Paris by the Book(20)
Ellie had not been satisfied with my I hope so and even less so by my I don’t know. I braced for the follow-up, is he alive? My answers would have been no different: I hope so; I don’t know. But somehow I knew that her just asking the question would make everything different.
But here, now, Ellie was pressing Daphne, not me. “You left the note on your pillow?” Ellie asked.
“Yes?” Daphne said, not quite seeing the blow that was coming.
“You didn’t write ‘be back soon,’ did you?” Ellie said, furious now. “Like he always did? Because that would be so clever.”
Daphne’s eyes filled, but she didn’t break her sister’s stare. She just let the tears, when they came, pulse down her cheeks one by one in silence.
Ellie stood and stormed away toward a scrum awaiting a Florida flight.
Daphne fell into my shoulder. I pulled her close. What’s always amazed me as a mother is that even as your children grow, they still fit. Infant or tween, their chins can find their own individual ways to burrow into your shoulder, your arms, your chest. And then you breathe in and they breathe out, and our molecules are all mixed up again, indivisible once more.
Daphne wriggled in deeper, mole-like, which meant I had to have her repeat what she said to make out the words: “What did your note say, Mom?”
I stiffened, just the slightest bit.
My note, before I’d torn up three different drafts and thrown every last one into the trash, had said that we missed him, we loved him, we were worried about him, please call, please write, please tell us what happened, why this happened, how we can keep this from happening again. My note said I love you and but you make it harder and harder to do so and we need to talk, and we did, but as I scratched one underline after another under that word, I remembered that we never would, because he was—had to be? the police seemed to think? the funeral director’s books seemed to suggest?—dead.
I thought of the boy in the bar with the books, the boy who’d loved Bemelmans, the boy who’d bought me a book about a balloon, the boy who said we’d go places. And we had. And now he had.
But where?
Daphne looked up at me, and so I told her what I’d written, which I hadn’t:
Meet us in Paris.
CHAPTER 4
What I should have felt when we first landed in Paris is obvious: Paris! Paris! Paris! Here were the routes I’d traced with a finger on childhood atlases, as though some miniaturized version of the city might bas-relief beneath my fingertips. It never had.
And it didn’t now. When Robert left, it turned out he had taken something—a small thing, perhaps, but still, an important thing: the exclamation point that had always followed the city’s name, at least for me. From the looks of the girls, he’d taken it from them, too.
Paris. Somewhere around here someone had once made a movie about a red balloon. Someone else had sat sketching schoolgirls marching about in two straight lines.
And back in Milwaukee, some couple had once argued whether Paris was best depicted in color or black and white. Now I saw—
That the city was spectacular. That it couldn’t and wouldn’t not be, and if I or my girls missed that exclamation point, we were missing the larger point. Paris wasn’t a painting, or a movie, or a poster. It wasn’t a prize. And now that we’d arrived, it was no longer a dream, either. It was real.
Then why didn’t it feel that way?
* * *
—
Well, in part, because it was so tyrannically hot. Those first August weeks in Paris, the heat staggered us. Even saying the month’s name in French—ao?t—felt, and sounded, like a little cry for help.
Not that anyone could have heard us above the din—the city was a city, and this fact somehow surprised us, too: how noisy it was, and at all hours. That I’d booked us a hot, cramped apartment between a hospital and train station did not help. During our daytime adventures, we’d sometimes find a narrow, anonymous passage and duck into it, in pursuit of nothing other than silence.
What surprised me most was how kind the city was to us. Nothing prepared me for this (though the girls, fed on Madeline, assumed it their due). I’ve experienced various Parisian unkindnesses since, but I’ll never forget those first days here when so many strangers seemed so warm, even courtly, especially toward the girls. Shopkeepers, museum guards, passengers on the Métro. Men gave up their seats; women stopped me to compliment my daughters’ beauty; bakers dropped a tiny chocolate (and then, with a wink, two, three) into the bag with our croissants. And the third Nutella crêpe? Free for the beautiful lady—who apparently was me. Paris in August is empty but for tourists, but the Parisians who’ve stayed behind need those tourists, they needed us. And, I was slowly letting myself believe, we needed them.
* * *
—
But with just four days left in Paris, we also needed Daphne’s passport.
It was gone. Eleanor’s fault: she’d told me that the first step in raising strong, independent women was to give them responsibility, starting with their boarding passes and passports.
Ellie misplaced her boarding pass between TSA and the plane in the United States; Daphne had lost her passport that morning in Paris. No idea how, where, just that it was gone. Also gone, and more devastatingly: the nascent confidence Eleanor’s plan had begun to instill in her. The State Department could help us with the passport, but I wasn’t sure who would reissue Daphne’s pride.