Personne

Odile stood in the darkest part of the yard, waiting, waiting, and Boy was nowhere in sight. This was her second time meeting him here, and she sensed he would fail to show, because Boy enjoyed the sort of good looks that made the world around him seem less important than he. His classmates, the other boys from the Priory School, treated her like a peasant, not because they were rich, but because she was tall and fat, and they knew they had what she wanted.

Now she became aware of the soft sound of the Sarthe slumbering in its bed. She could smell it a little over the aroma of the fresh boule she held in its burlap sack. In the forty-five minutes or hour she had stood here, she tried to make herself unaware of the bread. Its aroma and the solid fact of it meant she was doing something dangerous. Something foolish.

The moon drifted out from behind a scrim of clouds. Its light spilled across the yard like the yolk of an enchanted egg. Odile’s shadow stood out against the crazed paving of the front garden. Normally, she hated it, six feet tall, broad-shouldered, too round in all the wrong places, but tonight it barely bothered her. Something about it seemed changed. The shape was not lissome or elegant, but now she found it almost acceptable.

#

“Did you get it?”

His voice didn’t surprise her this time. When last they’d met like this, Boy’s first speech to her had made her yelp, shocked that he’d drawn so near without her noticing.

He was fair-skinned, freckled. Odile had seen him only once by day, and from afar, but last time he was here, she’d lit his cigarette for him and seen a galaxy of marks dusted across the bridge of his nose and spread beneath his ice-blue eyes.

There was an element to his looks she did not like. She thought of it as a sort of ease, an obviousness. As if God had fashioned Boy without paying his full attention. Yes, yes, blond hair, yes, blue eyes. Striking blue, of course. Yes, high cheeks, broad shoulders—everything from the Good Looks Drawer….

The set of his mouth undercut that effect. There was cruelty in it, or not cruelty, but a hardness that made his choir-boy aesthetic seem false. Besides, good boys didn’t sneak out of the Abbey to meet girls they barely knew.

“I have it,” she said.

“And do you have another cigarette?”

“Amazing.”

“Hein?”

She wasn’t sure what she’d meant, but supposed she ought to offer something. “Your accent,” she said. “You are British, but your French bears no accent.”

He said something in English. The words were quick and rough, but she enjoyed their rhythm. For a moment, she forgot her need for cool and smiled like a girl. “What did you say?”

“I said, ‘I have one when I wish it.’”

“Clever.”

“The bread?”

She hadn’t meant to hand it over so soon, but she could think of no reason to deny him.

He held it to his nose. “You made this?”

She blushed. “Of course. What will you do? Share it with your classmates?”

“What?” he said. “My—? No. Of course not.”

“You’d keep the whole loaf for yourself?” Now she said something she feared she’d regret, “You’ll ruin your figure.”

“My figure,” he repeated. She couldn’t read his tone.

“I’ll have another for you in a couple days.”

“Thanks. Can I—? I have money.”

Odile shrugged. “It’s a lesser crime to give than to sell. If anyone asks, I’m hopelessly smitten and make you loaves of bread to take away who knows where.”

For a moment, he watched her without speaking, then, “If anyone asks, tell them everything.”

A chill crept through her. Odile had known Boy wasn’t keeping the bread, but now his secret had deepened. “Never,” she said with defiance she didn’t feel. “I don’t know your name, and that’s fine, because I can’t tell what I don’t know.”

“It’s—”

She cut him off. “Don’t.”

“Odile.”

She shook her head. “Get out of here,” she said. “Run along with your prize.”

Her cheeks burned as he stepped back into the bushes. He might be different from other boys, but he was no smarter.

#

Odile made a point of thinking intently about her father every morning before she left her bedroom. She sat at her vanity, dragging her hands through her red curls in lieu of a brush or comb and stared past the oval mirror at the cold cerulean sky. She thought of her father’s cigarettes and his tobacco-stained forefingers—how she’d loved to smell them and wrinkle her nose. She thought of him sitting in his study, his reading glasses perched on the end of his beaky nose as he compared ledger figures. She remembered the smell of his skin, mineral oil and rosewater, and the way he shut his eyes and cocked his head when he sang.

