“What do you mean?” I responded, avoiding her eyes.
“I mean, what the hell is wrong with you? I’m your sister. I know when there’s something wrong.”
I had been yearning to talk to Georgia but couldn’t even imagine where to start. How could I tell her the guy that we saw leap off the bridge was actually a criminal I had been hanging out with—that is, until I saw him walk away from his friend’s death without shedding a tear?
“Okay, if you don’t want to talk I can just start guessing, but I will get it out of you. Are you worried about starting a new school?”
“No.”
“Is it about friends?”
“What friends?”
“Exactly!”
“No.”
“Boys?”
Something on my face must have given me away, because she immediately leaned toward me, crossing her legs in a tell-me-more pose. “Kate, why didn’t you tell me about . . . whoever he is . . . before it got to this?”
“You don’t talk to me about your boyfriends.”
“That’s because there are too many of them.” She laughed and then, remembering my low spirits, added, “Plus, none of them are serious enough to mention. Yet.” She waited.
There was no way I was getting off the hook. “Okay, there’s this guy who lives in the neighborhood, and we kind of hung out a few times until I found out he was bad news.”
“Like how bad is the bad news? Married?”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “No!”
“Druggie?”
“No. I mean, I don’t think so. It’s more like . . .” I watched for Georgia’s reaction. “It’s more like he’s in trouble with the law. Like a criminal or something.”
“Yeah. I’d say that’s bad news,” she admitted pensively. “Sounds more like someone I’d go for, actually.”
“Georgia!” I yelled, throwing a pillow at her.
“Sorry, sorry. I shouldn’t joke about it. You’re right. He doesn’t sound like good boyfriend material, Katie-Bean. So why don’t you just pat yourself on the back for not getting in too deep before you found out, and be on your merry way back to Guyland?”
“I just can’t believe that I was so mistaken about him. He seemed so perfect. And so interesting. And—”
“Handsome?” my sister interrupted.
I fell back on my bed and stared at the ceiling. “Oh, Georgia. Not handsome. Gorgeous. Like heart-stoppingly amazing. Not that it matters now.”
Georgia stood and looked down at me. “I’m sorry it didn’t work. It would have been nice seeing you out and about enjoying yourself with some hot Frenchman. I won’t keep bugging you about it, but as soon as you’re ready to start living again, let me know. There are parties nearly every night.”
“Thanks, Georgia,” I said, reaching out to touch her hand.
“Anything for my little sister.”
And then, without me even noticing, summer was officially over and it was time to start school.
Georgia and I speak French fluently. Dad always spoke it with us, and we spent so much time in Paris during our vacations that French comes as easily for us as English. So we could have gone to a French high school. But the French system is so different from the American that we would have had to make up all sorts of missing credits to graduate.
The American School of Paris is one of those strange places in foreign cities where expatriates huddle together in a defensive circle and try to pretend they’re still back at home. I saw it as a place for lost souls. My sister saw it as an opportunity to make more international friends who she could visit in their native countries during school breaks. Georgia treats friends like outfits, happily trading one for another when it’s convenient—not in a mean way, but she just doesn’t get too attached.
As for me, being a junior, I knew I had two short years with these people, some of whom would be leaving to go back to their home country before the school year was even out.
So after walking through the massive front doors on the first day of school, I headed directly to the office to get my schedule and Georgia walked straight up to a group of intimidating-looking girls and began chatting away like she had known them all her life. Our social dice were cast within our first five minutes.
I hadn’t been to a museum since I had seen Vincent at the Musée Picasso, so it was with a sense of trepidation that I approached the Centre Pompidou one afternoon after school. My history teacher had assigned us projects on twentieth-century events happening in Paris, and I had chosen the riots of 1968.
Say “May ’68” and any French person will immediately think of the countrywide general strike that brought France’s economy to a halt. I was focusing on the weeks-long violent fighting between the police and university students at the Sorbonne. We were supposed to write our papers in the first person, as if we had experienced the events ourselves. So instead of looking through history books, I decided to search contemporary newspapers to find personal accounts.
The materials I needed were in the large library located on the Centre Pompidou’s second and third floors. But, since the other floors housed Paris’s National Museum of Modern Art, I planned on following my schoolwork with some well-deserved art gazing.
Once settled in at one of the library’s viewing booths, I flipped through microfilm spools from the riots’ most eventful days. Having read that May 10 was a day of heated fighting between police and students, I scanned that day’s front page, took some notes, and then flipped past the headlines to read the editorials. It was hard to imagine that kind of violence happening just across the river in the Latin Quarter, a fifteen-minute walk from where I was sitting.
I ejected the spool and replaced it with another. The riots had flared back up on July 14, France’s Independence Day. Many students, as well as tourists visiting Paris for the festivities, were taken to nearby hospitals. I took notes from the first few pages, and then flipped back to the two-page spread of obituaries and their accompanying black-and-white photos. And there he was.
Halfway down the first page. It was Vincent. He had longer hair, but he looked exactly like he had a month ago. My body turned to ice as I read the text.
