At the Edge of Summer

Their nightmares were over. I thought that mine were gone, too. That other night, that night Clare kept watch, I’d slept soundly, for the first time in a long while. Maybe it was her lingering perfume, maybe the pad of her bare feet, maybe the way she couldn’t help but touch the side of my face when she thought I was asleep. But I’d dozed, for once at peace.

Now, crouched in the station, slipping in and out of that half sleep, the nightmares returned. Nothing specific; not the kind of dreams Chaffre’s Austrian doctor could find anything in. Sharp, shapeless shadows, screams that burrowed into my brain, aching pain in each limb. I woke sweating and buried my face so no one could see it. Through my haversack the mask dug into my hip.

It was exhausting, this remembering. My shoulder throbbed, and again and again I heard that thump as Chaffre fell next to me. I closed my eyes, to summon up memories of the other night, of Clare in the candlelight, of Clare touching my face, but all I could think of was Bauer, taunting, telling me nothing had changed. He had said “battle,” and, like an infection, the word had brought up every blood-slick battle there’d been, until I was afraid to close my eyes.

I could end it all. I could take the suitcase to one of the policier on the platform. It’s what I should have done the moment I entered the station. Passed on the suitcase and said there was a spy in Paris. He’d probably slunk back to Lili’s or else was lurking around the station the way I was, watching for a train to Berlin. They could find him.

But he was right. The war was over. The only one left was my own. My battle was with the past and what it left me with. I wasn’t alone. I saw it in the shattered, spent faces of the refugees in the station. All we wanted to do was sleep, not because our bones were weary, but because our hearts were.

“Monsieur, are you hurt?” It was a young girl, a refugee, with red-brown curls falling from beneath a knit cap. “You look tired.” Though she looked too old for it, she had a faded rag doll tucked into the front strap of her knapsack.

“Tired.” I rubbed the corner of my eye, remembering I wore no mask. But she didn’t flinch. “But why, of everyone in the station, are you speaking to me?”

She shrugged. “I thought you were lonely.”

“Where’s your family?” No one came to shoo her away from the monster. No one came to shake a finger at me for talking to this girl who looked so like Clare. “Mademoiselle, I could be a bad man.”

A sadness crept into her eyes and she touched the doll at her shoulder. “I don’t think there are really bad men anymore.” Behind her, a train whistled. “Only scared ones.”

Once I’d been scared and my best friend had died. I stood. I couldn’t look the other way while Stefan Bauer hurt someone else again.

A policier strode the platform in his dark uniform. I approached with the battered suitcase. “Monsieur.”

His hand went to his belt as he turned. I ducked my head.

“What is it?” He tapped his heels impatiently.

I wondered if I was making too much of it. In my hands, the suitcase looked innocuous. And maybe it was. The Paris I saw every day, shedding its mourning, wasn’t the defeated city of Bauer’s photos. Maybe he had nothing in the suitcase.

The refugee girl stood by the bench with her knapsack. Though she’d lost her home, she still refused to see the bad in the world. She didn’t know that it stalked the streets of this very city.

I lifted my chin. “Monsieur, I’ve seen a spy.” I opened the suitcase. “And I think I know where he is.”

The soldier stood on the threshold of the caves beneath Brindeau. The caves were dark, but he kept to the splash of sunlight outside, holding a stick like a rapier.

He came alone, lurking in the entrance, not quite stepping in. Once fearless in the face of a trench wall, he was afraid of a cave. Inside, it still smelled of an army, of horses and wood smoke and drying wool. Debris littered the caverns—rotting hay, scraps of torn cloth, tins, bottles, forgotten letters. Memories strewn underfoot. The soldier who hesitated outside, he was afraid of that more than anything.

I moved from the shadows. “Luc.”

I was nervous, too. Taut from my journey from Paris, terrified that I wouldn’t find him, that, once again, he’d disappear from my life, I left Mille Mots for the place I’d once felt safe. I went to the familiar darkness of the caves.

And then here he was. Amazingly, beautifully here. I remembered an afternoon in the hallway of Mille Mots where he told me the story of his mother leaving and of his seven-year-old self wishing for her so hard that she felt it across the Channel and came to him. I’d come from Paris, sending wishes into the sky with every mile. And he came. I held on to the end of my coat sleeves and stepped towards him.

At the sight of me, the stick clattered to the ground. And suddenly he was there, so close I could have taken him in my arms. And I should’ve. Instead I said, “You were gone.”