A Lily in the Light(73)
“Do you have a cell phone?”
Adam looked up, confused. “Yeah, why?”
Esme sat up a little farther, towing the blanket with her. “Is it OK if I give someone your number, just in case? I’ve been waiting for news about something.”
“Everything OK?” Adam’s brow wrinkled. Esme wanted to smooth the wrinkle with her finger.
“Yes,” she said, deciding to tell him the simplest version. It felt strange to say it out loud. The words were dry on her tongue and hung in the air. “They found a girl and think she might be my sister. She’s been missing for eight years.”
Adam stared at her for a minute. Esme tried to read his expression, to control her own as Adam pieced it together slowly.
Do you understand now? She prayed, thinking of all the secret phone calls, how much she hadn’t wanted to be the Waltz Girl, of all of the resistance she’d felt but couldn’t express. Lily would always be there, lingering just under the surface, waiting for just the right reminder, just the right little girl holding hands with a grown-up, a mess of brown hair blurring the years that had passed and the exactness of Lily. She couldn’t pluck her out like a splinter or tuck her away in her memory. She’d always find a way out, and that was OK. She’d loved that about Lily, that innocent invasiveness, and it was the same then as it was now, Esme realized. If she let Lily out in small doses, found her in a flower or a pair of tiny shoes in a window, Lily wouldn’t crash through at the beach or a nightmare or any of the places Esme didn’t want her to be. She just wants to be remembered, Esme thought, realizing that this would only work if Liz wasn’t Lily. If she was, well, she still didn’t have an answer for that.
“Holy shit,” Adam said softly.
“Yeah,” Esme said. She laughed at the idea of it, at the improbability, the possible miracle, the impossible. “Holy shit.”
“Of course,” he said, scribbling the number on a piece of paper. “Of course.”
His hand covered hers, warming her skin and the bones beneath it, anchoring her to shore.
There were no messages for her at the front desk. She dialed Madeline’s number and left Adam’s on the answering machine. Then she showered and changed into a summer dress, one her mother had made especially for this trip, probably hoping some Paris designer would see it and plaster it on magazine covers. Esme pulled the dress over her head. At first it was baggy and shapeless. She pulled at the waist and shifted the shoulder straps until it settled. What her mother had done slowly dawned on her.
It was the dress Anna Pavlova wore in Esme’s favorite photograph, the one where she was sitting on the lawn with a swan on her lap. The dress was barely visible in the picture, but her mother must have studied it closely, approximating the pleats in the front, how the top would flow over the bottom. It was a pale green, Esme’s color. Inside the pocket was a string of costume pearls. Esme stared at herself in the mirror, thinking of her mother at her sewing machine, studying the picture, a glimmer of the mother she’d been before, sewing costumes. Sewing herself into Esme’s dream.
Esme fastened the pearls around her neck and ran her hands down the skirt. She didn’t know how to say thank you. Her mother probably wasn’t expecting it either, but she would find a way.
She brushed her hair and patted lotion onto her face until she looked bright and fresh. That was it. No makeup today, just her own face. She was tired of hiding.
Adam was waiting in the lobby. Christophe was gone, thankfully. It was just the two of them. The dress swished when she walked, light as air around her knees. It made her feel ready. The roses on the table were leaning toward the door, where the sun made a triangle on the carpet.
“Hey,” he called, flipping his phone shut. He smiled and shifted from one foot to the other. The hazy comfort from their morning together dissipated. He had changed into a button-up shirt. Was this a date?
The same teenage Esme who’d bought Hostess cupcakes from the vending machine and eaten them in teeny bites, saving half for the next week, could not be on a date with Adam. The same Adam who’d once spliced the Home Alone kid into Sleeping Beauty so Macaulay Culkin would scream in the mirror when Aurora woke up could not be on a date with Esme. He lived in New York. She lived in San Francisco. There was an entire country of rolling mountains and flat plains between them and, of course, ballet—but still.
“It’s a date,” Imaginary Lily whispered from the phone booth, followed by smoochy kisses. “Adam and Esme sitting in a tree . . .” Lily’s voice trailed off when Esme narrowed her eyes, wishing she could feel annoyed at real Lily again just once and take it for granted all over again.
They stepped quietly from the lobby to the street. The fountain bubbled. Around it, people sat with sandwiches in waxed paper, balancing paper-bag plates and textbooks on their laps. The university crowd, a group Esme might have been part of had she not done ballet. They watched the summer students carefully, aware of how different their choices had been.
“All right,” Adam said. “The Latin Quarter is pretty cool, but there’s Montmartre or the river, Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower. I’m down for whatever.”
“Me too,” Esme said. “Let’s do it all.”
“We won’t have time for all of it.” Adam laughed.
“Obviously,” Esme agreed. “Let’s start with the Latin Quarter and wander. I want to see Hemingway’s house.”