It also made me feel I could be completely honest back, and that he would not judge me or blame me, but he would just listen. “I never knew how much I wanted children,” I told him. “Until I lost a baby a few years ago.”
“Oh,” Pierre said, casting his eyes down. “I’m very sorry, Marya. I shouldn’t have said anything. I didn’t know.”
“It’s all right. How could you?” I shrugged, and tears that I didn’t realize I still had for baby Zosia welled up in my eyes. I blinked them back, willing them not to spill over. I did not wish to make a scene, right here on the street in the middle of this crowd.
Pierre stared at me for a moment, then shifted his eyes away, straining his neck to catch a glimpse of the children up ahead. “I suppose I always imagined I’d be married by now, too,” he said. “Jacques was the one who said he’d be content to be a bachelor forever, not me. And look, even he is getting married.” Pierre let out a dry laugh.
“And why aren’t you married?” I asked him. Surely a man like him: handsome, intelligent, well-off, could marry his pick of women in France, even if his head were in the clouds, as Hela had said.
“I loved a woman once, many years ago. And then she died, and it almost ruined me,” he said. “I suppose I never wanted to let myself feel like that again, and for a long while I wouldn’t even consider falling in love.”
“Well, it’s not too late,” I told him.
He looked back up, smiled at me. “And for you, too,” he said. I supposed he meant it was not too late for me to have a child of my own, but I had this strange feeling he was really saying something else, something more. Something I shouldn’t want him to.
“My husband betrayed me,” I said, speaking the truth out loud for the first time. “I sacrificed my dream of an education in Paris for a life with him in Poland, and then he betrayed me. With my closest friend. They both betrayed me.” I paused, blinking back those tears that really wanted to roll down my face now. “That’s why I’ve been here for so long, all by myself. I had to figure out how I’m supposed to feel, what I’m supposed to do next.”
“And have you?” Pierre asked. “Figured anything out?”
I couldn’t hold the tears back any longer, and I felt them rolling down my cheeks, but I didn’t move to wipe them away. Through the blur, I saw the racers approach, the bicycles a swirl of green and yellow and blue as they whizzed by us. “I don’t know,” I finally said. Hela would be married in a few days, and then everyone would expect me to return home to Poland, to return home to Kaz and to my old life. I had thought that time, that distance, would soften the blow of his betrayal. But it hadn’t. “I really don’t know.”
Pierre reached his hand out, grabbed mine, interlaced our fingers and squeezed gently. I squeezed back, and my body turned warmer from the nearness of him. “Your husband is an imbécile,” he said.
IT WAS NEARLY DARK BY THE TIME WE ARRIVED BACK AT BRONIA’S. Jakub fell asleep on my shoulder on the omnibus, and Pierre lifted him off of me, carried him across his shoulder up to the house. My arm was still numb from the weight of my nephew, and now Lou clung to it as we walked up the steps. I watched Pierre holding on so gently to Jakub, and his tenderness for my nephew made me smile.
Lou let go of me and ran ahead to open the door for Pierre. I felt an ache in my chest for him, as I watched him carry Jakub up the stairs. He should be someone’s father. Someone’s husband.
“Marya.” Bronia’s voice startled me, and I turned.
Then another voice, from behind her: “Kochanie, is that you?” Kaz stepped out of the dining room. My face flamed red, as if I’d been caught doing something I shouldn’t have. I put my hands to my cheeks.
“What are you doing here?”
“I asked him to come,” Bronia said. And it didn’t make any sense to me. Why would she do that? Had my sister-mother betrayed me too? But how could she, when I hadn’t even told her the truth about what had happened between us. “You’re in denial about your condition,” Bronia said.
“My condition?”
Kaz walked closer, put his hands on my shoulders, then pulled me toward him, embraced me tightly. He kissed the top of my head, and though I didn’t want it to, my body relaxed against his. In spite of myself, I had missed him. “I would not miss your sister’s wedding,” he said gently in my ear, stroking back my disheveled hair with his hands.
I heard the sounds of Pierre’s footsteps, coming down the stairs with Lou, two at a time. Lou laughed a little, and I jumped back. Pierre saw Kaz, then met my eyes and frowned.
“Kazimierz,” Bronia said. “This is Pierre Curie. Jacques’s younger brother.”
Kaz stepped forward and they shook hands. Pierre was still frowning; Kaz shook his head a little, seeming confused by Pierre’s expression. I bit my tongue.
“Pierre,” Bronia said. “It is late and a long way back. You should get going.”
“Yes, of course,” Pierre murmured, his eyes still on me as he tipped his hat, walked out. I looked away, my face flaming hot again.
Kaz put his hand on my stomach, flattened his palm against me, holding still. “Kochanie,” he said again. “A baby?”
A baby? I laughed a little, glanced at Bronia, who stared back at me tight-lipped, serious.
“Marya,” she said, her frown creasing deeper. “You have been riding that silly bicycle around La Villette, your head in the clouds. Somebody needs to help you face the truth.”
My head in the clouds. It was the same way Hela described Pierre. And for a moment I thought about our conversation earlier, about the way his hand had felt holding mine, about the way everything had felt a little easier when it was just between the two of us.
“The truth?” I questioned Bronia, though somewhere inside of me, I felt a new red-hot terror rising through my veins, pooling in my stomach, nausea hitting me quickly again.
BRONIA PUT HER STETHOSCOPE TO MY EARS, UNBUTTONED A button on my dress, and put the cold end against my belly. She implored me to listen to the sounds that she was positive would come through. I heard them, a steady thump, thump, thump. But even then, I told her it was not proof of anything. What about the doctor who said my body could not hold on to a baby, deliver it into the world, living?
Kaz took the stethoscope for his own ears. Then, after he heard the sounds too, he exclaimed: “A baby!” His face erupted with a joy I hadn’t seen in him since we were very young, and so in love, and I felt it sharply inside my own chest, an ache, a wanting.
He kneeled down on the ground, kissed my belly. I wanted to continue to be mad at him. I wanted to insist that I had all I needed right here in Paris, on my own. I wanted to stay with my head in the clouds and my feet on the bicycle pedals on the cobblestone streets of La Villette. But there was a heartbeat inside of me, and suddenly that was more important than anything I needed or I wanted.
The day after Hela’s wedding, Kaz and I took the long journey back to Poland, together.
Marie
France, 1904
Pierre’s magical heart is right. 1904 changes us.
For one thing, from the very start of the year, there is the money. Seventy thousand francs from Sweden, and more from England for the Davy prize. We install a modern bathroom in our house, and I send twenty thousand Austrian crowns to Bronia and Mier to help with their sanatorium in Zakopane, and also gifts to Hela in Warsaw and Jacques in Montpellier.