Across Eternity Read online

  I give her a tight, barely visible nod and walk out of the house to find Henri.

  * * *

  He is pacing, out by his bale of hay. Our bale of hay. I will never look at it without thinking of the last time I was here, of all the promise that lay ahead. His life is still full of promise, though, isn’t it? Brand new promises he made some other woman the moment my back was turned.

  He watches me approach with his hands in his hair, tugging at it viciously. “Did you mean what you said? You’re going to leave here and go off with some musician?”

  I laugh. “I already gave up my entire life for you. I dropped out of college for you. I gave up my chance of escaping that hellhole so your sister could get home instead. Perhaps I deserve a few months of touring Europe with a famous musician as a consolation prize.”

  He looks gutted, which would be laughable were it not so outrageous. He presses the base of his palms to his forehead. “Don’t do this,” he pleads.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I reply. “It would be better for you if I’d died, wouldn’t it? That way, no one would get a sample of the things you chose not to wait for.”

  In two lunging steps he’s in front of me with his hands gripping my arms. “Stop this. Stop. You’re—” His lips press together tightly.

  “I’m what?”

  He closes his eyes and gives me the smallest shake of his head. “Nothing. I know how this looks. You just need to believe that I was in a bad place when you and my sister were gone. And I did wait. I did. Marie was certain you’d died and I insisted you hadn’t. I hunted for you. I dragged her back to Paris to find that house. And then I found your body. I held your skeleton in my hands. I—” His voice breaks and he stops talking entirely.

  My heart gives an unfortunate lurch of sympathy. I’m incapable of seeing the bad in him even when I’m the victim of it. I’m angry at us both for that fact.

  “Do not ask me to feel sorry for you,” I say between my teeth. “You waited less than three months after I left to fuck someone else, Henri.” My voice trembles. “Do not expect me to believe for a single moment that you were devastated by my loss.”

  “I was,” he says. His hold on my arms tightens. “I still am. Look at me. Do I look well to you? Happy and healthy?”

  I shake free of him, swiping an angry hand over the tears that are in my eyes. “I will not feel sorry for you!” I cry. “I won’t. You’ve been sitting here married and planning for your new family, while I—do you even have any idea what it was like, where we were held? Or did Marie spare you all that?”

  He stiffens, bracing himself. “She didn’t remember, mostly.”

  I look him in the eye. “We were drugged and beaten. I had to pretend for months that I was asleep so I wouldn’t be raped. I had to let the guards hit me and put their hands down my dress and maul me as I passed, without ever reacting once. And I had to watch all the other women die off, one by one. You know what they were doing there?”

  The cords of his neck stand out with tension. “Marie thought they were raising children who time travel.”

  “No,” I correct. “They were hoping to breed children who time travel. They assumed those of us able to fight off the drug were more powerful, and the rest were expendable. I finally had to give myself up simply so they didn’t kill me off.”

  He staggers backward and leans against the wall, holding his side. “God,” he groans, dragging a hand through his hair. “Please tell me they didn’t…” He can’t even say the word.

  “No. But how could it possibly matter at this point?” I reply. “You have a new, unsullied wife.”

  His shoulders slump, and a kinder person would stop right now, but I can’t. That anger inside me isn’t abated at all by what I’ve said. It’s like a fire, finding more things to burn, taking on new life.

  “They were drugging the food, so I starved myself to keep a clear head. I was so weak from hunger toward the end, but do you know what kept me going, Henri? You know what kept me from eating, kept my feet moving each day no matter how hard it got? It was you. It was the idea of getting back to you. And I could visit you in part, but not without changing your memories of our time together, so I came while you slept. I would lie down, half this past version of me and half the present one, and weep at how much I missed you. So don’t tell me how hard and sad it was for you here on the farm for a few months before you forgot me. Because I never forgot you. Not for a single day.”

  His hand goes to my shoulder. “I’m so sorry. I never meant for any of this to happen, Sarah.”

  His apology is a slap in the face. I never meant for any of this to happen. How many weak, worthless men have used that phrase before, and how dare he offer it to me now?