When the battle still raged at Dunkirk, Odile had looked out that same window at a night sky lit with man-made flashes. She thought of her father out there somewhere, gesturing with his rifle as he shouted at his men. Even those memories, the imagined ones, she held dear, but lately they had begun to warp and sag under the weight of time and anxiety. Soon, the stage of her mind would bow and break, giving way to a chasm full of wind and the din of chaos, and her father, all that she had of him, would tumble down and down where her mind could no longer reach.

Now, as she had this thought, she felt a sharp pang in her sinuses, felt hot tears well in her eyes. Stupid girl, she thought. Crying won’t bring him back.

#

The Parisian was already outside when Odile unlocked the bakery’s heavy wooden doors. Today he wore a gray wool shawl over a navy pea coat and a bright green skullcap. His nose was humped at the bridge and a little crooked, as if it had been badly broken some time ago. His skin was a light olive, and his eyes were a difficult shade of gray. There may have been a little green in them, once. His shoulders were narrow, and he was taller than Boy by several inches. Every time Odile saw the Parisian, he seemed to be leaning on something, even if he was standing fully upright.

“I was afraid the two of you had fled to the Zone Libre,” he said as Odile stooped behind the counter, gathering boules and baguettes from their baskets. The other, less frequent visitors from regions with heavier food shortages preferred fresh bread and would wait for Odile to begin the day’s baking before they bought, but the Parisian always preferred bread from the previous day. He claimed that a fresh brioche was too young to know its own flavor.

“This is our home,” Odile said. “Many others have it worse than we here in Sablé.”

“Certainly. After all, you have enough spare bread to sell to the likes of me.”

“You’re the only one who buys without a ration card,” she said. “We’re the favorite bakery of a certain Commandant in Le Mans, so while we enjoy a certain amount of leeway, we see no reason to test the goodwill of our benefactor.”

“It doesn’t bother you? Baking for Les Boches?”

“My mother and I have done nothing to survive that disturbs our sleep. Circumstances aren’t ideal, war can’t last forever, and as I said before—”

“‘Many others have it worse than we in Sablé,’” he finished with her. “A healthy perspective.”

“You want your usual order?” Odile asked. Usually, the Parisian was in and out quickly. She didn’t like this new, chattier, version of him, who wanted to know her feelings on the Occupation.

“Can you spare an extra boule or two?”

“If you can spare the extra francs.”

#

Later that night, Odile and her mother, Madame Hulot, sat listening to the BBC on the living room radio. That was what they told themselves they were doing. In the earliest days of the occupation, they sat together, scanning the airwaves for news, for some clue as to what had become of Odile’s father. They were careful to stay close to the dial, in case some German soldier or collaborator would come knocking on their door. Over the past two years, their vigilance had slackened until Odile’s mother barely listened at all, and Odile sat across the room knitting and unknitting shapeless lengths of nothing as the announcer read news or poems.

Tonight, Madame Hulot sat at the spinet piano she and Odile’s father had received as a wedding gift, noodling with her left hand as she leafed through the ledger books, her husband’s reading glasses perched atop her skull.

For some time, Odile’s mother had resembled a shade of herself, but in recent weeks, her face had begun to fill out again, and the haunted look she tried to hide from Odile had receded slightly from her eyes. Lately, instead of smelling of stale flowers, she smelled of dried lilacs. At first, Odile had wondered with a shock of mingled disgust and outrage whether her mother had begun seeing someone. Now, when she thought about it, which was rarely, Odile thought she owed her gratitude to anyone one or anything that brought her mother nearer to her again.

The owls are awake, in soundless flight

They row through the air on heavy wings,

The zenith fills, somberly glowing.

Pale Venus emerges, and it is Night.

Odile frowned. The first two stanzas of the poem had taken her away. She had imagined herself walking through the grounds of an abandoned chateau, watching the flowers close.

