Little Death by the Sea (33 page)

The nun, dressed in blue-black capes and a
starched white headdress looked at Maggie as though she did not
understand.

Maggie berated herself for not taking Zouk up
on her offer to come along and interpret. She had been so keen to
do this alone, almost as if the errand were a crusade with the
final understanding of her sister as some kind of personal Holy
Grail. Maggie took in a determined breath. No, she thought
stubbornly, as difficult as everyone in Paris was obviously going
to make this for her, she knew she wanted to do it alone.

“
Le archives de patients
?” Maggie
asked, smiling in the face of the stone wall in a habit. “Est-
ce
que je peux voir le archives de patients enciente Americaine, s’il
vous plait? Pour l’annee de une mille dix-neuf quartre-vingt six,
merci
.” Might I see the files for any American patients giving
birth within the last five years?

The nun looked away from Maggie and flipped
through a large book on the desk. Abruptly, the Sister left her
post altogether, leaving Maggie standing on tiptoe on the other
side of the counter not knowing whether she was heard or understood
or dismissed. She noted there was very little activity in the
waiting room area. A young mother sat with her baby, both gazing,
as if hypnotized, out the front window. Faintly, Maggie could hear
a hoarse moaning drift down one of the four corridors that emptied
into the main reception area where she stood. The entrance hall was
studded with high, ornately-carved wooden columns, perhaps twenty
in all, each buffed and kneaded to a glossy, copper-colored sheen.
The waiting room chairs were rickety, wooden affairs—likewise
brutally polished and oiled—and topped with hand-made green
velveteen cushions. Maggie got a mental image of a whole convent
full of women sitting around stitching green velour pillows for the
hospital waiting room when it was certainly cheaper and easier to
buy pre-fab foam seat pads. Maggie found herself reaching out to
touch one of the immaculately glimmering columns. Her eyes met
those of the young mother.

After a few moments, the stern-faced Sister
returned. She looked directly at Maggie.

“
A quelle annee
?” she said in a sweet
voice that belied her harsh face.

“Uh...
nineteen...er, quarant-huit
?”
Maggie said lamely. Oh, man, why didn’t I get Zouk or Laurent to
write this stuff out for me, she thought miserably.

The nun made an exasperated noise and spun
out a rapid-fire reprimand in complicated, incomprehensible French.
She slapped down a piece of paper and a pencil on the counter in
front of Maggie.

Maggie scrawled out the date and under that,
the name “Newberry.” The woman snatched it up and read it. Making
another sound in her chest that must have caused some discomfort,
the nun twisted on her heel and disappeared again. Maggie turned to
look around her and noted that the bored young woman in the waiting
room was now watching her openly.

Within moments the nun was back with a
folder. She indicated that Maggie was to take the folder to a
straight back wooden chair to the immediate left of the counter
where the nun would be able to keep her in sight at all times.
Maggie took the folder and settled into the uncomfortable chair,
smiling gratefully at the Sister.

She opened the folder and found only one slip
of paper inside. It was Nicole’s birth certificate. It read:
Nèe
l8 May. Mere: Elise Stevenson Newberry. Pere: inconnu
. Unknown.
Maggie felt a surge of anger at Gerard’s refusal to be accounted as
the father and then corrected her emotion. The last thing any child
would want was a document that linked her to that creep, she
reasoned. Her face lightened into a smile. This meant that Gerard
had no legal claim to Nicole! In the middle of the certificate was
the full name of Elise’s baby, handwritten, no doubt, by one of the
nuns, in full-flowery scroll: Margaret Nicole Newberry. Maggie
stared at the words. Elise had named her baby after Maggie.

Swallowing her emotion, Maggie looked around
for a copier machine, knowing she would not find one and then
looked over at the scowling nun who was bending over a large
ledger. Maggie tucked the birth certificate into her jacket pocket
and closed the file.

Returning the empty file to the counter,
Maggie thanked the nun brightly and fled out the front door.

Once outside, the sunshine hit her full in
the face as the cool breeze of the late morning sent her hair
billowing around her shoulders like a loose silk scarf. Elise had
never told anyone Nicole’s full name, Maggie thought as she hurried
away from the shambling old hospital. No one knew and no one would
ever have known unless they came to this desolate street in
degenerate Montmartre. Even Michele Zouk hadn’t known that Elise
had named her only child after Maggie, her only sister.

