I only put the centipede in Eliza’s slipper since I thought she was stealing my sister Sofya from me. I was eight years old and had just lost my mother. I couldn’t lose Sofya, too.
Eliza Ferriday, an American friend of the family, had taken us in for a week at her Paris apartment, two Russian cousins to the tsar forced from our St. Petersburg home before Christmas. Our father had remarried and gone to Sardinia on honeymoon with his new wife, Agnessa, who loathed me since, when she visited us in November, I first practiced my centipede skills on her. She especially hated my favorite interest, astronomy, and convinced Father to take away my maps of the constellations, saying they distracted me from French lessons. Though she tried to lure me out with the gift of a doll-sized Limoges tea set I spent most of November barricaded in my bedroom.
Once Sofya was on break from Brillantmont School in the Swiss Alps we’d met in Geneva to take the train to Paris. Pale and thin, still shattered by Mother’s sudden death the previous spring, Sofya said little on our train ride and immersed herself in the stack of books with which she’d filled her suitcase. As we pulled into the Gare de Lyon, she sat and pondered our fellow travelers on the platform. Thinking about Mother, who’d often met her there on school breaks?
Alone in Paris, awaiting the arrival of her husband and daughter from New York, Eliza dedicated every waking hour to our happiness, not leaving us alone for one second. The first day she brought us to a soup kitchen in Le Marais, and I watched as Eliza and Sofya’s bond grew by the moment. How easily she got my sister to laugh. They worked as one, side by side, ladling soup from a giant silver pot, while I retrieved the used bowls from the tables.
The next day I watched, envy coiling in my chest, as the two walked the Christmas market, arm in arm, discussing the merits of goose versus duck for dinner and which chocolates to buy at À la Mère de Famille candy store. As the week wore on, at night by the fire, we played cards and they let me win so they could move on to conversation about novels and men and other boring topics, and then stay up half the night talking more. How I yearned to go home to St. Petersburg and have Sofya to myself.
The night before we left for home, shortly after I’d gone to bed, the two came to my bedroom and woke me, embers still glowing in the fireplace.
“Wake up, my darling,” Sofya whispered in my ear. She brushed the hair back from my forehead as Mother so often had done. “Slip your coat over your pajamas and come with us.”
“We have a surprise for you,” Eliza said.
Half asleep, I followed the two out into the cold night air. We walked through a still Paris toward the Tour Eiffel and once there, stopped under a massive, dark globe that loomed above us.
“What is this place?” I asked.
Eliza and Sofya hurried me up three flights of metal stairs and through a pair of heavy, velvet curtains to a dark room. In the inky blackness I could make out a few inclined chairs close to us, like those on the deck of a ship but upholstered. Eliza and Sofya chose their seats and I lay between them. To our left and right others did the same.
“You woke me for this?” I whispered to Sofya.
“Just wait,” she said.
She held my hand as the domed ceiling above us came alive with constellated stars, reproducing the heavens as I’d seen them one hundred times from earth. The light of the stars revealed a whole auditorium full of people inclined as we were, gazing up at the massive ceiling.
“It’s called the Celestial Globe,” Eliza said. “A planetarium.”
I lay there stunned as the constellations appeared against the indigo sky. Libra’s scales. Bright Scorpio. Even usually dim Draco the dragon snaking past Ursa Minor.
Sofya leaned close and whispered, “That is where Mother lives.”
I barely breathed as we watched the moon drift by, fading from full to milky crescent, and a sense of joy I’d not felt since before my mother died filled me.
Eliza took my other hand, warm in hers. “We hoped you’d like it.”
As we lay there, the celestial world playing above us, it struck me that I had never lost my sister. Just acquired a