I don’t know which side of the family deeded Ellie her mane, but I’ve always hoped she (or he) was pleased with the result. Ellie’s hair, the brightest black imaginable, is a mammoth, bouncing mass, planetary, rich and wild. I hoped Asif would keep her safe, but I knew her hair would. Her bearing would. Anyone who came at my daughter should know they were tangling with royalty.
* * *
—
I went back to Bemelmans’s old wine bar once. Just me, by myself, midafternoon. I could have called Molly, but one thing that Paris, city of couples kissing everywhere, does surprisingly well is cater to solitary diners. And drinkers. I ordered the pâté. Some wine? Sure. Maybe that would fortify me enough to press for more about the missing murals. The chagrin d’amour.
Wine had fortified me years before. I remembered getting through three-quarters of a bottle one early evening with Robert. This was, needless to say, pre-daughters, pre-wedding, in fact, pre-Wisconsin World Tour, but rather in the middle of those very early weeks after we’d met outside the bookstore, when we spent most of our time naked, knocking about in the dark amidst his books.
“You’re lying,” I said.
I was sitting on the floor of his apartment when I said this, and I had been for the better part of an hour—which had followed an hour I’d spent waiting for him at my apartment before that. We’d been supposed to have dinner. He’d said he had to finish something. I’d decided to come over and stare him down until he did, or offered me his apartment’s one chair.
“I’m not,” he said, staring at his work. “I really am trying to finish—”
But that wasn’t what I’d been talking about.
“About your parents,” I said.
During our early days, and nights, together, we’d done the whence-me new couples do and bonded over the fact that we were both orphans—that Robert, like me, had lost his parents. His parents’ departure was more tragic than mine. Car crash, dead before the paramedics arrived. I’d thought my parents’ own relatively gradual departures (dad, years, mom, months) by wasting illnesses (lung cancer, from years of secondhand bar smoke) infinitely cruel, but what Robert described sounded exponentially worse. I’d hugged him. Gripped him, really, as I was gripped by the fact that I’d found someone, finally, whose orphanhood was worse than mine.
And yet, a week or so later, there on the floor of his apartment—
“What do you mean?” he asked.
And yet, “what do you mean” is not what someone who has lost two parents in a fiery wreck says. Moreover, there was something off about him and this loss. I would have expected some sort of comradeship, some sort of connection between us, a shared shock at discovering the world’s suddenly revealed wrongness, with the way that, sun or rain, each new day didn’t seem to care that our parents were dead. No one cared, not like me. I was slowly learning to navigate this new reality, but I couldn’t see any of this process in Robert. True, my parents had been gone only two years then and his, four, but still, the loss was like yesterday, wasn’t it?
Had his really died in a car crash four years ago? Or had they died some other way?
Or had they not died at all?
I asked him.
Now he stopped and turned from his work. He didn’t answer. There was a long silence that, the longer it ran, seemed to be an invitation to retract my question. I put the cork in the bottle. I wanted more than anything to leave.
“I don’t know,” he said finally. “Not really.” I watched him get angry, and then lose that anger in the face of mine: he’d lied to me, after all. “I’m sorry?” he said. “The thing is—I—I didn’t know we were going to be—together?”
Three weeks old then, our relationship.
“You thought, when you caught me, ‘awesome, shoplifters are usually good for a one-night pity fuck,’” I said.
“I wasn’t thinking that.”
“What do you mean, ‘I don’t know’? Tell me that much,” I said, “before I go.”
“Leah,” he said. “Don’t go.” So quiet then. I didn’t move. “It’s a lot to get into on a first date,” he said, “what happened. My life. I’m sorry I lied, though. It was easier, but—I’m sorry.”
“Easier? Fuck you.”
“Easier than saying, ‘I don’t know what happened to my parents,’” he said. “Please stop saying ‘fuck.’”
He left the chair for the floor.
