Paris by the Book(18)

I picked up the little slip of paper. I now almost wished it were a rhyme scheme, an acrostic.

Can’t

Write

Think

Can’t

Crashed

Jumped

I felt the world rushing up at me—and I mean that, not the floor, not the carpet, but the world, all of it, including Paris, where I’d wanted to go for so long, and now here it was, the code, the key, the passageway—

I did not want to go anywhere, except maybe to bed or outside to scream. I wanted a glass of something, something worse than wine. But I couldn’t get any farther than the sink. I watched myself turn on the water. I watched myself bend to the tap. What was I going to do? Drink, apparently, right from the faucet. I drank for a long while and then turned it off and dried my face. Eleanor waited quietly, hands in her lap.

I waited, too, and when I was ready, I spoke. “We haven’t learned the most important thing,” I said. The rational part of me—which was also the angry part—was slowly returning. “Why?” I said. “Why this way? It’s one thing for him to leave a sad little puzzle behind for me to solve. But it’s another thing for him to tease the kids, a code tumbling out of a box, his old m.o., and they’d have gotten so excited—”

Eleanor nodded. “That’s the part that troubles me,” she said.

“That he was a jerk?” I said.

No, Eleanor said. Robert could be clueless but not cruel, and therefore would not have left the code for his family to find if he’d known he wasn’t going to be around when they found it. And it was doubtful we ever would have found it without his prompting, given that we never went near that box. What troubled her was that this meant something had happened.

What troubled her, she went on, was that I’d been abandoned before, my parents dying so suddenly, so soon.

Our eyes met.

This was not that, she said.

“Got it,” I said, instantly angry that she would bring it up, angry all over again at my parents for dying, angriest of all, of course, at Robert.

“But do you get this?” Eleanor said. There was no question, she said. We should go.

“To France?” I said.

“That’s where he booked tickets to,” she said.

“Now?” I said. I’d sooner take a journey to the sun.

“Three weeks from now,” she said, “or whenever the reservation is for. We’ll pay—I’ll pay—for expedited passports, and—oh, none of that is an issue. Leah, of course go. And my god—don’t come back, not right away. If something terrible has happened here—I hold out hope that it hasn’t—there will be, for a time, the distraction of distance. So change the tickets. Take a month. Take however much time you need. Take leave. The university will figure it out. So will the airline. So will the girls’ schools. Ellie and Daphne may even figure out how to smile again.”

“They’ll be devastated,” I said, “especially when—”

“They awake tomorrow morning, and the next morning, and the next and the next, and he’s not here, in this house, in Milwaukee. This is what’s devastating them, Leah. This is what’s hurting.”

I thought of the ice-cream fight. I thought of Daphne addressing her diary, the dark: take me. I thought of both girls wishing that their dad was not dead and somehow wishing even more that their mom, their own mother, would more visibly join them in this wish and, better yet, make their father reappear.

I thought of how Robert had darkened everything of late, as though a black frame set upon a scene might come to leach its color into what one saw.

“We can’t leave,” I said, so quietly even I couldn’t hear the words. “Robert is away, writing, and is coming back.”

Eleanor could be brusque and businesslike, but like Robert—like the Robert I thought I knew—she was never cruel. She looked at me directly. “Do you believe that?” she said.

“Robert’s moved far away, and he’s changed his identity.”

“Do you want to believe that?”

I didn’t. I feared that he was dead. Because those books had convinced me. Because I had needed them to convince me. Because the world didn’t make sense otherwise, starting with six letters in a cereal box.

“Eleanor,” I said, more whimper than word.

Joking, sarcasm, anger was a way of pretending that I was fine, that I didn’t miss him. And part of me, I confess, did not. But the reader in me, the makeshift muse, word-drunk and bereaved, she suffered. And, yes, the rest of me, my fingers and mouth and hair and stomach, I missed him like air, like water, like a second skin, like a book you love, you need, but is no longer on the shelf when you go to look because it turns out it was never written.

“And the girls? What do they think?” she said.

Ellie and Daphne thought their father was a hero. And I’d agree if allowed to qualify, a classical hero, someone as heroic as he was remote, someone always off on an adventure. I occasionally convinced myself the solution to his (or our) angst lay in taxonomy. If only I could classify what was wrong with him, or me, our family, that house, that life, then I could solve it. He ran off on his writeaways because that was healthy, not rude. He was a good father, had to be, because the girls adored him. So, for the longest time, did I. He remembered Picture Day. He knew which summer camp deadlines fell the fall before. When he was home, he did color-correct laundry, sometimes helped with the dishes, and claimed the girls were telepathic because whenever asked to guess the number in his head, they were, somehow, always right.