“Mother,” she said quietly.

Madame Hulot didn’t answer right away. Instead, she took another puff from her absent husband’s Briar pipe and expelled plumes of smoke from her mouth and nostrils. When she did turn away from the ledger, she did so very slowly, as if the motion caused her pain.

“Yes…?”

“I don’t think we should sell to the Parisian anymore. He asked too many questions this morning.”

“About your father?”

“Why would he ask about Papa?”

“Madame Fercule endured similar silence from her Alcide after Dunkirk, and learned months later that he’d escaped the Boches and joined the Resistance in Paris.”

“You think that’s what’s become of Father?”

The woman’s shrug suggested she thought no such thing. “It’s possible,” she said. Moving as if through water, she turned back to the ledger and stared at it with unfocused eyes.

“Maman,” Odile said. “Maman!”

This time she didn’t turn at all. “Yes…?”

“I’m going to hire some help for the shop.”

Mme. Hulot grunted low in her throat. “With what, Conillet? We haven’t any money.”

So she had begun noticing the world again. The nickname was one she hadn’t used in ages, and according to the old ledgers her mother pretended to read, the bakery was doing brisk business.

“We’ll have less without the patronage of the Parisian,” Odile said, “but we’ve a little more than nothing.”

Another shrug. “Keep a careful accounting, hein?” Mme. Hulot said. “We don’t want any questions from the thrice-damned Germans.”

#

This time, it was raining when Boy appeared, so Odile let him into the bakery. They smoked together in the back room, away from the windows. This time, Boy looked as if he hadn’t eaten since Odile had given him the last boule. He was hatless, and his wet hair matted against his skull. One strand lay plastered across his forehead like a golden wound. He smelled of horses.

“Sorry to come so late,” he said.

“None of us can come and go as we please,” Odile said with a shrug. “I imagine you’d have sent word if you could.”

“Monks to the left hand, Boches to the right,” Boy said. “My problems have problems….” He took one last drag on his cigarette and glanced around the room, looking for somewhere to put it out. Odile took the butt from him and stamped it out. She’d sweep up before bed.

“If you worked here, you’d have cover to come and go. You could do the sweeping.”

“Absurd,” he said. “I can’t work for you.”

“Absurd?” she asked. “Which part of the proposition is so outlandish? The one where you take orders from me, or the part where I continue to supply you with bread at a vastly reduced risk to myself and my family.”

“Now you care about the risk?”

“Oh!” Odile barked. “Son of a—! Listen with your ears and not your ass! You’d rather keep mucking out the horse-stalls like a serf? You smell like horseshit every time I see you.”

“It’s my job.”

“Some job,” she said. “It’s the kind of peasant work they give bad boys who get caught sneaking out.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

She scoffed. “Because you don’t sneak around?”

“Because I’m never caught.”

“Work here. Sweep up. Fix things. Learn a recipe or two.”

“I told you. I can’t work for you.”

“Why not?”

Boy sucked his teeth. He grinned like a shark for a moment, and it was the most honest expression Odile had ever seen. Just as quickly, he folded up the look and put it away somewhere behind his eyes. “I’d be too distracted.”

#

As Odile led Boy up the back stairwell, she felt as if she’d become twins. One sister still stood in the bakery’s back room, chain-smoking cigarettes and trying to seem casual. The other sister was the one who had stared Boy down, and then, when he tried to dispel the tension by lighting another cigarette, had grabbed his wrist and pulled him close.

Such a masculine gesture should have mortified her, should have turned Boy off completely, but she could tell from the way he’d kissed her that he’d never been approached this way before, and he needed to know what she’d do next.

They paused at the second floor landing to paw at each other like cats fighting. Boy’s mouth tasted of brandy and cigarettes and something else Odile couldn’t identify. There was a sharpness to it, and it tasted somehow pale. She kissed hard, completely in control, letting him lean against her so hard that if she chose, she could step backwards and drop him on his chin. She sucked first his top lip, then his bottom, then pointed her tongue and explored the area between his teeth and lips. Every time she used her tongue like a sword, Boy groaned in spite of himself and tried to pull her closer. He grabbed her hair, her neck, her shoulders.