Maggie touched the pocket which held Nicole’s
birth certificate. Her mother would be glad to see this, she
thought. She would be glad to safely file this document away in the
Newberry archives along with all the other family documents.

She stopped at a stand-up pizzeria and bought
a slice of pizza and a can of Coke and consumed her lunch as she
walked down
Boulevard de Clichy
, a street as cheerless and
ugly as any she’d found in Montmartre so far. Pigeons flocked and
crowded her until she finally gave up the bulk of her lunch to
them, scattering it in handfuls in the air and stepping away from
the frenzy of feathers that resulted.

The address that Zouk had given her for Elise
and Gerard’s old apartment was 1/2 Bijoux in Montmartre. She had
been warned that it wasn’t a proper street and didn’t appear on any
maps of the neighborhood so she was prepared to have to hunt for
it. Across from the Moulin Rouge, with its gaily-lighted blades,
and before Clichy jammed into
Rue Caulaincourt
, Maggie could
see the ghostly spires and columns of Montmartre Cemetery and she
knew she was close. Zouk had said that Elise would often write of
the view of the celebrated cemetery from her flat. Maggie
approached it slowly, looking around, trying to find in the rows
and rows of ancient, towering apartment buildings the window that
might have been Elise’s perch as she wrote to her friend,
Michele.

A large orange neon-painted bread truck
pulled away from the curb in front of Maggie, quickly revealing the
alleyway.
1/2 Bijoux
. Barely wide enough to allow two mopeds
abreast, it was paved with large, rough cobblestones bordered on
both sides by a long, thin gutter. The alley entranceway smelled of
stewed cabbage.

A long row of colored wooden doors lined each
side of the small street. Bright colors of blue and red and yellow,
the paint peeled off in big gouging wedges to reveal gray,
depressing portals to the lives that lay within. A small boy
emerged from one of the painted doors. He glimpsed Maggie and ran
squealing down the alley to dart into another door. The stone steps
of the street echoed his laughter until it seemed to Maggie, that
it nearly drowned out the traffic noises from the main street.

She looked for numbers by the doors but there
were none that she could see. The very brick of the buildings
seemed to envelope her. She began to feel suffocated, even nervous.
Elise lived here, she thought? It was just one more wretched street
in a whole wretched neighborhood. But the fact that Gerard could
bring Elise here—where she would live with her baby, little
Nicole—was, in Maggie’s eyes, further evidence of the man’s guilt
and general uselessness as a human being.

An old woman swept mindlessly at the dust and
dirt on a broken threshold. Maggie approached her.

“Pardon, Madame?” Maggie said. “Uh...
je
cherche pour une apartment. Est-ce que vous m’aider,
peut-etre
?” Maggie didn’t care how her French came out. She
knew she couldn’t speak it well enough not to escape a Parisian’s
scorn so she didn’t care to obsess about it. Get the right verbs
out and who cares what tense they’re in, she reasoned. They’ll get
the idea.

Usually.

The woman stopped sweeping and stared at
Maggie.

Maggie tried again. “
Je voudrais
l’apartment de demi Bijoux. Comprenez-vous, Madame?
”

Within seconds another woman appeared in a
nearby doorway. She was about Maggie’s age but her face looked
crushed by time and harsh weather. Her eyes were a beautiful light
blue which negated the travesty of her life. She was dressed in a
soiled daydress of bright poppies. She was very thin with wiry gray
hair that hunched on her shoulders like a diseased Pomeranian. And,
like the broom-woman who had resumed her sweeping, her face
appeared ravaged and old before its time. She crossed her thin arms
in front of her chest and stared at Maggie. A strong odor of urine
and cooking food drifted from her doorway.

“
Madame
?” she barked at Maggie.

“
Oui, Madame
.” Maggie licked her lips
and tried to smile. “
Je voudrais l’apartment de demi
Bijoux,
” she said. “
Je cherche
—“

“Madame is renting the apartment?” the woman
interrupted nasally.