Firefighter Jacques Dupont, nineteen years old, born in La Baule, Pays de la Loire, was killed in duty last night in a building fire believed to have been sparked by a Molotov cocktail thrown by student rioters. The residential building at 18 rue Champollion was in flames when Dupont and his colleague, Thierry Simon (obit., section S), rushed into the building and began pulling out its inhabitants, who had taken cover from the fighting at the adjacent Sorbonne. Trapped under burning timbers, Dupont expired before he could be evacuated to the hospital, and his body was received by the morgue. Twelve citizens, including four children, owe their lives to these local heroes.
It can’t be him, I thought. Unless he is the spitting image of his dad, who happened to sire a son before he died at . . . (I glanced back at the obituary) nineteen. Which isn’t impossible . . .
As my reasoning foundered, I forwarded to the next page and scanned the Ss for “Simon.” There he was: Thierry Simon. The muscle-bound guy who had turned Georgia and me away from the fight at the river. Thierry had a voluminous Afro in the photo but wore the same confident grin that he had flashed me with that day across the café terrace. It was definitely the same guy. But more than forty years ago.
I closed my eyes in disbelief, and then opened them again to read the paragraph under Thierry’s head shot. It read the same as Jacques’s, except it gave his age as twenty-two and place of birth as Paris.
“I don’t get it,” I whispered, as I numbly pressed a button on the machine to print both pages. After returning the microfilm spools to the front desk, I left the library in a daze and hesitated before stepping on the escalator going to the next floor. I would sit in the museum until I figured out what to do next.
My thoughts were being yanked around in ten different directions as I drifted through the turnstile and into
an enormous high-ceilinged gallery with benches positioned in the middle of the room. Sitting down, I put my head in my hands as I tried to clear my mind.
Finally I looked up. I was in the room dedicated to the art of Fernand Léger, one of my favorite early- to mid-twentieth-century French painters. I studied the two-dimensional surfaces filled with bright primary colors and geometric shapes and felt a sense of normalcy return. I glanced over to the corner where my favorite Léger painting hung: one with robotic-looking World War I soldiers sitting around a table, smoking pipes and playing cards.
A young man stood in front of it, his back to me as he leaned in closer to inspect something in the composition. He was of medium height with short-cropped brown hair and messy clothes. Where have I seen him before? I thought, wondering if it was someone from school.
And then he turned, and my mouth dropped open in disbelief. The man standing across the gallery from me was Jules.
Chapter Ten
MY BODY NO LONGER FELT CONNECTED TO MY mind. I stood and walked toward the phantom. Either I’m having a mental breakdown that started in the library, I thought, or the guy standing in front of me is a ghost. Both explanations seemed more probable than the alternative: that Jules had actually survived a head-on collision with a subway train, not only in one piece but apparently uninjured.
When I was a few feet away, he saw me coming, and for a split second, he hesitated. Then he turned to me with a completely blank look on his face.
“Jules!” I said urgently.
“Hello,” he said calmly. “Do I know you?”
“Jules, it’s me, Kate. I visited your studio with Vincent, remember? And I saw you at the Métro station that day of . . . the crash.”
His expression changed from blank to amused. “I am afraid that you have me confused with someone else. My name is Thomas, and I don’t know anyone called Vincent.”
Thomas, my foot, I thought, wanting to shake him. “Jules. I know it’s you. You were in that horrible accident when . . . just over a month ago?”
He shook his head and shrugged, as if to say, Sorry.
“Jules, you have to tell me what’s going on.”
“Listen, um, Kate? I have no idea what you’re talking about, but let me help you over to that bench. You must be overexcited.Or overwrought.” He took me by my elbow and began leading me back to the benches.
I jerked my arm away and stood facing him with fists clenched. “I know it’s you. I’m not crazy. And I don’t know what’s going on. But I accused Vincent of being heartless for running away from your death. And now it turns out you’re alive.”
I realized that my voice had been rising as I saw a security guard head our way. I flashed Jules a furious look as the uniformed man walked up to us and asked, “Is there a problem here?”
Jules calmly looked the guard in the eyes and said, “No problem, sir. She seems to have mistaken me for someone else.”
“I have not!” I hissed under my breath, then left, walking quickly toward the exit. Turning to see Jules and the guard staring my way, I strode out of the museum and ran down the escalators.
There was only one place I could go.
The subway ride back to my neighborhood seemed interminable, but finally I found myself sprinting up the Métro steps into the fading sunlight and heading toward the rue de Grenelle. Standing before the massive vine-draped wall, I rang the doorbell. A light went on above my head, and I looked up into a video surveillance camera.
“Oui?” a voice asked after a few seconds.
“It’s Kate. I’m . . .” I paused, momentarily losing my courage. But remembering the cruelty of my last words to Vincent, I spoke with renewed resolve. “I’m a friend of Vincent’s.”
“He’s not in.” The male voice crackled metallically through the tiny speaker on the bottom of the keypad.
“I need to talk to him. Can’t I leave a message?”
“Don’t you have his phone number?”
“No.”
“And you’re a friend?” The voice sounded skeptical.
