from the stream one afternoon when an unfamiliar car pulled up the road. Ettie stopped behind a tree, in a panic, until she recognized Arno. She ran through the snow to meet him. She was about to ask if he had thought to bring food with him, until she saw the look on his face. She knew that something had gone wrong. He grabbed his rucksack and they went up to the house. The snow was turning blue. Soon it would begin to melt. Arno had indeed brought food, and he unpacked some bread and cheese and sausage. Bettina was there, her hands covered with ink, and when she saw him she burst into tears. There was no easy way to say what had happened, an explosion gone wrong, the bomb in Jean’s hands. Claude was fine, but Victor had been badly burned and after a doctor had seen to his wounds, he’d insisted on being taken to a farm near a village about an hour away.
“They’ll come back,” Arno said.
“Of course,” Bettina agreed.
Ettie made dinner that night, she was as good a cook as any of them. Afterward she went outside as she always did. Arno came out as well.
“We’ll have to move back into the woods soon,” he said.
He’d been nearby when the bomb had gone off and had seen what it had done to his friend. He now had ringing in his ears, but more than that, he seemed changed. He had a gun that he played with, as if he could never be ready enough for an attack. He’d brought in some rifles from the trunk of the car.
“All of those people on the convoy we couldn’t stop will die because we made a mistake,” he said. “I made the mistake. It was my plan.”
“We all make mistakes,” Ettie told him. It was better to make a mistake than to do nothing. “I think you should teach me some things.”
He looked at her, confused. “Bettina is teaching you to be a printer.”
“That’s not what I want to be.”
He took her in, then handed her the gun.
Vengeance was just beneath her skin, a shadow self, her true self, the one who had been holding her sister’s hand, the one who ran into the woods, who wanted to learn everything she could be taught, starting now.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE HERON
PARIS, SPRING 1942
THE HERON HAD GONE TO Spain and then to Africa. He simply couldn’t tolerate the cold; his bones were hollow and he needed light and food. But at last he came back for her and one warm night he called to her. Ava heard his voice and she could feel his cry echo inside of her. When she knew Lea was safely asleep, she rose from the blanket on the floor, which served as her bed. She went out the window, through the garden that was covered with blue squill, and then climbed over the garden gate Madame Lévi kept locked. She ran to the river, her breath coming hard. This was what freedom felt like, escaping the bonds that tied her, doing as she pleased, if only for a few hours. It was wrong, and she knew it, but she could not deny herself this one pleasure. She spied the heron in the shallows, in the place where she most wanted to be. Every night she went there, at the same hour, and every morning she returned with her hair streaming down her back, wet from the river.
One night, Lea woke to find Ava gone. Lea had been dreaming of her mother, and when she had such dreams it was as if she’d had a visitation, as if the dream was real and her waking life was imagined. In her dream, they’d sat together on a bench in their courtyard, and Hanni had leaned close to whisper. She is not who she thinks she is, she was made to love you, but she doesn’t know that yet. Every time she looks at you, I see you. Every time she embraces you, you are in my arms.
This spring Jews in Paris had been made to buy yellow stars to be sewn onto their clothing. They had been given food cards imprinted with the word Jew. All public places were now forbidden.
Lea went into the garden to wait for Ava. She felt as though her mother had woken her for a reason. She thought of all her mother had done for her and all she had sacrificed.