  “Don’t use my name.”

  “You already gave it to me,” he says.

  I stand up straighter, buoyed by my rage. “I gave you a lot of things,” I snap. “And now I’m taking every one of them back, and I’m giving them to someone else. Don’t ever use my name again. You didn’t deserve it after all.”

  I walk away and he lets me. Everything I said was perfectly cutting. It made me feel no better at all.

  17

  SARAH

  The next day, Henri is absent. Yvette stays in with us, knitting baby booties while Marie-Therese and I cut and chop and can. She spends the entire afternoon musing aloud about baby names for the child she’s convinced is a boy, until I think I can’t stand it anymore.

  “Shall I name him Henri?” she asks us. “Would my husband like a junior around the house?” I picture Henri as a toddler—that adorable, rosy-cheeked boy I once saw chasing chickens through the yard, plump-legged and gleeful—and suppress a shudder of pain. That little boy should be mine, not hers. That child wouldn’t be mine regardless, I remind myself.

  I don’t answer the question so Marie-Therese replies for me. “As long as he’s healthy, I doubt Henri will care what you name him.”

  “And you, Amelie?” asks Yvette. “What do you think Henri would like?”

  My eyes raise to hers. “I’d have to care what Henri likes in order to form an opinion.”

  She smiles then. It’s so obvious that I’m wounded by this situation and she enjoys that fact. She feeds on my unhappiness like a monster. I can’t hold it against her, entirely, because I’d happily feed on hers as well.

  In the afternoon, when we’re done with the canning, Yvette enlists me to help her sew small, adorable little baby gowns in white linen. I think of refusing her, and yet a piece of me now seeks out the pain, as if something might break inside me once there’s been too much of it.

  So, I sit with her while she muses aloud about Henri and the baby and their blissful future. My needle jabs into the fabric haphazardly, and jabs into my own thumb more than once. I almost enjoy that pain too. I like feeling something other than the wound she and Henri have created.

  “Your stitching is atrocious,” she says, clicking her tongue at my handiwork as I bring my bleeding thumb to my mouth. She pulls it from my lap and rips the seams out. “Try again.”

  She hands it back to me, regarding me with those cat eyes of hers. We’ve fooled her not at all with our pretense of being cousins. She knows Henri and I were more. How could she not? Some piece of us exists in every glance he and I exchange.

  “What do you think of the name Andre?” she asks, watching me carefully for a reaction. “Or Pierre? Pierre Durand. He sounds like a politician, does he not?”

  I look up from the gown, wondering what, exactly, she wants from me. Does she want me to weep and beg her to give him back? Does she want me to lash out in a jealous frenzy? If she knew what I was capable of, what I’m tempted to do, she’d stop pushing me.

  “I like Ted Bundy for a boy,” I reply, focusing once more on my stitches.

  “Tedbundy?” she asks, as if it’s all one word. “It’s an American name?”

  “Yes.” I’m not completely evil. I’d stop them if she actually considered it. Probably. “It’
s really popular.”

  “What an odd name,” she replies. “I think I prefer Pierre.”

  * * *

  I’m in the barn when Henri finds me. He pauses before walking in. “Dinner is ready,” he says.

  I don’t glance up from the cow I’m milking. The mere sight of him hurts. I will stay until the end of October, as I promised, but if I avoid him, avoid looking at him, maybe I can stop wanting him too. “I’ll be in when I’m done.”

  He goes nowhere, however, and I’m finally forced to glance up. His brow is arched, and he’s looking at me in the old way, not as if I’m a victim or a torturer, but as if I’m a naughty child in need of a spanking, one he’s too amused by to deliver. “Who is Ted Bundy?” he asks.

  “A serial killer. He murders a bunch of women in the 1970s and has sex with their corpses.”

  His mouth twitches. “Yes, I suspected as much. Please stop offering my wife input.”

  That word—wife—siphons every ounce of joy from this conversation. “Then tell her to stop asking for it,” I reply.