Maggie swallowed and forced another smile to
her lips.

“
Pas exactement, Madame
,” she said.
Not exactly. She held out the scrap of paper with Elise’s name and
Cote d’Azure address scrawled on it.

The woman in the flowered poppy dress took
the paper and scrutinized it. She motioned for Maggie to follow
her.

The doorway was about four and a half feet
high and Maggie instantly got a picture of her tall sister having
to stoop every time she entered the building. It was no wonder
these women looked twenty years older than they should, Maggie
thought, as the woman unlocked the miniature door and gestured for
Maggie to enter.

Maggie bent over and took a step inside. She
heard the scurrying of tiny feet and then not-so-tiny feet as if
little animals had been interrupted in the midst of some activity.
It was dark and her eyes could just make out the profile of a short
staircase in the gloom. Behind her, her guide slammed the door shut
on the dim sunlight, immersing them into complete darkness. She
then snapped on a feeble overhead lamp and led Maggie up the
stairs.

At the top of the stairs was another door,
this time of normal height.

“
Poussez-vous
!” the woman urged from
behind.

Maggie placed her hand against the rough
wood, careful of splinters, and gave a gentle push. It yielded
against her hand. There was no lock, no latch, not even a shutting
mechanism to keep the door firmly against its jamb. Had Elise lived
here with just the downstairs lock on her door? Maggie wondered, as
she stepped into the room beyond.

Inside, light seeped into the room through
the slits of the loosely shuttered windows. Maggie squinted and
waited for Madame to find the light switch. Instead, the woman
pushed past Maggie and strode to the window. With a loud grating
sound, she unlatched the shutters and whipped them outward. The
room filled with the gray light from the alley. Madame moved across
the room and began working on the opposite window.

Maggie looked around her. It was a pest-hole.
One room of very dark wood and no furniture save a large and ugly
armoire. The sounds of the little creatures living behind the walls
were loud and constant. On one dirty, bleak wall, someone had
painted a group of gilt-framed silhouettes. A man, a baby, a woman.
Maggie felt a catch in her throat as she looked at Elise’s whimsy,
her family. She imagined her sister painting them. Her back to the
south window, waiting for the sun to create the shadow, waiting for
the light to come to her. Against the wall was a small iron sink,
rusted black and filthy from the years. Unwillingly, Maggie
intercepted another barrage of images. This time of Elise bathing
Baby Nicole in the sink. Of Elise washing her long mane of pale
curls in that sink.

Madame jerked open the last of the windows
and a different kind of light filled the room. Bright and lifting,
this light came from the window that faced away from the alley,
away from the heart of Montmartre. Maggie walked to the window and
looked out. The grim, stately stone markers of Montmartre Cemetery
spread out below her, its few large trees shading the dead, the
celebrated and the wretched. Elise would have sat at this window in
order to see the cemetery and to write Michele and she would have
used this light by which to paint. Maggie felt a tremendous sadness
and wished there were a place where she could sit down for a
moment. To think that Elise had been living for three years in this
slum and her Atlanta family had never had a clue.

“Two hundred
francs, Mademoiselle
.”
The woman stood in front of Maggie, her arms again pressed rigidly
across her bony chest. “You are understanding?”

Maggie leaned gently against one of the
windowsills, her head whirling in the close heat of the apartment.
She nodded at the woman. Understood. Two hundred
francs
to
rent. She apologized for wasting the woman’s time and left the
little apartment.

3

He placed the newspaper on the kitchen table,
knowing she was watching him from her position at the sink. He
reached for his cooling coffee, refusing to look at her for the
moment.

“Any good headlines?” Darla asked quietly,
her voice casual to cloak the fear she’d begun to feel these
days.

“Still complaining about the traffic on the
perimeter loop,” Gerry said, taking a long sip of coffee.

“You’d think they’d be bored with that.”
Darla carried her coffee to the table and sat down with him.
“They’ve only had the perimeter for twenty-seven years now.”

Gerry noted the distancing pronoun “they”
instead of the more familiar “we” and felt a small satisfaction.
She was coming around. She was already starting to say good-bye to
this place. She would be ready to leave when it was time.