12

ON MARGUERITE’S WINDOWSILL was a jar of lavender cuttings. Valerie touched a soft handful of silver-grey leaves and tiny purple flowers. Their fragrance drew her back into the everyday world, the one in which, whatever else happened, she’d have to live out her days.

Her mother had taught her to bake. One-eighth teaspoon of baking powder, she’d say. Only Valerie was in France, a country of decimals, not fractions. Point-five millilitres, the spoon read. Karen had once tried to teach her metric measures. Give it a try, said her sister. It’s not as hard as it looks.

Alone now, Valerie measured with care. She felt helpless.

While her mother gave piano lessons, she’d practise baking, stirring her mother’s lavender into the batter, along with a sprinkling of Brahms and Mozart. What does this recipe call for? One egg. Cracking it on the side of the bowl — what pleasure it still gave her, a smart flick of the wrist that broke the shell, the yolk slithering into the mix, round and gold as the sun that warms the skin, even when the skin is chilled with dread.

Taking the spatula, Valerie folded in the flour and baking powder. Thanks to her mother, she’d come to believe that the world was full of unheard music. She’d taste its richness in her baking, feel the hum of it in flowers, in rocks, in the dew on the grass until the silence ended on a summer night with her Uncle Joe in the backyard strumming his guitar, looking like a Mexican gaucho with thick black hair and a moustache. He was playing Malagueña and Valerie switched on, all five senses whirring. She could taste the sharp ping of starlight, feel the music plucking at her body. She learned guitar and began to sing.

By the time Valerie could strum a tune, she was thirteen, and she knew her neighbour Matthew.

“You’re learning to play git-tar,” he said to her. “Like Elvis.”

She tried to do that lopsided Elvis smile.

“Maybe Andrés Segovia,” she replied.

Matthew’s silence was as deep as a well. “You’ll have to play for me,” he said.

“Do you like music?”

Matthew nudged some gravel and dirt with the toe of his shoe. “Don’t know,” he replied. He lowered his eyes, as if he’d said a shameful thing.

***

She sang and played him a folksong called “I Gave My Love a Cherry.” It had beautiful words.

A story when it’s telling, it has no end.

For sure, that lyric was true. She’d once seen her own heart on a medical technician’s screen, that tough little fist-sized pump, the rhythm section of her body. How long’s it been doing that, she wondered, unable to imagine a beginning, not believing that at a specific moment, someone in the Heart Department had thrown the switch that triggered the lub-dub, lub-dub of a few tiny valves in her chest. As she’d gazed at the screen, she felt she was witnessing an elemental rhythm, one that had infused her unborn self, one that had no end. Her heartbeat wasn’t hers alone.

It was Andre’s, too.

***

All of fifteen, and you were sitting on the hallway stairs, hunched over into the music of my old guitar, plucking out chords and a melody. Your strong tenor singing went soft and low, the way a young voice gets when it’s shy with poetry, lost in a tune still spinning through the mind, so I knew you must be composing a song and I said to you I had no idea you even played, and you said a little or no big deal, as if words might end the magic, as if music were your beloved and the two of you needed time alone.

You knew we were a musical bunch. You’d met your grandmother and your great-uncle Joe. You knew, of course, that I played guitar. It’s like I’m trapped, you’d joke. Inside a musical-family dynamic.

You and J.S. Bach, I replied.

You thought life was unfair, that Gerard and I had grown up in the sixties, that we’d had the best pop music ever written. How you loved plucking out those old Beatles songs, gentle ones like “Michelle” and “Norwegian Wood,” but you’d smile as you played your own songs, your singing so soft that I never did hear the words. You’d slip back inside yourself, strumming the guitar, doing runs, your hands forming the same chords my hands had formed, inventing the same rhythms.

***

What a kid. Valerie put the pastry dough into the fridge. She thought of her family’s love of music, then of Matt who now preferred Gregorian chants and the masses of Bach and Mozart. He’d said once that many inspired compositions were based on folksongs. How odd it was that years ago he’d been slow to react, unsure what to make of her when she started to play guitar.

“But now he loves music,” she said out loud.

She didn’t notice Marguerite leaning against the doorway, tapping the side of her head.

“Mon Dieu. Who are you talking to this time, who isn’t here?”

Valerie was embarrassed. “A friend of mine who’s flying today.”

“No, your friend is not. No one is.”

He’s not flying into New York, she thought. He’s fine.

***

She could see him striding toward the boarding gate, tall and lanky as prairie grass, the glint of sun in his hair, his grip on a scholar’s briefcase full of papers, his blue eyes dreaming awake. As if he were still coming home from Vietnam, still consoled by his call to the priesthood. She wondered if Marguerite could read her mind. She felt sick.

“Pauvre Valerie, are you all right?” asked Marguerite.

Maybe Matt flew yesterday.

“I’ve felt better,” she replied.

She didn’t want to get more specific. Marguerite might think she had a lover.

Her stomach began to settle down. She didn’t welcome the thought of throwing up, even if a plane came down and hit the island. Her mind felt jammed full of planes tumbling out of the sky. She decided to imagine Matthew whole and well.

Marguerite had something in her hand, a wad of mail.

“Birthday cards,” she remarked. “From my youthful neighbours.”

“You have lots of friends.”

“Oui, and imagine, we’d thought of flying to Paris. To celebrate with my son.”

“My sister’s flying to Paris today.”

“From what planet, ma chère?”

“Planet London.”

“I hope she brought along her Walkman,” said Marguerite. “She is flying nowhere.”

***

Valerie tidied up, feeling rueful as she rinsed off the baking implements. She’d heard that those madmen who flew into the towers had used knives to hijack the planes. She put knives in the dishwasher every day, but there was no refuge in domestic arts, no world apart from the world. For the rest of her life she’d knead blood into bread. She thought of her garden, its rich soil a grave.

Even so, there was work to do. There was a special knife to slice those apples. She glanced at Marguerite’s butcher block. One slot was empty; the bread knife was lying on the counter. Valerie rinsed it, dried it, put it back in the block. Maudits kamikazes. She scrubbed the bowl, fists clenched like a fighter’s.