Paris by the Book(21)
Not me, because I’d lost almost all of my own, having forgotten to bring the passport photocopies Eleanor had insisted I make. Fortunately, she’d insisted on keeping a set as well, and when I called that afternoon, she said she had the copies right at hand.
I waited for “I told you so,” autotext she keeps tucked in her cheek.
But instead: “I’m so glad you called,” Eleanor said. “I have something to tell you—unless—is this costing you thousands, this call?”
It wasn’t; Ellie had known to acquire these chips hardly bigger than a beauty mark that, once inserted into our phones, somehow made calling and texting and surfing cost next to nothing, or so she said.
“Not thousands, but . . .” But I needed to hurry Eleanor along; Ellie was bored and Daphne’s face was blotchy with tears and shame. Both were eavesdropping avidly. “Eleanor? The passport’s number. That’s all I need.”
We were sitting on a bench in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, a destination I’d put off, partly to hold it in reserve as a grand finale, partly because I hadn’t realized climbing it, especially at peak season, required an advance reservation.
And partly because—this is silly, or maybe not—I’d long ago envisioned climbing to the top and planting a kiss on Robert once there. Look who’s made it to Paris, France, from Paris, Wisconsin! Eighteen years, and here we are!
And we were. I let my eyes travel up the structure and squinted. It looked even hotter up there, that much closer to the sun.
“Nonsense,” Eleanor said. “It’s better to have the page itself,” Eleanor said. “I’ll FedEx it to you.”
“That will cost thousands,” I said.
“Thousands?” Daphne squeaked. Daphne worried about money for reasons that were obscure to me—had Robert and I once argued over finances in her presence? In Milwaukee, she had collected jars and jars of change. And if we were ever in a bookstore and she saw a discount sticker on one of Robert’s books, she took it off.
“No—Daphne, it’s okay,” I said. “It’s just that Aunt Eleanor wants to mail us a paper copy of your passport, and—”
Ellie exhaled long and slow. “Wow,” she said finally, and stood. Eleanor’s cumbersome suggestion proved just how old she was. But this moment proved to me just how old Ellie had become. She was about to turn fifteen then, a teen. Witness the exhale, the “wow,” the shimmering disdain, but most of all, the sheer height of her: when your child achieves (or exceeds) your height, you come to feel barely half their size. Ellie and I could now look each other in the eye. We could wear each other’s clothes. She dwarfed me. “Just, wow,” Ellie elaborated. And with that, she took the phone from me, explained to Eleanor what was needed—scan, upload, send—and then ended the call, brought up a map, and led us to a nearby Internet café.
Such cafés are all but extinct now and this one should have been then. It was un-air-conditioned, unpleasant, filled with young men who should have spent their last euros showering instead of surfing. The room rang with conversations in a dozen languages, but rules were rules—the manager pointed to a sign, in English, NO PHONE TALKING—so I was ordered out to the sidewalk when Eleanor called back.
“You’ll have it in a moment, I expect,” said Eleanor. “But can I use that moment?” she asked. “Like I said, I may have found something.”
I stared into the café; Daphne stared back; Ellie stared at her screen; the manager stared at my girls.
And an ocean away, Eleanor began to explain that the man whom we thought had disappeared without a trace had left behind a substantial one. Not six letters, but one hundred pages.
* * *
—
“It’s some sort of—well, manuscript, I guess,” Eleanor said. “With a cover letter. Addressed to a prize competition. It arrived earlier via campus mail, from the math department. My assistant’s theory is that Robert must have tried to send something to our department’s central printer ages ago—it’s time-stamped March, a month before he vanished—and the document turned left instead of right at some digital intersection, spitting itself out at a random printer across campus.”
“March?” I said. “It’s August.”
“Five months, five hundred yards,” Eleanor said. “That’s about right for campus mail. Speaking of, has my e-mail arrived?”
I tapped the café window; Ellie looked over—as did half the café—and shook her head. “No?” I said.
“Shoot,” she said. I heard clicking. “Resending. In the meantime, let me read just a paragraph or two, because it’s so very . . .”
And here my waking dream began in earnest—or I’d been dreaming since arriving in Paris, or since Robert left.
“Okay. ‘Please find enclosed my submission for the Porlock Prize,’” Eleanor read, and then paused. “Never heard of such a thing. Mind you, I lead a sheltered life. ‘It is’—this is him now—‘per the guidelines, a manuscript that, in the spirit of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s great “Kubla Khan,” lies unfinished due to the author having been interrupted during its production.’ Let’s be clear,” Eleanor said, “Coleridge wasn’t ‘interrupted,’ despite his claim that a ‘person from Porlock’ had ruined his poem; no, he was—well, speaking of brains, actually—”