“If we get this apart,” T said, “we might never get it back together again.”
“Our gas will take us farther without the trailer,” Nanée said.
“Our jerry cans are in the cart.”
“Pffft. We’ll put them in the trunk.” Thinking through whether there was anything she particularly cared about in the trailer. Her books, yes, but she couldn’t possibly get them all in the car. And beyond that? Even the single piece of art she’d brought was not the one she’d wanted—not the Edouard Moss push-up man she’d returned to the Galerie des Beaux-Arts to purchase that day after the Surrealist exposition, but a photograph by another artist she’d bought when that one wasn’t for sale, a woman’s face and naked breasts seeming to float in murky water. On Being an Angel, it was called. She’d never even hung it, and yet it was the only art she’d brought, as if it would bring bad luck not to leave the Paris apartment intact for her return at this insanity’s end.
They gave up on the hitch, finally, leaving in the absence of their banging an eerie silence. Had the German attack, wherever it was, ended?
Nanée hopped into the driver’s seat to try to turn the car again, Dagobert following lest he be left behind. She pulled the car forward a few inches, then backward and forward, backward and forward, cranking the steering wheel with each reversal. Again and again and again, an inch or two gained each time, until finally she moved forward, completing the turn even with the trailer still hitched.
T cheered, and Peterkin cheered with her, his bunny still held by its ear, as Nanée climbed out to bask with them in this small victory. Dagobert put his paws to the window and barked.
A terrific roar sounded overhead, the inverted gull wings of a German Stuka flying low. As they stood watching, it fired.
Surely it wouldn’t shoot at them? Surely it wouldn’t shoot a child? Disbelief flooded Nanée even as she saw that Peterkin was straight in its path.
She ran for him.
T ran too.
Nanée reached him first.
Scooped him up.
Ran for the tree line.
The roar of the planes—several now—was deafening, the rat-a-tat-tat of their guns pure hell.
One of the planes followed them, shooting as if in a carnival game. But not at all like that. Not pretend. Not a nightmare. Real screams filled Nanée’s ears, real wails. T screaming, “Peterkin!” and Peterkin crying in Nanée’s arms. Was he hurt? Was T?
Nanée, still running, glanced back to confirm that T was just behind her.
She dove for the tree line, the sturdy trunks and cover of leaves.
She would not cry. She would not cry.
T was beside her on the ground already, taking Peterkin from her and tucking him underneath her to shield him with her body.
Nanée looked out to the little car pointed in the only direction the road went, toward the German planes already disappearing. Dagobert watched her through the car window, shivering.
She was up again, running back to the car, T with Peterkin close behind her.
The poor dog climbed all over Nanée in the urine-smelling Citro?n as she shoved the gearshift into drive, spraying gravel and dirt as she took off down the road, all the while saying to the whimpering dog, “It’s okay, we’re all okay, we’re okay.”
THE BRIDGE AT Sully was strewn with bodies caught in the German strafing. The line waiting to cross stretched forever: cars with number 75 license plates, the code for Paris; buses and tractors and bicycles; even old tumbrels, those two-wheeled open carts that once carried condemned prisoners to the guillotine. All were loaded with mattresses and dishes, clothes, food, children’s toys, books, even fur coats, despite the desperate heat. But most people walked. If they were lucky, they pushed prams full of their belongings. Everyone was headed south, toward the sea.
They barely made fifty miles that first day, despite driving late into the night, the Citro?n’s headlights—dimmed by the wartime regulation blue paint—reflecting such a nasty drizzle that Nanée drove with her head out the window to better see. They gave up at a dark barn on a dark road somewhere near Vierzon. Nanée explored it, flashlight in hand, and returned to report that there was a hayloft, if they could get Peterkin up the ladder.
“A hayloft all to ourselves,” she said. “That sounds rather deluxe, doesn’t it?”
She set a flashlight, pointed up, at the bottom of the ladder, and they began to climb. They were nearly to the top, Peterkin on his mother’s back, T choking under his grip around her neck as Nanée followed close behind to catch him if he fell, when a rung splintered under T’s foot. Nanée called out, but already the wood was snapping.