At some point, they ascended the rest of the stairwell—they must have—because they were falling into Odile’s feather bed, writhing to escape their clothes like Houdini trying to shrug off a straight-jacket. It occurred to her now that she should worry about undressing before him. Displaying her rolls and moles. Instead, the thought thrilled her, and she licked her lips as she unfastened her buttons.

Odile’s heart fluttered in her throat. She thought of her father tumbling into darkness. She thought of her mother’s fingers questing across the ledger page, of wood smoke curling into the winter air. She thought of these things not because she was away from herself or away from her body, but because, for now, her body had no need of her. The Thinking Odile, the part of her that was an assemblage of tics and fronts erected to keep the outside world at bay, seemed to float high above her. If Thinking Odile looked down, she would see herself and Boy rutting like beasts.

Or would she? Maybe she would see herself transformed, made incandescent by Boy’s hunger and striving?

“Is that good? Is that right?” he asked, breathing hard, as he crooked his fingers inside her.

Odile let loose a string or profanities. Then, “God damn it…! I can’t feel my hands!”

#

Sometime in the middle of the night, Odile rose to sit at the vanity. She was not asleep, but neither was she awake. The mirror was not a mirror at all. Instead, it was a window like the others in the room. It, showed her a landscape she didn’t recognize, a tangle of forest foregrounded against high, proud mountains. She sensed, instead of saw, figures moving among the trees. They seemed to chase each other, playing, but there was an edge to the play, to the shift of power, so that one could never tell which figure would cause another to cry out.

The landscape seemed to recede into the distance, and her mother’s face drew near. It was as pale and wan as it had been a month ago, and as Odile watched, the cheeks sank further, and the bones beneath them threatened to break the skin.

You can’t, Odile said. You’ve only just returned. What will I do without you? What will I tell Father when he comes home?

When her mother answered, it was with her father’s voice:

Allow my head, that rings and echoes still

With your last kiss, to lie upon your breast,

Till it recover from the stormy thrill,

And let me sleep a little, since you rest.

#

The morning brought cold rain. Odile rose, checked the window, looked over her shoulder at Boy dreaming away, and lay back down. When he felt her beside him once more, he drew close, sliding his fingertips across the softness of her belly.

“I came back to bed because I thought you were still asleep,” she said.

“That’s the only reason?”

“Your other girls are content to lie around all day?”

“My other girls,” Boy said.

“I can’t be your first.”

“No,” he said.

She wasn’t sure how she felt about his answer.

“You were my first,” she said. “Boys don’t like me.”

He shrugged against her. “Boys like girls. You’re a woman.”

Heat spread across Odile’s face as she drank in his pronouncement.

“So you still won’t work for me?”

“You think we’d actually work?”

“I run a tight ship,” she said with a shrug. She briefly fought the weight of Boy’s arm to grab her cigarettes and matches from the night stand. She lit two, handed Boy one.

“My name is Abel,” he said. “After the world’s first murder victim. My parents are dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shook his head. “I was only ten. It’s as if it happened in another world. I feel the space inside me where they should be. I have a few memories. The rest is nothing, not even void.”

“They died in England?”

“Yes. Outside of Essex. Motoring.”

“And their money sent you to the Priory?”

“My uncle took me in. He’s Headmaster there.

“Abel. Do you have any brothers?”

“No, I—Yes. One.”

“When we first met, I fantasized that my father sent you to our bakery and that you were keeping him in hiding, feeding him my bread.” Odile retrieved the round metal dish she used for an ashtray and tapped her cigarette on its rim. “I try to think about my father only very seriously. It seems the right thing, because if he still lives, it must be only the direst secrets and business keeping him away.”

“I’m sorry to disappoint,” Abel said. “I remember your father, but I don’t know him.”

