Paris by the Book

by Liam Callanan

  They didn’t; the pickup, after destroying the phone, had stopped just short of Ellie. Hip did meet bumper, but the driver had stopped so miraculously, precisely, shy of her that all his truck really did was tip her to the ground. She never hit her head. Someone ran up with a lawyer’s business card, insisted we go to the hospital. The paramedic said it was our choice. The driver was relieved when Ellie chose not to. I was relieved when Ellie, perhaps because she was so shaken by the experience, perhaps because she was certain I would now buy her a new and fancier phone, hugged Daphne and apologized for yelling at her. Daphne mumbled her own apology, incoherent.

  We staggered home. We changed and brushed our teeth. We apologized to each other. Ellie told me what kind of new phone she wanted. Daphne said nothing, stayed bent over a diary Eleanor had given her, scribbling entries Eleanor said I shouldn’t read but which I of course did. I later woke Daphne when I saw that day’s final line:

  Whoever you take next, let it be me.

  Whom was Daphne addressing? I didn’t know, and so I hovered over her, wondering how to let her know she was loved, she was safe, she must never, ever wish for death—sweet girl!—

  And studying her in those brief seconds before I saw she saw it was me, when I was still just some strange dark figure looming, I saw her eyes brighten with fear, and relief, that her prayer was being answered.

  * * *

  —

  I heard a quiet, insistent knock at the front door minutes later.

  Though it was almost midnight, I didn’t even bother with the peephole. Was it—?

  Eleanor.

  I’d made the discovery earlier that evening. The note. But not Robert’s usual kind, and not in the usual place. Before I shared it with the police—much less the girls—I wanted to discuss it with her, especially as it required some of her expertise, very close textual analysis. I’d suggested we meet the next morning, but Eleanor had said this called for a meeting, wine, immediately. Now that she was here, I tried to wave her off; I told her about Ellie, Daphne, the cones, the phone, the street. Now was not the time, I said.

  After Eleanor confirmed everyone was physically okay, she said that this was exactly the time. More to the point, past time.

  “So again,” Eleanor said. “This was where?”

  We were in the kitchen. She’d brought a paper-bagged bottle but ignored it as soon as I gave her the “note.” Not the usual three words, be back soon, but, as I said, just six letters: CWTCCJ.

  “In the granola,” I said. I went to get the box, but she flicked an impatient wrist. I returned and continued. “The weird organic shit that he was forever buying but never ate. Certainly no one’s touched it in the four weeks since he’s been gone.”

  “Until today,” Eleanor said.

  “Until today,” I said.

  “Because you were hungry?” Eleanor said.

  I nodded, because that was easier than admitting I didn’t have the stomach for almost any food those days, that I’d gone to the granola for the most pathetic of reasons: I’d accidentally washed his clothes. Right after he left, I’d discovered some shirts of his in the laundry pile, and set them aside for the police to inspect. Which they declined to do, because, as they gently asked, what would that tell us? I was too dazed to know how to answer, though in the subsequent weeks I did: it would tell you who he was. I kept the shirts in a pile on the floor, sometimes buried them beneath a pillow as I slept. I smelled them and remembered, until one sleepy morning I forgot what I was doing and dumped them into the washer with everything else. And out they went with the Tide. I panicked, I pretended I wasn’t panicked, I went through his closet, some drawers, but the scents there were too faint, too clean. And in the kitchen, looking for some noninebriant that would make me hungry again, I found his granola. It smelled stale. And then I saw the slip.

  “So my idea,” I said. I was still wobbly from Ellie’s close call, but Eleanor was here now. She had her reading glasses on. Time to work. “It’s a rhyme scheme, right?” I said. “He loved puzzles? Words? A poem? I mean, you’re the expert, but . . .”

  Eleanor turned it over. Nothing.

  “Not a poem,” she said.

  “Well, it’s not from the granola people,” I said. “This is a thing of his. You know him. He loves hiding notes for the girls.”

  “Do you have a laptop?” Eleanor said.

