But it wasn’t just “another day.” I spent three days alone working on the squeeze, until Pascalle was glaring and even Mrs. Ladd looked drawn. Then I cast again with plaster of Paris, one negative and one positive. On this last positive, I built Luc’s face.
I worked slowly, carefully, scraping away the plaster grain by grain. I had my sketch right beside me, the sketch that first revealed the battered soldier as my lost childhood love. I worried over every line in the sketch. I doubted my memory.
But I also doubted my doubt. Maybe there was something, some chink in his armor. An honest something to hope for. With each scrape of my knife, with each shower of plaster dust falling onto the table, maybe, maybe, said my heart.
At the end of each day, I caught up the dust into my palm. I went to the Square du Vert-Galant and stood with my feet on the point of land. It was the place Luc had mentioned in his letter, the place where he said he always felt the breath of Paris on his face. Now, it was my quiet spot in the city. I let the wind carry away the palmful of dust into the river and I hoped.
That first week, after Luc touched my wrist and asked me to stay, he didn’t come to the studio at all. Then one day he appeared in the doorway, shy, hat in hand like a suitor. I blushed to see it.
But he didn’t talk to me. He just nodded and went to sit with the other mutilés and their checkerboards. Another patient. I bent my head and tried to forget he was right there, watching.
I smoothed out his left cheek, his jaw, the corner of his eye. With my knife, I gave him that angled cheekbone I remembered. That straight jaw that always tightened when he was nervous. That left eye that crinkled at the corner in one of his unexpected laughs. Luc, always so serious. Even as a boy—studying, working, wishing he could do more for the château—he always looked like he carried the world on his shoulders.
That’s why his letters surprised me. They weren’t at all serious. Hiding behind pen and paper, Luc bantered, joked, teased, in a way that he didn’t often do in person. That was the Luc I thought I’d meet again someday. In all of those sunshine daydreams I had of coming back to Paris, of climbing the paths in the Parc des Buttes Chaumont and painting by the Seine, that lighthearted Luc was there by my side. None of the adolescent awkwardness we’d known before. Instead, the comfortableness, the humor, the friendship we’d built through our letters.
But here I was, in Paris at last, with Luc at last, and there were no smiles. His face was drawn and weary. He had no laughter left.
With my knife, I sculpted the Luc of my letters, the Luc of my daydreams. I curved the left side of his mouth upwards in a smile. I quirked an eyebrow in a moment of suppressed mirth. It didn’t matter. Mrs. Ladd would make me change it in the end.
To my surprise, she didn’t. She paused once at my table, nodded down at the plaster, and said, “That’s the face of a man healed.”
Each morning, he’d arrive at nine-thirty in his wrinkled gray suit and secondhand fedora to sit with the mutilés and a glass of wine that he’d nurse for hours. Though he always held a book in front of him, I pretended he was watching me over the top of the spine. And then hated myself for wishing. He was waiting for a mask, to allow him to move on, and here I was sighing like a schoolgirl and stretching out my work so he wouldn’t have to leave. He’d stay until three o’clock and then, with a quick glance my way, would slip out the door.
One day when he arrived, it was to a sketchbook and pencil waiting at his usual seat. He blinked, and I smiled to see him so startled. He looked up, questioningly. I nodded. That whole morning, as I pressed the sheet of copper against my plaster sculpture, as I traced each line and curve until it held the imprint of Luc’s face, he warily regarded the sketchbook. I trimmed away the extra copper and the right half of the face; he had no need to cover that. As I smoothed down the raw edges, Luc finally picked up the pencil. Arm held stiff, he began to draw.
After he left, when I was cleaning up, I opened the book. He’d roughed in a soldier, a poilu in a dented helmet and greatcoat. Though the soldier’s shape was blurred, his face was full of careful detail. Weary lines, a grim line of a mouth, yet eyes boyish wide. It wasn’t anyone I recognized, but it was someone Luc knew well.
