Page 25 of One of Them

Frustrated, she turned her gaze elsewhere.

There was an armchair with a tufted ottoman; next to it was a standing lamp whose shade dripped fringe.

The floor was covered in rugs, some of them overlapping, and the windows were lined with long velvet drapes.

There was the Moroccan screen, an intricately carved thing with four folding panels.

Behind it was an armoire, which her father used for storage, since the room had no closets.

She decided to look there. Inside were some boxes that contained large envelopes, and she began to go through them methodically.

A couple of them contained clippings from newspapers and magazines; another contained receipts dated from one, two, three years ago.

Delia grew impatient. Maybe her father had been telling the truth—other than the inventory sheet from the warehouse, there was no more information available about the sculpture.

On the top shelf of the armoire were still more boxes; one of them was labeled Correspondence .

She eased it off the shelf and sneezed; the box was dusty.

Sitting down on the floor, she began to go through the papers in the box.

Most were letters having to do with the gallery, and they all seemed to be recent; nothing from Europe.

But then she noticed a thin blue envelope stuck between two larger sheets of paper. She pulled it out.

The shock of what she saw caused a sharp intake of breath and a small fit of coughing.

It was an unopened letter from her mother, addressed to her, and sent to her grandparents’ address on Riverside Drive.

She clawed apart the envelope and extracted a single sheet of onionskin paper.

Her eyes scanned the page; certain sections jumped out:

... the police came to Serge’s apartment, and they were intent on taking him down to the station for questioning.

They insisted I go along as well. I was frantic.

I knew you would be leaving soon, that we were all scheduled to leave, but when I told them this, they ignored me.

We were held for three days, and when I was finally released, I went straight to the apartment.

You were gone, of course; I knew you would be.

I wanted you gone—it meant you would be safe, an ocean away from the war.

But I was sick, knowing that you would think I had abandoned you like that.

Yes, your father and I fought. We always fought.

That was nothing new; you’d witnessed plenty of our fights.

And I do have a temper, I admit. Still, I wouldn’t have disappeared like that of my own volition, and I hope you will believe me, and believe how sorry I am.

It must have been terrible to leave without me, wondering where I was and why I hadn’t come back.

Delia felt dizzy. She had to put the letter down.

So there was an explanation for what had happened, and for her mother’s disappearance—but Simon had kept it from her.

How could he do that? And that name, Serge.

She vaguely recognized it from the diary pages she’d read.

Who was he, and what was Sophie’s relationship to him?

She resumed her search and found two more letters from Sophie. Like the first, they were addressed to her and unopened. In one of them, she read:

Please tell your father I’m sorry. I would tell him myself, but I know he won’t hear it from me.

He’s simply blotted me out—I know him so well.

My temper burns hot but then cools down.

His is slower to build, and slower to fade.

He can keep it going for days, weeks and even months.

I couldn’t take it any longer. That’s why I’ve gone to live with Serge.

I’ll be back in touch and tell you more when I can.

When all this is over and we can breathe again.

Delia had to read those last sentences several times. Live with Serge? The idea whipped through her like a gale-force wind. Setting the letters down, Delia looked desperately around the room, searching for something that would anchor her again. There was nothing.

Still shaken, she was about to return the box to its shelf when she noticed lined sheets of paper peeking out from the pile and instantly recognized Sophie’s writing.

When Delia extracted them from the pile, she saw that they had perforated edges—the missing diary pages.

The diary was still in her possession, hidden in her closet; she had not looked at it in years.

She remembered how badly she’d wanted to know what was in those missing pages. Now she would get her wish.

I’ve decided to leave. There, the words are out now.

Real. Not just in my mind, but here on a page in this book.

They declare an intention. A challenge that I have to meet.

I know that leaving will break Simon’s heart, and I wish I didn’t have to do that.

But not leaving will break mine, and in the end, I have to save myself.

I never expected to feel this way about another man, I didn’t plan it, or go looking for it.

But it happened, and I can’t undo it. I worry about Delia, but she’s a strong girl, stronger than me, stronger than Simon.

She’ll get through this. And because of her, Simon will get through it as well.

It will be better for her to stay with him.

Better for all of us. We’ll still be able to see each other, of course I want that.

But if I want to live with Serge, I can’t have her too, it will never work.

She’ll hate him and he’ll resent her and, ultimately, me.

None of us will be happy. At least this way, two of us will.

And Delia, she’ll be able to understand it one day.

Not right away. But in the future. The war has made everything more complicated; it’s blown apart all of our plans, so we’ve been revising them, even making them up as we go along.

For now, the goal is to head south, and then to Spain.

We’ll be safe there. I haven’t told Simon yet; I haven’t been able to. But I will, and very soon.

Sophie had filled in all the blanks. But how had Simon come to have these pages?

And why had he kept Sophie’s plans from Delia?

Painful as it would have been, knowing would have been better.

Delia put the box back where she’d found it, keeping the letters and diary pages.

She would read them all again, but not here.

She had to get out of this room; it reeked with her father’s deceit.

And there was something else too: the memory of Mrs. McQuaid’s face, standing outside the car where Delia and Ian had been kissing.

The hurt she must have felt was like the hurt Delia was feeling now, imagining her mother in love with someone else, ready to leave her family for him.

Maybe Delia deserved this pain. After all, she’d caused it in someone else.

Downstairs, Delia ignored the overgrown tangle at the back of her own house; it seemed to mirror her family’s chaos.

Instead, she looked over the fence to the orderly beds and neatly swept paths of the Frosts’ garden.

Things were growing already. The sight made her feel calmer, and she took several deep and steadying breaths.

She still had so many questions, and what she’d just read only added to the list. Her father wouldn’t be able to answer them; she knew that.

No, the answers were somewhere else: Paris.

Yes, that was it. It was April now; her father would be home by the beginning of May.

Classes at Barnard ended in May, so she could tell Simon the semester was over and that she was planning a trip.

Ever since she was expelled, she’d been treading water, trying to figure out what to do next.

Now she knew. The very next day, she went uptown to West Thirty-Eighth Street, where the office of the French line was located.

She was the first one through the door, and by ten o’clock she had booked her passage.

Exactly two months later, on June 15, Delia arrived in Paris for the first time since she’d fled seven years before.

The city looked grayer and drabber than she remembered.

More worn down. And it felt both familiar and strange at the same time.

Sitting in the taxi that took her to the hotel she’d booked, she recognized the names of so many streets from the past, but she herself was so different.

The girl she’d been when this was her home was gone.

The cab stopped in front of the hotel, and the cabbie helped her take her bags into the lobby. There were only two, one large and one small. She didn’t know how long she would be staying, and if she needed anything else, it would be easier just to buy it.

Hotel Delambre was in Montparnasse, not far from where she’d grown up on the rue Vavin, and she spent the first couple of days traversing the streets she’d known so well.

The past was all around her, shimmering in the distance, or close by, breathing softly at her neck.

Familiar Métro stations, landmarks that she’d visited or passed a hundred times, even the sound of French being spoken everywhere, summoned her memories.

They hovered alongside her wherever she went; there was no avoiding them.

Not everything was familiar though; there were differences.

Shops she remembered were now gone, sometimes replaced by others or else just boarded up and empty, a reminder that the people who’d once occupied them were now gone too.

She wondered what had happened to them, if they’d managed to survive the war.