“Yes, I mean no. But I need to talk to him. Please.”
There was a moment of silence, and then I heard the click that meant the gate had been unlocked. It swung slowly inward. Across the courtyard, a man stood in the open doorway. My heart dropped an inch when I saw that it wasn’t Vincent.
I walked quickly across the cobblestones to face the man, trying to come up with something to say that wouldn’t make me sound like a crazy person. But when I reached him, all words escaped me. Although he seemed to be in his sixties, his faded green eyes looked centuries-old.
His longish gray hair was smoothed back with pomade, and his face was punctuated by a long, hooked, noble-looking nose. I immediately recognized in his face and dress the mark of French aristocracy.
If I hadn’t already met his type as clients of Papy’s antiques business, I would have recognized his features from the portraits of nobility hanging in every French castle and museum. Old family. Old money. This palace of a house must be his.
His voice cut me off midthought. “You’re here to see Vincent?”
“Yes . . . I mean yes, monsieur.”
He nodded approvingly as I corrected my manners to befit his age and station. “Well, I am sorry to inform you that, as I said before, he is not here.”
“Do you know when he’ll be back?”
“In a few days, I would think.”
I didn’t know what to say. He turned to leave, and feeling completely awkward, I blurted, “Well, could I at least leave him a message?”
“And what message would that be?” he asked dryly, adjusting the silk ascot tied at the neck of his impeccable white cotton shirt.
“Could . . . could I write it?” I stammered, fighting the urge to just walk away. “I’m sorry to impose on your time, sir, but would you mind if I wrote him a message?”
He lifted his eyebrows and studied my face for a moment. And then, opening the door behind him for me to pass through, he said, “Very well.”
I walked into the magnificent foyer and waited as he closed the door behind us. “Follow me,” he said, leading me through a side door into the same room where Vincent had brought me tea. He gestured to a desk and chair and said, “You will find writing paper and pens in the drawer.”
“I have some with me, thanks,” I said, patting my book bag.
“Do you wish me to send for some tea?”
I nodded, thinking that would win me a few minutes to think of what to write. “Yes, thank you.”
“Then Jeanne will bring you your tea and show you out. You can give the note for Vincent to her. Au revoir, mademoiselle.” He gave me a curt nod, and then closed the door behind him. I breathed a sigh of relief.
Pulling a pen and notebook out of my bag, I tore off a piece of paper and stared at it for a full minute before starting to write. Vincent, I began.
I’m starting to understand what you meant when you said that things aren’t always as they seem. I found your photo, and that of your friend, in the 1968 obituary pages. And then, right afterward, I saw Jules. Alive.
I can’t imagine what all this means, but I want to apologize for the mean things I said—after you treated me so kindly. I told you I never wanted to see you again. I take it back.
At least help me understand what’s going on, so I won’t end up in a loony bin somewhere, blabbering about dead people for the rest of my days.
Your move.
Kate
I folded the note and waited. Jeanne never came. I watched the minutes tick away on the grandfather clock, growing more nervous with each passing second. Finally I began to worry that perhaps I was supposed to go find Jeanne. Maybe she was waiting in the kitchen with my tea. I walked into the foyer. The house was silent.
I noticed, however, that a door across from me was ajar. Walking slowly over to it, I peeked inside. “Jeanne?” I called softly. There was no response. I pushed the door open and walked into a room that was almo
st identical to the one I had come from. It had the same small door in the corner as the one that Vincent had brought my tea through. The servants’ entrance, I thought.
Opening it, I saw a long, dark passageway. My heart in my throat, I walked toward a windowed door at the end, with light illuminating its panes. It swung open onto a large, cavernous kitchen. No one was there. I breathed a sigh of relief, and realized that I had been afraid of running into the master of the house once more.
Deciding to leave the note in the mailbox on the way out, I hurried back down the tunnel-like space. Now that the kitchen’s light was at my back, I saw several doors punctuating the long hallway and noticed that one was slightly ajar. A warm light was glowing from inside. Maybe this was the housekeeper’s room. “Jeanne?” I called in a low voice. There was no response.
I stood motionless an instant before feeling myself driven forward by an irresistible impulse. What am I doing? I thought as I stepped through the doorway. Heavy curtains blocked the outside light, like in the other rooms. The only illumination came from a few small lamps scattered around on low tables.
I stepped into the room and softly closed the door behind me. I knew it was insane. But the rational part of my brain had lost the battle, and I was now on autopilot, trespassing in someone’s house in order to satisfy my curiosity. My skin felt like it was being pricked by a million tiny adrenaline darts as I began to look around.
To my right, bookcases surrounded a gray marble fireplace. Above its mantel hung two enormous swords, crossed above the hilts. The other walls were hung with framed photographs, some in black-and-white and others in color. They were all portraits.
There seemed to be no sense to the collection. Some of the people in them were old, some young. A few pictures looked as if they were taken fifty years ago, and others looked contemporary. The only thing tying them together was that they were all candid: The subjects didn’t know their picture was being taken. Weird collection, I thought, shifting my gaze to the other side of the room.