Free We All Ran into the Sunlight by Natalie Young Page B

building simply didn’t exist.
    She thought of the baby’s blanket Arnaud’s mother had given her before their departure from Paris and how she held it, spilling heavy and dusty white from its yellowed tissue. Conceiving a child, even figuratively, meant believing there was something to bring it to, something good and whole and not full of fragments; a world in which the act of remembering was sweet and nostalgic and not like walking into a room full of soft, open cuts, bits of vein everywhere, cuts and sinews of flesh on the floor, on the backs of the doors. What if she could not do it? She would let them all down. Mother, Father, Sister , Brother. Their expectations would fall like a pack of cards around her. And then they would claw at the absent baby like wolves gone mad for lack of food. Because her fear, even then, was that someone might see the doubts that sank to the silt in her mind, or that they might perceive from the look on her face the shadows of these hulks appearing, so sinister, at the edges of her thoughts. You had to believe you believed in belief, and Lucie had been given no reason, though she didn’t really know it then, to believe in anything. There wasn’t a role model of goodness and patience and faith and charity as far as the eye could see. And you had to see some goodness to believe in it, that was what she believed. Her mother-in-law was bent on glory and a screwy patriotism raged in her heart. There was wonder, the old woman shrieked, in the sloshing of buckets on hospital floors, in the plastering-up of old walls; there was hope in the cleansing rain of autumn, in the snow falling softly on northern graves. There was glory, she said, in the women returning to the hearth now, to fatten like hens and produce their eggs, to sit and fatten and squawk like hens, thought Lucie, in a great triumphant line of readiness to aim, fire and plug the country’s gaping lines.
    She didn’t bother to mix the brandy with water but drank it neat, cradling the cup in her hand before climbing in beneath the blankets on the floor. The fire flickered in the grate. On the window ledge, the glass jars glittered, like a row of blinking eyes.
    But the night brought strange dreams, dreams of the women from the village coming through the chateau gates carrying baskets. In her kitchen window Lucie stood, a much smaller woman than she knew herself, a girl in a nightdress, with hair curling thinly down her back. She stood in the kitchen window watching the women gather in the chateau courtyard, hundreds of them, squawking, with their little tiny aprons on.
    She woke sweating, to knocking on the shutters, once, twice, a sharp rap, then silence and nothing. She put the dream to the back of her mind and stood slowly, comforted by the embers still glowing softly in the fire.
    The shutters were rapped at again, and she walked towards them and opened them up to nothing but the white winter morning and the fog stretched three foot thick on the ground.
    She could have sworn it was then that the bird flew into the kitchen because when Arnaud came back to Canas that evening he found his wife sitting under the kitchen table still wrapped in the thick cotton nightdress. All day she had been under there. She was hiding from the bird; you never saw anything so wild, she said.

3
     
     
    The storm came at the end of February. The rain began and needled the ground; five days, pelting the courtyard, bringing up deep whorls like a thousand worms turning the earth.
    From the kitchen window Lucie stared at the ground. It was 1950. The century on its fold. But the days were dark and seemed endless. She mopped the floor, washed the walls so that everything, inside and out, was washed in synchronicity. Life didn’t begin again. It merely tried to release itself from the past.
    The rain seeped into everything. Who knew what happened upstairs, in the rest of the house? She imagined pools of water, rain coming in through the roof. She imagined