#

Weeks passed without event. Boy—she still thought of him as Boy—and Odile fell into a rhythm. He didn’t always appear at the bakery in the mornings, but when he did, he did enough work that his help was actually help. They spent most nights in Odile’s bed.

One such night, Odile was troubled again by her former state of waking-not-waking, and rose to look into her vanity’s glass. This time, the window her mirror had become looked down on the back garden of her house.

Someone stood in the darkest part of the yard, smoking two cigarettes at once.

Odile almost called out to him, asking why he would do something so silly, but then the figure lit a cigarette, and Odile realized that the two burning coals she’d first seen had been his eyes.

They regarded each other for a long time, then the man with the glowing eyes nodded curtly and turned away. He was no longer a silhouette, but a collection of arboreal shapes that had never, could never, equal a human form.

#

The Parisian appeared once more, and once more, he was in the mood to converse. As their transaction concluded, Odile asked for his ration card.

“My card?” he said. “Fuck my card. Son of a bitch! Do you fucking peasants have any idea what we go through in the city? Do you know what those fucking Germans do to us? Your father would be ashamed!”

The sick thrill Odile had felt as she watched her customer lose his temper gave way to cold fury.

The Parisian watched, sneering, as Odile came around the counter, holding a brioche the size of her fist. She thrust it so hard into his belly that the ball of bread crumbled to pieces.

“What do you know about my family, you effete fucking city dog shit?” she said. In her own ears, her tone sounded amused, even friendly. “Take this last loaf for free, but if I see you again, I’m going to shove a boule straight up your dainty Parisian ass.”

The Parisian just watched her, shocked. Then, a thought flickered behind his eyes.

“Oh, you tell my mother,” Odile said with a sneer of her own. “I run this bakery…! And we’ve made our last sale to you.”

#

After the Parisian had gone, it occurred to Odile that she might have made a fatal mistake. She knew precious little about the man, and knew nothing he hadn’t told her himself. He could be a collaborator, or even a collaborationist with real power, with ties to the Gestapo or the Franc-Gardes. If that were the case, there would be precious little good reviews from the Commandant in Le Mans could do to save the Hulots.

She tried to calm herself with thoughts that no one truly powerful did his own weekly bread shopping, but how much power, really, would it take to smash Odile and everything she worked for?

The panic made Odile’s body a prison, and she wished fervently that Boy would arrive bearing his ring of keys.

#

Boy stayed away that day and the next. Odile baked feverishly, stacking baguettes and boules in an unholy snit even as she wore her friendly, untroubled expression like a carnival mask. Later, she spent an unproductive hour or two questioning her mother about the Parisian. Madame Hulot knew little about him, cared even less. Odile was tempted to tell her mother why the information was so important, but the woman had begun to appear tired again, and Odile hated to alarm her.

#

The next morning, as soon as Odile opened, a new customer appeared at the shop. He was compactly built and not tall. He smelled strongly of sandalwood, and while he wore street clothes—a brown leather coat over an ice-blue cardigan sweater and gray pin-striped slacks with square-toed leather shoes—he was clearly one of Les Boches. His impeccably sculpted white-blond hair, and the fit of this clothes, like they’d been hand-stiched directly onto him—proclaimed his station as loudly as any uniform. If it hadn’t been for his soft and friendly gray eyes, Odile would have been certain she was lost.

“May I help you?” she asked. She had to work to keep her voice steady, but she succeeded.

“Your mother owns this place, yes?” His voice was soft—not quite a purr, and his French was impeccable.

“We both do, technically. My father is dead, so his share has passed to me.”

“Dunkirk?” he said, then sucked his teeth. “Damnable thing.” He seemed to mean it.

“Yes, Dunkirk.”

“I wonder has it occurred to you that at least some of us on our side detest this occupation as much as you do?”

Odile opened her mouth but said nothing. The man’s expression and inflection were so open, so guileless, that she didn’t know how to conduct herself. She desperately hoped Abel would stay away now. If he were to appear while this man—this officer—was here menacing her, he might do something irrevocably rash.