  “Google had nothing,” I said, which wasn’t entirely true. After I’d failed to find anything with those six letters, I’d set Google to another task, which led me to a French firm that offered to make a perfume from a DNA sample, which they could collect from a variety of sources, like, say, an old piece of clothing, the more unwashed the better—

  “Maybe you asked Google the wrong thing,” Eleanor said, and found a stool. “Get your computer and let’s visit some airlines, starting with the ones that fly out of Milwaukee. Failing that, O’Hare.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “Because six dollars says it’s a confirmation code, dearest.”

  Which was how Eleanor reminded me that most of Robert’s puzzles were solved easily; recognize the frame or context and then everything flopped into place. CWTCCJ wasn’t an anagram or rhyme scheme but an itinerary. And so we tried one airline, and then another, and then there it was, a three-week trip to Paris. Departing the first of August.

  “Surprise,” Eleanor said.

  Robert had been due to go to Paris in late summer, as Eleanor knew. Earlier in the year, for the sake of cash flow, he’d written an article about children’s lit and Paris, and a small publisher who’d seen it had asked if Robert thought it could be a book. With maps. And directions and addresses and opening hours and URLs. And there’d be an advance, some money for expenses.

  Great, Robert told me, I’ve graduated to writing guidebooks.

  Really great! I said. Because I wanted some kind of light on his horizon, someone other than me telling him, you’re good. And I didn’t ask, is there enough money to take me? the girls? because I knew there wasn’t.

  But I had wanted Robert to ask, to explain, to renew the promise that someday we’d go to Paris. Honestly, at that point, I would have smiled at an invitation to return to Paris, Wisconsin, either one, so long as doing so would return to me some older, less wise, less weary, less wary Robert, one who said, “sure,” “why not,” and “we’ll figure it out,” and once, when I was in the midst of stealing a book, “I think you forgot something. . . .”

  Because I hadn’t. I forget nothing. Not the number of cats in The Red Balloon or the color of the picnic table where he’d proposed, nor that he’d once upon a time promised to take me to France.

  Paris in August is terrible, he went on.

  Really? I thought. But what I said was see? You do sound like a guidebook author! He turned away, I turned it on: a real artist would say, “a few weeks, on my own, in Paris? I’ll buy the ticket tonight.” After a few hours of furious silence, he said he would. And don’t tell the girls, he said, it would be a surprise.

  The next morning, the surprise came when he told me he hadn’t bought the ticket, and wouldn’t.

  “You had no idea?” Eleanor asked, peering at the screen. I peered at her, curious how the blame that had pooled just moments ago at Robert’s feet was somehow seeping toward mine.

  “Eleanor,” I said.

  Not only had he booked himself a ticket—he’d booked tickets for all of us.

  Paris. I would finally—

  He had finally—

  We would all go to—the actual place. The city. Not the one with the cornfield and the water tower, not the wayside with the picnic table and trash barrel, not any Paris on this continent, but the real city, Madeline’s city, Lamorisse’s city, mine.

  Paris.

  Eleanor watched me, waited, but I couldn’t speak. So she did. “We’ve learned two things, then,”
she said. Her seminar voice. She folded away her glasses. “One, he booked flights—including for himself, I see—and two, he had—has?—a credit card you don’t know about.” (Had, it was later determined. The trip was the last thing charged on it; before that, a year or so of little purchases—gas, food—that roughly corresponded with his various prior absences.)

  I picked up the little slip of paper. I now almost wished it were a rhyme scheme, an acrostic.

  Can’t

  Write

  Think

  Can’t

  Crashed

  Jumped

  I felt the world rushing up at me—and I mean that, not the floor, not the carpet, but the world, all of it, including Paris, where I’d wanted to go for so long, and now here it was, the code, the key, the passageway—

  I did not want to go anywhere, except maybe to bed or outside to scream. I wanted a glass of something, something worse than wine. But I couldn’t get any farther than the sink. I watched myself turn on the water. I watched myself bend to the tap. What was I going to do? Drink, apparently, right from the faucet. I drank for a long while and then turned it off and dried my face. Eleanor waited quietly, hands in her lap.

