“He says he misses me,” Stevie answered her. “He's antsy for me to come home. He says he's pining for my cooking. He must have lost his memory too. What's to miss? Chinese takeout, or deli food? I haven't cooked a decent meal for him in four years.”

“I don't blame him. I missed you today too.”

“I'll be there tomorrow. And I'm sleeping there tomorrow night.”

“No one's coming after me,” Carole said reassuringly. “All the other guys blew themselves up.” And they damn near blew her up too. “There's no one left.”

“I don't care. I'd rather be there with you.”

“I'd rather be at the Ritz,” Carole laughed, “than at the Pitié Salpêtrière. Hands down. You've got much better room service there.”

“Never mind,” Stevie said firmly. “I'm moving in. And fuck them if they don't like it. If they can't even keep a security guard on your door through lunch time, you need a watchdog over there.”

“I think Matthieu took care of that. They looked scared to death of him. And there are about a million guards in the hall tonight.”

“He scares me too,” Stevie said honestly. “He looks like a tough guy.”

“He is.” Carole remembered that about him. “But he wasn't with me. He was married. He just wouldn't leave his wife. We talked about it today. We lived together for two and a half years. He wouldn't divorce her, so I left.”

“I got into one of those once. They're hard to win. Most people don't. I never did it again. Alan may be an asshole at times, but at least he's mine.”

“Yeah, I guess it took me a while with Matthieu to figure that out. He told me he was leaving her when we met, that his marriage was over, and had been for ten years.”

“They always say bullshit like that. The only one who doesn't know about it is their wife. They never leave.”

“He stayed married to her till last year. He said I was right to go.”

“Apparently. And he divorced her now?” Stevie sounded surprised. At his age, no one got divorced. Especially in France.

“No, she died. He stayed with her till the bitter end. Forty-six years. Of a supposedly loveless marriage. What's the point in that?”

“Habit. Laziness. Chickenshit. God knows why people stay.”

“His daughter died when I was living with him. And then his wife threatened suicide. There was an endless string of excuses, some of them even valid, though most of them not, until I finally gave up. He was married to her, and to France.”

“Sounds like you didn't have a chance.”

“No, I didn't. He says that now too. He sure didn't say it then.” She didn't tell Stevie about the baby she'd lost, but she was going to talk to Anthony about it sometime, in case he remembered it. He had never said anything to her, but it had been obvious, in the hospital when they met, how much he had hated Matthieu in the end. Even her children had felt betrayed. It had left a lasting impression on her son, whatever the details.

“You looked miserable when we came back to pack up the house.”

“I was.”

“You seem to be remembering a lot of stuff,” Stevie commented. Carole had come far in the past few days. The boy with the knife had jogged her memory too.

“I am. Little by little, stuff is coming back. Feelings more than events.”

“That's a start.” Mike Appelsohn had helped her too, except for his interview with the press, which had set the boy with the knife after her. “I hope they send you back to the hotel soon.” Stevie was deeply worried about the potential risk to her from remaining terrorists. But now, so were the police.

“So do I.”

They said goodnight then and hung up, and Carole lay in bed for a long time, thinking how lucky she was, how blessed to have her children, how miraculous her survival had been, and how fortunate she was to have Stevie as a friend. She tried not to let herself think of Matthieu, or the boy who had come to kill her with the terrifying knife. She lay in bed with her eyes closed, taking deep breaths. But no matter what she did, she kept seeing the boy with the knife in her head, and then her mind would race to the safety and protection of Matthieu. It was as though all these years later, he was still a place of refuge and peace, and would keep her safe from harm. She didn't want to believe that, but somewhere locked away in the memory of her heart, she still did. She could almost feel his arms around her as she drifted off to sleep at last.





Chapter 13




The police came to take a report from Carole the next day. The boy they'd taken into custody was from Syria, and he was seventeen years old. He was a member of a fundamentalist group that had been responsible for three recent terrorist attacks, two in France and one in Spain. Other than that they knew very little about him, and Carole was the only person who could link him to the bombing in the tunnel. Although much of her memory was still fuzzy about it, as well as details of her own life, she distinctly remembered seeing him in the car next to her, as her cab had sat stuck in traffic underground. It had all come back to her when she saw his face in her room at the Pitié Salpêtrière. His eyes had riveted her as he lunged at her with the long, curved blade.

