Where The Seine Forgets

CHAPTER SIX: The Night it Rained In June

Chapter Six — The Night It Rained in June

The rain came suddenly on a Thursday evening when they were walking near the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont — which was farther from both of their neighborhoods than they usually ventured, and chosen precisely for that reason.

They ran for the shelter of the park's pavilion, arriving breathless and damp, and stood together watching the rain turn the lake into hammered silver. Élise was laughing, slightly wild-eyed — it was the laugh of someone who had been too careful for too long and found a moment to be otherwise. Jimmy was watching her laugh with the expression of a man who was trying to memorize something.

"What?" she said.

"Nothing." He looked away. Then back. "When did you last laugh like that?"

"Honestly?" She thought about it. "I can't remember."

He had a bottle of wine in his bag, the way he often did, because he was the sort of man who treated small pleasures as a form of preparation. He opened it and they passed it between them and watched the rain and there was a particular kind of silence between them that was not empty at all — it was dense with everything that hadn't been said yet, pressing gently on both sides.

"There's a man who came to the club last week," Jimmy said. "From New Orleans. Name of Dwight Carroll — used to run with a crowd I knew back home."

Something in his voice made her pay attention. "And?"

"And he brought news. Old news, about the night I left." He was looking at the lake. "There was a man. Vernon Cade. He blamed me for something I didn't do, and he had enough friends that I decided to leave before his version of events became the only version. Dwight says he's still angry. That he's the reason I can never go back."

The rain hissed against the pavilion roof.

"What did he blame you for?"

"His son," Jimmy said. "His son and I were friends. Good friends. And one night, his son decided to stand up to a group of white men outside a dancehall, and I —" He stopped. She waited. "I pulled him away. I knew what would happen if he didn't walk away. I'd seen it before. He was angry with me. Called me a coward in front of everyone." A pause. "Two weeks later, he got into a fight without me there to pull him away, and he died. And his father decided that I was responsible. That if I'd let him stand his ground the first time, he'd have known he could."

"That's not — " she began.

"It doesn't matter if it's rational. Grief isn't rational. Vernon Cade decided, and in that town, what Vernon Cade decided became true." He turned to look at her then, directly, the way he rarely did when he was telling something real. "I tell you this because I want you to know who you're sitting in the rain with. Not the man on stage. The actual man."

She reached across and took his hand.

It was the first time they had touched, and it was so simple — her fingers over his, no flourish — that it seemed like something that had always been true and was only now becoming visible.

Neither of them spoke.

The rain continued and the lake continued and time moved at a different speed under the pavilion roof, and Élise thought: if this is who I am in my actual life, then my actual life is just beginning.