The Nightingale(178)

Isabelle didn’t understand. She shook her head.

“He’s been here, remember? After Tours. He brought you home.”

My nightingale, I got you home.

“Oh.

“He won’t think I’m pretty anymore.” Isabelle tried to smile, but she knew it was a failure.

Vianne put an arm around Isabelle and gently turned her around. “We will go and write him a letter.”

“I don’t know where to send it,” Isabelle said, leaning against her sister, shivering with cold and fire.

How did she make it home? She wasn’t sure. She vaguely remembered Antoine carrying her up the stairs, kissing her forehead, and Sophie bringing her some hot broth, but she must have fallen asleep at some point because the next thing she knew night had fallen.

Vianne sat sleeping in a chair beneath the window.

Isabelle coughed.

Vianne was on her feet in an instant, fixing the pillows behind Isabelle, propping her up. She dunked a cloth in the water at the bedside, wrung out the excess, and pressed it to Isabelle’s forehead. “You want some marrow broth?”

“God, no.”

“You’re not eating anything.”

“I can’t keep it down.”

Vianne reached for the chair and dragged it close to the bed.

Vianne touched Isabelle’s hot, wet cheek and gazed into her sunken eyes. “I have something for you.” Vianne got up from her chair and left the room. Moments later, she was back with a yellowed envelope. She handed it to Isabelle. “This is for us. From Papa. He came by here on his way to see you in Girot.”

“He did? Did he tell you that he was going to turn himself in to save me?”

Vianne nodded and handed Isabelle the letter.

The letters of her name blurred and elongated on the page. Malnutrition had ruined her eyesight. “Can you read it to me?”

Vianne unsealed the envelope and withdrew the letter and began to read.

Isabelle and Vianne,

What I do now, I do without misgiving. My regret is not for my death, but for my life. I am sorry I was no father to you.

I could make excuses—I was ruined by the war, I drank too much, I couldn’t go on without your maman—but none of that matters.

Isabelle, I remember the first time you ran away to be with me. You made it all the way to Paris on your own. Everything about you said, Love me. And when I saw you on that platform, needing me, I turned away.

How could I not see that you and Vianne were a gift, had I only reached out?

Forgive me, my daughters, for all of it, and know that as I say good-bye, I loved you both with all of my damaged heart.

Isabelle closed her eyes and lay back into the pillows. All her life she’d waited for those words—his love—and now all she felt was loss. They hadn’t loved each other enough in the time they had, and then time ran out. “Hold Sophie and Antoine and your new baby close, Vianne. Love is such a slippery thing.”

“Don’t do that,” Vianne said.

“What?”

“Say good-bye. You’ll get strong and healthy and you’ll find Ga?tan and you’ll get married and be there when this baby of mine is born.”

Isabelle sighed and closed her eyes. “What a pretty future that would be.”

*

A week later, Isabelle sat in a chair in the backyard, wrapped in two blankets and an eiderdown comforter. The early May sun blazed down on her and still she was trembling with cold. Sophie sat in the grass at her feet, reading her a story. Her niece tried to use a different voice for each character and sometimes, even as bad as Isabelle felt, as much as her bones felt too heavy for her skin to bear, she found herself smiling, even laughing.

Antoine was somewhere, trying to build a cradle out of whatever scraps of wood Vianne hadn’t burned during the war. It was obvious to everyone that Vianne would be going into labor soon; she moved slowly and seemed always to have a hand pressed to the small of her back.

With closed eyes, Isabelle savored the beautiful commonness of the day. In the distance, a church bell pealed. Bells had been ringing constantly in the past week to herald the war’s end.

Sophie’s voice stopped abruptly in the middle of a sentence.

Isabelle thought she said “keep reading,” but she wasn’t sure.

She heard her sister say, “Isabelle,” in a tone of voice that meant something.

Isabelle looked up. Vianne stood there, flour streaking her pale, freckled face and dusting her apron, her reddish hair bound by a frayed turban. “Someone is here to see you.”