“They all died,” Rose continued after a moment. She opened her eyes again and looked at Hope. “It was all I needed to know then. I asked your grandfather to tell me no more. My heart could not bear it.”
Only after he’d delivered the news had she finally agreed to return with him to the Cape Cod town where he’d been born and raised. Until then, she had been determined to remain in New York, just in case. It was where she’d always believed she’d be found, in the meeting place they’d spoken of years before. But now, there was no one left to find her. She was lost forever.
“All these people?” Annie asked, breaking the silence, bringing Rose back to the moment. “They all, like, died? What happened?”
Rose paused. “The world fell down,” she said finally. It was all she could explain, and it was the truth. The world had collapsed upon itself, writhing and folding into something she could no longer recognize.
“I don’t understand,” Annie murmured. She looked scared.
Rose took a deep breath. “Some secrets cannot be spoken without undoing a lifetime,” she said. “But I know that when my memory dies, so too will the loved ones I have kept close to my heart all these years.”
Rose looked at Hope. She knew that her granddaughter would do her best to explain it to Annie one day. But first, she would need to understand it herself. And for that, she needed to go to the place it had all begun.
“Please go to Paris soon, Hope,” Rose urged. “I do not know how much time I have.”
And then, she was done. The toll was too high. She had said more than she’d said in sixty-two years, since the day Ted had returned with the news. She looked up at the stars and found the one she had named Papa, the one she had named Maman, the ones she had named Helene, Claude, Alain, David, Danielle. There was still one star missing. She could not find him, no matter how much she searched. And she knew, as she’d always known, that it was her fault he wasn’t there. A piece of her wanted Hope to find out about him, on her journey to Paris. She knew the discovery would change Hope’s life.
Hope and Annie were asking questions, but Rose could no longer hear them. Instead, she closed her eyes and began to pray.
The tide was coming. It had begun.
Chapter Seven
Do you, like, have any idea what she was talking about?” Annie says as soon as we get back in the car after dropping Mamie off.
She’s fumbling with her seat belt as she tries to buckle it. It’s not until I notice that her hands are shaking that I realize mine are too.
“I mean, like, who are those people?” Annie finally clicks the belt closed and looks at me. There’s confusion etched across her smooth brow, along with her smattering of freckles that are fading more the farther we get from the summer sun. “Mamie’s maiden name wasn’t even Picard. It was Durand.”
“I know,” I murmur.
When Annie was in fifth grade, her class did a basic family tree project. She’d tried to use a website to trace Mamie’s roots, but there’d been so many immigrants with the last name Durand in the early 1940s that she’d gotten stuck. She’d sulked about it for a week, upset at me that I hadn’t thought to research Mamie’s past before her memory began to vanish.
“Maybe she got the name wrong,” Annie says finally. “Maybe she wrote Picard but she meant Durand.”
“Maybe,” I say slowly, but I know that neither of us quite believes it. Mamie was as lucid as we’d seen her in years. She knew exactly what she was saying.
We drive the rest of the way home without speaking. But for once, it’s not an uncomfortable silence; Annie isn’t sitting in the passenger seat resenting me with her every breath; she’s thinking about Mamie.
The light in the sky has almost entirely gone out now; I imagine Mamie at her window, searching the stars as twilight finally gives way to the blackness of night. Out here on the Cape, especially when the summer tourists have all snuffed out their porch lights until the next season, the nights are dark and deep. The larger streets are lit, but as I turn onto Lower Road and then Prince Edward Lane, the faint glow of Main Street vanishes behind us, and ahead of us, the last vestiges of Mamie’s heure bleue disappear into the dark void that I know is the west side of Cape Cod Bay.
I feel like we’re in a ghost town as I make the last turn onto Bradford Road. Seven of the ten homes on our street are summer homes, and now that the season’s over, they’re deserted. I pull into my driveway—the same driveway where I spent summer nights as a little girl catching fireflies and winter days helping my mom shovel snow so she could get her old station wagon out—and turn off the ignition. We’re still in the car, but now that we’re a block from the beach, I can smell salt in the air, which means that the tide is coming in. I have a sudden urge to hurry down to the beach with a flashlight and dip my toes in the frothy surf, but I quell it; I have to get Annie ready to go to her father’s for the night.