Paris by the Book(35)

“I miss him more here,” Daphne said instead. “More than in Milwaukee.”

I nodded to this as though I missed him more here, too, but what I really was thinking was of course you do. Because, of course: here was the unanticipated effect, the danger, of relocating to Paris, to relocating inside the pages Robert wrote. It did not grant us distance but collapsed it. He had disappeared, but thanks to his manuscript, thanks to Paris, we’d disappeared inside him.

“I sometimes wonder if Ellie—?” she began, and I knew I had to cut her off. The sisters could compete in other aspects of their lives, but not in how much they missed their father. Or did they regardless? Outside Bemelmans’s bar, I remembered how I had first thought Daphne, then Ellie, Robert’s true champion. What I’d not realized, what I realized now, was that they, there—everywhere, always—had been measuring me.

“I’m sure she does,” I interrupted, but Daphne’s eyes grew so wide, I stopped to clarify. “Does Ellie what?”

“Does—does she see him, too?” Daphne gushed. “Does she see Dad?”

She waited for me to speak, and I couldn’t.

I had not told the girls about the customer finding their father’s book, of me finding the I’m sorry inside. I’d not told them and I was proud of not telling them. Nothing to see here. Moreover, I’d not told them that I’d wondered if the scribbled apology was an apology to me, that the book’s sudden appearance, and then disappearance, was his doing. That had little basis in reality. I recognized that, and even forgave myself for it. Such slips were to be expected. Why hadn’t I expected my daughters would slip, too?

“I don’t see him all the time,” she mumbled.

“Daphne—what?” I said. “I’m sorry—do you mean—where—?” What I so readily forgave in myself was frightening in Daphne.

“When I’m out walking,” Daphne said. “With the twins, and we’ll be coming home and we’ll be near something—like Notre-Dame—from one of the Madeline books, and I’ll think, I should look for him, because this is what he was coming to Paris to do, research locations for that book.”

We should have stayed in Milwaukee. Or we should have moved to the desert. Jupiter. Some place he’d never find us. Some place we’d never find him.

“What we were coming to Paris to do,” she amended. “And sometimes, you know—I see him. Just out of the corner of my eye. And I’ll turn to ask Peter and Annabelle—they can be very méchants about holding hands, you know, especially crossing streets; if you let go for one second, they wander off, especially Annabelle—and he’ll be gone.”

“Oh, Daphne,” I said, scrambling. “Sometimes—sometimes I think I see him, too.” Because I had, after all, that first day outside Madame’s bookstore. “Sometimes people can—sometimes imagination—sometimes we can imagine things so well, so very precisely, that we think—”

“Mom!” Daphne said. “Not ‘think.’ Not ‘imagination.’ It’s really him, vraiment.”

“You’ve talked to—Ellie about this?”

Daphne shook her head. “Mom,” she said.

“I know . . .” She waited for me to continue. “I know,” I said, “that we both miss someone, very much.”

“Daddy’s here,” Daphne said. “In Paris.”

Molly had told me she wasn’t learning French because they’d only be here two years. And, she added, the Kiwis she knew who’d lived here ten, fifteen, twenty years—they’d lost some of their English. I asked myself now whether I’d done something similar to the girls in a fraction of the time. Stranded them between two languages, two countries, two realities. Or rather, between reality and fantasy. I’d not told them what the grief books had told me, and look what had happened: he was walking the streets of Paris in their imaginations.

And now in mine.

I was so startled, I blurted out the first question I could think of, the one that, were he alive, hurt most.

“But, sweet girl—then why wouldn’t he come—”

“Maybe he hit his head. Like Pascal!”

Daphne had an odd theory about The Red Balloon and its oddly happy ending, when Pascal, who’s just lost his balloon to the bullies’ rocks, is suddenly rescued, lifted up and away into the sky, by dozens of new balloons. Daphne believed the flyaway ending wasn’t real; Pascal must have gotten conked by a stray rock; the sunny final scenes thus spin out of his concussed unconsciousness. There is absolutely no basis for this theory on-screen. For some of us, however—Daphne and I chief among them—there’s also no basis for the film’s actual, happy ending. After all, as Pascal flies away smiling, what must he see when he looks down at the ground? His best friend, crushed in the dirt.

Daphne continued: “Dad hit his head, he’s looking for us, but maybe—maybe he doesn’t know he’s looking. Maybe”—her thumb scratched circles on the table—“maybe he doesn’t know what he’s looking for.”

“Sweetheart,” I said.

The circles stopped. “You can keep telling people—strangers—he’s dead,” she said. “I know you do, you say ‘lost,’ but the way you say it, in French anyway, I know you mean for people to think he’s dead, but—but I know he isn’t.”