Paris by the Book(25)

“Ellie. Sweet girl. They—”

She coughed and cried a bit and shoved away the arm I tried to drape around her shoulders. People turned. When she spoke again, her volume fell again by half, almost to a whisper.

“He didn’t—hate us, did he?” she said.

Mothers’ hearts break different ways, that’s not a surprise. What always surprises me is that there’s always a new way for them to be broken. “No,” I said. “Sweetie. Love. No.”

“He wanted us to come here?” Ellie said.

“I don’t—it seems—I don’t know,” I said.

“The book—those pages, though. It seems like—it’s like a clue?” Ellie said.

No, it’s not a clue, I could say, and we’d go home. Or, rather, I’d go home alone, because if I said it wasn’t a clue, that there was no hope of finding her dad, I’d lose her—both girls—forever. But if I said, yes, it is a clue, then—

“What do you feel?” I said. It was a favorite question of Robert’s, something he got from one of those parenting books, or something he just knew to ask.

“You sound like Dad,” Ellie said.

“Well?” I said.

Ellie shifted.

“I feel like it’s a clue,” she said.



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In another three minutes, Daphne would arrive with directions on where to find the very best takeaway crêpes nearby, as well as a plan for our final hours in Paris, one that sounded innocent but wound up changing absolutely everything.

Before all that, though, this: Ellie, pressing, waiting, wondering where her mother stood.

“And you?” Ellie said. And I thought: I can answer this. It’s just an unfinished manuscript. They’re just pages. Ellie didn’t, couldn’t, wait. “Do you feel he’s alive?” she said.

I quickly said yes, the easier answer.

Except it wasn’t. In the United States, it had been easy, or at least expeditious, to pretend he was dead. But here in Paris, with each passing page—each passing day—it wasn’t. Nothing was easy here. Everything was Robert here.

Ellie smiled. I tried to smile back. I said I would be a moment, and then I found a toilet, where I threw up.





CHAPTER 5


After that customer had presented me Robert’s book, the one with the I’m sorry scribbled inside, I remembered I’d once asked Robert why he’d set that novel in middle school. Didn’t everyone hate middle school?

That was why he’d set it in middle school, he’d said. His book offered an escape.

But schools, strangely, would prove our escape during our first days in Paris, although I don’t think any of us thought of it that way. Not initially. Not me. Maybe Daphne knew what she was up to all along when she proposed we stop sightseeing and start school-shopping instead. Let’s pretend we’re moving here! Why not, I thought? I’d gotten good at pretending.

That most of the schools, like most of Paris, were shut tight for August did not deter Daphne and Ellie; working from a list a bemused tourist office employee gave us, we marched from one school to another. We peered through windows when we could and made sophisticated determinations as to the school’s quality based on the size of the door, the age of the paint job, the presence of graffiti, and what online reviews had to say.

On one occasion, we found a door ajar in an otherwise barricaded archway. Ellie pulled us through, and where I’d expected a foyer or hallway, we found a quiet courtyard with a dry fountain in one wall and a small lemon tree opposite in a giant wooden box on casters. A wide tunnel beyond opened into a broader, startlingly modern space—some sort of athletic field, artificial turf, countless lines gracefully arcing this way and that, delineating the games and sports of what seemed to be another world.

A woman appeared, my age but more stylish, more serious, slim skirt, dark hair with an unembarrassed strand or two of gray, all pulled tightly back. Ellie said bonjour and then nervously switched to English to explain that we were moving to Paris and so looking at schools.

I broke in to say that that wasn’t exactly true.

The woman turned to me with a face like iron, silent. Even the girls took notice. She turned back to them. It’s not a simple thing, she said to them. And here, appropriately enough, began our French education: no rarely means no, but more often no, this won’t be easy. If you want it, you must work for it. Because nothing is easy. And nothing was more remarkable than watching as the woman took each girl by the hand—even too-old-for-this Ellie—and led them inside.

There we learned that this was a collège—roughly equivalent to junior high, for ages eleven to fifteen—and that the school was a public one and thus free.

On our way out, I tried to explain to Ellie and Daphne that every other aspect of Paris would not be free—including the school’s cafeteria, or cantine, whose menu (we were given a copy from last May) always included a cheese and dessert course and such delicacies as “navarin d’agneau printanier”—spring lamb stew.

Daphne suggested I get a job in Paris.

Ellie pointed out that I already had one; couldn’t I just do it here?



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