THIRTEEN
MARTHE
Chavaniac-Lafayette
Spring 1941
But I don’t have a mother, I think, staring in disbelief at the paper. There’s been some sort of mistake; some sort of clerical error . . .
I’m so disoriented, so transported outside myself, that I have the sensation of floating above Madame Simon’s polished walnut desk, with its shiny telephone and a lighter embossed with an owl that seems to blink at me in mockery.
I have to focus my own eyes on the page, where they land each time on the same words.
Mother: Minerva Furlaud, deceased.
Father: unknown.
So I’m not a veritable foundling left by the faeries? I had a mother—a real mother—with a name. Furlaud. Why isn’t it mine? I’m so brittle with shock that I want to shake myself until the memory of my mother rattles out of my bones. Failing that, I want to shake anyone who might remember, so I all but throw the file onto Madame Simon’s desk. “I was told no one knew who my parents were. This says otherwise.”
Scowling at my tone, Madame Simon puts on her glasses. As she reads, her eyes narrow. “Well, that’s strange, isn’t it?”
“Strange?” Boiling anger bubbles past my confusion. Knowing my mother’s name would’ve meant everything to me growing up here in the orphanage. When I was old enough, I could’ve visited her grave. I might’ve felt some sense of solid connection to another human being. Some understanding of who I am . . . and maybe even who I’m meant to be. “Mon Dieu, it’s more than strange you’d keep this secret.”
Madame Simon is somehow impassive in the face of my outburst, unlocking her desk drawer and retrieving a pack of cigarettes. I’ve never seen her smoke before, and now, impatiently, I watch her flick the old owl lighter. She tries three times before it lights. “What is strange,” she finally says, “is that I’ve been keeping records for the Lafayette Memorial for more than twenty-four years and I’ve never seen this document before in my life.”
“You signed it, didn’t you?” I snatch the paper back, only to find the signature is Madame Beatrice’s.
Then I sit down, hard.
“It was Beatrice who found you when you were a child,” she explains. “She must’ve felt it was her responsibility to file the appropriate papers.”
I hadn’t known Madame Beatrice found me. Why didn’t I know that? I take a deep breath. “I want to know everything. Where I was found, for starters. The street, the time of day, what I was wearing . . .”
Madame Simon exhales, wreathing herself in smoke. “I’m afraid I never knew those details.”
A knot of emotion swells in my throat, but I swallow it down, refusing to cry, because I’m not the crying kind.
“I assure you, Marthe, if there was any chance you had surviving family, we would’ve looked for them.”
Surviving family? I’m afraid to hope. Hope, after all, is almost as dangerous as trust. “I want to see all my records.”
“If there’s anything else, it would be at our Paris office, which has been closed since the start of the occupation. With Nazis goose-stepping down the Champs-élysées, I can’t think of any way I could get records from there.”
“There has to be a way,” I insist. “Even if I have to go to Paris myself.”
“You can’t even cross the line of demarcation without a travel pass.”
This fact pierces my bravado, and my shoulders slump. “Then how am I supposed to find out why this woman’s name is on my birth record?”
“You’ll have to ask Beatrice.”
“Oh, why didn’t I think of that?” My sarcasm is sharp, because we’re separated from Madame Beatrice by a British blockade, leagues of ocean, and deadly German submarines. Even before the war it was nearly impossible to get a long-distance call through from Chavaniac to New York, and now even the mails aren’t reliable, but Madame Simon opens her drawer again and gifts me with several precious tissue-thin airmail sheets.
“Here. You can write her a letter . . . but . . .”
“But?”
She stares a long moment. “Maybe you shouldn’t shake this tree just now.”
“Why not?”
“Because this record was filed a long time ago in the chaos and desperation of the Great War. Under such circumstances, mistakes can be made.”
We’re in the middle of a different war now, and our record-keeping is impeccable. “If it is a mistake, I need to know that too.”