Paris by the Book(70)

But sturdy enough to bob about that massive lake for a year?

“What day was this?”

“The day he disappeared. Just over a year ago.” She looked me up and down. “This is a lot,” she said. It was. I didn’t believe her, and yet—

“The sailing center?” I asked Eleanor. “Are you—are they sure that—”

“No,” Eleanor said. “I mean, I’m not sure, but the police are, and well, that does make me more sure. It’s hard to believe that the idiots at the sailing center didn’t realize it was missing. They’d even told the police all was in order way back when. But now, a year on, the Coast Guard finds a boat, someone does an inventory—it’s very haphazard, mind you. I drove by on the way to the airport to see for myself, and—I don’t know if you’ve ever been—”

I had not; it was Robert’s thing. His private pride and solace.

“It’s a mess, naturally. Student-run. I mean, there are boats—not a handful, dozens—in all states of disrepair, life jackets everywhere—”

Eleanor’s digressions, asides, and general anger—at the police, the club, and, I detected, Robert—softened the blow of her news somehow. And I still had my own solace, my self-delusion. I had my own pieces of evidence, although in the midst of this onslaught they seemed to be disintegrating. Forget the Coast Guard, the police, the student sailing center: what made me most anxious was that Eleanor now believed Robert was gone.

“But no sign of him at all?” I said.

“Dearest,” Eleanor said, and her face flushed as she turned away. “I knew this was going to be difficult,” she said to herself. She looked at me once more. “As I said, there are some legalities ahead, and you have to prepare. And I will help you prepare. But part of that is talking to the girls.”

“Prepare?”

“In Wisconsin and most other states, the presumption is that after someone has been missing for seven years and there’s no sign, they can be declared dead.”

“It’s hardly been seven minutes!”

“It’s June,” Eleanor said.

“Early June!” I said.

“What does it matter, Leah? The thing is, you don’t have to wait seven years if certain conditions obtain,” Eleanor said. “In all this time, there has been no sign of him at the bank, no sign of him on the credit card, no sign of him anywhere in Milwaukee—”

“Because he’s fucking here,” I said, and pointed to the tablet. “I just saw him.”

Eleanor looked around the room as if for support, but found none. “And who else?” she said, not angry but insistent. “We all saw that video—your own daughters saw it—and no one saw him then.”

“Daphne saw him on the bridge!”

“There, too, no one else,” Eleanor said.

“I found that ‘I’m sorry’ he wrote in that book,” I said. “I’m certain of that.”

“I’m sure you are,” Eleanor said. “But are you certain when he wrote that? Maybe it was years ago in another used bookstore. Can you be certain he wrote it?”

I couldn’t be. Because I couldn’t check. Because he’d stolen it back.

“I’m certain he wrote that manuscript!” I said. “And you can’t tell me you aren’t. One hundred pages, and he’s on every page, as you were the first to insist.”

“And I’ll insist that you start with the first page where it says ‘a novel,’ which means, as I sadly have to remind my undergraduates every single September, that each page following is fiction.”

“It’s real! You’ve been to the store.”

“I’ve been to your store. But I didn’t meet—what was the wife’s name?—Callie?—and I’m quite certain I didn’t meet the husband, either.”

The lobby, badly lit, made Eleanor look old. I’m sure I looked even older. The room swallowed sound, too: my throat felt like it had just spent the entire evening yelling, but I’d been barely able to hear myself speak.

“I’m sorry, Leah,” Eleanor said. “I’m angry. Not at you. Or, a little at you, because you won’t let me help. But I’m angry at me, too, because I can’t figure out how to help. And because I can’t answer your questions the way that I should: am I certain the police are right? Am I certain Robert’s dead? Am I certain he’s at the bottom of Lake Michigan? I don’t know. I do know what I now believe, which is that he’s no longer with us.”

I still didn’t look up; I could feel her looking at me, waiting for me to meet her gaze, but I couldn’t, so I didn’t.

“You need to imagine a future without him, Leah.”

And there was the problem, the reason that I was so angry, too. I was already living that future. But it was a carefully constructed future that relied on certain elastic ambiguities, the way seams in a sidewalk let the pavement expand and contract with the seasons. I had good days and bad days, but with each passing day, I learned to live without Robert. And part of me liked life without him. I missed the author, but not the angst. I missed the dad, but not the doubter. I missed the boy who chased me, but I didn’t miss the man who’d made me chase him for almost twenty years.