Sarah's Key (38 page)

He already felt like he was out of my life. Like he had already left.

That night, every time I rose to feed the hungry child, I thought of the States. Boston? No, I hated the idea of going back to the past, to my childhood city.

And then I knew.

New York. Zoë, the baby, and I could go to New York. Charla was there, my parents not far. New York. Why not? I didn’t know the city all that well, I had never lived there for a long spell, apart from my annual visits to my sister’s.

New York. Perhaps the only city that could rival Paris because of its complete and utter difference. The more I thought about it, the more the idea secretly appealed to me. I didn’t talk it over with my friends. I knew Hervé, Christophe, Guillaume, Susannah, Holly, Jan, and Isabelle would be upset at the idea of my departure. But I knew they would understand and accept it, too.

And then Mamé had died. She had lingered on since her stroke in November, she had never been able to speak again, although she had regained consciousness. She had been moved to the intensive care unit, at the Cochin hospital. I was expecting her death, gearing myself up to face it, but it still came as a shock.

It was after the funeral, which took place in Burgundy, in the sad little graveyard, that Zoë had said to me, “Mom, do we have to go live in the rue de Saintonge?”

“I think your father expects us to.”

“But do
you
want to go live there?” she asked.

“No,” I said truthfully. “Ever since I’ve known what happened there, I don’t want to.”

“I don’t want to either.”

Then she said, “But where could we move to then, Mom?”

And I replied, lightly, jokingly, expecting her to snort with disapproval, “Well, how about New York City?”

I

T HAD BEEN AS easy as that, with Zoë. Bertrand had not been happy about our decision. About his daughter moving so far away. But Zoë was firm about leaving. She said she’d come back every couple of months, and Bertrand could come over, too, to see her, and the baby. I explained to Bertrand that there was nothing set, nothing definitive about the move. It wasn’t forever. It was just for a couple of years. To let Zoë grasp the American side of her. To help me move on. To start something new. He had now established himself with Amélie. They formed a couple, an official one. Amélie’s children were nearly adults. They lived away from home and also spent time with their father. Was Bertrand tempted by the prospect of a new life without the everyday responsibility of children—his, or hers—to raise on a daily basis? Perhaps. He finally said yes. And then I got things going.

After an initial stay at her house, Charla had helped me find a place to live, a simple, white, two-bedroom apartment with an “open city view” and a doorman, on West 86th Street, between Amsterdam and Columbus. I sublet it from one of her friends who had moved to Los Angeles. The building was full of families and divorced parents, a noisy beehive of babies, kids, bikes, strollers, scooters. It was a comfortable, cozy home, but there, too, something was missing. What? I could not tell.

Thanks to Joshua, I’d been hired as the New York City correspondent for a hip French Web site. I worked from home and still used Bamber as a photographer when I needed shots from Paris.

There had been a new school for Zoë, Trinity College, a couple of blocks away. “Mom, I’ll never fit in, now they call me the Frenchy,” she complained, and I couldn’t help smiling.

N

EW YORKERS WERE FASCINATING to watch, their purposeful step, their banter, their friendliness. My neighbors said hi in the elevator, had offered us flowers and candy when we moved in, and joked with the doorman. I had forgotten about all that. I was so used to Parisian surliness and people living on the same doorstep barely giving each other curt nods in the staircase.

Perhaps the most ironic thing about it all was that despite the exciting whirlwind of a life I now had, I missed Paris. I missed the Eiffel Tower lighting up on the hour, every evening, like a shimmering, bejeweled seductress. I missed the air sirens howling over the city, every first Wednesday, at noon, for their monthly drill. I missed the Saturday outdoor market along the boulevard Edgar-Quinet, where the vegetable man called me
“ma p’tite dame”
although I was probably his tallest feminine customer. Like Zoë, I felt I was a Frenchy, too, despite being American.

Leaving Paris had not been as easy as I had anticipated. New York and its energy, its clouds of steam billowing from its manholes, its vastness, its bridges, its buildings, its gridlock, was still not home. I missed my Parisian friends, even if I’d made some great new ones here. I missed Edouard, who I had become close to and who wrote to me monthly. I especially missed the way French men check women out, what Holly used to call their “naked” look. I had gotten used to it over there, but now, in Manhattan, there were only cheerful bus drivers to yell “Yo, slim!” at Zoë and “Yo, blondie!” at me. I felt like I had become invisible. Why did my life feel so empty? I wondered. As if a hurricane had hit it. As if the bottom had dropped out of it.

