I worried for Adelle’s house, so close to the harbor. Since my cousin’s departure, neither Adelle nor Jestine had worked in my parents’ home. They had avoided me as well. As soon as crews had chopped up fallen trees and hauled them away, I left the children with Rosalie and made my way to their house with a satchel of food and clothes. There was a huge flood between the town and the docks, impassable. I paid a man to take me across in his canoe. Clouds reflected in the water. Everything was calm now, and the sky was an indigo color. When people in Paris thought of paradise, surely they imagined this.
When the boatman dropped me off, I waded through knee-deep water until I reached Adelle’s cottage. There was a starfish on the road. It was a good thing the house had been built on stilts, and that the stilts were pounded into rock, otherwise the house would have likely floated away to the other side of the world.
Adelle came onto the porch. She took the necessities I’d brought her, then hugged me close. “I’m grateful, but you shouldn’t have come here,” she said. The roads were dangerous, not only because of the flooding. There were looters and bands of wild dogs, all of them hungry. Adelle said that Jestine had been unwell and had taken to her bed. During the storm they had both said their last prayers as seawater rushed in through the windows. At the worst of the flooding they’d tied themselves to the cast-iron stove in the kitchen, which was the heaviest thing in the house. There was still sand on the floor, and the blue paint was pale with salt. Adelle swore that a flatfish had swum through the window, right into a cooking pot, which was God’s way of seeing that they had enough to eat through the storm. They were Christians and believed in a merciful maker who would watch over them.
I told Adelle I’d come despite the floods because I missed them both. And because I had a secret. I wanted Adelle and Jestine to be the first to know.
“It’s no secret, Rachel. I told you your fate before you got married. I saw that man and his children and all the other children that you’d have. Now you tell me my fate in return. Is your mother going to have me come back to her house?”
I suppose my mother had bad-mouthed Adelle and she could not get other work. I didn’t mention that a hired woman was now serving dinner there. I was still confused over the matter. I asked Adelle what had happened between her and Madame Pomié, and she simply said, “We had words.”
“What kind of words?”
“What kind do you think? Would your mother say anything nice to me? She didn’t want me or Jestine in the house.”
Just that morning my mother had ordered one of the hired men who worked in the yard to cut down the rose tree Adelle favored, but fortunately Mr. Enrique had taken it to his house before any damage was done.
“I’ll speak to my mother,” I promised. “You’ll see. You’ll be back and nothing will change.”
But Adelle didn’t agree. “Everything changes. Look at you. Look at Jestine.”
I went into the bedroom and saw Jestine in her bed. She wore a white nightdress, and her arms were bare. It was afternoon and hot and murky, the way it is after a storm, with air that smelled like the tide. I lay down beside Jestine, and she opened her eyes. As girls we had done everything together. At least that hadn’t changed. What had happened to me had happened to her as well. I could tell from the sleepy look in her eyes, the rise in her belly. I was happy about it. Our children would be friends, although they couldn’t be the cousins that they truly were. This child to come was the reason Aaron was being sent to Paris.
“We should have run away when we had the chance,” Jestine said. “If you hadn’t gotten married we could have gone and been there waiting for Aaron, but you had to go and fall in love with those children. I could tell after your first visit to his house that we would never get out of here.”
I felt stung by her remarks. I promised that nothing would be different. I swore it on my blood. I bit my own arm and let it bleed onto the sheet. We watched as the blood formed the shape of a bird. We would still go to France, I insisted. We would leave after the children were born, despite the fact that I was a married woman. I’d lately been reading about the history of Paris, and now I told these stories to Jestine, how the streets were built over tunnels that were a thousand years old, how the Île de la Cité had been shored up by ancient ramparts to ensure that the island would never float away, no matter what floods might come. I read her Perrault’s story of a girl who was in love with a beast, and knew he had a true heart.
“Not that one,” Jestine said.