Paris by the Book(93)

It almost worked, but it didn’t. Instead of crying, I began running. Out the door, up the sidewalk.

He caught up with me in front of Madame Grillo’s. “Okay,” he said. “I’m not going to tell you not to run.”

“You’re not going to tell me anything,” I said.

“What did they say?” he said.

“They said—who? The police? The police apparently told them to go home, as if that made sense.”

“Do these twins know your address?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “And if they don’t know the address, they know the name of the store. They’re not idiots. Nor is their father. Or maybe he is, having entrusted their care to the likes of us. Me. Shit.” I stopped running.

“Shouldn’t we—you stay at home?” he said.

Home. “No,” I said. “I’m going to the Métro station, the top of the street. In case they knew to come home, or in case they told someone where they were going.”

I looked at him. I closed my eyes.

“We’ll go back,” he said. “We’ll go back to the store, you and I, and we’ll wait.”

I listened, I heard that you and I, and those three words—that one word, and—summoned almost twenty years, a whole world. I heard it, I saw it, and then I didn’t. I had moved a family to Paris, I had fed and clothed and schooled two daughters and, until today, successfully minded two more children, and I had done it myself, with only the occasional help of a handsome young MBA student and a New Zealand expat and an aloof old woman who once loved books. I once loved Robert. I once threatened to leave. But I hadn’t, and if he hadn’t, we could have worked together on staying together, he and I. I opened my eyes.

“You go back to the store,” I said. “I’m going to the Métro. I’m calling Ellie and Eleanor and Daphne and telling them to go looking.”

“Go looking?” he said.

“The girls have gotten really good at it,” I said.

And, I suppose because this part of the story had yet to be written, he said nothing in reply.



* * *



—

And because I didn’t know what part of the story this was, I didn’t say good-bye.

Peter and Annabelle weren’t at our home stop, Saint-Paul, so I raced to the park they’d been aiming for, Square du Temple. No sign of them—and luckily, no pompier-frogmen dredging the pond. I went back to Saint-Paul and boarded a train eastward, bound for the end of the line. Eleanor said she’d go west but wound up going south—indeed, Ellie later had to go deep into the Left Bank in search of her godmother, who’d gotten lost trying to follow an invisible trail of bread crumbs back to Erdem’s backyard.

Prior to that, Ellie had been thrown off a series of interurban trains at the Gare de Lyon, where the TGV launches for Grenoble. She’d run up and down the aisles of one car after another, yelling Quelqu’un a vu des jumeaux, de faux jumeaux—très jeunes?

Daphne, like me, went to our Métro line’s eastern terminus, Chateau de Vincennes, where the twins would have been forced to disembark if they’d not already. I was sure they’d be on the platform. They weren’t, Daphne was, and so we retreated, one station at a time, toward Saint-Paul and our store on the rue Sainte-Lucie-la-Vierge, searching each platform for a sign of them. We saw a number of policemen out and about, and Daphne asked them if they were looking for the twins. They all answered her kindly, but scorned me, the American mother who had lost two children.

I received a call asking me to report to the Préfecture de Police immediately—they had not found the twins yet, but there was paperwork to be done, and it was best done now. I hung up without letting them finish. The next call came from the American embassy: Carl. I was startled by his powers of inference, that he knew I was in trouble. Did he, like Asif, have secret cameras installed, too? But no, Eleanor had called the embassy. Carl had gotten wind, and was concerned: a woman named Eleanor had said something about my having a husband? And that I adopted two British children? I should come into the embassy to speak with a case officer at my earliest opportunity. Carl assured me he would sit in on the interview.

“Thank you,” I said, “but I really need to find these children.”

Carl replied, “We do maintain a list of English-speaking counsel,” and I thought, not another counselor. But then I realized he was talking about an attorney. I hung up.

Daphne and I exited at our home stop, Saint-Paul. We checked the boucherie and the boulangerie and the chocolatier. We went to the carousel and Chef Picard’s. We went back to the Square du Temple, the twins’ school, and then the girls’ school, and then circled around the block to Eleanor’s hotel. We stopped in every store on the street.

All this resulted in nothing other than so delaying our return to the store that we arrived long after the twins themselves had arrived. They had found their own way home, where a kind man had received them, read to them from one book and then another and then The Red Balloon, and then left them all alone in a warm, bright store, guarded by books.



* * *



—

I hugged the twins for so long that Daphne asked me what I was doing, and then I hugged her, too. She started crying then, and apologized for pushing Ellie so near to the tracks. I told her I understood—because I did; I even appreciated the camaraderie of someone else whose anger had sloshed out of its container—and told her that the person she really needed to apologize to was her sister.