  He still stands there. “You shouldn’t be doing so much,” he says quietly. “You’re still too thin.” I rise—not because I’m done but because I have to get away from him.

  “Do me a favor,” I reply, handing him the half-full pail. “Don’t try to pretend you care. I think you’ve proven quite conclusively you don’t.”

  I enter the kitchen with Henri on my heels. He hands the pail to Marie, mumbling something about how I shouldn’t be working as hard as I am. He looks as if he should be working less hard himself. Exhaustion is etched into the corners of his face and he walks away with his hand pressed, as always to his side.

  Yvette looks at me as I take a seat, her eyes raising slowly, cunning as always. “He’s right, of course. You do work too hard, but I understand it. We are just scraping by here. It must be awful to feel like you’re another mouth to feed at a time like this, when our family is growing.”

  She wants to hurt me. The smartest thing I could do right now is not give her the satisfaction of knowing she’s succeeded. But I lash out instead. “If times are so hard and you’re barely scraping by, perhaps you shouldn’t have decided to grow a family right now. That seems like a far larger problem than my temporary visit.”

  Her cheeks suck in and her eyes narrow, just for a moment, before she stretches like a cat and looks at me from beneath her long lashes. “Henri does not give me a moment’s rest, even now, in that regard. Pregnancy is unavoidable with a man like him.”

  She wanted to hurt me and she has. My God, she has.

  I realize only now the lies I’ve still been telling myself to dull the pain. I wanted to believe he’d used her to drown his sorrows, but that wasn’t it at all. I close my eyes and push away from the table. I can’t sit here. I can’t remain across from them for another meal, watching Yvette’s eyes dancing across his broad shoulders, counting the moments until she gets him alone.

  “I think I’ll go for a walk,” I tell Marie. “I’m not really hungry.”

  I ignore Yvette’s Cheshire-cat smile and walk out the door. Marie finds me a short time later, sitting by the hay bale, and places bread and cheese and ham on a plate in front of me. “Eat,” she says. “You still look as if you’re a moment from death’s door.”

  I brush the tears off my face. “Unlike the luscious Yvette, who is blooming.”

  She laughs. “Even as starved as you are, Yvette’s face can’t hold a candle to yours, which you must realize. If it could, she wouldn’t be so tediously jealous.”

  “Jealous?” I scoff. “What’s she got to be jealous of? She’s married to Henri and having his child. He apparently rushed off to Paris to beg her to marry him and can’t keep his hands off her now.”

  Her smile fades. “Surely you realize that Yvette stretches the truth a bit?” she asks. “Does Henri strike you as being unable to keep his hands off her? They’re rarely even in the same place.”

  “Because the grapes are coming in and he’s busy.” I think about the day he undressed me in the middle of the vineyard, during Madame Beauvoir’s visit. How desperate he was, how reckless. Yvette was right. Pregnancy is unavoidable with a man like him. “Believe me, he finds a way to work around that.”

  Her hand covers mine. “No matter what Yvette says, he does not share with her what he did with you. I shouldn’t tell you this, but theirs was no great romance, the way she made it sound. He got her pregnant by accident and she showed up on our doorstep two months later. He did the right thing.”

  I wrap my arms around myself, blinking away tears. “He told me he’d wait forever, Marie. Instead he got her pregnant three months after I left. So, no matter how you spin this story, he’s not the innocent one in it, is he?”

  “No,” she says. “I suppose he’s not.”

  * * *

  I lie down that night, realizing something that is equal parts pathetic and terrible: I miss the days of captivity. Not all of it, but just these moments at night, when my head first hits the pillow. Because at least then I had something to dream about, something to want and to return to. There was hope, and now there’s none. Even if I’d died, I could have died knowing I was deeply loved by someone—all a lie, of course, but I didn’t know that then.