“The crazy thing is,” he said, “I thought, ‘wow, for once, you know what? I do have a way, a means of’—that night, with the books, the bar, I thought you were beautiful—I think you’re beautiful—I think you swear too much but, I thought, ‘the Bemelmans book, Madeline, is right in front of us. Use that!’ I mean, that’s never happened on a date before.”
“Never?” I said. I didn’t feel beautiful. “I would have thought that your standard shtick. What kind of woman doesn’t fall for the boy who loves books written for little girls?”
“They weren’t,” Robert said. “And I don’t. I mean, I do love Madeline. And Bemelmans in general. But I also love—Johnny Tremaine. Anne of Green Gables. David Copperfield. . . .”
And—fuck—a dozen other books about orphans.
Robert only had tattered toddler memories of his mom. Nothing of his dad. Or so he thought. His mother had died, but not in a crash, or a car crash. Overdose. His birth certificate did not list a father. Sometimes he remembered things, sensations—sunshine, the beach. Sometimes the smell of cigarettes: Marlboros, he’d since determined. But so many memories of so many foster homes since had supplanted everything else. There had been two, three almost-adoptions, but after a while, he’d just gotten too old. He’d been told to “ride it out.” He had, and he swore it was only recently he’d learned the expression wasn’t write it out.
There on the floor, he was everything I was not: sober, serious, not crying. He’d learned to like being alone, he said. He’d learned to like reading. He’d liked Madeline because not only were there no parents but everyone seemed to get along in Madeline’s tidy, iron-cotted, light-filled dorm. He’d slept in rooms just like that, he said, and it had never been like that.
“But”—I wasn’t calling him on his lies anymore, because they weren’t lies, I could see that, the way his eyes had gone stone in the telling, but there were other things I couldn’t see—“didn’t she, didn’t Madeline have parents? Wasn’t it just supposed to be a boarding school, where she was?”
Robert nodded, a smile coming to his face, along with some color. “And I liked that,” he said. “It was like she was choosing to grow up without parents. I liked to imagine that I’d chosen, too. In that—in those places, places where I was—all you want is to be able to choose. Clothes, lunch, school. Something, anything.”
He paused.
“And that’s everything?” I finally asked.
He said nothing, just shut his eyes. And then he went back to his little table and his work and he sat and I sat and after a while, he turned off the light and came to me and kissed me, behind one ear, then another, whispering I’m sorry and believe me.
* * *
—
Daphne asked if we might have some coffee while we waited for Asif and Ellie to return from their date.
Successive parenting failures in Paris: one, to cocoon the girls from the city enough that they went to bed at a normal hour; two, to cocoon them from the city enough that they didn’t adopt its ubiquitous vices. In Ellie’s case, cigarettes. Ellie protests she only wants to have them on hand for friends who want them, which I half believe because she herself doesn’t directly reek of smoke, and because I’m too tired to discipline her effectively. I pick my battles. She bathes, goes to school. Succès.
Daphne’s vice is more curious. Coffee. Yes, she’s too young. But she favors decaf, and only ever just the one cup at a sitting—a petite French-size cup, not a massive Ameri
can jeroboam of the stuff—served to her at a café or by her own mother on a night like this, the twins safely in bed upstairs, her older sister unsafely at large in the city, her mother’s mind unsteadily roaming from one continent to another.
With the distraction of Asif, the scribbled I’m sorry in Robert’s book, and the twins coming and going, I knew I’d not given Daphne nearly enough time. She seemed pleased to have it now. She took down her special mug from the cabinet, Daphne-size, cryptically labeled: biz. I thought it was some dot-com tchotchke Ellie had found at a marché aux puces—literally (and epidemically) a market of the fleas—but no, it was from a real shop and had real style, I subsequently found out: biz was French texting slang for bises, kisses. And I wanted to do just that as she moved quietly about—coffee, cream, sugar, a saucer, a tiny spoon; she loved the ceremony as much as the first sip—I wanted to kiss her, and not the ever-fraught French bises on the cheek (one for someone you just met, two for an old friend, or one for a man, three for a woman? I forever did it wrong) but a kiss planted American mom–style, right on the crown of her head.
