“I don’t see your mother,” I said.
Sarah scanned with me. “Are we early?”
“A few minutes,” I said. “Want to have a hot chocolate while we wait?”
“Chocolat chaud, oui,” she said.
I waited through a short queue and then sat on a bench and blew on our drinks. “Très chaud.”
“Muy très chaud,” Sarah said.
We laughed at that.
“I take it we’re lucky to see snow here,” I said. “Apparently it’s been rare the past few years.”
“I liked it last night.”
“Yes, it was pretty.”
“Daddy?”
“Yes?”
Sarah sipped her cocoa.
“You have a question?”
“No, it’s nothing.”
We stared off into the same space.
“There she is,” Sarah said.
“Where?”
“Over by the trampolines. She doesn’t see us.”
“She will, just sit tight. Enjoy your chocolate. It’s good, isn’t it?”
Meg did finally see us. She waved and walked toward us. She was carrying a small paper sack and her purse. She decided to take a shortcut through some bushes. Stepping through the snow, she could not see the brick or rock that tripped her. She fell but not all the way down, catching herself against a small tree. I trotted the eight or ten yards to her, leaving Sarah on the bench.
“I’m okay,” Meg said.
“Good. We’re just having some hot chocolate.”
Meg looked past me to wave to Sarah. “Zach?”
“Yes?” I turned to see that Sarah was not on the bench. We turned in circles looking for her. I saw the heads of the children on the trampolines going up and down. I looked for her wild head of hair.
“Where is she?” Meg asked.
“She was on the bench,” I said. “Sarah!”
Meg called her name as well. Passersby looked at us.
“She cannot have gone far,” I said. “You go that way toward the fountain. I’ll look back the way of the museum.”
“Zach?”
“I’ll meet you at the fountain.” I called her back. “You say, ‘Je cherche une fille brune. Elle porte un manteau rouge.’”
She repeated the words back to me.
I did my best not to panic. Though the air was chill, I was colder inside, icy. I looked at every face, short or tall. I imagined it would be easy to spot my child because there were so few brown faces, but I did not see her, and so that thought steered me again toward dread and panic. I found myself trotting and worrying while I moved whether I was going so quickly that I might miss her. Soon I was out of breath, leaning over with my hands on my knees, still looking everywhere.
A young woman walked quickly toward me and stooped to pick up something from the ground. “Excusez moi, monsieur,” she said.
I thought she might know something about Sarah, so I attended to what she was trying to tell me.
“Vous avez laissé votre bague ici.”
“What?”
Then, in English, “You have dropped your ring.”
I recognized the scam right away, though I felt stupid for letting her get even that far. “Go away,” I said.
“This is your ring,” she said. She tried to hand it to me.
“Non!” I used my hand to shoo her away. “Je ne suis pas intéressé.”
She didn’t just move away from me, she ran.
I looked to my left to find that a policeman had stopped next to me. He asked me if I needed help without opening his mouth, just the tilt of his head.
“Ma fille. Elle a douze ans et est brune. Elle porte un manteau rouge.” I held my hand in the air to indicate her height.
He studied me, nodded, tilted his head as if to tolerate my poor French. “Don’t worry, we will find her,” he said in English. Somehow his French accent was reassuring. He spoke into his radio.
“My wife is waiting by the fountain. Maybe she’s found her.”
“Where is the last place you saw her?” he asked.
I pointed. “A bench over there.”
“What is her name?”
“Sarah. Sarah Wells. She might be a little disoriented. She has a medical condition and can have seizures.” I felt as if I were somehow betraying my daughter by offering that information.
The policeman reported that information into his radio. He looked at me. “She is black? Like you?”
“Oui.”
The policeman and I walked to the bench and continued on toward the fountain. I searched every face, not only to see if it belonged to my daughter, but also searching for any suggestion of knowledge of her, as if there might be a conspiracy. My mind was racing. I felt my hands shaking and I tried to stop them.
“I too have a daughter,” the policeman said. He was looking too, his head moving in sharp microturns, snaps of several degrees at a time. I wondered if that was a real way to search or if he had been taught that in gendarme school, a method to give panicked parents confidence in his efforts. “She is younger than your daughter.”
Another policeman fell into stride with us.
I spotted Meg, hugging herself, turning circles near the fountain. Sarah was not with her. She saw us approaching and stopped turning, shook her head. “There is my wife,” I said.
The new policeman peeled away from us and headed past the fountain toward la place de la Concorde.
“Where did she go?” Meg asked. She sounded angry.
“It’s all my fucking fault,” I said. “I shouldn’t have walked away from her.” I had turned away for only a second, but why even that?
The policeman received a call on his radio, then looked at us. “No, it was something else.”
“Could someone have taken her?” Meg asked.
“She probably just wandered off and became lost in the crowd,” the policeman said. “It is easy to do.”
I thought of the river and grew more afraid. “We should go over and check the Seine,” I said.
We walked that way. That was when I saw the rear side of a long rectangular building. I paused and observed the low hedge surrounding it. “What is this building?” I asked.
“This is the Musée de l’Orangerie,” the policeman said. “Impressionist paintings are in there. Monet’s Water Lilies.”
