Yes, I tell her. Go play next door. Be home for supper.
Ève has no idea what she has lost. Fifteen months old, she toddles around the house, still pulling off her clothing at will and stealing Irène’s toys. She will never remember him. She will never know him. I walk through days and days carrying that thought in my head, and that becomes my undoing. Pierre’s loss is a great loss for the scientific community, a great personal and professional loss for me. But more than anything it is Ève’s loss that breaks me. She will never know her father.
JACQUES AND BRONIA BOTH LINGER IN PARIS FOR WEEKS, HOVERING. Bronia looks after the children, stepping in for Dr. Curie in the evenings when normally I would. Jacques says he is straightening Pierre’s affairs with the university and that he will go home when he is sure we are okay.
“We will never be okay,” I tell him flatly, and he frowns, making his face look more angled, more like Pierre’s.
“In time,” Jacques says kindly, patting my shoulder. “In time.”
But what does Jacques know? What does Bronia know? He will return soon to Montpellier to his own wife, Marie. Bronia will return to Zakopane and Mier and Lou. They will not work and live and breathe and raise their children alone.
I spend days in bed, not having the energy to get up, much less care for the children or tend the house. Bronia and Jacques do these things for me. Jeanne Langevin and Henriette Perrin stop by each afternoon with food, and Bronia thanks them on my behalf, feeds their delicious meals to my children, herself, and Jacques. I hear the noises of them downstairs. Normal noises, happy noises, laughter. I put a pillow over my head, drowning them out.
“Siostra,” Bronia calls into the darkness of my bedroom. “Come, have dinner with us.”
“I’m not hungry,” I say back.
When I stay in bed, when I close my eyes and dream, Pierre is still here, still almost close enough to touch. I dream him here; I dream of ways to stop him, to save him. But every morning I wake up and remember again and again. He is gone.
EVEN THOUGH HIS BODY IS IN THE GROUND IN SCEAUX, I HAVE kept ahold of him in my own way. The shirt Pierre was wearing that last day, his bloody and torn and muddy shirt—I’ve folded it up and put it in a small brown paper package, wrapped it with string, and tied it to my stomach, wearing it with me underneath my clothing, holding the last pieces of him tight against my skin. It went with me to his burial in Sceaux, and it goes with me again when I go back with Jacques and Bronia and Dr. Curie to see his finished tombstone.
His name is on it. Pierre Curie.
It cannot be. It cannot be. His shirt is tied to me still. It has his blood, his life. They have made a mistake, engraved the wrong man’s name.
“This isn’t right,” I say. “This can’t be him.”
“I’m sorry, but it is,” Bronia whispers into my widow’s veil. I don’t want to listen. I want to go back to my bedroom, where I can be alone with my dreams and the last piece I have left of him.
How is it possible? His name, written on a tombstone, next to Sophie-Claire’s, who has been gone from us nearly ten years. How can that be? My Pierre.
My sister-mother holds on to me. “You have to be strong now, for the children,” she says softly. I think of them, Irène and little Ève. And then I tell Bronia about the piece of him I kept, that I have with me now.
Back at the house, she helps me untie it from my body. She lights a fire in my bedroom, and she says to me sternly, but kindly, “It is time to let go now. It is time to let go.”
“I’VE SPOKEN TO THE UNIVERSITY,” JACQUES SAYS, A WEEK later, the beginning of May. Time has passed. I don’t understand it. I clutch Pierre’s watch still, feel it ticking on relentlessly beneath my fingers. “They will offer you a generous widow’s pension for Pierre’s position,” he says.
“Widow’s pension?” I laugh bitterly. “I am much too young for that.”
Jacques nods, agreeing.
“And do they think I won’t work any longer?” To be thirty-eight years old and to be a widow, to think that I should live the whole rest of my life and not be able to work. Pierre and I have left so much still undone in the lab, work with our radium unfinished. Who will finish, if not me? “I don’t want a pension,” I say. “I’ll support myself. But I need the lab. They cannot take away the lab space from me.” To lose Pierre and my work? It is too much; it is just too much.
Jacques pats my shoulder lightly, understanding. He is one of the kindest men I have ever known, aside from Pierre, and Papa, and his father. He will try and help me with anything I ask of him. “What do you want me to tell them, Marie? What will make you happy?” he asks gently.
Happy is a funny word. And as soon as Jacques says it, he must judge that it’s the wrong one because he puts his hand to his mouth. There will be no happy going forward. There will be important work to do. There will be science. And now I will do it alone.
“I want his job,” I tell Jacques. “I want them to give me his teaching position. His laboratory. I don’t need the pension. Just the salary he was making so I can support my family. And I will earn it by doing the work he was doing, myself.”
Jacques considers it for a moment. “You know they have never hired a woman to teach there before.”
I nod. Of course I know. “But no woman ever won the Nobel Prize before I did either,” I remind him.
BY THE MIDDLE OF THE MONTH IT IS SETTLED; JACQUES HAS convinced them. I will take Pierre’s position at the Sorbonne, his lab space, and ten thousand francs a year of salary.
Jacques leaves to go home to his family in Montpellier, and Bronia takes the train back to Poland, her family. And then it is just me and Dr. Curie and the girls. Our house on boulevard Kellerman, where Pierre and I lived together for so many years, feels too big, too empty, too quiet.
“Shall I go too?” Dr. Curie says softly one night as we sit together in the parlor, after he has gotten the girls to go to sleep.
“Go?” I am shocked by his question. I have not considered it before.
“Jacques said there is room for me in Montpellier.”
Of course. Dr. Curie was only here because of his son, and now his son is gone. And what am I to him but a Polish woman, unrelated by blood? He has another son, with a French wife, and two more grandchildren in Montpellier. “You want to go to Montpellier?” I ask him.
He frowns, puts his head in hands. Then rubs his eyes. He is tired, and he is sad, and it has never been so clear to me that he is an old man as it is in this very moment. “I want to do whatever you want me to do, Marie,” he finally says.
I cannot imagine continuing on without him. Who will look after the children while I work? I can hire someone, of course, but it wouldn’t be the same as their grand-père. “I want you to stay with us,” I say. “The children need you. I need you.”
Dr. Curie lifts his head, smiles now.
“But I want to move,” I tell him. “I cannot live in this house any longer without him.”
Marya
Paris, 1906
Hela’s baby girl was born in the middle of the night on the third of May, two weeks after I arrived in Paris. The baby came out pink and screaming, aided in delivery by Hela’s father-in-law, Dr. Curie, who still practiced medicine though he was getting up in years. He himself had tears in his eyes when he handed Hela her baby for the first time, and as Hela was already forty years old, and his Pierre was still unmarried, perhaps Dr. Curie had long believed that he might never have any grandchildren, up until that very moment when he held her in his hands.