“Do you miss Dad, Mom?”
And yes, coffee made Daphne seem more grown up, and grown up suited her. She was born an old soul. I’d had serious, adult conversations with her since the day she was born. That look that infants have, that deep, unembarrassed, unhurried gaze they can give you, as though they are patiently waiting for you to say something worth responding to? Daphne never lost that look.
“I do, sweetie,” I said, and did not look at Daphne. She and Ellie have Robert’s eyes. And though Daphne’s come complete with her own (smaller, brighter) splotch of color in her right iris, her eyes have none of his furtiveness. He had such wonderful eyes, Robert, and I forever urged him to do more with them, like look at me.
“Do you?” Daphne said. I checked to see how much of her coffee was gone. There was an ashtray on a high shelf I dearly wanted to use. More than one night I’d rifled through Ellie’s purse, looking for cigarettes.
“Daphne,” I said. I did not want to answer this question. I did not want to have been asked it. “What’s going on?” I said, and watched her decide not to answer this. Yet.
“I miss him more here,” Daphne said instead. “More than in Milwaukee.”
I nodded to this as though I missed him more here, too, but what I really was thinking was of course you do. Because, of course: here was the unanticipated effect, the danger, of relocating to Paris, to relocating inside the pages Robert wrote. It did not grant us distance but collapsed it. He had disappeared, but thanks to his manuscript, thanks to Paris, we’d disappeared inside him.
“I sometimes wonder if Ellie—?” she began, and I knew I had to cut her off. The sisters could compete in other aspects of their lives, but not in how much they missed their father. Or did they regardless? Outside Bemelmans’s bar, I remembered how I had first thought Daphne, then Ellie, Robert’s true champion. What I’d not realized, what I realized now, was that they, there—everywhere, always—had been measuring me.
“I’m sure she does,” I interrupted, but Daphne’s eyes grew so wide, I stopped to clarify. “Does Ellie what?”
“Does—does she see him, too?” Daphne gushed. “Does she see Dad?”
She waited for me to speak, and I couldn’t.
I had not told the girls about the customer finding their father’s book, of me finding the I’m sorry inside. I’d not told them and I was proud of not telling them. Nothing to see here. Moreover, I’d not told them that I’d wondered if the scribbled apology was an apology to me, that the book’s sudden appearance, and then disappearance, was his doing. That had little basis in reality. I recognized that, and even forgave myself for it. Such slips were to be expected. Why hadn’t I expected my daughters would slip, too?
“I don’t see him all the time,” she mumbled.
“Daphne—what?” I said. “I’m sorry—do you mean—where—?” What I so readily forgave in myself was frightening in Daphne.
“When I’m out walking,” Daphne said. “With the twins, and we’ll be coming home and we’ll be near something—like Notre-Dame—from one of the Madeline books, and I’ll think, I should look for him, because this is what he was coming to Paris to do, research locations for that book.”
We should have stayed in Milwaukee. Or we should have moved to the desert. Jupiter. Some place he’d never find us. Some place we’d never find him.
“What we were coming to Paris to do,” she amended. “And sometimes, you know—I see him. Just out of the corner of my eye. And I’ll turn to ask Peter and Annabelle—they can be very méchants about holding hands, you know, especially crossing streets; if you let go for one second, they wander off, especially Annabelle—and he’ll be gone.”
“Oh, Daphne,” I said, scrambling. “Sometimes—sometimes I think I see him, too.” Because I had, after all, that first day outside Madame’s bookstore. “Sometimes people can—sometimes imagination—sometimes we can imagine things so well, so very precisely, that we think—”
“Mom!” Daphne said. “Not ‘think.’ Not ‘imagination.’ It’s really him, vraiment.”
“You’ve talked to—Ellie about this?”
Daphne shook her head. “Mom,” she said.
“I know . . .” She waited for me to continue. “I know,” I said, “that we both miss someone, very much.”
“Daddy’s here,” Daphne said. “In Paris.”
