With her walking cane, she poked at the grass growing up around the ruins. “Voilà,” she said. “No one could ever explain this.”

Finn bent down and parted the grass. There was a small cross forged of iron next to a carved stone chiseled with words in English: H+L, Journey Without End.

Part 6

The Var

I see my path, but I don’t know where it leads.
Not knowing where I’m going is what inspires me to travel it.

—ROSALIA DE CASTRO

Eighteen

Bellerive, the Var, France

January 1945

The war ground to an inglorious end. Of course there were victory celebrations—homecoming parties for soldiers and fighters who’d been in hiding, dancing in the streets, toasts with the wine and champagne people had concealed from the Germans, feasts of food that was no longer scarce. But there were also more somber events—memorials and Masses for the fallen, marches of shame for collaborators and for women who had taken up with the Nazis.

Lisette struggled to find a sort of peace. After the Var had been liberated by the Allies, she acknowledged the joyous celebrations that erupted through the village, but her world had come apart.

When she and Hank heard the fighting on that August morning, he’d ordered her to run for her life. She’d rushed to find her parents. She had left them innocently having morning coffee, and had returned to find that they had been killed when the town bridge was hit. Survivors told her the first strike was sudden, and there was no time for her parents to panic or suffer, but she sometimes wondered if they said that just to soothe her. Cradling each of them in her arms for the last time, stroking their dusty, lifeless faces, she had felt as though the earth beneath her feet had fallen away.

Needing Hank more than ever, she’d returned to the stone hut, only to find it collapsed into a pile of rubble, circled by foxes and crows. There was no sign of him. She became obsessed with finding him. She spent hours, days, and weeks, working her hands bloody as she sorted through the collapsed pile, but he was gone. Had he escaped? Tried to join the fighting? Had the Allied invaders rescued him? She remembered something he’d once said to her: “The first person through the wall always gets hurt.” Had he tried to be first through the wall?

She collected a few precious artifacts—his chute envelope and some gear, the Mass card, broken glass from their champagne bottle. The discoveries only raised more questions and lowered her hopes, and the loss felt like a kind of insanity.

When tanks manned by American soldiers in battle dress rumbled through the streets, the people of Bellerive went mad with the joy of liberation. Lisette asked every man she saw if he knew Henry Watkins, a paratrooper, but she received nothing in return except propositions. No one had heard of him and they looked at her as if she’d gone crazy. And every night, she prayed on her knees to a God who did not seem to be listening.