And the nights.

Nights were forlorn, even those I spent with Neil. Lying in bed listening to the sounds of the great, pulsating city and letting the images come back to me, like the tide creeping up the beach.

S

ARAH.

She never left me. She had changed me, forever. Her story, her suffering, I carried them within me. I felt as if I knew her. I knew her as a child. As a young girl. As the forty-year-old housewife who crashed her car into a tree on an icy New England road. I could see her face, perfectly. The slanted green eyes. The shape of her head. Her posture. Her hands. Her rare smile. I knew her. I could have stopped her on the street, had she still been alive.

Zoë was a sharp one. She had caught me red-handed.

Googling William Rainsferd.

I had not realized she was back from school. One winter afternoon, she had sneaked in without me hearing her.

“How long have you been doing this?” she asked, sounding like a mother coming across her teenager smoking pot.

Flushed, I admitted that I’d looked him up regularly in the past year.

“And?” she went on, arms crossed, frowning down at me.

“Well, it appears he has left Lucca,” I confessed.

“Oh. Where is he, then?”

“He’s back in the States, has been for a couple of months.”

I could no longer bear her stare, so I stood up and went to the window, glancing down to busy Amsterdam Avenue.

“Is he in New York, Mom?”

Her voice was softer now, less harsh. She came up behind me, put her lovely head on my shoulder.

I nodded. I could not face telling her how excited I’d been when I found out he was here, too. How thrilled, how amazed I’d felt about ending up in the same city as him, two years after our last meeting. His father was a New Yorker, I recalled. He had probably lived here as a little boy.

He was listed in the phone book. In the West Village. A mere fifteen-minute subway ride from here. And for days, for weeks, I had agonizingly asked myself whether I should call him, or not. He had never tried to contact me since Paris. I had never heard from him since then.

The excitement had petered out after a while. I did not have the courage to call him. But I went on thinking about him, night after night. Day after day. In secret, in silence. I wondered if I’d ever run into him one day, in the park, in some department store, bar, restaurant. Was he here with his wife and girls? Why had he come back to the States, like I had? What had happened?

“Have you contacted him?” Zoë asked.

“No.”

“Will you?”

“I don’t know, Zoë.”

I started to cry, silently.

“Oh, Mom, please,” she sighed.

I wiped the tears away, angrily, feeling foolish.

“Mom, he knows you live here now. I’m sure he knows. He’s looked you up as well. He knows what you do here, he knows where you live.”

That thought had never occurred to me. William Googling
me
. William checking out
my
address. Was Zoë right? Did he know I lived in New York City, too, on the Upper West Side? Did he ever think of me? What did he feel, exactly, when he did?

“You have to let go, Mom. You have to put it behind you. Call Neil, see him more often, just get on with your life.”

I turned to her, my voice ringing out loud and harsh.

“I can’t, Zoë. I need to know if what I did helped him. I need to know that. Is that too much to ask? Is that such an impossible thing?”

The baby wailed from the next room. I’d disturbed her nap. Zoë went to get her and came back with her plump, hiccupping sister.

Zoë stroked my hair gently over the toddler’s curls.

“I don’t think you’ll ever know, Mom. I don’t think he’ll ever be ready to tell you. You changed his life. You turned it upside down, remember. He probably never wants to see you again.”

I plucked the child from her arms and pressed her fiercely against me, relishing her warmth, her plumpness. Zoë was right. I needed to turn the page, to get on with my life.

How, was another matter.

I

KEPT MYSELF BUSY. I did not have a minute to myself, what with Zoë, her sister, Neil, my parents, my nephews, my job, and the never-ending string of parties Charla and her husband Barry invited me to, and to which I relentlessly went. I met more new people in two years than I had in my entire Parisian stay, a cosmopolitan melting pot that I reveled in.

Yes, I had left Paris for good, but whenever I returned for my work or to see my friends or Edouard, I always found myself in the Marais, drawn back again and again, as if my footsteps could not help bringing me there. Rue des Rosiers, rue du Roi-de-Sicile, rue des Ecouffes, rue de Saintonge, rue de Bretagne, I saw them file past with new eyes, eyes that remembered what had happened here, in 1942, even if it had been long before my time.

I wondered who lived in the rue de Saintonge apartment now, who stood by the window overlooking the leafy courtyard, who ran their palm along the smooth marble mantelpiece. I wondered if the new tenants had any inkling that a little boy had died within their home, and that a young girl’s life had been changed that day, forever.