Page 42 of The Seekers of Deer Creek

“You have given me such a gift”—she referred toMoonbathers, now displayed in her dressing room—“that I wondered how to possibly repay you.”

“This cottage, your company, this impossible summer—gifts enough.”

“Every woman needs a tangible marker of their lives. Let me do this for you, my darling. And after the bench is installed, we will sit on it and dream together. Then when you go back to your glamorous Parisian salons, I will sit alone and think of how cruel you were to abandon me.” She smiled teasingly. I tried not to dwell on the bleakness that awaited me after Arles. “So really, it’s a gift for me.”

The bench was not just a bench. We had never spoken directly of our future, uncertain though it may be, but it was there, in that drawing, in those words. A bench would last through the storms and bird shit and any unforeseen wars that would tear through Arles.

It was then that I resolved Justine should know everything. Our love would not be a veiled sort of compromise.

I began, “I want to tell you—”

The words grappled their way back down my throat. I’d hidden myself for so long that I no longer knew how to stand in the light.

“What is it? Don’t you like the bench?”

“How could I not?”

“Then what?”

“Oh, Justine. How can I say it?”

She pressed her lips to the summit of the cheekbone below my left eye. It was her favorite spot, where a star-shaped freckle rested. My mother had tried to scrub it away with soaps and ointments when I was a child, but Justine cherished my mark. She called it her kissing star. “You can say what you want, because I already know all that is essential about you.”

Constancy, that most beautiful and essential lie between lovers.

I pulled her onto my bed and swept her curls from her face. I rubbed my fingers on her pointed chin, the feature she most hated,but I worshipped. Would that I could have frozen us in ice, forever trapped in the moment like one of the statues she’d ordered for the fête.

Instead, with halting pauses and fumbled words, I told my story. It began with my true name. Then, it ended with my death.

Mine was a broken confession, one unworthy of documenting as it happened, but I can recall it better now, without her piercing gaze on me, those dear lips struggling to form words in response to all I revealed.

In short—

May 17, 1943

I was sixteen when I met the man who did not like to hear the wordno. He was a French soldier with eyes the color of a peacock feather and cold, knifing lips that spat like wads of tobacco. He saw something he liked in me; or maybe he saw something he hated and wanted to destroy. At that age, I knew nothing of men and the perils of rejection. I ignored his advances. All I wanted was to draw and be alone, away from my sister’s curious eyes and the chatter of our neighbors. The soldier watched and bided his time.

Soon enough, there was a shed with a locked door that could not be pried open. A clammy hand held over my mouth. Splintered wood on my back and a shuddering aloneness that would follow me until the day I met the Chaton.

After, the soldier tore open the door to the shed. His silhouette was a black flame in the penumbra cast by the sudden light. He threw a stack of money at me. Bills fluttered around my crown like the wings of an oriole, confusing me. How had he determined my price?

And yet, after he left, I gathered those bills and placed them in mytorn waistband. I walked home with a dull static in my ears, feeling as if I’d been cut out of the fabric of life. Where I once existed, there was a slovenly rip, a dark breach.

Almost ten months after the shed, there was a baby. I named him Huy, after the sunlight that broke through a haze of clouds at the exact moment he was born. I named him for hope.

My father had been furious when he discovered my predicament; my mother silent and unsympathetic. I was fortunate they did not turn me onto the street, as many might have. Nevertheless, they blamed me for my carelessness. Good girls, they said, did not find themselves in such situations.

I was never good, but I did not deserve what I got. No one ever did.

Ng?c, then only thirteen, had been flustered by the sudden storminess in our household. She understood when I began showing signs, yet never once did she turn from me.

She’d lean her head against mine and say, “We’ll raise him together. He will be our most beloved boy.”

She was so sure he would be a boy, even before he quickened.

I asked, “And your dreams of singing at the opera?”

“We can manage. We have all the time in the world.”