“Why would that be?”
Camille shrugged. “Perhaps you liked your life as it was.”
“It was a lie. How can anyone like that?”
He had a blue canvas bag. “I brought you something. A gift before I leave.”
It was a painting of this very park, and of her three children, and of the chestnut tree. The park benches looked glittery, as if a rain had fallen. The painted air was a strange blue color, as if the artist had managed to catch bits of mist and add them to his paints.
She thanked him and kissed his cheek. She was so grateful, but if he wished to give her a gift this wasn’t the one she wanted. She whispered what she most desired and he nodded, then jotted a note concerning the one she preferred. She then gave him the box of sixty letters. She had written in tiny print, which allowed her to tell the entire story of her life as it had been so far, the stolen years her mother knew nothing about.
Camille took the letters and said his good-byes. He had been following her for so long, it seemed odd that he would leave her in this park and not shadow her on her walk home. He knew her route, knew the way she ran a hand through her youngest daughter’s hair, and that she usually stopped to look in the branches of the chestnut tree in her yard to see if there were birds nesting there. Before he left, Lydia embraced him. He had become quite dear to her.
“Tell my mother I’m about to give birth to a boy,” she told him. “We’re naming him Leo. I was going to write that in today’s letter, but I’m telling you instead.”
Camille walked away, then turned back to her and waved before loping off. He left Paris soon after, packing up nearly six years of his life into two small suitcases and a leather trunk. He hated to return home, and could barely bring himself to think of what was waiting for him. His mother’s demands, a job at the store, his paints drying up in the heat of August, the girl he yearned for, Marianna, already married. He would give himself two years, and then, if it was as bad as he imagined it would be, he would find a way to leave. He had that in his blood, a history of men who knew when to stay and when to run away, men who could tell when it was time to find another life and another land.
Soon after he left, Lydia went to the Pizzarro house. Camille’s aunt welcomed her when the maid ushered her into the drawing room.
“This is unexpected. But a pleasure!”
They had not seen each other since Lydia’s initial visit. Tea was offered, but tea had not brought Lydia to this house, and so she said perhaps another time.
“You must miss your nephew,” Lydia said.
“Oh, we do,” Madame Pizzarro said warmly.
“As do I. We became very close. We both were born in St. Thomas, and so he granted me something to remind me of that place.”
Lydia took out the note Camille had left with her, written hastily in the park, a grin on his face as he complied with her wishes. He wrote to ask that the painting in his aunt and uncle’s parlor be given to Madame Cohen on the day she came calling. Madame Pizzarro frowned as she read it. She had grown accustomed to the painting and did not wish to part with it.
“I’d have to discuss this with my husband,” she said. “We had it framed at quite some expense.”
“I can pay you for that. I know you admire the painting, but it means so much to me. More than you can know.” Lydia had gone to stand in front of it. A woman carrying a basket of laundry, the sea behind her. Lydia knew what was inside the house on stilts and what was down the road where the donkeys ate tall grass and dodged toward you if you dared to pull their tails. The disease and shock that had left her without a memory was returning, bit by bit. She found she understood English, and she referred to foods with unfamiliar words, calling the porridge her daughters ate in the mornings fongee and making them laugh.
She was so overcome that she began to sob.
“My dear!” Madame Pizarro said. “Please don’t do that!”
“I’m so sorry,” Lydia said. “I’m so terribly sorry.” She could hardly get the words out in French. She thought an odd phrase—Jeg er ked af—unsure of what it meant. “I truly don’t think I can live without it.”
“That’s very clear,” Madame Pizarro said, signaling to her maid to find some brown wrapping paper. “It’s yours, my dear.”
When she was given the painting, Lydia thanked her hostess and wished her well. She went into the corridor for her cloak and stood there for a few moments to collect herself. The heat inside her felt like the heat on this road leading down to the harbor on days when this woman held her hand. Do not run too far from me, she always said. At last, Lydia ventured into the street. It was nearly summer and the trees smelled sweet. The sound of birdsong echoed in the pale blue air, haint blue, the boy Camille had called this shade. He said it kept the ghosts away. It was the color of the sky in the painting she now had of her mother, whose name was Jestine, and who had been waiting for her daughter ever since she had been stolen, convinced that one day sixty letters would arrive in a box scented with lavender, the herb that always brings a person home.