On the floor outside Marie-Laure’s bedroom door waits something big wrapped in newsprint and twine. From the stairwell, Etienne says, “Happy sixteenth birthday.”
She tears away the paper. Two books, one stacked atop the other. Three years and four months have passed since Papa left Saint-Malo.
One thousand two hundred and twenty-four days. Almost four years have passed since she has felt Braille, and yet the letters rise from her memory as if she left off reading yesterday.
Jules. Verne. Twenty. Thousand. Leagues. Part. One. Part. Two.
She throws herself at her great-uncle and hangs her arms around his neck.
“You said you never got to finish. I thought, rather than my reading it to you, maybe you could read it to me?”
“But how—?”
“Monsieur Hébrard, the bookseller.”
“When nothing is available? And they’re so expensive—” “You have made a lot of friends in this town, Marie-Laure.”
She stretches out on the floor and opens to the first page. “I’m going to start it all over again. From the beginning.”
“Perfect.”
“‘Chapter One,’” she reads. “‘A Shifting Reef.’” The year 1866 was marked by a strange event, an unexplainable occurrence, which is undoubtedly still fresh in everyone’s memory . . . She gallops through the first ten pages, the story coming back: worldwide curiosity about what must be a mythical sea monster, famed marine biologist Professor Pierre Aronnax setting off to discover the truth. Is it monster or moving reef? Something else? Any page now, Aronnax will plunge over the rail of the frigate; not long afterward, he and the Canadian harpooner Ned Land will find themselves on Captain Nemo’s submarine.
Beyond the carton-covered window, rain sifts down from a platinum-colored sky. A dove scrabbles along the gutter calling hoo hoo hoo. Out
in the harbor a sturgeon makes a single leap like a silver horse and then is gone.
