Paris by the Book(54)

“She wanted to, though,” Ellie said. “She was jealous of me up on the railing, getting all the attention.”

“She’s not the jealous type,” I said.

“Yeah, well,” Ellie said.

“Well, what?”

Ellie waited a beat. “She’s not Declan’s biggest fan,” she said.

“This is changing the subject,” I said.

“Not really,” Ellie said. “Not if we’re talking about jealousy.”

“We’re not,” I said.

“She said as long as Declan’s around, Dad’s not coming back,” Ellie said.

“What?” I said.

“He’s not coming back, is he?” Ellie said, instantly hushed, earnest. “Dad?”

All that effort to pretend Robert dead, and I’d told myself this was how it needed to be. But looking at Ellie, I saw that I had needed them to pretend, too, to believe, that he was alive.

Her right ear—the ear closest to me, the one my insufficient words were reaching first—the tiniest strand of hair had fallen across it, and all I wanted to do now was go to her, tuck it behind her ear. As a baby, it had taken her so long to get her hair, and then it came in—and came and came and came, and I’d never been able to keep up since. She’d grown up in Paris, and I’d been proud of that, her style, her strut, her poise. I’d had none of that at her age. I’d had a bar towel and a roomful of rheumy men who called me kid and, later, other things. Nothing I couldn’t handle, but I’d grown up too fast.

Maybe Ellie and I had more in common than I thought.

And so: fuck. I’d wanted my girls to be girls for as long as they wanted to be girls. That Ellie no longer was, was my fault. Paris’s. Robert’s.

“Oh, Ellie, I don’t know if Dad’s coming back,” I said, and it was almost a relief, to finally say something about Robert that was completely true.

It bought me nothing. “You haven’t heard from him?” she asked.

“Ellie,” I said, “I would tell you.”

“Would you?”

“Ellie.”

“You know something,” Ellie said.

I know you fell, I thought. I know that river is called the Seine. I know the Eiffel Tower is five kilometers away and Milwaukee, six-and-a-half thousand. I know that your eyes, like Daphne’s, like his, are gray. I know I see him in you. I know I see him every day. Every day I see you. I see you and I think, how could it be possible that he’s dead?

“I don’t,” I said, because—did I? I didn’t. Not for certain. Nothing that I could let her hang her hopes on. Or mine. Not yet.

She looked at me forever. “You never do,” she said, and began to climb the stairs.

How to explain what happened next? I then went dancing with Declan despite my daughter being sick and angry with me.

Or, more truth: I went because she was.



* * *



—

Declan and I texted back and forth for hours—what had seemed like a fun, spur-of-the-moment idea required much more planning, and waiting, than I would have thought. Declan said of course it did; no place worth going to was worth going to before midnight. So I napped, and then paced, and then made coffee, and then listened to the girls sleeping—no coughing—and paced some more. I shouldn’t go. I shouldn’t have gotten into it with Ellie. I should have had a proper talk with Daphne. And so I told myself I would, tomorrow; I’d talk with Daphne first thing, and Ellie, too. And it would be a better conversation than any tonight because it would come the morning after I’d danced off some stress. Robert took writeaways? I would pioneer danceaways.

Declan finally sent word that a three-wheeled minicab—a very unofficial, and app-based, taxi service he’d learned about from a kid earlier that night at the store—would meet me in about twenty minutes.

I wandered the shop floor. I liked having the store and its stock to myself. As a kid, I’d put myself to bed most nights after a peck on the cheek, after which my mom went back to helping Dad in the bar. I buried myself in books. Not just my beloved Red Balloon companion book but whatever the library had, whatever I could buy for a quarter at rummage sales. Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys and The Phantom Tollbooth and almanacs of the Olympics and a solitary 1960s-era encyclopedia, the C volume, which I managed to write just about all my elementary school reports out of: “Cheese,” “Chess,” “China,” “Coal,” “California,” “Cardiology,” “Civil War,” “Cinema.”

That “Cinema” later caught my fancy in grad school was a natural progression, a smug professor once informed me: I’d led such an impoverished childhood. But I hadn’t. I’d seen the world, “lived” in France. I liked films (but only on big screens; televisions only ever remind me of the bar) but will always love books.

I briefly worried Robert’s disappearance would sour this love—I watched books, or the business of books, slowly ruin him. So it was a great surprise that the business of books, weak as our bookstore’s was, went so far to sustain me. But it did.

A grad school friend had once made me jealous on Facebook with a photo of her grinning next to a barn. She’d left school for Hollywood and television: I wrote this last week, they built it this week!