The police questioned her for nearly three hours, and showed her photographs of a dozen men. She recognized none of them, only the young man who had entered her room and tried to kill her. One of the photographs vaguely reminded her of the driver of the car next to her, but she hadn't paid as much attention to him as the boy in the backseat, and she couldn't be as sure. She had no doubt whatsoever about the boy who had attacked her, she remembered clearly his mournful face as he stared at her from the backseat. His attack had brought it all clearly into her mind again. The images were very sharp.

Other memories were returning too. Often they were out of sequence and made no sense to her. She could see her father's barn in her mind's eye, and she remembered milking the cows as though it were yesterday. She could hear her father's laughter, but no amount of concentration could help her recall his face. The meeting with Mike Appelsohn in New Orleans when he discovered her was a blank to her, but she recalled the screen test now, and working on her first movie. She had woken up thinking of it that day, but meeting Jason and her early days with him had vanished into thin air. She remembered their wedding day and the apartment in New York where they'd lived after they were married, and she had a vague memory of Anthony's birth, but nothing of Chloe's, the movies she'd made, or the Oscars she won, and she still had very little memory of Sean.

Everything was disjointed and out of sequence, like clips from a movie that had landed on the cutting-room floor. Faces would come to mind, or names, often unrelated, and then whole scenes would appear and be crystal clear. It was like a crazy patchwork quilt of her life, which she tried constantly to sort out and organize, and put into sequence again, and just as she thought she had it right and knew what she was remembering, she would remember another detail, face, name, or event, and the whole story changed again. It was like a kaleidoscope, constantly shifting, changing, the colors and shapes altered and moving. It was exhausting trying to absorb it all and make sense of it. For hours at a time now, she had total recall, and then for many more, her mind seemed to shut down, as though it had had enough of the sifting and sorting process that occupied her every waking hour. She was trying to force herself to remember it all, and asked a thousand questions as things came to mind, trying to make the focus more acute in the lens of her mind's eye. It was a full-time job, and the hardest one she'd ever done.

Stevie was well aware of how exhausting it was for her, and sat in silence in her room when she could see that Carole was trying to run things through her head. Eventually, Carole would say something, but for long hours she would lie on her bed, seemingly staring into space, thinking about it all. Some of it still made no sense, like photographs of people in an album with no labels to indicate who they had been, or why they were there. About some things she remembered too much. About others far too little. And all of it was jumbled in her head. Sometimes it took hours to identify a scene, face, or name, and it was a real victory for her when she did. She felt triumphant every time, and then would lie silent and drained of energy for a long time.

The police had been impressed by what she did remember. Initially, they had been told she had no memory at all. And many of the other victims they'd spoken to recalled even less than she did. They hadn't been paying attention when they'd been sitting in the tunnel, talking to other passengers, playing with the radio, or the shock of the event and their resulting injuries had wiped all recollection from their minds. The police and a special intelligence unit had been interviewing people for weeks. And until then they had been told that Carole would be unable to contribute anything to their search. Suddenly that had changed, and they were grateful for her help. They were providing additional security for her at the hospital. There were now two members of a SWAT team, the CRS, standing outside her door in combat boots and dark blue overalls. There was no mistaking who they were, or why they were there. The machine guns they carried said it all. The CRS was the most feared unit in Paris, brought in to break up riots, during threats, or after terrorism erupted somewhere. The fact that they had been called in confirmed the seriousness of the event that had brought her to the Pitié Salpêtrière.

There was no solid reason to believe that other members of the group would attempt an attack on her again. As far as they knew, all the perpetrators had died in the suicide bombing in the tunnel, with the exception of the one boy who had fled. Carole distinctly remembered him running backward to the entry of the tunnel just before the first bomb exploded. Her memory was more vague about the subsequent ones, because by then she herself had been blown out of the cab and was free-falling toward the tunnel floor. But the police still had a reasonable concern that she was a highly visible victim of the event. Eliminating her would be a plus for the terrorists, as well as an additional victory, in killing a well-known person to bring attention to their cause. In either case, the police and special intelligence units had no desire whatsoever to have Carole die on French turf. They wanted to do everything possible to keep her alive, at least until she left France. And since she was an American, they had contacted the FBI as well. They had promised to provide surveillance of her home in Bel-Air for the next several months, particularly once she was home. It was both frightening and reassuring at the same time.