  I waited, too, and when I was ready, I spoke. “We haven’t learned the most important thing,” I said. The rational part of me—which was also the angry part—was slowly returning. “Why?” I said. “Why this way? It’s one thing for him to leave a sad little puzzle behind for me to solve. But it’s another thing for him to tease the kids, a code tumbling out of a box, his old m.o., and they’d have gotten so excited—”

  Eleanor nodded. “That’s the part that troubles me,” she said.

  “That he was a jerk?” I said.

  No, Eleanor said. Robert could be clueless but not cruel, and therefore would not have left the code for his family to find if he’d known he wasn’t going to be around when they found it. And it was doubtful we ever would have found it without his prompting, given that we never went near that box. What troubled her was that this meant something had happened.

  What troubled her, she went on, was that I’d been abandoned before, my parents dying so suddenly, so soon.

  Our eyes met.

  This was not that, she said.

  “Got it,” I said, instantly angry that she would bring it up, angry all over again at my parents for dying, angriest of all, of course, at Robert.

  “But do you get this?” Eleanor said. There was no question, she said. We should go.

  “To France?” I said.

  “That’s where he booked tickets to,” she said.

  “Now?” I said. I’d sooner take a journey to the sun.

  “Three weeks from now,” she said, “or whenever the reservation is for. We’ll pay—I’ll pay—for expedited passports, and—oh, none of that is an issue. Leah, of course go. And my god—don’t come back, not right away. If something terrible has happened here—I hold out hope that it hasn’t—there will be, for a time, the distraction of distance. So change the tickets. Take a month. Take however much time you need. Take leave. The university will figure it out. So will the airline. So will the girls’ schools. Ellie and Daphne may even figure out how to smile again.”

  “They’ll be devastated,” I said, “especially when—”

  “They awake tomorrow morning, and the next morning, and the next and the next, and he’s not here, in this house, in Milwaukee. This is what’s devastating them, Leah. This is what’s hurting.”

  I thought of the ice-cream fight. I thought of Daphne addressing her diary, the dark: take me. I thought of both girls wishing that their dad was not dead and somehow wishing even more that their mom, their own mother, would more visibly join them in this wish and, better yet, make their father reappear.

  I thought of how Robert had darkened everything of late, as though a black frame set upon a scene might come to leach its color into what one saw.

  “We can’t leave,” I said, so quietly even I couldn’t hear the words. “Robert is away, writing, and is coming back.”

  Eleanor could be brusque and businesslike, but like Robert—like the Robert I thought I knew—she was never cruel. She looked at me directly. “Do you believe that?” she said.

  “Robert’s moved far away, and he’s changed his identity.”

  “Do you want to believe that?”

  I didn’t. I feared that he was dead. Because those books had convinced me. Because I had needed them to convince me. Because the world didn’t make sense otherwise, starting with six letters in a cereal box.

  “Eleanor,” I said, more whimper than word.

  Joking, sarcasm, anger was a way of pretending that I was fine, that I didn’t miss him. And part of me, I confess, did not. But the reader in me, the makeshift muse, word-drunk and bereaved, she suffered. And, yes, the rest of me, my fingers and mouth and hair and stomach, I missed him like air, like water, like a second skin, like a book you love, you need, but is no longer on the shelf when you go to look because it turns out it was never written.

  “And the girls? What do they think?” she said.

  Ellie and Daphne thought their father was a hero. And I’d agree if allowed to qualify, a classical hero, someone as heroic as he was remote, someone always off on an adventure. I occasionally convinced myself the solution to his (or our) angst lay in taxonomy. If only I could classify what was wrong with him, or me, our family, that house, that life, then I could solve it. He ran off on his writeaways because that was healthy, not rude. He was a good father, had to be, because the girls adored him. So, for the longest time, did I. He remembered Picture Day. He knew which summer camp deadlines fell the fall before. When he was home, he did color-correct laundry, sometimes helped with the dishes, and claimed the girls were telepathic because whenever asked to guess the number in his head, they were, somehow, always right.

