Paris by the Book(76)

Eleanor raised her glass. “I had no idea I was prying,” she said. I looked at her. “I mean, I did. But I really was just curious if he was from Ireland, because—”

“Iowa,” I said. “He’s in Paris studying for an MBA, but he’s from Iowa.”

“Oh, for godsakes,” Eleanor said, and leaned back. “Why didn’t you say that in the first case? I taught there for a year. The world would be a better place if it was given over to Iowans. There’d be no more war, we’d go to bed on time and drive on very tidy roads, yielding every so often to proud and capable Amish and their carriages. We’d eat a lot more pork, true, but I found that, prepared well, it’s quite tasty.” She speared a fleshy square of orange-flecked red. “As is this,” she added. She nodded to the bottle, and so I poured her a final sip of wine, and then myself one, too. There was no way we’d make it back in time to welcome the girls home from school. I got out my phone to text Ellie, to tell her we were delayed, that Molly was manning the store, and that homework should be done before anything else.

I felt Eleanor watching me but didn’t look up until I’d hit SEND.

“Just Ellie,” I explained, waving the phone. I wanted to prove to Eleanor, if not myself, that I was the kind of mother who always kept her kids apprised of her whereabouts.

“Do you talk to her about Robert?” Eleanor said. “She’s never been the fragile type, my goddaughter, but nonetheless—”

“She’s a cool customer,” I said. “Not like Daphne.” My memory, merciless, flashed a picture of Daphne in the hospital, hot with fever.

“Cool she may be, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to talk,” Eleanor said.

“They both do,” I said. Flatly, because this was something I felt more than knew. Some days, I felt like we’d portioned out the stages of grief from one of those books: Daphne, to judge from her silences and haunted looks, had taken sadness; Ellie, anger; and I, of course, denial.

The look on Eleanor’s face told me that she’d read my uncertainty perfectly. “May I show you something?” she asked, wiping her hands.

“Please don’t,” I said.

She reached for my phone and then handed it back to me. “Make it do the Internet thing.”

“What?”

“The—I hate this word—browser. Open the browser.” I did, and she took it back and painstakingly typed something in, waited for it to load, narrating what she was doing all the while. “You know Ellie’s class project? Photography.” I shook my head. “I wondered as much. She is, of course, very talented.” She handed the phone back. Ellie had produced a photo blog—Paris street scenes, close-ups of various addresses. I sighed with relief. So this was just about a blog (another awful word), about a hidden talent of Ellie’s that wasn’t hidden at all: I’d been through her phone the night before I’d gone to Ménilmontant. I’d known she was skilled, that she had an eye.

“She is very talented,” I said, flicking through the photos. I liked how Ellie had avoided the usual suspects—no Eiffel Tower or Sacré C?ur here, just random businesses and signs around Paris. A certain weary bleakness pervaded. My kind of girl. Lamorisse’s, too, though she’d dispute that. But that wasn’t what Eleanor was getting at.

“Leah,” Eleanor said gently, and took the phone. She put it flat on the table between us and began swiping through the photos once more. “Do you see?”

I leaned closer. Had Eleanor—had Ellie—caught him on film, too?

It took a moment, but then I saw what Eleanor saw. Not in every photo, not always in the center, but—there it was. I picked up the phone. And there. And there. The shoe store. The restaurant. The upholstery shop. On the door. The awning. The sign. The menu. Boutique Robert. Restaurant Robert et Louise. Robert Four. Chez Robert. Editions Robert. Robert et fils.

“Oh my god,” I said to the phone, to Ellie, wherever she was. I looked around the sunny garden, at the happy twins, at the laundry on the line of the neighbor behind. I saw everything. But I’d not seen how my own child—my oldest—ached. I’d not seen how much she saw. “This is terrible,” I said, once I’d found my voice again.

Eleanor shook her head. “It’s beautiful is what it is.” I put the phone down. I had to stop looking. “But it does mean—she misses him,” Eleanor said.

“I know—I knew that—Eleanor, I’m not a monster—”

“I know you know,” Eleanor said. “But I also know that they don’t know, not what happened to their father. And this is the result.” She turned the phone facedown before starting again. “Telling them that the police think—know—that he died, this isn’t going to be easier, especially at first, but eventually it will be better.”

“And then, once we tell them he’s dead, Ellie will stop taking photos of ‘Robert’ around Paris?”

“She may very well take them for the rest of her life. You should at least buy her a decent camera; she’s got a future.”

“Eleanor—”

“You all have a future. But if you don’t accept that he’s dead, then she won’t accept it, and Daphne won’t, and the mystery’s going to pull on all of you forever.” She picked up the phone and, with some increasingly hard tapping, figured out how to close the blog. “And down the line, pull in ways that may not be as beautiful as this.”