The officer turned, taking in the high ceilings, the stacks of bread, craning his neck as he looked toward the oven. “There will be a reception,” he said, still looking round, “In Le Mans. A week, Friday. I have a list. A car will arrive to collect the order and deliver payment. Some of the recipes hail from my own Swabia. Take great care to execute the instructions I’ve provided, as written. They are my father’s. These recipes are my second gift to you and your shop, Mademoiselle Hulot.”

“Yes, sir. Of course. What was the first?”

“Indeed,” he said. “What is the first?”

Now the atmosphere of the shop darkened, grew oppressive, but the light changed not at all. “A Monsieur LeCorps has hinted at certain improprieties. You are acquainted with the man, yes? Parisian accent? Always slouching?”

“Yes,” Odile said. She’d begun to sweat. “What improprieties, sir?”

“Nothing of consequence,” he said. He fussed over the words as if stroking a prized cat. “After all, if any such improprieties had occurred in the past, one might ascribe them to the recklessness of youth. To the ignorance of certain consequences, yes?”

“Any mistakes I’ve made are my own,” Odile said.

“Please understand, Mademoiselle Hulot, that no one cares. About. That.”

Odile waited, cold, for him to speak again.

“Yes,” he said. “Well. Your craftsmanship is exquisite. I have no doubt that you alone can provide the Laugenpretzels and Hefezopfs I require.” He approached the counter and placed his list upon it, but didn’t withdraw his hand. For a moment, he stared at it, and Odile stared, as well, at its translucent skin and the network of blue veins beneath. His hand suggested he was older than he looked by at least a decade.

“I am no fan of this circumstance,” he said. “The brutality of the occupation. The way good people are forced to live. The terrible terrible things my countrymen feel they must do to maintain order. I hate extortion. I abhor fear-mongering, and I detest violence…. But feeling so, in my own way, am I not the worst of us?”

“I don’t… I don’t know, sir.”

“Well, Mademoiselle, rest assured that if I am forced to engage this matter in my official capacity that you, your mother, and your stalwart employee will learn the answer to my question. Clear?”

Odile couldn’t form a response. She felt as she had when her father had taken her to the zoo in Le Mans. There, at the reptile house, she’d seen a boa constrictor for the first time. Her father was friends with a zookeeper who took them behind the display and gathered out the serpent to show them up close.

He let Odile touch it. It was one great muscle, like a disembodied limb, but harder, like a leather shoe that was somehow alive…. Even so, it had displayed more genuine warmth, more human care, than the Commandant in his street clothes.

#

Sleep stayed away that night. Odile’s imagination was a riot of bloody scenarios, dismemberment, rape, and torture. She tried to read, but even knitting was beyond her, as scattered as her focus had become. Eventually she ran out of cigarettes, and had to choose between going to bed and seeking out one of her father’s pipes and her mother’s loose tobacco. Finally, she put out the lights and lay down, but that was no help. She found herself shuttling in the dark between her feather bed and the vanity, hoping for another of her nocturnal visions.

Finally, sometime close to the Witching Hour, Odile spotted a figure in the garden beneath her window. Without thinking, she drew on her dressing gown and went outside to question him.

“Whereinhell have you been?” she said as she strode into the gloom. “I’ve been climbing the fucking walls!”

“What?”

The voice was unfamiliar, and now, Odile realized, with a sinking heart, that the silhouette was unfamiliar as well. For a brief, terror-bright instant she thought this must be the Parisian returned, intent on harming Odile and her mother without intermediaries of any kind.

But there was no leaning quality to this figure. He stood tall, swathed in shadow, and as he lit his cigarette, Odile got an impression of him in the fleeting match-light. He seemed slightly swarthy, with dark, close-cropped hair, and large, wet eyes. Something in her recognized him.

“Who are you? What are you doing here?”

“I wanted a look at you.”

“Did Abel send you? Who are you?”

