knife sticking out of their chest. ‘I don’t know what to say…’
She shook her head for me to stop talking, moaning with her head down, her hands on his body. And I stood there for a minute or two, not sure what to do, watching his blood drip off the floorboards and into the dirt. I touched her arm, and she broke away in a panic, wiping her face of tears.
‘We need to get him out of here.’ She sniffed. ‘Clean it up.’
‘Don’t you want more time with him?’ I said.
‘We don’t have time.’
She moved away, and I caught a whiff of warm blood wafting from his body. I was reminded of meat Mama sometimes left on the counter on a hot day. My belly roiled and I felt faint, grabbing the side of the truck to hold myself. ‘I think I’m… I’m…’ Mucus coated my throat like off-milk and then vomit spurted from my mouth and all over the truck’s back tyre.
Marguerite waited for me to finish heaving, crying into her sleeve, when I looked up at her, wiping the remains of last night’s soup from my lips.
‘Welcome to the Résistance, Adèle.’ The sun had crested over the foothills and beamed a shiny white light onto the water that glistened behind her like fallen snow.
She wiped her red eyes. ‘Now, get up.’
*
We hid Philip under a blanket and pushed him up against the door, putting his arm over his head as if he was sleeping. ‘If the police stop us, tell them he’s drunk and that he’s passed out,’ she said, and then commanded me to drive the truck out of the birch forest and down a dirt road dotted with covered gypsy wagons and laundry hanging from trees.
She had found a tan duffle bag stuffed as fat as a pig in the truck’s bed and had been rummaging through it since we left the stream. ‘Keep driving until I tell you to stop,’ she said through the back window, which had been busted out.
‘Why would we get stopped?’ The wheel spun loose in my hands, and my arms ached from trying to keep the truck steady. I lifted my eyes from the road just long enough to glance over my right shoulder.
Marguerite’s head bobbed up from the back of the truck. ‘Because you’re driving like a juvenile!’
I stepped on the accelerator.
We stopped at a cottage at the edge of a wheat field that hadn’t been ploughed in years. ‘Don’t say much,’ she said, reaching for the duffle bag to carry inside. ‘They get paid to help us.’
I nodded.
I got out of the truck and followed Marguerite up to the door. She went to knock, but the door opened before her knuckles hit the wood.
‘Zut alors!’ The same bald man who drove us to the convent stood in the doorway, which surprised me, though I wasn’t sure why, not after seeing Claire get shot in the chest or riding in a truck with a dead man.
He threw his hands to his head, and yelled for his wife.
The wife scolded us with her eyes, but me more so, probably wondering what I was doing with Marguerite. They drove the truck around the back of the cottage where weeds and tangle grass grew up like flowers. We watched them from the screen door in the kitchen with the duffle bag at our feet.
‘What are they going to do?’ I said.
They lifted the body out of the truck. Marguerite turned away when she saw them take him by his limbs, each grabbing a foot and a hand. ‘What do you think they’re going to do?’
She paced the room, holding her stomach, looking visibly ill, but then dropped to her knees and prayed, murmuring prayers I’d heard at the convent. I put my hand on her shoulder when she sobbed into her hands. The sound was gut-wrenching.
Marguerite stood up after crossing her chest, and wiped her eyes, moving to the duffle bag.
‘Are you going to be all right?’ I said, though I wondered how she could be.
‘We knew this might happen,’ she said, sniffing. ‘He died doing what he believed in. There’s some comfort knowing this.’ She paused, giving her eyes one last wipe. ‘And that I killed the German bitch who did it to him.’
I pointed outside where the couple was preparing the body. ‘But… But…’
Marguerite looked at me from the ground as she opened the duffle bag. ‘I have to carry on because that’s what Philip would want. We must honour