“Can we look in there?” I asked.
Meg looked at the building, then at me, and nodded. It apparently made sense to her that Sarah would wander into a museum.
I was convinced, hopeful, that we would find Sarah sitting on a bench in front of a Cézanne or a Matisse, and she despised Matisse, and that that would be the end of it. Neither the two old women at the reception desk nor the security guard had seen a girl matching Sarah’s description, but they invited us in to look. The tense walk through the giant oval halls of the Water Lilies searching for my child was surreal; the light was surreal, and so, I suppose to distract myself, I observed that irony of that surreality against the huge impressionistic murals. A swing through the rooms yielded no daughter, no evidence that she or anyone like her had been there.
Meg was too far into shock to cry, but I might have been. The fact was, I was angry, perhaps at myself, I didn’t know. The anger manifested in my snapping at the nice young policeman.
“So, what are you people doing?” I asked. “Our child is lost out here somewhere. What are you doing? Where are the other policemen?”
“We will find her,” he said.
“You keep saying that.”
Meg took my hand. More as an expression of fear than to calm me down, though her touch had that effect.
The Wedding Feast at Cana, 1563, Pado Caliari. “It’s so big,” Sarah remarked about the canvas. Parked beside me on the bench in front of it, she was staring, she told me, at the dogs in the foreground and the cerulean of the sky behind. The halo looked fake, as, of course, it was.
We crossed the busy street on our way to the river. I couldn’t im
agine my Sarah alone in the middle of that traffic. On the other side we walked down the stone stairs to the wide path along the Seine. The sight of the dark water caused my breathing to catch in my chest or throat, my mouth. I realized that my fear was keeping me from searching. I began to try to study the faces along the bank, but I couldn’t resist looking at the river.
“What are you looking at?” Meg asked me.
“I don’t know.” I didn’t know why I was thinking I would see Sarah in the water, but I thought just that.
The policeman’s radio crackled. He stepped away, listened, talked, came back. “We have found your daughter.”
“Thank God,” Meg said.
“Where is she?” I asked.
“Near where you saw her last,” he said. “I will take you back there.”
“Thank you,” Meg said.
We climbed the stairs back up to street level and found the lane filled with protesters carrying signs and chanting. “Dieu dit non!” they shouted. “Dieu dit non!”
“God says no?” I asked the policeman.
“They are against men marrying men,” he said.
I did not consider any opinions about the crowd’s cause, but I hated that they were making it difficult for us to cross the avenue. We wanted to get to our child and they were in our way. I grew angry and came near shouting at the marchers.
“I can’t believe this,” Meg said.
“Dieu dit non!”
We wended our way through the mass of people, their faces a mixture of ugly anger and glee. I found ways to hate them all, for their politics, for their noise, for their nastiness, for their simply being in my way. One woman who looked like she had stepped right out of a painting of the French countryside appeared to snarl at me. We made it to the other side of the road and walked past the impressionist museum and discovered a flurry of police activity, police shouting, police trotting, police pointing, police pushing nonpolicemen behind things, all with policely concern. Our policeman was talking into his radio and was now visibly agitated. He stopped us with a half-raised arm.
“What is it?” I asked.
“What’s wrong?” from Meg.
I pushed past our policeman and stepped around the tall hedge. Almost immediately I spotted Sarah. She was some forty yards away from me across the bare-ground plaza. It was what was between us that was causing the fuss. A white man held a pistol high over his head and was shouting at the top of lungs, “La voix du peuple, l’esprit de la France! Renvoyez-les! Renvoyez-les!”
Sarah cowered behind the sturdy leg of a big policeman who stood with his automatic rifle at the ready. She was terrified of course. She found my face across the commotion and pleaded for my help. The man with the pistol continued to shout, even louder now, and wave his weapon. He turned his blond head and looked in the direction of my daughter. I don’t know what came over me, but I became convinced that this right-wing fanatic was zeroing in on the dark skin of my child. He was turned away from me, and all of a sudden I was sprinting toward him. He turned to me just as I was on him. I collided with him hard enough to knock him over. I grabbed the pistol, twisted it, and bent it back against the outside of his hand. I thought I heard his finger break, and I thought even then that I couldn’t have in that din. He didn’t let go. The police were on top of the two of us immediately. They were as rough with me as they were with him. I was elbowed in the back of the head and had my arm wrenched behind my back. I saw Meg running to Sarah. Sarah screamed for me; her voice sliced through the shouting of men. The policemen asked me again and again what I thought I was doing. I didn’t understand the French, but the tone made the meaning clear. The word bête was repeated. Sarah and Meg managed to get to me. I was handcuffed. I dropped to a knee to let Sarah wrap her arms around my neck. A policeman pulled her away. The cop who had been helping us explained to the others what was going on, then he looked at me and asked in English what I thought I was doing.
“I’m sorry. I was afraid for my daughter,” I said in English. It was too much of an effort to find the words in French.
“That was stupid,” he said.
“I know,” I said.
Meg looked at me, held my face, and stared at me like I was crazy.
“I’m okay,” I told her. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I saw him looking at Sarah.” I was pulled back to standing by a policeman. “I’m okay.”
