The gendarmerie? In my house? “The children?” I gasp, suddenly panicked.
“They’re fine. They’re at the Perrins’.” Irène is often next door, playing with her little friend when I arrive home, and that in itself is not unusual. It is the way Dr. Curie’s voice breaks, the way his eyes cloud with tears.
I pull out of Dr. Curie’s grasp and rush into the dining room. There, sitting at my table, are two policemen, along with Professor Appel and Jean Perrin. They all stare at me as I enter, with serious faces, wide eyes.
“What is it?” I demand. Has Pierre has gotten sicker? Is he in the hospital?
“There was a dreadful accident,” Jean Perrin finally speaks, his voice shaking. “Pierre was run over by a carriage, Marie.”
“Run over? By a carriage?” I repeat the words back, and they sound empty, untrue.
“He was always dreaming of something, never paying attention,” Dr. Curie murmurs, almost to himself, as if he’s in such a state he doesn’t realize the rest of us are in the room with him.
“I’m so sorry, Marie,” Professor Appel says. “He didn’t make it.”
Pierre was just here, this morning. Just riding bikes with me in Saint-Rémy last weekend and saying how lucky we are. How he loves our life. I shake my head. “That can’t be,” I say. “It must be some mistake.”
“Marie.” Jean Perrin stands, comes to me, holds on to my shoulders, as if to hold me up, to keep me standing. I shake him away. I do not need him to carry me. I carry myself, I always carry myself. “It is true,” he says gently. “Pierre is dead.”
“Pierre is dead.” I echo him, the words coming out too loud, hurting my own ears. “Dead? He is absolutely dead?”
No one says a word for a moment. I have frightened them with my logic, or with my lack of tears or with the way shock ripples through me, making my voice loud and angry and so absolute.
“Yes,” Jean Perrin says again. “Dead.”
“Where is he?” I demand. “I need to see him.”
“Madame.” One of the gendarmerie rises. “I don’t know if that’s the best idea. He will not be as you knew him.”
“I have to see him,” I say again,
The men all look at each other. “His skull was crushed,” the other gendarme says, his tone gentle, as if that will soften it.
His brilliant, beautiful mind, crushed. Trampled by a carriage. In the street.
“Bring him to me,” I say louder, and all around me the men’s voices buzz and hum. They are bees in my garden, annoying me.
A FEW HOURS LATER, THEY BRING HIM TO THE HOUSE BY AMBULANCE, carry him in on a stretcher, and lay him out in our living room. It is dark inside the house, but neither Dr. Curie nor I have lit the lamps. A gendarme hands me Pierre’s things—his pocket watch, not trampled at all, completely unbroken, still ticking. It feels impossible, that it continues to keep time. That time is still moving forward at all.
I clutch the watch in my hand, feeling it ticking against my palm, and I go to him. His head is wrapped in bandages, but his face looks exactly like him, when he is sleeping. My Pierre. I grab his hand and it is still warm, still feels responsive to my touch. Could they be wrong? I put my hand to his neck to feel for his heartbeat, but there is nothing. Nothing at all.
I sit with him, holding on to his hand with one of my hands. His watch with the other. I cannot speak, and I have no tears.
Behind me, Dr. Curie stands quietly, watching, waiting for me to break apart. But morning comes first, and Pierre’s brother, Jacques, arrives at our house from Montpellier.
“Marie,” Jacques says, touching my shoulder gently. He tries to pull me up, pull me away from Pierre, but I refuse to budge. “Papa says you have been here all night. But they need to take him away. Prepare his body for the funeral.”
Maybe it is that word, funeral, that I have not considered until right now. Or maybe it is the sound of Jacques’s voice, an echo of Pierre’s. But quite suddenly my tears come, my body is racked with sobs that I cannot control, that I cannot stop, even if I would want to.
Marya
Paris, 1906
Klara and I arrived in Paris just before Easter weekend, and enduring the long train rides with a two-and-a-half-year-old, even a usually pleasant one like Klara, was a hellish sort of torture I did not wish to ever repeat. Never mind we planned to return to Poland in only a month’s time, and I would have to do it all over again. Stepping out from the Gare du Nord, into the warm, bright Paris morning, I inhaled deeply and tried to put that thought out of my mind.
Our trip to Paris was at once a last-minute decision and the culmination of eight long months of Hela’s worried letters to me and Bronia. Truth be told, Bronia was the one Hela longed for in her condition, the one she begged to come to Paris to help her through childbirth. But Bronia was too busy with Jakub and Lou, and her sanatorium was quite busy as well. Bronia could not leave Zakopane for an entire month, and she had written to me, begging me to be the one to go instead. I’d showed her letter to Kaz as proof. See. Hela cannot survive without me. Even Bronia said so.
What I did not show Kaz was my correspondence with Pierre. Not because I was doing anything wrong—Pierre had been keeping in more frequent touch to update me on Hela’s condition, which he promised he was keeping an eye on for me. But because my letters from him felt private. Something outside of our family or the friends I had in Loksow who Kaz also knew. Before Pierre, Leokadia had been my closest friend, and look what had happened when I’d involved Kaz with her life. No, Pierre was separate. All mine.
I wrote to Pierre last week, to let him know of our upcoming trip, and he wrote back, letting me know he’d taken Jacques’s bicycle out again. Fixed a broken spoke, and oiled it, and put air in the tires. And perhaps, he wrote, if she is old enough and wants to learn, you would let me teach your Klara to ride, too?
THE WEEK BEFORE I LEFT FOR PARIS, I RECEIVED A LETTER from Leokadia. She would be in Paris the week after Easter, too, giving a series of concerts at Montmartre. And she enclosed two tickets for me, should Hela and I wish to attend. She wrote how she would love to see me again, and though I folded the letter and tickets back up, thinking I would never actually go to her concert, I had brought them with me all the way to Paris, just in case I changed my mind.
The day of her concert, a Thursday, it was dreadfully dreary and rainy outside. Hela lay in her parlor moaning about her heaviness, her swollen ankles, and the way her mind felt as though it had been stretched and rolled into pastry dough, flat and malleable, and I can’t even concentrate on keeping up with the latest papers, she complained.
I sliced some bread for Klara and heated some water for Hela in the kitchen, squeezing a full lemon into it, before taking it to her. “This will help with your swelling,” I told her. “I promise.”
She frowned, as if to say, who was I? Not her sister-mother. Not her sister-doctor. Not even someone who had obtained a doctorate in science from the Sorbonne. But then she sighed and took the hot water from me. She blew on it before taking a sip. “I’m sorry I’ve been so difficult,” she said. “I just feel so miserable. Tell me it gets easier when the baby gets here, Marya?”
I laughed a little, and lied to her, assured her everything would be easy. Everything would be easy, and harder, too. Though Hela, who already employed a servant to cook for her, would probably also be able to afford a wet nurse and a nanny to look after her baby. Perhaps nothing at all would ever be as hard for her as these last few exhausting weeks of her pregnancy had been. But poor Hela, she was in such a state right now. And I really didn’t know how to help her.