Trust Me (Paris Nights #3)(6)
Lives spread out all around him here. Sparks of light everywhere. When that Eiffel Tower over past the Seine lit in its sparkle dance, he wondered if that was why Parisians had made it sparkle—the lights on the Tower represented the life in every person who looked at it. In which case, it made sense the Tower had gone dark a time or two these past few years, in grief. But mostly, it kept stubbornly sparkling. Just like Lina. You can’t put us out.
***
“?a va, ma puce?” Sofia Farah asked over the phone.
Lina peeked over the edge of her bed at the windows. “I’m fine, Maman. You know I’ve got the police guards.”
“Do you want us to come in?”
“It’s an hour drive, Maman. I’m fine.” She couldn’t tell her mother this, but her plan was to indulge in sexual fantasies until she fell asleep. Jake Adams was going to come in very handy.
She stretched down and checked under her bed again, holding her phone to her ear. Still no monsters under there.
She sat back up, pressing her back to her closet door. She’d already checked in there once—just in case Jake had missed a fang gleaming in the dark—and she was absolutely determined not to check again.
“It would be no problem, pucette.”
Pucette. Lina had gotten about twenty years younger in her mother’s eyes the instant someone had tried to kill her. It might be her mom was calling her every hour not for Lina’s sake but for her own. To make sure she was still okay. “I’m still okay, Maman,” she murmured. “I worked on my ice sculpture today.”
“Yes?” An encouraging murmur.
“I’m going to do a dragon.”
This time, a warm, fierce sound of approval. Actively lured over from Algeria by the French government to help factories desperate for workers, her mother’s parents had ended up stuck in the terrible conditions of the Nanterre shantytown, where Sofia had been born. When the public outcry had pushed the government to build better lodging, the family had been moved into the HLM where Sofia had grown up and near where Lina herself had grown up. Sofia should, in theory, have been too young to remember much of the shantytowns, but she’d grown up a fiery activist. Missing 1968 by a decade—as far as Lina was concerned, her mother would have made a perfect student protestor—Sofia had instead become an ardent feminist and a teacher, determined to change all the lives she encountered, all the time, and insisted they stay in their bad banlieue so she could better do that. But when Lina’s father, who had started work at fifteen just like Lina had, had therefore been eligible for retirement at fifty-five two years ago and sold his little épicerie, Lina had finally talked her parents into moving with her grandmother into a better banlieue.
Where the next door neighbors glared at them, but anyway…
Lina’s fiery, vibrant, warm mother was going to wrap those neighbors around her finger in the end, Lina was sure of it.
“But I keep cutting off its head,” Lina said.
Her mother laughed. Lina relaxed a little of the pressure she was putting into making sure the closet door behind her stayed closed.
“Seriously, Maman, you guys need to go ahead and leave on your vacation. You know if you wait until August 1, you’ll be stuck in traffic for hours getting away from Paris.”
“Well, you come with us,” her mother said stubbornly.
“Maman. No. Vi’s still in the hospital. I’m not leaving her there.”
“And I’m leaving you here and going off to fight police officers over burkinis?”
Lina gazed beseechingly at the ceiling. Her mother didn’t even wear a hijab and had spent her student years refusing to even don a bra, that “symbol of the patriarchy,” but of course she was going to wear a burkini at the beach to make a statement, now that some beaches had been outrageous enough to try forbidding them. Her mother’s main cause was girl power, and this battle was a don’t tell us what to do with our bodies one. She was dying to get a picture of herself in the papers with a couple of (ideally male) police officers looming over her on the beach, forcing her to remove a burkini.
“Maman, you do know anything you do now will be amplified a million times, with all the media focus on us.” Particularly on Lina, but since Lina wasn’t giving media interviews, television crews kept trying to feed their audiences by hanging out around her parents’ house, too. But even that was nothing like the numbers of journalists and crazy people hanging around her aunt and uncle’s building; their situation was terrible.
On the plus side, the numbers Lina could see hanging outside her apartment building and restaurant halved each day, proof that no matter what happened, media attention just never lingered long.
But her mother getting arrested in a burkini would probably pull it right back. “It’s an opportunity to make a stronger statement,” her mother said firmly.
Her mother’s own way of trying to find a damn silver lining.
“Go make that statement, then. I’m fine, Maman.”
“I know you’re fine, pucette,” her mother said. “You’re going to be just fine.”
She sounded like she had all those times when Lina skinned her knee as a child or struggled with some social situation as a young teenager—hugging her, rocking her if she was little enough, consoling her, and communicating her absolute certainty that Lina could handle anything she had to.