Molly had told me she wasn’t learning French because they’d only be here two years. And, she added, the Kiwis she knew who’d lived here ten, fifteen, twenty years—they’d lost some of their English. I asked myself now whether I’d done something similar to the girls in a fraction of the time. Stranded them between two languages, two countries, two realities. Or rather, between reality and fantasy. I’d not told them what the grief books had told me, and look what had happened: he was walking the streets of Paris in their imaginations.
And now in mine.
I was so startled, I blurted out the first question I could think of, the one that, were he alive, hurt most.
“But, sweet girl—then why wouldn’t he come—”
“Maybe he hit his head. Like Pascal!”
Daphne had an odd theory about The Red Balloon and its oddly happy ending, when Pascal, who’s just lost his balloon to the bullies’ rocks, is suddenly rescued, lifted up and away into the sky, by dozens of new balloons. Daphne believed the flyaway ending wasn’t real; Pascal must have gotten conked by a stray rock; the sunny final scenes thus spin out of his concussed unconsciousness. There is absolutely no basis for this theory on-screen. For some of us, however—Daphne and I chief among them—there’s also no basis for the film’s actual, happy ending. After all, as Pascal flies away smiling, what must he see when he looks down at the ground? His best friend, crushed in the dirt.
Daphne continued: “Dad hit his head, he’s looking for us, but maybe—maybe he doesn’t know he’s looking. Maybe”—her thumb scratched circles on the table—“maybe he doesn’t know what he’s looking for.”
“Sweetheart,” I said.
The circles stopped. “You can keep telling people—strangers—he’s dead,” she said. “I know you do, you say ‘lost,’ but the way you say it, in French anyway, I know you mean for people to think he’s dead, but—but I know he isn’t.”
“Daphne,” I said.
“And I know you know he isn’t,” she said.
“Look—” I started to say.
“I am,” she said, stressing each wonderfully awkward, but thus all the more emphatic, English word. Je suis is so slippery, even feathery, by comparison. “I am looking,” she said. “And where do you think Ellie is tonight? She’s looking.”
“She’s what?”
“No, Mom—listen. We’re looking.”
And they were.
Not just for him, but for m
e, for that version of her mother who was interested in confronting uncomfortable questions.
“Why,” Daphne said, “aren’t you?”
Because your father is—
Is not—
But I couldn’t say it.
Loss, like French, has its own grammar. Unlike French, immersion only makes it harder to master.
CHAPTER 7
One of the scariest books we have in the store goes by an unlikely title: Swahili Grammar and Vocabulary. Published by a “Mrs. F. Burt” in 1923 and bound in bloodred buckram, the book initially hid behind a bookshelf, where it must have fallen decades before I found it. I’d almost tossed it in the trash; I had enough trouble selling English-language books. I’d opened it, though, to see if Mrs. F. had convinced them to at least print her full name inside. And there, on the foxed and browning pages, I found the inscription: To Anderson, on the night of the lion.
I decided not to throw it away.
For a while, it went back and forth to school in Daphne’s bag. She was as fascinated with the inscription as I was—was this Mrs. Burt’s handwriting? who was Anderson? what lion?—but eventually tired of it. I reclaimed it from Daphne, studied the odd left-leaning penmanship, compared it to what I remembered of Robert’s.
But mostly I thought about that night, the one of the lion, how so few words can change everything: a boring textbook made into an urgent mystery. The inscription seemed to celebrate an escape, but had everyone escaped?
I hadn’t, not from my conversation with Daphne, not from the question she’d asked about looking for Robert. When I tried to answer, when I couldn’t answer, she shook her head and wandered wordlessly to her room. She didn’t have to tell me not to follow, and I didn’t. She wasn’t six anymore, nor even twelve. She and Ellie were both teens, that other country. That mother-daughter rupture, it happens everywhere. Or so I’ve heard. But it yawns particularly wide in Paris, and did then. They’d gone looking without me. They’d believed he was here before I did.
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