Paris by the Book(36)

“Daphne,” I said.

“And I know you know he isn’t,” she said.

“Look—” I started to say.

“I am,” she said, stressing each wonderfully awkward, but thus all the more emphatic, English word. Je suis is so slippery, even feathery, by comparison. “I am looking,” she said. “And where do you think Ellie is tonight? She’s looking.”

“She’s what?”

“No, Mom—listen. We’re looking.”

And they were.

Not just for him, but for me, for that version of her mother who was interested in confronting uncomfortable questions.

“Why,” Daphne said, “aren’t you?”

Because your father is—

Is not—

But I couldn’t say it.

Loss, like French, has its own grammar. Unlike French, immersion only makes it harder to master.





CHAPTER 7


One of the scariest books we have in the store goes by an unlikely title: Swahili Grammar and Vocabulary. Published by a “Mrs. F. Burt” in 1923 and bound in bloodred buckram, the book initially hid behind a bookshelf, where it must have fallen decades before I found it. I’d almost tossed it in the trash; I had enough trouble selling English-language books. I’d opened it, though, to see if Mrs. F. had convinced them to at least print her full name inside. And there, on the foxed and browning pages, I found the inscription: To Anderson, on the night of the lion.

I decided not to throw it away.

For a while, it went back and forth to school in Daphne’s bag. She was as fascinated with the inscription as I was—was this Mrs. Burt’s handwriting? who was Anderson? what lion?—but eventually tired of it. I reclaimed it from Daphne, studied the odd left-leaning penmanship, compared it to what I remembered of Robert’s.

But mostly I thought about that night, the one of the lion, how so few words can change everything: a boring textbook made into an urgent mystery. The inscription seemed to celebrate an escape, but had everyone escaped?

I hadn’t, not from my conversation with Daphne, not from the question she’d asked about looking for Robert. When I tried to answer, when I couldn’t answer, she shook her head and wandered wordlessly to her room. She didn’t have to tell me not to follow, and I didn’t. She wasn’t six anymore, nor even twelve. She and Ellie were both teens, that other country. That mother-daughter rupture, it happens everywhere. Or so I’ve heard. But it yawns particularly wide in Paris, and did then. They’d gone looking without me. They’d believed he was here before I did.

I was falling behind, which meant I couldn’t see what they saw coming next.

I went to my room, dislodged the Swahili book from my bedside pile, and took it down to the shop. The street was completely dark. I’d misunderstood, or only half understood, the inscription. It wasn’t the lion that was scary, but the night, this night, which, as I stared into it, became terrifying. The book, the store, the window I was looking through, but most important, what Daphne had told me she’d seen, all of this was transforming the street outside and the city beyond from a place I thought I knew well into something once again foreign. I had to find a stool to steady myself as the feeling came over me that I no longer knew where, or who, I was. This lasted all of a minute, then everything returned.

I went upstairs to wait and see if Ellie would, too.



* * *



—

“We’re looking”: and indeed, Ellie and Asif had gone looking that night in Ménilmontant. I know that not because Daphne said so, and certainly not because her sister told me—Ellie arrived home at 1:00 A.M. and I did not rise to confront her—but because of Ellie’s phone.

Which I’d found because I did not confront her. Ellie slept with her phone at her side, flouting a rule I’d found impossible to enforce. Another rule: I was free to examine her phone’s entire contents whenever I wanted, without warning. I’d never enforced this rule (I didn’t like the Orwellian feel of it, but the Orwellian parenting website I’d gotten it from said just establishing the rule could suffice), but I’d never revoked it, which meant there was absolutely nothing wrong with sneaking into the girls’ room, sliding the phone off Ellie’s nightstand, and taking it to the kitchen, where six successive password guesses failed until a final one—her father’s birth date—succeeded.

I went straight to the photos. I skipped the texts. I wasn’t that kind of mom, I told myself. And so I tried not to look as I looked.

But I needn’t have worried; speed-skimming revealed a girl in love with Paris as much as or, if I had to judge by photography alone, more than with Asif. There were plenty of shots of him, yes, including one or two making a sinewy bicep. But there were many more of him framed by an archway: he would often be out of focus, but the colorful garden beyond, sharp and true. There were endless shots of him in cafés looking away from the lens, and not seeing what Ellie seemed to see—others looking at him, at them. Ellie, it seemed, saw what I saw, that Parisians enjoy life’s little dramas. What I enjoy about Parisians is that they expect drama.

And sometimes, although you are not a tenth the romantic your younger sister is, you create a folder on your phone solely devoted to photos of your missing father. Or so I had intuited Ellie had done. There was a folder for friends, for favorites, for Bemelmans (just two off-kilter shots of Notre-Dame and some of the Seine). And there was a folder for “Dad.” I hesitated before clicking on it. I’d feared that the girls missed him less now. I’d feared that I’d wanted them to miss him less. But the truth was, we all carried him in different ways. Sometimes Daphne set an extra plate at dinner for him, as we’d occasionally done in the States during his absences. But here in Paris, she just as often silently picked that plate back up and returned it to the cabinet before we started eating.