Paris by the Book(77)

So it was time.

“Make your case,” I said quietly. “That he died.”

Eleanor took a deep breath. I did, too, but it caught, and it was a moment before I could exhale.

“It’s not mine,” Eleanor said, and took the folder out of her purse. The report inside was poorly written, but otherwise, all was as Eleanor said. A boat had been signed out. The same boat had been found. No body had been found, but since the “subject’s” disappearance, “no evidence of life,” online or off-, had been found either. It was the department’s recommendation that the surviving spouse petition the court to have “the missing person” declared dead, given that he had faced “imminent peril”—a 922-foot-deep Great Lake—and “failed to return.”

I pushed the folder back to her. I didn’t say that what unsettled me most were his fingerprints. Not prints they’d lifted from any suspicious surface, but prints they’d had on file—I think from his driver’s license or passport. I couldn’t say, only that the whorl of lines, its interruptions and breaks, its careful contours, seemed so undeniably him, despite the fact that I’d never seen these prints before. They reminded me of his eyes, that burst of color in the one. They reminded me of him.

“I don’t know what to think, Eleanor,” I said.

She bent down and rustled through her purse, returning with a handkerchief, which she handed to me. I had no idea what to do with it. Ding, ding: that warning bell buses sound. I heard it now, that folder on Ellie’s phone. The one I’d not opened. “Dad.”

Eleanor mimed patting her cheeks. I was crying.

“Leah,” Eleanor said.

I bent to my purse to look for tissues I knew weren’t there. But I kept looking, to hide my face, and I heard Eleanor leave the table, say something to the twins about “Nutella,” and then return. I heard the door to the restaurant creak open, slam shut, and then it was quiet. I straightened up.

Eleanor looked at me carefully. “Okay, crying finished, children sated, Paris paused,” she said. “Now is your chance. Make your case. The police have made theirs. Hold forth.”

After a moment, I began.

“I don’t know what to say,” I said. “I mean, for months, I made myself believe he was dead. And up until the ‘clues’ or ‘signs’ or ‘hallucinations’—whatever we want to call them—up until those started arriving, I’d almost done it. I’d almost willed him dead, in my mind. I never believed it, not soul-deep, but I came to—understand it. Intellectually. It made sense.”

“‘Sense,’” Eleanor repeated.

“Until it didn’t make sense. Until pretending he was dead no longer made things easier, but stranger. That’s where I am now. That’s why this report . . .” Didn’t apply, I wanted to say, as though it was a matter of jurisdiction, as though what happened in Milwaukee had no bearing on Paris.

“Leah, it’s just that—I’m worried that if you don’t—”

“Eleanor—fine,” I said. “If you’ve come to Paris to get me to sign some form, and by signing that form, you think that Robert will indeed disappear, then I will sign it. We’ll delete him. He’s no more than a character in a manuscript, at this point, right? A film.”

“Leah,” Eleanor said.

“Because it’s easier to say that than to ask, what kind of man leaves his family like that? I’m not talking about the sheer burden of abandonment—the doubling of parental duties, the stress of not just doing all the laundry but dealing with every single fucking crisis that children can produce—I’m talking about the withdrawal of love. You fall for someone, he falls for you, you marry, and then he gets tired of it all and doesn’t have the decency to tell you. Or to die. Instead, he lingers on, he lurks, he haunts you, keeps you from moving on despite your very best efforts to do so. He decides to continue to live the life he had before, just this time from the other side of the window, outside looking in? The police say he’s dead. Can they also make sure he stops coming around?”

“Leah,” Eleanor said again, just interruption enough to make me stop and think—why was he coming around? But I could also hear Eleanor say it: you, dear—the girls. He’s coming round because he loves you.

But she wasn’t saying that. She was saying he was gone.

“Eleanor,” I said. “I understand. They think he’s dead. Now you think he’s dead. And yes, I can understand this. I just can’t pretend to believe anymore. Where’s the evidence? I know the evidence is that there is no evidence, but—”

“But there is . . . this,” Eleanor said. She pulled out another folder, hesitated, and then opened it and laid the contents between us. “I’m switching topics,” she said. “Or maybe not.”

In another minute or so, we would grimace at each other, collect the twins, pay the bill, and march the whole way home hardly exchanging another word. She’d go to her lodgings and I to mine, and I’d see to dinner and bedtime alone, and then I’d descend to the little office behind the store, turn on the desk lamp, and sit there, surrounded by dust and dark, and open the folder once more.

But that was all to come. There, then, in kind Mr. Erdem’s backyard, she looked at me looking at what she’d taken out—and then quickly apologized and began to stuff it back inside the folder. “Damn it,” she said. “That was awfully stupid.”