Paris by the Book(19)
And they laughed when he told them they were right because he was lying or telling the truth, it didn’t matter, not to them, no more than the fact that he would sometimes disappear for a night, a day, a weekend. It had been weeks at this point with no word. Which meant Robert now fit a profile. I didn’t see it myself, not right away, but the police did. Nobody’s that clean, the police technician said, and the detective eventually had to update his theory about corpses leaving more clues. Because not a penny of our bank account had been pinged, not an electron of his e-mail disturbed.
“Do they think he’s alive?” Eleanor pressed. “The girls.”
You’re going to have to stand a little taller was one of the first things Eleanor had told me, back in the freshest, darkest hours after Robert disappeared, and I had taken that to heart. I stood taller, even as I noticed that taller put me just the slightest bit farther from the girls. They looked up at me and I looked down and we saw each other, but from a new distance. The result wasn’t vertigo, but it left all of us mildly ill, and no one asked what was for dinner, what number was in any one of our heads, whether Dad was still alive. Dad is away was our collective term of art, and so solid-seeming it had been, too, until it began to teeter in that school crosswalk, and then shattered, like Ellie’s phone, in that busy street.
“They do,” I said.
“You don’t,” she said.
“I—can’t,” I said.
“Can you try?” she said.
I didn’t answer; I couldn’t. It was the same question I’d asked Robert the last night I saw him. He wasn’t happy, he’d said. Wasn’t sleeping. Wasn’t working.
Can you try? I’d asked. The girls were tucked in bed upstairs; otherwise I would have been louder, because I wanted him to listen to me, or to the doctor, or the therapist he refused to keep seeing.
Writing is ruining me, he’d said.
I listened to the clock tick. My heart beat. Myself say, in this whole house, only you?
* * *
—
I didn’t eat the morning of our flight and not the night before. I’d drunk some wine; that went poorly. Then coffee: worse.
Worse still, the airport, where every father of every age seemed to have gathered. They lifted bags out of taxis, held doors, ferried lattes in cardboard carriers that were—like much of the world, I realized—designed for four. They scooped up little boys who hugged them good-bye and dropped everything to catch daughters, mid-leap, who welcomed them home. They wore suits, sweats, fatigues. Were shaggy-haired, buzz-cut, bald. As short as Robert, as thin, as haunted, or nothing like him at all. The fathers were everywhere except at the airline counter. Eleanor distracted Ellie and Daphne out of earshot while I asked if a Robert Eady had already checked in.
“No,” said the woman.
Simultaneously relieved and devastated, I said something about how it was unlikely he would check in.
The woman shrugged and delivered a bored speech whose punch line was a $150 change fee.
That’s all? I thought. I almost paid it. It seemed cheap compared to how much change my life had gone through since April; $150 wasn’t much to change it back, to bring a man back from the dead.
I shook my head. She scribbled something on our boarding passes that the TSA agents took as instruction to subject us to a scouring search. I watched as my purse, Daphne’s underwear, and a petite container of Clearasil pads I didn’t know Ellie had packed were wiped down with what looked like a Clearasil pad. For explosives, the agent said, winking at the girls as if this were a game.
For three weeks, I’d told the girls. Twenty-one days in Paris. This trip, which we were going to take with Dad, we’re going to take ourselves. Daphne had asked if we were going to meet him there, and in the pause it had taken me to mull whether saying maybe was right or wrong or kind, Ellie had said no.
I said our only real goal for this trip was to get away, see the sights, see some pages from Madeline come to life. Dad had needed a longer than usual writing break, apparently. And, apparently, this was his plan for us: Paris. Besides, they loved Bemelmans, right? Ellie especially. She loved sharing alarming anecdotes from the “grown-up” Bemelmans anthologies Robert had found—did I know Bemelmans claimed to have shot someone? That his governess had killed herself when he was six? That Bemelmans had thought of killing himself with a velvet rope from the Ritz? No, I did not. (Had her father thought such thoughts? For the longest time I did not let myself think so. Now I couldn’t not.)
* * *
—
To fly anywhere these days means navigating, first, a gauntlet of questions.
Did you pack your own bags?
Did anyone ask you to carry something for them?
Has your bag been in your possession the entire time?
But the most difficult one came from Daphne.
“Did you leave Dad a note?”
“Yes,” I said, which was untrue.
Ellie, who had been pretending not to follow our discussion as she played with her new phone, tilted slightly closer to us, eyes still focused on her screen.
“I did, too!” Daphne whispered loudly. “I left it on my pillow.”
This was too much for Ellie. Earlier, when Daphne had gone to a bathroom near the gate, Ellie had asked: is Dad coming back? Tell me the truth, now—Daphne can’t hear you.