Paris by the Book(24)

In Robert’s manuscript, the family does stay. Despite their grand plans to travel the world, when the father disappears, they go no farther than Paris. They don’t go home, either. There’s a passage where one of the fictional daughters talks about “missing person protocol,” about how it’s best to “go where the one who’s missing liked going”: this resonated deeply with Ellie and Daphne. I wanted to point out that this was taken almost word-for-word from a conversation we’d once had at the Milwaukee Humane Society, where the topic had been the neighbor’s missing dog and the destination a park. I wanted to say this but then didn’t, because, among other things, when they’d found the dog, he was dead.

The mom in the manuscript manages, and the girls do, too. The bookstore that initially rebuffed the family takes pity on them in the wake of Dad’s disappearance and offers them jobs; the mom finds an apartment nearby; the girls enroll in schools. Every so often, mother and daughters take to the streets and walk a route lifted from a Madeline book. Many Paris landmarks have cameos, and some less familiar spots, too.

There is occasional talk of clues. But as Eleanor said, no specifics.



* * *



—

We revised our trip’s remaining itinerary to follow the manuscript’s pages. But just as quickly, the girls’ interest in the itinerary waned and so did mine. We’d seen most of Paris’s top tourist sites; we’d seen a lot of tourists. We’d not seen Robert.

We had eaten a lot of Nutella crêpes, however. Ellie and I now sat on a bench along a swept path in the Tuileries Gardens just west of the Louvre and watched Daphne search for that hour’s ration. We’d expected to find dozens of crêpes carts here but instead encountered countless informal exercise classes, running and leaping amongst the trees and tourists. Ellie had ordered Daphne to go ask someone where we could find food. I’d told Ellie Daphne wasn’t her servant and Ellie had said, no, she wasn’t: she was our translator. And it was true; the past few days had proven Daphne’s superior language skills.

The afternoon was especially hot, which I hoped meant we could forgo further conversation. Across the way, Daphne tentatively approached an older couple. They listened to her with grave, attentive faces.

“Mom,” Ellie said, “if we go back home—”

“To our apartment?” In addition to its prime spot between the busy hospital and noisy train station, the apartment had a half bath in the hallway shared with the neighbors.

“Blech,” Ellie said. “To Milwaukee.”

“‘If’?”

“You know what I mean,” Ellie said, and I decided I didn’t, not yet. “Anyway, we should leave Daphne behind.”

Again, it was hot, and we were in dappled shade, which must have looked pretty, but a solid concrete roof would have done more to protect us from the sun. Our brains were baking, Ellie’s especially.

“That’s sweet, Ellie,” I said, and straightened up. Apparently, it was time for a talk after all. “Daphne’s your sister.” Ellie kept staring at Daphne. “Ellie,” I said, “I know it’s been hard but—”

“But that’s not what I mean,” Ellie said. “Look at her. She’s, like, thriving over here.” And Daphne was. She had moved on from the older couple and was now in an animated conversation with two tall teenagers, everyone nodding, laughing, pointing this way and that.

“She’s really good at French,” I said.

“No,” Ellie said. “I mean, yes, but, like, she’s really good at the whole French thing. Not just the talking, but the doing, the . . .” She sat back. “I don’t know.”

“Ellie,” I said, expecting, hoping, to be interrupted, because I had nothing to say.

“All my friends keep asking if we’ve found him,” Ellie said, softer now. “If he’s come back.” She looked at Daphne. “If we’re coming back.”

I tackled the least provocative part of that. “We are,” I said. “Just three more days, okay? Then we’ll be—”

“Actually—if Daphne stays,” Ellie said, sitting up straight, “I want to stay with her.” Her face was flush, sweaty strands of hair slicked to her forehead.

“Daphne’s not—Ellie—no one’s—okay,” I said at last. “I know this has been—is hard.”

“I don’t want to go back,” Ellie said. She was speaking to the air, to Paris, not me. “Not right now, and not three days from now, and maybe not for a while. I don’t want to go back because—because Dad isn’t there, and I—I don’t want to—I don’t want to be that girl, the one with the ghost parent. I don’t want to say a thousand times, um, no, I don’t know.” Now she turned to me. “I don’t want to have people say they’re sorry for me.”

This was awful. But it was almost a relief to talk about something I knew how to talk about—girl gossip; I was not in the midst of an international parenting crisis, just an old-fashioned domestic one. “Ellie,” I said, “it means they care.”

“It means they have no fucking clue!” Ellie said, and we both blinked. “Do you know how many friends so far have told me stories of losing a pet? Like, six. Three cats, I think, dogs, a ferret.”