Meg did not look like she believed me.
“Daddy?” Sarah said as I was pulled away a few steps.
The handcuffs were removed, and I stood there rubbing my wrists while they asked me questions. My mouth and throat were dry, scratchy. What was my name? What kind of name was that? Did I know the man with the gun? Had I ever seen the man before? Where was I from? Did I have military training? Did I have a history of mental illness? Why was I in the country? When would I be leaving?
Somewhat satisfied, they let me go.
Gabrielle d’Estrées and One of Her Sisters, 1594. Pinch, pinch. My daughter laughed, returned to it again and again, laughed at it again and again. Pinch, pinch.
The wisest know nothing.
Als sei kein Unglück die Nacht gescheh’n
The more I thought about what I had done in Paris, the more my action confused and upset me. To say that I hadn’t been thinking clearly was of course an understatement. It was more accurate to say that I had not thought at all, even with so much on my mind. But just what did that mean? To not think. I guess I was simply my animal self, not that an animal would have been so stupid. Something went through my mind, however rushed. Uncensored, certainly. Ill considered, obviously. My action at any other time might have caused major problems between Meg and me, but, given all else, the matter fell away.
Weeks passed. Christmas Day came and went. An annoyance, as always, but poignant this time, as the activity of counting Christmases occurred to me. The morning of gift opening was sweet enough, boring enough, sad enough. The same was true with the coming of the new year. And then the new semester began, distinctly marking time as they always did. Semesters came and went so quickly, so innocuously, that they felt like nothing until they were counted, and then the sum was decades. I never saw old coming.
Episodes of forgetfulness or spaciness were noted now and again. The seizures did not worsen; however, they occurred more frequently. We observed usually two a day, if in fact that was what they were. The fear of course was that there were others that we did not witness. For that reason, both consciously and un, we hardly ever left our daughter alone. This neither went unnoticed nor was it liked by the twelve-year-old. I imagined how I would have felt if my parents had loomed over me every second of every day, and so I managed to force myself to give her some space.
School began again for Sarah, and that presented new problems. We couldn’t keep her home, and though I didn’t want to tell her teachers, it was necessary. They had to not only be on the lookout for seizures and changes in them, but they also needed to understand that there might be a difference in her work and attention. I hated the teachers’ reactions. Pity and premature condolences.
Ms. Boone, Sarah’s sixth-grade teacher, was straight out of central casting. She was perfectly postured with her hair done up in a bun. She nodded a lot.
Meg briefly described Sarah’s disease.
“Oh my,” Ms. Boone said. “What can I do to help?”
“Just watch her,” I said. “She might space out from time to time, but we don’t even know if that’s a symptom. She might be merely daydreaming.”
“But we need to know if she’s doing it more frequently,” Meg said.
Ms. Boone made a note on the paper in front of her.
“Things are going to get a lot worse,” I said. “Sarah will have to leave school. We don’t know when that will be.”
From the look on Ms. Boone’s face, I could see that the gravity of the situation was becoming apparent.
“Sarah is going to die,” I said. It felt strange stating it so bluntly, at once
terrifying and, in a sick-making way, freeing.
Ms. Boone put down her pencil. “Oh my.”
Later that night, Meg and I sat in front of the idle fireplace. “Did you see the look on Ms. Boone’s face?” Meg asked.
“The oh my look,” I said. “We’d better get used to it.”
“Why?” Meg started to cry.
I pulled her close. There was nothing to say. There was nothing to do.
In my dream I was back on the streets of Paris, not far from Notre-Dame, on the left bank, near the English bookstore Shakespeare & Co. I wore a yellow slicker, the kind with a reflective silver stripe, even though there was no rain. I stood outside an Orange mobile phone store. The store was packed with customers, unhappy customers. They had all taken numbers and were all visibly displeased. Just outside the door, sitting on the sidewalk, back against the wall, was a Roma woman. She held a spotted puppy, perhaps the cutest puppy I had ever seen. The open box she had put beside her for money was empty. The puppy hardly moved in her arms. She looked at her empty box and then at me. She sighed, stood, and walked away. I followed her. I was just five or so paces behind her, and either she was remarkably oblivious or completely indifferent to my presence because she did not once turn to eye me, suspiciously or otherwise. I followed her through the busy 6e and into the Jardin du Luxembourg, where she sat next to another woman dressed as she was, who could have been her twin or her. She handed over the puppy. The second woman, the new woman, shot me a hard glance that, frankly, more scared than startled me. I followed her anyway, followed the puppy, recalled in my dream how in movies everyone says to follow the money. I followed her the long walk to Montparnasse. The woman sat on the cold ground outside the station and positioned the docile puppy on her lap, wrapped her shawl around it. Then it was no longer a puppy, no longer a dog but a child, a little child. Girl or boy I could not tell, but it was docile like the puppy had been. There was no puppy now, only the woman and the child. She put her open box beside her and put a few of her own euros into it. Still, no one else dropped any money into her box. I walked up to her. I emptied my pockets of all the money I had. It filled the box. The woman stared at me. I could not see the child’s face. I wondered if it had a puppy’s face.
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