The Nightingale

Ari looks away. Quietly, he says, “I slept with her stuffed animal for years.”

“Bébé,” I say, remembering.

Ari reaches into his pocket and pulls out the framed photograph of me and Rachel. “My mom gave this to me when I graduated from college.”

I stare down at it through tears.

“You and Sophie saved my life,” Ari says matter-of-factly.

I hear Julien’s intake of breath and know what it means. He has questions now.

“Ari is my best friend’s son,” I say. “When Rachel was deported to Auschwitz, I hid him in our home, even though a Nazi billeted with us. It was quite … frightening.”

“Your mother is being modest,” Ari says. “She rescued nineteen Jewish children during the war.”

I see the incredulity in my son’s eyes and it makes me smile. Our children see us so imperfectly.

“I’m a Rossignol,” I say quietly. “A Nightingale in my own way.”

“A survivor,” Ari adds.

“Did Dad know?” Julien asks.

“Your father…” I pause, draw in a breath. Your father. And there it is, the secret that made me bury it all.

I have spent a lifetime running from it, trying to forget, but now I see what a waste all that was.

Antoine was Julien’s father in every way that mattered. It is not biology that determines fatherhood. It is love.

I touch his cheek and gaze up at him. “You brought me back to life, Julien. When I held you, after all that ugliness, I could breathe again. I could love your father again.”

I never realized that truth before. Julien brought me back. His birth was a miracle in the midst of despair. He made me and Antoine and Sophie a family again. I named him after the father I learned to love too late, after he was gone. Sophie became the big sister she always wanted to be.

I will tell my son my life story at last. There will be pain in remembering, but there will be joy, too.

“You’ll tell me everything?”

“Almost everything,” I say with a smile. “A Frenchwoman must have her secrets.” And I will … I’ll keep one secret.

I smile at them, my two boys who should have broken me, but somehow saved me, each in his own way. Because of them, I know now what matters, and it is not what I have lost. It is my memories. Wounds heal. Love lasts.

We remain.