Madame Tane nodded. “Bruised and badly shaken, but not hurt, thank God.”
I took another sip of the Armagnac. It was warm and thick, and I could feel it in my belly. “May I go up?” I asked.
“Of course.” Madame Tane stood, and I followed her out into the old farmhouse’s front room and up the stairs to the second floor. At the end of a narrow hallway she stopped and put her hand to her lips.
“Here,” she whispered, indicating a closed door. “I’ve made a bed up for you as well and left some towels. There’s a bathroom next door. Monsieur Tane and I will have dinner soon. We hope you’ll join us if you’re not too tired.”
I nodded. “Thank you.”
“I’m sorry,” the woman said; then she turned and started back toward the stairs.
I put my hand on the knob and quietly opened the door. The bedside lamp was on, casting a warm circle of light on the room’s two twin beds. In the bed on the right, her legs curled protectively into her stomach, was Heloise. She woke at the sound of my footsteps and opened her eyes, staring at me through the fog of sleep.
“Eve?” she said.
“Yes.” I crossed to the bed and bent down beside her. “Sorry to wake you.”
She sat up, propping her shoulders on the headboard, resting her hands on top of the quilt. There was a long red welt on her right cheek, and the backs of her hands were raw and scratched. She’d been the dearest to me of all the sisters, and though I felt guilty thinking it, I was relieved that she was the one who had been spared.
I put my hand gently on hers. “You all right?”
She nodded, and I could tell she was fighting back tears. “There was a man,” she said. “I left compline early. I was going to the kitchen.”
Her hair was loose around her face. I reached up and brushed a stray strand from her cheek. Normally, we took that walk together each night, from the chapel to the kitchen to finish the next day’s baking.
“I don’t know how I did it.” She looked away from me, out the bedroom’s window toward the floodlit yard and the darkness beyond. “I just ran, Eve, as hard as I could. I could hear them, you know, the others. At first I thought they were singing. It sounded like they were singing, but they were screaming.”
“Shush,” I told her. “We can talk about this later.”
She shook her head, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “One of the men, he had me in his hands.”
“It’s okay,” I said, feebly trying to reassure her.
“No,” she insisted. “Listen.” She hardened her face, as if this was something she had to get through, as if she couldn’t rest until she did. “They were looking for something, someone. The American, he said.”
I straightened slightly, the hairs along the back of my neck bristling.
Heloise looked up at me. Her eyes were huge and dark. “They came for you, Eve.”
THREE
Most amnesiacs are not nearly as lucky as I am. Of the scant number of people who suffer some kind of brain trauma and lose their memories, the overwhelming majority lose not only their grip on the past but their ability to form new memories as well. Put simply, their brains can no longer learn. Introduced to someone at a cocktail party, they will forget that person’s name before the next sip of their martini. Give them a trivial task, like making tea, and they will need to be reminded five or six times of what they are doing. Most people like this live in constant terror, each moment groundless, independent of the one that came before.
Among the few with simple, retrograde amnesia, only a miraculous few, like me, can remember skills from the time before. Most have to be retaught the simplest things, how to fry an egg or flush a toilet. Many find that their talents and handicaps, likes and dislikes have changed drastically. I knew a man once, one of Dr. Delpay’s patients, who had been a successful lawyer in his old life, and in his new one had taught himself to paint. He never set foot in a courtroom again, and had no desire to, but his paintings, beautiful, dark canvases, now sell for tens of thousands of euros.
In the first few days after the accident my memory was utterly lightless, black like the depths of the convent’s wine cellar, that terrifying blindness of not being able to see your own hand in front of your face. Then, slowly, my knowledge of the world came back to me in dozens of daily discoveries, things I’d learned and forgotten I’d learned. My ease with several languages, passable French and German, a smattering of Spanish and Russian. The names of constellations. How to drive a car. These all resurfaced like the tattered relics of a shipwreck, tide-driven to the nearest shore. And though I was familiar with the mechanics of these things, the pattern of a gear shift, the conjugation of a verb, the shape of Orion, I could not tell you how I’d come to know them.
In the beginning I’d tried to piece together a life from these scant clues, women I would have liked to have been. A housewife separated from her group, a stray from a wine country tour. A travel writer. A teacher. But there was other, less comfortable evidence that just didn’t fit, how when I took a seat for prayer I felt compelled to scan the chapel for the closest exit, how my eyes were always turning toward the woods, as if I expected something to come from them. Or how I knew from the day I arrived every place on the abbey grounds where a man might conceal himself.
Then one morning while Heloise and I made our way to the kitchen, I’d reeled at the distant crack of Monsieur Tane’s old rifle, the sound ricocheting up from the farm below us.
“The fox,” Heloise had explained, her hand on my arm, her voice calm. But her face had betrayed me, her eyes reflecting some deep and instinctive terror in my own.
For an instant I’d looked at her fragile body, the pale V of skin where her shirt opened around her neck, and I’d thought of my fingers on her throat, the heel of my palm against her breastbone, all the various ways in which I could hurt her with only my hands.
For a long time after that the only mysteries I’d wanted to understand were those of the kitchen, the secret properties of yeast, the alchemy of combining butter and flour to make air, the way Heloise marked the tops of the bâtards so that they split like overripe fruits in the oven.
I sat with the Tanes through dinner, trying unsuccessfully to force down a small plate of food. I should have been hungry, but I wasn’t. I felt stretched thin, tired and edgy at the same time. I managed a glass of Monsieur Tane’s homemade wine, then excused myself and went upstairs.
Careful not to wake Heloise, I let myself into the little guest room, kicked my shoes off, and stretched out on the free bed. I switched the bedside lamp off and let my eyes adjust to the semidarkness. The light from the yard below threw spidery shadows onto the dormered walls, the crooked outlines of tree branches, the narrow thread of a power line. I could hear Heloise breathing, and the sound of the cotton sheets rasping against each other when she moved.
They came for you, Eve, I heard her say, and once again goose bumps stippled the top of my spine. She’d been afraid, I reassured myself. She didn’t know what she’d heard. And yet, whoever did this had to have wanted something.
Shuddering at the thought, I pulled the thick wool blanket up over my shoulders and rolled onto my side. Sleep seemed an impossibility, but somehow my exhaustion overtook me. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again the moon was sitting high in the room’s one window, a thin crescent like the pared tip of a fingernail.
I swung my legs off the bed and let my feet touch the cold floor. I’d been dreaming, running on legs that stubbornly refused to move with any speed. There was a child in my arms, a little girl with Heloise’s face.