The next day, when I put the copper into the electroplating bath, he wasn’t alone. A few other mutilés had pulled chairs nearby and were watching Luc work. He didn’t say a word, but they kept his wine refilled. He’d added two other soldiers to the sketch, both facing away. One leaned on a rifle, the other was praying. By midday there was a fourth soldier, sitting with his head hanging between his knees.
On the third day, Luc tore sheets from the back of his book. There was now a tableful of mutilés with paper and pencil, sketching away at trees and houses and airplanes. Every once in a while he’d look up from his own drawing to offer a quiet suggestion or two. Meanwhile he added a parapet and row of sandbags behind his penciled poilus.
The next morning, when I took the gleaming half mask from its bath, Luc finally approached. He didn’t even glance down at the drying mask, waiting to be painted. He only looked at me.
“Thank you,” was all he said. “You knew what I needed.”
When I looked at his sketch later, the young soldier in the middle held a sword, a great sword with a twisted pommel. In the midst of war, he looked invulnerable.
You knew what I needed.
The day the mask was ready, I was as nervous as Christmas morning.
I’d spent months hiding—behind my scarf, behind my guilt, behind my excuses. At Mabel’s insistence, I went reluctantly that first time to Mrs. Ladd’s studio. I knew I was going to another mask, albeit one more tangible than the regret I’d been wearing. I didn’t expect more than a more polite way to hide my memories. I didn’t expect to be fixed.
Then I met Clare. There’d never been façades between us, even when we had nothing but letters. She’d put on a falsely cheerful front for her grandfather, as I had with Maman, but we didn’t with each other. Our words, our pictures, our ink-smudged fingerprints in the margins, all were honest. With Clare in the studio, my defenses slowly began crumbling. They wouldn’t have mattered to her anyway.
I’d held her hand while she sponged plaster off my cheeks. I’d watched her across the room while she spent far too long making the mask. These past weeks, my heart made me more vulnerable than my ruined face ever had.
But here she was, as nervous as I was, fingers tapping the underside of the table, waiting to pull the cloth from yet another mask. She’d seen me bare, and yet was handing me something to cover all that again.
“I did the best I could,” she said right away. “Well, are you ready?”
I was freezing cold all of a sudden, and no, I wasn’t ready, but I swallowed and I nodded. She pulled up the cloth.
Despite her doubts, Clare had done it. That curve of my brow, the shape of my lips, the angle of my cheek. She’d taken half of a ruined face, a handful of memories, and she’d made me. No one else could have done it.
“Magnifique.” I reached for it, almost. “Of course it is.” What was I imagining? Something as stiff and distant as the plaster casts lining the walls? Something that wasn’t me? “Mademoiselle…Clare…can I have a moment, please?”
She opened her mouth as though to protest, she bit her lip, she nodded. After a moment of withheld breath and withheld words, she retreated to the other side of the room.
I was left alone with my own face.
As perfect as it was, it was unsettling. To see half of my own face, too shiny, a single gaping hole for my eye, staring up from the table. Half of a carefully stubbled cheek, a half a mouth caught up in an almost-smile, a look I hadn’t worn in far too long. Too perfect. It could have been a painting, a sculpture, something hanging from the wall of a gallery. It was vivid and lifelike, but it wasn’t real.
Was this my choice, then? To be a gargoyle or, instead, to be a work of art? I touched the metal with my index finger. Perhaps these days I was as cold to the touch.
“Luc.” Clare was suddenly at my elbow.
She stood by me, so shining and hopeful. I thought of all her patience and persistence, when I’d given her nothing but bitterness in return. She didn’t demand, just said, “Please.”
I picked up the mask. Clare was right. She did make a thing of beauty. I put it on.
For a moment everything went dim. She fussed and adjusted, her fingers light as pearls. I blinked and, through the narrow left eyehole, I saw her stop and press a hand to her mouth. So quickly, I wondered if I was wrong. I wondered what she saw.
It rubbed at the edges, the way a new pair of shoes did. The weight of the metal pushed against my scars and made me feel every ridge. It was cold and smooth as ice, but Clare had done well. The mask skimmed my face like a second skin.
She finished fiddling with it and asked, “Would you like to see the mirror?”
