The Nightingale

“How will you cross? It’s after curfew,” she said, clasping her hands together to still their trembling.

“I will be Laurence Olivier. A man overcome by grief, taking his beloved sister home to be buried.”

“What if they check her breathing?”

“Then someone at the border will die,” he said quietly.

Vianne heard what he didn’t say as clearly as the words he chose. She was so surprised that she couldn’t think how to respond. He was saying he would die to protect Isabelle. He turned to her, gazed at her. Gazed, not looked. Again she saw the predator intensity in those gray eyes, but there was more there, too. He was waiting—patiently—for what she would say. It mattered to him, somehow.

“My father came home changed from the Great War,” she said quietly, surprising herself with the admission. This was not something she talked about. “Angry. Mean. He started drinking too much. While Maman was alive, he was different…” She shrugged. “After her death, there was no pretense anymore. He sent Isabelle and me away to live with a stranger. We were both just girls, and heartbroken. The difference between us was that I accepted the rejection. I closed him out of my life and found someone else to love me. But Isabelle … she doesn’t know how to concede defeat. She hurled herself at the cold wall of our father’s disinterest for years, trying desperately to gain his love.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Isabelle seems unbreakable. She has a steel exterior, but it protects a candyfloss heart. Don’t hurt her, that’s what I’m saying. If you don’t love her—”

“I do.”

Vianne studied him. “Does she know?”

“I hope not.”

Vianne would not have understood that answer a year ago. She wouldn’t have understood how dark a side love could have, how hiding it was the kindest thing you could do sometimes. “I don’t know why it’s so easy for me to forget how much I love her. We start fighting, and…”

“Sisters.”

Vianne sighed. “I suppose, although I haven’t been much of one to her.”

“You’ll get another chance.”

“Do you believe that?”

His silence was answer enough. At last, he said, “Take care of yourself, Vianne. She’ll need a place to come home to when all of this is over.”

“If it’s ever over.”

“Oui.”

Vianne got down from the wagon; her boots sunk deep into wet, muddy grass. “I’m not sure she thinks of me as a safe place to come home to,” she said.

“You’ll need to be brave,” Gaëtan said. “When the Nazis come looking for their man. You know our real names. That’s dangerous for all of us. You included.”

“I’ll be brave,” she said. “You just tell my sister that she needs to start being afraid.”

For the first time, Gaëtan smiled and Vianne understood how this scrawny, sharp-featured man in his beggar’s clothes had swept Isabelle off her feet. He had the kind of smile that inhabited every part of his face—his eyes, his cheeks; there was even a dimple. I wear my heart on my sleeve, that smile said, and no woman could be unmoved by such transparency. “Oui,” he said. “Because it is so easy to tell your sister anything.”

* * *

Fire.

It’s all around her, leaping, dancing. A bonfire. She can see it in quivering strands of red that come and go. A flame licks her face, burns deep.

It’s everywhere and then … it’s gone.

The world is icy, white, sheer and cracked. She shivers with the cold, watches her fingers turn blue and crackle and break apart. They fall away like chalk, dusting her frozen feet.

“Isabelle.”

Birdsong. A nightingale. She hears it singing a sad song. Nightingales mean loss, don’t they? Love that leaves or doesn’t last or never existed in the first place. There’s a poem about that, she thinks. An ode.