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“
Abducted
is not the right word if I was raised by my own father.”

“But it is. You were stolen.” This was what he’d come to say and couldn’t before. “From your mother.”

Lydia let those words settle inside her.

“They tied her to a tree and had hired men standing guard. She’s been waiting for you all this time. I need to know what I should say to her when I return.”

It was now fully dark. Men in overcoats and hats were walking past, on their way home. The sky was ink, the boy noticed this, ebony at the edges, midnight blue in the center. Only bits of pale light still remained. The city was a miracle, and the idea that he would be leaving it depressed him immensely.

“What was my mother to you?” Lydia asked.

“A friend of our family. And with her mother, for a time, our maid.”

“A maid?” She was puzzled.

“And I must tell you, I suppose, because of the world we live in, she was of African heritage.”

“I see,” Lydia said, although she didn’t quite. She was a Jewish woman and the wife of Henri Cohen and the mother of three daughters and a resident of Paris for so long she could remember nothing of a deeper past. She took the letter the boy offered and opened the envelope. The paper felt like silk, watery; it had been flattened and creased a hundred times over. The print was faded, pale, but she could read it well enough.

My darling, my daughter, my star, my life.

I would not have given you up for anything in the world. Not for any amount of money, not for any promise, not even if they said it was a better future. You were meant to be with me, and no one, not on earth and not in heaven, could have ever loved you more.

You can be whoever you want to be, but you will always be my child, and we will always belong to each other, even if we never speak or see each other again.

She folded the paper back into the envelope, and slid it and her hands inside her cape. They were ice-cold. She was stunned and yet, at the same time, not surprised to discover that someone had loved her beyond measure.

“I need time,” she said when she could speak. “To think about this.”

“Of course.” This boy, Camille, was quite unusual. He seemed an equal. A man from St. Thomas who could understand what a man who had been born and raised in Paris never could. He rose to leave her to her thoughts.

“What will you do when you go home?” she asked.

“I’ll pretend to be who they want me to be.” He grinned then, and she saw his youth. “But it won’t work. In the end I’ll have to disappoint someone. Either them, or myself.”

She herself did not think she could go home yet. She went to a restaurant instead and said she was to meet her husband there, for a woman on her own was not allowed inside. She sat in the lounge and ordered an aperitif and drank it. She shivered, realizing that she was always cold. She had been since the time she’d had that fever. She wondered what had come before and why she could remember only bits and pieces: a red flower, a woman’s voice, a bird that was bright yellow. All at once she knew this was the woman her father had written about and loved. The boy could easily be a liar, the letter forged, the information untrue. But she believed it. He had been following her for so long. He’d known her when she hadn’t known herself, for if this letter was indeed from the woman who had given her life, then Lydia was no longer sure who she was. Certainly not the same woman who had walked into Madame Pizzarro’s house.

When the manager came and asked if she would like him to send a driver and a carriage for her husband, stating that she could not continue to drink on her own, she shook her head and asked that the aperitif be put on her husband’s account. Everything looked new to her, the way things look in dreams. In dreams, the same street one walks along daily becomes a mystery, the stone gray color of the pavement turns to silver and then to gold and then the street disappears completely.

When she at last arrived home, Henri was at the door, worried.

“I couldn’t imagine what had happened.” He embraced her, so grateful for her well-being he didn’t notice that she didn’t respond. The children had been given dinner and had been sent to bed by the maid. Her name was Ava; she originally came from the Loire Valley, not Jewish, a working girl from a farm. Lydia had never asked if she had brothers and sisters. They spoke only of the details of daily life. What the menu would be, what the yardman had failed to do, how the children were growing so quickly, like sprouts. Even when the maid had confided about the boy who’d often come to the back door, Lydia hadn’t thought to ask if she’d been frightened or confused by a stranger. Lydia felt flushed with guilt to think she’d never spoken to this woman about anything deeper than menus and household duties; she’d never asked a question, never had any interest.