  And they laughed when he told them they were right because he was lying or telling the truth, it didn’t matter, not to them, no more than the fact that he would sometimes disappear for a night, a day, a weekend. It had been weeks at this point with no word. Which meant Robert now fit a profile. I didn’t see it myself, not right away, but the police did. Nobody’s that clean, the police technician said, and the detective eventually had to update his theory about corpses leaving more clues. Because not a penny of our bank account had been pinged, not an electron of his e-mail disturbed.

  “Do they think he’s alive?” Eleanor pressed. “The girls.”

  You’re going to have to stand a little taller was one of the first things Eleanor had told me, back in the freshest, darkest hours after Robert disappeared, and I had taken that to heart. I stood taller, even as I noticed that taller put me just the slightest bit farther from the girls. They looked up at me and I looked down and we saw each other, but from a new distance. The result wasn’t vertigo, but it left all of us mildly ill, and no one asked what was for dinner, what number was in any one of our heads, whether Dad was still alive. Dad is away was our collective term of art, and so solid-seeming it had been, too, until it began to teeter in that school crosswalk, and then shattered, like Ellie’s phone, in that busy street.

  “They do,” I said.

  “You don’t,” she said.

  “I—can’t,” I said.

  “Can you try?” she said.

  I didn’t answer; I couldn’t. It was the same question I’d asked Robert the last night I saw him. He wasn’t happy, he’d said. Wasn’t sleeping. Wasn’t working.

  Can you try? I’d asked. The girls were tucked in bed upstairs; otherwise I would have been louder, because I wanted him to listen to me, or to the doctor, or the therapist he refused to keep seeing.

  Writing is ruining me, he’d said.

  I listened to the clock tick. My heart beat. Myself say, in this whole house, only you?

  * * *

  —


  I didn’t eat the morning of our flight and not the night before. I’d drunk some wine; that went poorly. Then coffee: worse.

  Worse still, the airport, where every father of every age seemed to have gathered. They lifted bags out of taxis, held doors, ferried lattes in cardboard carriers that were—like much of the world, I realized—designed for four. They scooped up little boys who hugged them good-bye and dropped everything to catch daughters, mid-leap, who welcomed them home. They wore suits, sweats, fatigues. Were shaggy-haired, buzz-cut, bald. As short as Robert, as thin, as haunted, or nothing like him at all. The fathers were everywhere except at the airline counter. Eleanor distracted Ellie and Daphne out of earshot while I asked if a Robert Eady had already checked in.

  “No,” said the woman.

  Simultaneously relieved and devastated, I said something about how it was unlikely he would check in.

  The woman shrugged and delivered a bored speech whose punch line was a $150 change fee.

  That’s all? I thought. I almost paid it. It seemed cheap compared to how much change my life had gone through since April; $150 wasn’t much to change it back, to bring a man back from the dead.

  I shook my head. She scribbled something on our boarding passes that the TSA agents took as instruction to subject us to a scouring search. I watched as my purse, Daphne’s underwear, and a petite container of Clearasil pads I didn’t know Ellie had packed were wiped down with what looked like a Clearasil pad. For explosives, the agent said, winking at the girls as if this were a game.

  For three weeks, I’d told the girls. Twenty-one days in Paris. This trip, which we were going to take with Dad, we’re going to take ourselves. Daphne had asked if we were going to meet him there, and in the pause it had taken me to mull whether saying maybe was right or wrong or kind, Ellie had said no.

  I said our only real goal for this trip was to get away, see the sights, see some pages from Madeline come to life. Dad had needed a longer than usual writing break, apparently. And, apparently, this was his plan for us: Paris. Besides, they loved Bemelmans, right? Ellie especially. She loved sharing alarming anecdotes from the “grown-up” Bemelmans anthologies Robert had found—did I know Bemelmans claimed to have shot someone? That his governess had killed herself when he was six? That Bemelmans had thought of killing himself with a velvet rope from the Ritz? No, I did not. (Had her father thought such thoughts? For the longest time I did not let myself think so. Now I couldn’t not.)