“‘…Thou askest me of my glorious name, and I will tell it thee; and do thou give me a stranger’s gift, even as thou didst promise. Noman is my name, Noman do they call me—my mother and my father, and all my comrades as well.’”

“…What?”

“Abel already told you his name. He’ll tell you mine, as well.”

“Where is he?”

The figure’s shoulders stooped with sadness, and he took a breath. Odile realized now that there’d been no joke and no affront in his quote. Whatever game this stranger played, it was not one he enjoyed.

“Out searching for me. I told him not to in the note I left, but Abel is… He’s not one to be told what to do.”

“You’re the one he’s been feeding with my bread.”

“Yes,” Noman said. Odile couldn’t help but think of him as Noman. “I owe you.”

“I can’t anymore. The Commandant—he’s been here. Personally. I can spare you one more tonight, but that’s it.”

“Honestly, I’d appreciate it. I’ve a long journey ahead, and I’m unsure of my destination..”

“God. You’re just a boy. Like Abel.” Even as she said it, she knew it must be true. He must be a Jewish or Romani student at the Priory school secreted away by Abel and the monks when the Germans began enacting their putrid laws.

“There may be elsewhere you can hide,” she said. “Not here, but close.”

Noman seemed to consider, then, “I can’t,” he said with a shake of his head. “Les Boches know too much about me already. I must go quickly, but… I had to see.”

“See what?”

“You’re not like his others.”

She blushed. “I’m fatter, you mean.”

Noman grimaced. “I don’t mean that. You’re… you’re changed in a way that they were not.”

Because her father was missing? Because she was risking her life and her mother’s life just standing here?

“I won’t ask you to take care of him,” Noman said. “But I will ask, what do we have if we don’t have each other?”

Odile made a rude noise. “Don’t be an asshole. We have ourselves. I’ll get you that bread now, O Great Odysseus.”

#

Odile mouthed a filthy word as she let herself back into the yard, a sleeved baguette in the crook of her right arm. She wasn’t surprised to find Noman gone when she returned to the darkest part of the garden, but she was surprised to find Abel standing in his place.

His chest heaved, and even in the dark, Odile could tell his hair was awry. She couldn’t tell whether it was physical or emotional exertion that had momentarily stolen his voice.

“…He was here, wasn’t he? Why would you have brought bread, if not for him? That whoreson. That filthy sonofabitch.” His words were riven with affection.

“He was your brother, wasn’t he?”

They stood in silence for a long time before Odile took Abel by the wrist and led him inside. He wept as they went, sobbing hard and loud like a little boy. The sound of his despair brought a lump into Odile’s chest.

“I know,” she said as she led him up the stairs. “I know what it’s like. It’s like the sun’s gone out.”

Abel let go her hand to steady himself against the wall. When that didn’t work, he began to kneel, and Odile descended a little and went to him.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s all right….”

She racked her brain, searching for something to say in his native language. All she could remember was a passage she’d memorized in primary school, and it hardly seemed appropriate.

“What was his name?” she said.

“What?”

“He didn’t tell me. He said you already told me your name, so you would tell me his.”

“It was—It’s Jacques. Jack.”

“Good. That’s the first thing. Now, let’s go upstairs and I’ll run you a bath. I’ll scrub you good, and you tell me about him.”

They wavered for a moment, holding each other. “He came to live with us when I was thirteen,” Abel said. “He’s from . . . He’s from somewhere else.”

“America, or . . . ?”

Abel shook his head. “A place full of monsters. He was running from them. And now he’s running from our monsters, too.”

Odile frowned, bit her lower lip. She wondered why Abel’s explanation didn’t frighten or even surprise her. She thought of her dream. The man—the boy—? With the glowing eyes. “He’ll be all right,” she said. “And you’ll see him again.”

“How do you know?”

“Because you need him,” she said. “And he loves you at least as much as I do.”

Abel just watched her for a moment, then something relaxed inside him. Some part of him, however small, believed.

When Odile pulled away and resumed her climb of the stairs, Abel followed her, steady and quiet.

END