While she was preparing for bed in her dressing room, she went to the mirror and studied her reflection. She was the same and yet brand new.

It was true. Her eyes were silver.

SHE REREAD THE LETTER
whenever she was alone. And then one day she took up a pen and paper and wrote back. She told her mother everything she remembered. How ill she had become on the ship. How she had refused to eat and they’d made her drink hot lemon juice to break her fever. She admitted that she could now speak only French, but that her French was flawless, so that everyone assumed she’d been born in Paris. She wrote that she dreamed of teal-colored birds that danced for each other, and that when she had such dreams she awoke crying. She wrote a letter every day for twenty days, and in each she told more of the story of her life. It was as if she was writing her diary all at once, from the time she woke from the fever on the boat to this very day. She was afraid to mail them for some reason. She had a peculiar fear that if she posted them, they would vanish or be stolen and would never reach their intended reader. Instead, she folded them into a small wooden box in which she kept lavender sachets. She didn’t notice how quickly time was passing. Snow fell in early December.

“Will you be going home for Christmas?” she asked the maid, Ava.

They were in the kitchen together, making notes regarding the pantry. Ava seemed shocked to be asked her plans.

“If I can have the time,” she said, wary. “I would like to.”

“Is it a farm?”

“Oh, yes,” Ava said, her cheeks flushed, cheerful to think about her family home. “Mostly chickens and goats.”

“By all means go home. You’ll be paid for your time.”

Snow was falling when Lydia wrote her thirtieth letter. It was Christmas Eve, a time when they always stayed at home. It was not their holiday to celebrate, but there was a peacefulness when the city was deeply quiet, so different than it had been during the riots of the past year. Lydia was in the parlor and the children were asleep. Henri came in from the garden. It was a clear night, and he had been looking at the constellations. He clapped the stray flakes of snow from his coat. There was a fire in the fireplace, an envelope on Lydia’s lap, and the small dog the children had begged for, whom they called Lapin, Bunny, was napping on a small moss-green pillow.

“If we have a son,” Henri said. “We should call him Leo. For the lion of the stars.”

“What if I wasn’t who you thought I was?” Lydia asked. Her pretty face was furrowed with worry.

Henri sat beside her. “Is this about your father? That he didn’t leave much? You know I don’t care. We’re fine, Lydia. There’s no cause to fret.”

“I believe that my father may have been a horrible person. He may have done something awful.”

“Well, he’s gone, so it doesn’t really matter. Neither does the money. The old house brought a good amount. Our girls won’t be in need.”

“But what if I wasn’t who you thought I was.”

He got them both a drink and sat beside her again.

“You think I don’t know you?” he asked.

It was the moment when she could easily have embraced him and thrown the thirtieth letter onto the fire, which was already burning so brightly. She thought about a summer trip she’d made with her parents, to the sea, when she was a girl. They were in the ancient city of La Rochelle, famous for its fields of salt and Roman ruins. She’d never been to the ocean before, but she was entranced. Perhaps she was only seven, little more. She heard her name being spoken in a soft voice, as if someone who knew her was calling to her. She walked over the stones, there for all eternity, made of a soft-clay mineral, filled with the fossils of snails and sea creatures that had lived before there were men and women. Her mother rushed after her, frightened.
Don’t you dare,
her mother cried. Lydia thought her mother feared she would drown or be taken up in the undertow. Now she realized that wasn’t it at all. It was how easily she was called to the sea, how familiar it seemed to her, how right and how beautiful, as if she belonged to it and it to her.

In bed she told her husband everything. She could not look at him as she spoke.

If one is not born of a Jewish mother, it is impossible to be considered a member of the faith, and if she was not, their girls were not either.

“Easily rectified. Conversion is possible if we feel the need,” Henri said.

“I cannot convert from who I am, Henri. My mother’s mother was an African slave.”

“Who your parents were means nothing to me,” Henri told her. “It’s your heart I want.”

Her false mother had been right about one thing: he was a man who would not harm her. As for her heart, it was already broken. That was the source of the fever that had caused her to lose her past and herself.

