was waiting for her at the edge of the lawn. From here she could see the neighbor’s yard; she’d kept an eye on Lea. It had been her idea to send her there, after all.
“What were you doing for so long?” Ava asked, as if she didn’t know. She couldn’t abide seeing grief in Lea’s eyes, not when there was a remedy.
Lea shrugged and bit her tongue. “Looking at birds” was all she would say.
“Nothing more?”
“Could you teach me their language?” When Ava hesitated, Lea added, “I know you can. I’ve heard you talk to the heron.”
“It takes time to learn a language.” Especially when it was complicated, with an ancient structure more complex than any human language. There were no numbers, no tenses, more syllables and vowels, and a series of clicks, all with ten or more meanings.
“I have time,” Lea vowed. She knew she was asking for a favor from someone she had treated shabbily. “I promise, I’ll be a good student.”
They went to the garden so lessons could begin. They sat facing each other. Everything else dropped away, everything changed between them, they were of one mind, and as they looked into each other’s eyes neither had the desire to look away. Think in blue, in green, in starlight, in song, in a blessing, in beauty, in gratitude.
Inside the convent they could hear birdsong all through the dinner hour. Some of the girls began to cry and others laughed out loud. The sisters remembered things they had long forgotten, from a time when they were young and filled with faith. No one noticed that Lea was late, and that when she arrived she sat down beside Renée, as if they were friends and had always been so, and that beneath the table, out of sight, Lea handed her a chocolate bar she’d stolen from the kitchen.
When the time came for Lea to ask the heron for what she wanted, she brought a pan of bread and milk into the courtyard as an offering. She had practiced the phrases so often through the night that the girls in the attic thought she was singing them to sleep, and even Renée closed her eyes and dreamed of things she had never seen before, trees made of flowers, beaches of black sand, clouds that were spun out of rain.
The heron came down from the roof when Lea entered the courtyard. After he’d had his breakfast, she begged for a moment of his time. It was a poor attempt at speaking his language, but he gazed at her with his yellow eyes, doing his best to understand her. When he didn’t immediately swoop away, she went on, hopeful he would help her. She asked politely for what she wanted, pleading for him to go back to the house in Paris.
Please find him for me.
She had no idea that Ava had already asked the heron to do this one kindness for her. And so he allowed her to tie the metal canister to his leg, though he was no one’s servant, and looked the other way as she did so.
Her script was tiny and neat. She’d used pale blue ink she’d found in the mother superior’s office when Ava sent her to deliver bread and jam and a pot of tea. She’d taken a pen as well, for she’d been taught to be a thief when the need arose.
I am fine, but no one knows me as you do. Please stay alive.
The heron returned a week later. He perched on the ledge and pushed the window open. The other girls in the attic thought they were dreaming, for what they saw was impossible, and so they went back to sleep. They thought that birds and mortals lived in the same world, but only the world of men mattered. Julien had thought the same thing when he found the heron in the yard in Paris. By now the military had taken over the house, and the family lived in the greenhouse with the domed skylight. When the rain fell it sounded as if rocks were falling. Julien and his father had been taken as forced labor. They cleaned the streets, scrubbing stones. They had blisters on their hands and they didn’t speak to Madame Claire about their humiliation. They didn’t have to. Claire now cleaned the house for the German captain who lived there. When she thought of Marianne and how she’d treated her, she closed herself in the linen closet and cried.