All six children love the sand and the water, and we send them outside to go and play and come back to us for supper, then lessons. They return dirty and exhausted and starving for a feast Dr. Curie prepares. During the days I catch up on my reading, and I write notes in my journal. My body is away from my lab; my mind never leaves it.
It is only Paul who seems unhappy here. He will disappear for the afternoon, and whenever I go to look for him to let him know supper is ready, I find him sitting alone in an empty corner of the beach, gazing off into the water with a steady frown on his face.
“Are you feeling ill?” I ask him one afternoon in early June. I put the back of my hand to his forehead, but his body temperature feels normal. I sit down next to him on the beach, gaze off into the water, but it is infinite and boring. I don’t understand what he’s doing out here.
He turns away from the water and offers me a wan smile. “I just need a break sometimes. You know how that is, Marie?”
“From work?” I ask him, not knowing how that is at all. Whenever I try to take time away from my work, I feel lost. Work is what nourishes me, keeps me alive.
He shakes his head. “It’s just… do you ever feel that everything around you is crushing you? So much so that it is impossible to breathe.”
It is strange the way he describes a feeling I’ve known well my whole life: when Mama died, when Kazimierz left me, and most recently when I lost my Pierre. “The dark fog,” I say, resting my hand gently on his arm. “The heaviness.”
He turns his eyes back to the water, but he moves his hand up to hold on to mine. “When I lose myself in the expanse of the sea,” he says softly. “I can remember how to breathe again.”
SINCE WE HAD LIVED NEXT TO THE LANGEVINS ON BOULEVARD Kellerman for years, I count both Paul and Jeanne among my before and after friends, along with the Perrins (who have decided to spend the summer in Brittany with family this summer, instead of with us). The Langevins were a part of my other, married life, and they have remarkably stayed my friends through the endless black tunnel of my grief and our move to Sceaux. It is both wonderful and terrible to have friends who have known you in both your best and darkest times.
Jeanne acts as though nothing has happened, nothing is different here in Arromanches than it ever was back on boulevard Kellerman when Pierre was alive. I find that to be her most remarkable quality; the way she just simply ignores my loss and the changes in my life. And mostly that is why I make a point to eat breakfast with her each and every morning during the month of June. We sip coffee, and Jeanne talks about herself, about her own marriage. “Paul is horrible to me,” she confides one morning, about a week after Paul told me of his darkness on the beach. Jeanne’s favorite topic of conversation is, and always has been, her marriage.
I sip my coffee, and nod and murmur softly. My friendship with Paul has always relied upon my balancing and ignoring Jeanne’s badmouthing of him with what I know and see to be true with my own eyes. I have watched him teaching maths to our children these last months: He is soft-spoken, so unbelievably patient and kind, even with their painstakingly elementary grasp on the subject matter. And then I think about how lost he’s been looking when I find him on the beach, the sweet sad sound of his voice when he told me how it is impossible for him to breathe. I can’t imagine him intending to be horrible to anyone. But I have the feeling if I were to tell Jeanne all this, she would get angry with me. And it is nice to have a friend, another woman around me, for once. So I say nothing at all on the subject. I simply nod.
“He has a mean streak, you know,” she tells me now, pouring thick cream into her cup, turning her coffee an unpalatable shade of tan. “He purposefully denies me money, Marie. Money I need to care for his children.”
“If you ever need money,” I say to her. “I could lend you some money.”
“Oh no.” She pushes my offer away with a flick of her wrist, then takes another sip of her coffee. “I’m not asking you for money. I’m just telling you, one woman to another, how hard it is for me. You understand?”
I nod, but the truth is, I don’t understand at all. I have made my own money, relied on my own self, since I first left my home and moved to Paris so many years ago. I want to tell Jeanne, if she thinks her life is hard, she should imagine what it is like to grow up under Russian rule in Poland, to be so poor as a student in Paris that you faint from hunger. That she should imagine what it is like to fall in love and finally, finally, have everything, and then have your husband be crushed by a horse in the street.
But I don’t say any of that to her, and Jeanne is already on to another topic, looking out the window, commenting on the clouds rolling in over the water. “I think it’s going to storm tonight,” she says.
I sip my coffee and look outside. The clouds are high and thin, nonthreatening. “I wouldn’t worry,” I say. “It doesn’t look like anything serious.”
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT I AWAKE TO A LOUD CRASH above me. I remember what Jeanne said about a storm, and wonder if she was right after all, if the noise that awoke me was thunder. But the clouds had floated back out to sea in the afternoon as I’d suspected; the night sky had been black and starlit.
Above me now, I hear Jeanne’s voice, saying words I can’t quite make out. But her tone sounds frightened, or is it angry? What was that noise? My heart pounds furiously, and I get out of bed, find my robe. The Langevins have taken the upstairs bedrooms, the Curies downstairs. I tiptoe around downstairs, but Irène and Ève and Dr. Curie are all soundly asleep.
The entire house feels quiet and still, and I return to my room. Perhaps I dreamed the disturbance. But no matter now; I am wide awake.
I light a lamp and check Pierre’s pocket watch, the last relic I have allowed myself to save of his, to keep with me always. It is nearly five in the morning, and I suppose there is no use going back to sleep. I take my notebook and quietly tiptoe down the hall and out onto the back porch. I will work by lamplight, then catch the sunrise across the water and enjoy the quiet until the children wake after the first light.
I am out here for only a few moments, when the door opens again, and I jump. Paul walks out, his head half-covered in a towel. I lift my lamp so I can get a better view. There is what appears to be blood running down his cheek, from just above his right eye.
“Paul!” I gasp. “Whatever happened to you?” The loud noise… Jeanne’s voice. But I can’t reconcile any of this with the blood on Paul’s face.
“Jeanne got angry with me,” he says softly, his voice resigned. Then he attempts a half smile. “The vase fared much worse than I did, I assure you.”
I stand and go closer, holding the lamp to his forehead to examine the wound. I remove the towel gently—pieces of glass are stuck in his hair, and I pluck them out gingerly one by one with my fingers, then look at his wound again. “I have a needle and thread in my room. I can go get it, stitch this for you,” I say.
“No.” He gently moves my hand away, clasps my fingers in his own. I give his hand a small squeeze, before letting go. He reaches up to touch his wound, then winces. It’s tender. “I’ll be fine.”
“Paul, you’re bleeding.”
“It’s a superficial cut,” he insists. “I’m telling you, I’ll be fine.”
He sighs and sits down on a chair beside me. He presses the towel to his wound until the bleeding seems to stop. I want to ask why Jeanne got so angry, and how exactly a vase came into contact with his forehead. And is she the reason for his crushing darkness, his need for afternoons alone gazing at the water? But I bite my tongue. Jeanne is my friend. Paul is my coworker, and also my friend. I shouldn’t get in the middle of whatever is happening with them.