was cold, but not as cold as it would be in a few weeks. She reached for the shawl she’d left on the foot of the bed and wrapped it around her shoulders.

Von Richter had claimed the upstairs bedroom. Vianne had abandoned the floor to him, choosing to move with her children into the smaller downstairs bedroom, where they slept together on the double bed.