“And your family?” Lydia asked. “What will it mean to them?”

“There is no need to confide in them, or to invite them into the intimate details of our life.”

Then she knew: he feared they would not be as open as he was to her true history. The business was a family business, based as much on relationships as on the ebb and flow of the banking world. All of their dealings were held within their community with other Jewish families. The unrest around the King, Louis-Philippe, had had little to do with people of their faith in the past, but his lack of concern for working people had touched off serious uprisings. There were days when black smoke filled the city; angry crowds gathered, provoked by how little the King cared for those who felt disenfranchised. For the Cohens, the desire was to keep on in a normal working manner, and that did not include a daughter-in-law whose background would call attention to them. Still, Lydia did not wish to lie to her own children’s grandparents, uncles, and aunts.

“What if I wanted them to know?” she said. “What if not being myself had made me ill?”

“Are you ill?” he said, concerned.

“I have been in the past, and would be again.”

Henri held her close. “It’s your choice. Whatever you decide makes no difference to me.”

The snow continued to fall; still, she heard the nightingale. Lydia wept to think she had not left it any seeds or fruit, and that it might perish on this night. Yet, she did not go to it, but listened until silence overtook her. At last she slept and dreamed of the sea, and when she woke the sky was clear. The snow covered everything and was so deep it had stopped all of Paris. Before she turned to her husband, or looked in on her children, she slipped on her boots and woolen cape and went into the garden.

The bird was in the snow, frozen, feathers silvered with ice. Lydia knelt. She lifted the nearly weightless body and laid it across her knees. She had always half thought she’d imagined the bird and its song, but no, it was real. The morning was so hushed she could hear her own pulse, and then her ragged breathing, and something like a sob. She took the bird around the side of the house, where the trash barrels and coal bin were kept. She lifted the cover of one of the barrels and dropped the nightingale in. She felt a shudder go through her when she heard the soft thump. She had always thought her mother was in the garden singing to her, watching over her. But no longer. The woman who had raised her was nothing to her anymore.

The winter went on. Frozen, gray, with hard frosts that were followed by drizzles of snow. She did not see the boy on the street or in the synagogue. Perhaps he was busy with his last term of school. Perhaps he had said all he had to say to her. She found that she missed his presence. Once she walked past his aunt’s house, but didn’t dare to go to the door. He’d said he was leaving at the end of the school term. Paris itself was mayhem. The King had been overthrown, and the factions of his opposition now turned against each other. There was a lawlessness in the streets they hadn’t seen before. Henri suggested that Lydia and the girls stay close to home. For weeks on end their parlor was their world, and Lydia put off changing that world, at least for a while. The girls wore their blue dresses and danced as the snow, in record amounts, fell down and bonfires burned black in the distance.

Lydia discovered that she was pregnant in the spring. She felt different than she had during her other pregnancies, and she guessed the baby was a boy. If it were, they would call him Leo, after the lion in the sky. Henri had said nothing she had discovered about herself mattered, and to him it didn’t. But of course, there was the rest of the world. She thought about that every time she went out, had a conversation with her neighbors, discussed dinner with Ava. She thought of her children and this son-to-be and what they would have to deal with being their true selves. On some afternoons she wandered off by herself. She did this on Saturdays, letting her mother-in-law take the children to the synagogue, saying her pregnancy made her dizzy. That was not the truth. She took a streetcar to the Montmartre district, where African women worked in the market. Many of them sold baskets woven out of coils of straw, handcrafted, and so beautiful they made tears spring to her eyes. She bought one in a market stall from a woman from Senegal. There were birds in some of the hanging baskets, bright, flittering bits of orange and yellow. The basket she bought was a small oval, and the straw smelled like cardamom. She kept it on her writing table, and held it up to breathe in the scent of the straw. Her heart, though broken, still beat. In bed she and Henri held each other without speaking and made love with urgency, as if the world was ending and the storm was outside the door.