Once upon a time my father, Raymond, taught me about such things as we sat in his study, reading and studying the globe. But no more.
On February 22, 1915, more than a thousand shells were showered on Reims, sometimes as many as ten every minute. The Germans called it “watering the city.” An incendiary bomb set Villa Traverne on fire, and our once-fine house burned for fully a day, until there was nothing left but charred ruins.
We had no choice but to leave. We were barely able to get our injured soldiers out in time; later they were evacuated by the army, andthe rest of us were left standing, dazed and smudged with soot, in the rubble-strewn street. Honorine left to try to find her sister.
Nothing remained of the life our family had lived.
All my father’s books, his precious tomes, gone.
Only the globe stood, a blackened tribute to what once had been our world.
?Now my father passes his days in silence, staring at the walls. Papa had remained strong through the maiming of my brother and the death of my sister.
But this final blow, the loss of Villa Traverne, has rendered him mute.
It was up toMamanand me to find a new situation.
Despite all the destruction and chaos rained down upon Reims, there were still neighborhoods that remained intact. We moved into a small house that had been abandoned by an evacuated family, in the southern part of the city. Some clothes and cookware had been left behind, and we availed ourselves of them though my mother insisted we show the items the utmost respect so the family might find their things intact upon their return.
Ifthey returned.
Chapter Thirteen
Rosalyn was on her way back to Cochet when she noticed her gas gauge was nearing empty.Damn it. She tried to remember if she had seen a gas station once she had left the autoroute on her way to Cochet that first day.
Soon enough the fuel light blinked on, ratcheting up her nervousness.
She pulled over to the side of the road, took several deep breaths, and turned to her phone for help. Its software directed her to a nearby village, where she found two gas pumps in the parking lot of a small convenience store. The store was closed for the holidays, of course, but to her great relief the pumps took credit cards.
Rosalyn tried one card, then another, then another. Each time the pump’s digital display demanded a code.Whatcode? She didn’t have codes for her credit cards. She had a PIN for her debit card, but the pump didn’t recognize that card and spat it out.
She felt like crying.
An engine rattled as an old truck pulled up on the other side of the island. She recognized the vehicle, and the driver: He was thefarmer she had encountered in the field during her predawn walk that first day, the same one she had seen several times since. They waved each time, but always at a distance. Seeing him now, up close, she realized he looked very...French. Full lips, pouting, the top lip as full as the bottom, as though poised to say something, or to kiss someone. He had unbearably sad, downward-tilting gray-green eyes. Her mother would have said he “looked like trouble,” with his scruffy, short-cropped beard, but Rosalyn sensed sorrow more than anything else.
He inserted his card into the other gas pump, tapped in a code, and immediately started fueling up his truck.
“Bonjour, monsieur,”Rosalyn said.
“Bonjour,”he said, his eyes on the digital readout.
“Pardonnez-moi,”she continued. Although the man projected an air of “Don’t bother me,” desperate times called for desperate measures, so she asked him if he would help her:“Est-ce que vous pouvez m’aider avec le machine? J’ai besoin de pétrole.”
He let out a long sigh, practically rolling his eyes, and spoke in rapid-fire French, which she couldn’t follow.
“Je suis désolée. Je ne comprends pas,”Rosalyn apologized, and asked him to speak more slowly.“Est-ce que vous pouvez parler plus lentement?”
He stared at her for a moment, then asked in clipped English: “It is an American card?”
“Yes.”
“The American card does not work here. You have to have the chip.”
“Ithasa chip.”
“And a code.”
“What code?”
