“Please, messieurs, I beg you,” Maëlle says, looking from one man to the other. “I spent everything I have on the train ticket. I have nowhere else to go.”
“You come to a strange city without resources?” Bayol frowns. “You have no family in the city of Angers?”
She shakes her head. Maëlle had run away from home with nothing more than what she had tucked into her satchel. She had been so sure.
“Then already you have proven you are a foolish girl,” says Bayol, handing the rose back to her and running his fingers over the section of feathers he had just been carving, examining the depth of the grooves.
“I beg to differ,” Maëlle responds, desperate. “Would you say that if I were a man?”
She jumps at a loud bark of laughter. Behind her, several other workers have gathered to listen in on their conversation.
“But you arenota man, my child,” Monsieur Bayol says, sounding distracted. He picks up his gouging knife and cuts another tiny section of wood, blowing the debris away. “You are a girl. Surely I don’t have to explain the essential differences to you.”
“Men are not accustomed to bravery in a woman,” Maëlle says, pleased with how calm her voice sounds, despite the pounding of her heart. Indignation fuels her confidence. “You mistake it for foolishness. We are entering a new century; are we not ready to embrace a new way of life?”
Bayol straightens, placing a hand on his chicken and glancing behind her at Léon and the others. When he looks back at Maëlle, one side of his mustache lifts as he gives her a smile.
Maëlle feels a sweet, liquid triumph flow through her veins.
CHAPTER SEVEN
PRESENT DAY
PARIS
Cady
The alienating, dehumanizing experience of international air travel, which most people complained about, was par for the course for Cady. She had been trained as a child to stand in line and wait, to shuffle silently through from one checkpoint to the next, losing herself in her thoughts.
Paris, on the other hand, was terrifying. The foreign language, the unfamiliar streets—even the charming but minuscule Left Bank apartment she had rented, three stories up a winding stone staircase—knocked her off-balance and left her feeling even more out of place than she usually did.
So she focused on the carousels.
A month ago, and what seemed like a world away—when she was still in Oakland and planning this trip had been a theoretical exercise—Cady had researched Parisian carousels and composed her “must include” list. While Sebastian cooked dinner, Cady and Olivia had spread the map of Paris out on the kitchen table and pinpointed the locations of the historic machines, noting the nearest Métro stations. There were so many carousels to visit, in places with enticing, exotic-sounding names: Trocadéro, Montmartre, Jardin du Luxembourg, Forum des Halles, Bois de Vincennes, Jardin du Ranelagh, Musée des Arts Forains, Square des Batignolles.
Now, as the days passed, Cady took immense pleasure in checking each carousel off her list, jotting down meticulous notes about date, time of day, weather, and the names and e-mail addresses of the parents of any children included in her photographs.
The morning after she arrived Cady dragged herself out of bed before dawn to photograph the Trocadéro carousel. Styled in traditional wood and illustrated with Parisian scenes, with the orange and pink light of dawn reflected in the great water mirror of the Warsaw Fountain, it was the perfect place to photograph the Parisian sunrise.
It seemed clichéd to include the Tour Eiffel carousel in a book of Parisian carousels, and yet how could she not? Cady headed to the corner of the Pont d’Iéna and Quai Branly, situated right below the twinkling lights of the Eiffel Tower. With its prancing white horses, the two-story carousel provided the ideal opportunity to take a classic shot of the Eiffel Tower—with a carousel in the foreground. She angled the camera to include some nearby palm trees, their fronds waving lackadaisically in the breeze.
Next, she moved on to the carousel at the Hôtel de Ville, Paris’s town hall. The light in the evening created harsh shadows against the pretty tones of the panels painted with classical scenes. The ornate double-decker merry-go-round was similar to the one located at Trocadéro, so she made sure to catch the iconic hotel in the background.
The small green-roofed carousel in the Jardin du Luxembourg claimed to be the oldest in Paris, dating back to 1879. The rather run-down, weathered animals, ridden by thousands of children for more than a century, were designed by the architect of the Paris Opera house, Charles Garnier. Its main attraction, Cady learned as she watched the machine go round, was thejeu de bagues, or game of rings: Children sitting on the outside horses used sticks to attempt to spear tinrings as they rode past. A wrinkled elderly man rapidly loaded rings into old wooden shanks in an intricate, practiced motion.
Every day when Cady stopped for lunch at a bistro or brasserie near wherever she was shooting, she would try to engage the waiter in a discussion of carousels, but to a person they seemed hopelessly bored and uninterested in this American tourist and her quest.
Far from being put off, Cady enjoyed their surliness. It seemed...authentic. It had always embarrassed her to go to her local grocery store in Oakland, where the poor cashier was forced to read her name on the receipt and say, “Thank you, Ms. Drake.” Even when it was delivered in a warm tone, the endearment wasn’t genuine; Cady found she preferred the Parisians’ slightly standoffish attitude.
So Cady kept to herself, exploring the disconcertingly cobbled streets, figuring out how to buy groceries, hunting down carousels, exchanging as few words as possible with parents when she asked their permission to photograph their children on the rides.
But even as she watched the carousels whirl round and round, each one more charming than the last, Cady felt something shifting within her. Bit by bit, she was easing into the sense of anonymity she felt as she walked the streets of Paris. With each new stranger she met, stumbling through conversations in her clumsy French, she felt increasingly free to present a new face, a different aspect of herself.
About a week after she arrived Cady had been sitting at an outdoor café, savoring an extravagant meal served by an efficient but unfriendly waiter, looking out at the bustling plaza in front of the Panthéon, when it dawned on her that Olivia had been right. Cady was starting to feel... if not happy, at least sort of comfortable. Somehow her usual manner, which people in friendly California described as overly forward and abrupt, seemed to fit in here. Or maybe it was simply that since she was someplace foreign and didn’t understand all the language or customs, she allowed them to flow over her instead of trying to fathom every little thing.
And every night when she retreated to her tiny apartment, Cady opened the mystery box she had found inside Gus. She reread the handwritten note, stroking the silky braid of hair, studying the wooden rose and the photograph of the woman who had loved, or who had been loved. Or both.
Souviens-toi de moi.
