Paris by the Book(83)

It was Robert, then, and he was writing me, and he was promising that we would see each other soon.

Robert.

What surprised me now was how much this hurt.

Where was—joy? Or relief, or even some indignant pride? I had been right. The girls had been right. He was alive!

He was alive, and that hurt, because that meant he’d been alive all this time. It meant that he’d only leave again.

Because that’s what he wrote:

Leah, it’s been so long, too long, so long I don’t know if I can explain it, even to myself. I do know I want to try. And so even though this is short notice, and probably too much to ask, I think we should meet soon, before I go. I really do—

I fixated on those last three words, I really do, because those were what convinced me, that painful, awkward earnestness. It was Robert. And fixating on those last three allowed me to not fixate, not just yet, on the three before, before I go.

I opened a window to write a reply and then closed it.

How do you write someone who no longer exists? He wasn’t dead—Eleanor could argue with me, and maybe the police, too, but I knew, just as the girls had known these past months in Paris. He was alive. Here was this e-mail. But I also knew that the Robert I’d known, the man I’d married, even if he showed his face, even if I touched him, that Robert wouldn’t be there. I’m making it sound like a question of physics; it’s not. It’s just time plus distance, times Paris, minus love . . .

Maybe it is physics. Physics is the most mind-bending of the sciences, and I was having a hard time bending my mind around this fact: Robert, alive.

Not only alive, but apparently feeling emboldened enough to flit back into our lives. And out again.

I opened the reply window once more. The cursor waited.

He was in Paris?

Those two words he’d written—meet soon—made it sound so.

Although Chicago was only eight hours by air.

Timbuktu, just seven.

He could be anywhere.

He was here.

He was right here, and I was going to meet him.

No. No?

No; or not yet, because what I needed to do first was call Eleanor.



* * *



—



And Eleanor’s first thought was to call the embassy: they could send Marines. That’s who the ambassador called on in an emergency, and if this wasn’t one, what was?

But what was this? That was the question Eleanor returned to once she’d settled down. When I called her hotel, she’d flown to the store, brusquely kicked out a customer, and studied the e-mail with her reading glasses on and then with them off.

“People impersonate other people online all the time,” she said.

“All this time, he was alive,” I said. “Is alive.”

“Neither of us are the least bit good with computers,” she said, staring at the screen. “It’s really not for us to say if this is genuinely him.”

“It is for me to say. I’m his wife. Eleanor? It took me too long to accept the truth, but I did. I was right.”

Eleanor, who’d arrived shaken, turned paler still. “And if I have my chronology right,” Eleanor said, “the girls were ‘right’ before you. Or rather, they were never wrong. Because they never convinced themselves he was dead.”

I shook my head; I wasn’t sure where this was going, but wanted to stop it before it went where it shouldn’t. “Eleanor—”

I didn’t have to even finish the thought.

“Of course. Absolutely not,” Eleanor said. “They can’t see him. Not this meeting. Not until we know it is him.”

“It is!”

“Do you—do you want me to meet him?” Eleanor said, sounding uncharacteristically unsure.

“Do you want to meet him?”

She shook her head.

“No, I do not,” she said. “I would do this for you, because I would do anything for you, but I do not want to meet him because I am enraged at him. I have that luxury. I am not his wife. I am not the mother of his children. I can indulge a pure, uncomplicated anger.” She flared her nostrils, I think unconsciously. Had Robert actually been there, a brick across the head couldn’t have hurt him more than the stare she now summoned. “What I think is also entirely beside the point. How do you feel?”

I felt queasy and nervous, furious and afraid, sad, and most unexpectedly, somewhere deep in my feet, a tremor that felt like the first flutterings of—what could not be happiness. And yet.

“Very strange,” I said.

Eleanor looked at the e-mail one more time, scrolling up and down, deliberating. She asked if I’d gotten other e-mails. I checked; I hadn’t. She said to check again. I said the next time I went into my e-mail, it was going to be to write him one.

“Okay,” Eleanor said. “Maybe we don’t call the Marines, or even the police, just yet. But we must have a plan.”

And so we worked one out, starting with what to tell the girls: nothing, we agreed. Possibly nothing ever. Nothing, anyway, until we found out more. And to do that, I’d have to meet with him. In some public place, Eleanor insisted, where she herself would lurk nearby, along with—

Well, was I sure I didn’t want to call the embassy? Perhaps they could just send “a small Marine,” she said, “in civilian clothes—”