  It’s weakness on my part, but I allow myself to travel to Henri’s bed the summer before, back when I was still wanted there. I nestle beside him, breathing in his scent of soap and fresh linen and whiskey. He’s naked under the sheets. My hand slides over his arm, his back, his hip. Already he is growing hard, and in a moment it will wake him, and he will roll me on my back, still half-asleep. He’ll wake slowly, his thrusts increasing in tempo, a hand gripping the headboard and his jaw tight as he tries not to come, waiting on me.

  And maybe I should do it. Maybe I should lie here with my eyes open at last, quietly taking something from Yvette the way she now takes from me.

  I shudder away from him instead, and return to myself, this pathetic husk of who I was, now sleeping in the guest bedroom upstairs while below me, he fucks his wife.

  18

  SARAH

  I help Marie with the morning’s chores. When Yvette finally rises, she sits at the table and waits to be served. I ignore her but Marie is far too nice and asks if she can get her something. Yvette only wants coffee. She pats her stomach and says she doesn’t want to get too fat with the baby. “Though God knows his father doesn’t seem to mind my new curves,” she says with one of those smiles I hate.

  I ignore her, continuing to pound the bread on the counter with unnecessary violence. Why do I have to stay until the end of October? As far as the war is concerned, the next months are calm. Drole de Guerre, they call it. The phony war. Yvette will be eight months pregnant at that point, so I’m sure they won’t want to travel to the United States yet. There is absolutely nothing I can do for them that Marie cannot. My teeth grind at the thought of remaining here, suffering the sight of Yvette’s hand on Henri’s, her head on his shoulder, night after night. It’s not even fair to ask it of me—after the way I suffered to get back to Henri, to get his sister home to him, have I not done enough?

  And yet…what if I’m wrong? Cecelia wouldn’t have given me a specific date without a reason. As angry as I am, I don’t want any harm to come to Henri or Marie-Therese, though I can’t say the same for Yvette.

  “I’m sorry he’s had so little time to spend with you, Amelie,” she muses, looking at me over her coffee mug. “I hope you won’t take it personally. This is just a very busy time for us on the farm.”

  I stop what I’m doing. I haven’t seen her do a goddamn thing since I arrived. “Is it a very busy time for you?” I ask pointedly.

  If she understands my implication, she pretends she doesn’t. “Very. Though I told Henri he must hire more men next year. It’s crazy that he’s working so many hours. Especially wounded the way he is.”

  My work stops again. Wounded? I think of the way he holds his side every time
he sits and rises. I’ve wondered about it but didn’t want to ask—it’s no longer my place and he’s no longer my concern. “You said he’d been shot.” My voice cracks as I say the words. “Hasn’t it healed?”

  She waves her hand, dismissing it. “It’s fine. A scratch at this point.”

  Relieved, I focus on the other part of what she said. “You mentioned hiring people next year?” I look from her to Marie. “I assumed you’d go to the United States once the baby was born.”

  I don’t know why they haven’t gone already, to be honest. There were months and months where Yvette could have traveled safely, and they must have realized the window was narrowing. Why the hell didn’t they go?

  Marie shifts uncomfortably, cutting a quick glance at Yvette and away. “I’m not sure what the plans are. We can’t do anything at the moment.”

  Yvette’s jaw has dropped. “Moving? From France?” She laughs. “But of course we’d never move. Whatever gave you that idea?”

  I ignore her and stare at Marie. After everything we went through, solely so I could get them to safety…they’re staying? Tears sting my eyes, and I’m not sure if they’re from rage or sadness. I whip the apron over my head and march straight out the door.

  I go to the fields to look for Henri. I find him, sweat on his brow though the weather is on the cool side this morning. He looks older than his age right now.

  He stops working when he sees me approach. There is a moment—there is always a moment—when a certain light enters his eyes at the sight of me. As if he’s forgotten about our time apart, forgotten what he’s done. And I understand it because there’s a moment, when I first see him, that I forget too. And then I have to live through the hurt all over again as I remember.

  “Why didn’t you leave?” I demand. “You should already be in the US.”

  His tongue darts out to tap his lip, the way it does when he’s thinking through an answer…or concealing one. “I just wasn’t sure about some things, and I doubt Yvette wants to go to the United States.”