“And I put it in the window after that,” I said.
“Did you know it was me?” he said.
I said nothing.
“You did,” he said.
“I did,” I said. “But I also thought it couldn’t have been you.” Or shouldn’t have been.
“I—that’s how I felt, about all of it. The girls—Ellie, Daphne”—he could barely speak the words—“I wasn’t even sure it was them. They’re so . . .” I wanted to say, we weren’t sure it was you, but of course the girls had been, long before me. “I thought, it couldn’t be them behind the glass, it couldn’t be you behind the glass. But it was you behind the glass.”
“And still you didn’t reach out.”
He shook his head: “You would have—I thought you would—it would—all disappear. Samuel Taylor Coleridge—this is crazy but—there was this prize—it doesn’t matter. Coleridge, this famous poem, he had it all in his head, ready to write, got fifty-four lines down, and then—someone walked in—the dream disappeared.”
“We didn’t.”
“I was sure you would. I got as close to the bubble as I could without popping it.”
“Until now.”
“Leah, I don’t know how to say . . .” He drew a little circle on the counter. Just like Daphne. “But you all looked, you look very happy here,” he said.
“‘Happy’?” I said, indignant, because I’d become that Parisian. Happiness is an American emotion, if not affliction. It prevents Americans from seeing how difficult this city, its people, its landlords, UPS drivers, and doctors are, how dangerous its bridges, its river, its bookstores. How fragile its every last stone, story, or film.
And yet, as I’d been reminded, Charlemagne used to walk here. And Bemelmans and Lamorisse and Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso and Joan of Arc and Marie Curie and Edith Wharton and Janet Flanner and James Baldwin and James Joyce and Sylvia Beach, and now me. And Robert.
“We are happy,” I said slowly. “Not happy all the time, but the girls have figured some things out. It’s been an adjustment. We’re still adjusting.” I could see the words piling up ahead of me, and I stumbled as I tried to avoid saying them: “and, and now, now that you’re back, it’ll be, we’ll be . . .”
And there it was. The pause. The moment when his eyes, after finding every last place in the store but my face, finally found my eyes. Found them, watched, and wondered. Was this the real Leah?
Was this the real Robert? Was this really our life? And how much better would it be with him back? He could—we could—Robert could get an apartment nearby, maybe. We’d work something out.
That pause, and then Robert spoke.
“That’s what I thought,” he said.
“No,” I said. “No—listen, Robert—the girls . . .” Was this why he’d surprised me midday, to be sure the girls would be away at school?
“They’re—they’re doing better without me.”
“You can tell that from the sidewalk, from stalking us?”
“Leah, I’m sorry—of course—I miss—there’s not even a word for what I feel—”
“‘Guilty’? ‘Ashamed’?” He nodded, but I shook my head. “Fight,” I said, and I meant with me, against me, but also, of course, for me.
“Leah—all those writeaways,” he said. “I thought they were as much for you all as for me.”
“Fuck you.”
“I did!” he said. “I needed them—yes. Absolutely. More and more. But I needed them because working at home—or seeing you all at home after working—I saw you see my face, and—I—I didn’t like what I saw there. When the girls needed help, they never called for me.”
“‘Dad! Daddy!’ echoed through the house the minute you came home!”
“But they—”
“But they leapt into your arms.”
“And every time, I thought I’d drop them. I thought I’d disappoint them. I knew I was disappointing you.”
“You did not.”
He stared, waited for the lie I suddenly couldn’t say.
“You said I was dead,” he said.
“What?”
“The lady up the street here, sells mops?” he said. “I asked what time the bookstore opened and she said she didn’t know, ‘sometimes open, sometimes close, but hard for her, bookstore lady; her husband dead.’”
“For the longest time,” I said, “I tried to convince myself you were.”
He laughed, or tried to. “For the longest time, I was sure, too. I mean, up until five minutes ago, when you started throwing those books. They hurt—”
“Sorry—”
“No, it was—I deserved it, and worse, and maybe there’s an essay in there somewhere about how e-books will never hurt as much, they don’t have the heft . . .”
A pause.
“You’re writing again,” I said.
A pause.
He nodded his head left, then right. Yes and no.
“That’s great,” I said. “You . . .” But I wasn’t sure what I was going to say, because it seemed like I was sliding toward some sort of equation: you left us, and writing, art, life became possible again.
“Robert, is everything all right? Because—”
“Everything is okay,” he said. “Just okay, but okay is much better than it’s been. Everything was not okay for a while.”
“Because they’ve got doctors here, too. Medicine. Psychologists. Funnily enough, we’ve met one or two.”
“No—I mean, I’m not—I’m not in that place anymore. Not right now. Like I said, when I went running that morning, sailing, it was bad. I wasn’t looking to drown, but I wasn’t necessarily looking to come back, either. I thought I’d let the universe decide.”
“Don’t involve the universe.”
“Let the lake decide.”
“The lake?” I said. “I didn’t get a say?”
“I knew what you’d say.”
“Is that why you didn’t call?”
“I did call!” he said. “From the last pay phone on earth. Long before I got back to Milwaukee. Hours after I left the water. On the way to the shelter. Before the berries. I saw the area code. It’s when I figured out I was in Michigan. I called collect. No one answered.”
“You tried once? You’re supposed to call back. To have found a fucking library and e-mailed.”
He shook his head. “I’ve got no excuse, or I just gave it to you. I wasn’t in my right head. I didn’t want to die, but I did want to be alone. I knew if I came back—‘Robert,’ ‘Daddy’”—and now his eyes filled, finally—“you’d just want to save me. And I didn’t want—”
“Enough,” I said.
“It was already too much.”
It was too much. In our first days together in Milwaukee, I remember looking at Robert in his all-but-bare apartment, huddled at that cheap desk, surrounded by his stalagmites of books, and thinking he looked so lonely, so alone. But that was nothing, could be nothing, compared to what he felt now, out in the world. I didn’t want to know the answer to the next question I asked, but I couldn’t not ask it.
“Robert, the girls? How can you bear to be apart from them, to not smell them, hear them laugh . . .” As I said this, his lips moved, but I couldn’t hear anything. It was like the girls’ old Whisper Theater, all hush and hiss, every syllable so important, intent, unintelligible. Until it finally was.
I loved you. I love you. I love them. Ellie, Daphne. You. And you, Leah. You.
I think I heard that. I know I did, but I leaned in close to hear him, and that became a hug, which silenced him. In the hush, I thought of the girls whispering stories, our little bedtime cocoon, wondering what he’d seen when he poked his head in all those nights, what he’d heard.
What could I say now to him that would make him stay? Did I want him to? I didn’t
know. If I kept him from leaving, it would be the most loving thing I had ever done for him. And the cruelest thing I’d ever do to the girls. Because as soon as we got him back—I could see this, feel this, taste it in my throat—he’d go again. Maybe years. Maybe forever.
Still, I said it. “Stay.”
He shook his head. “Leah, I can’t—”
“See the girls,” I said.
His shoulders hunched forward like I’d hit him.
“They’re all grown up,” I said.
“They’re beautiful.”
“It’s Paris,” I said.
“It’s you,” he said.
I thought, this is like the end of the film, not a DVD, but a film, thirty-five-millimeter celluloid, twenty-four frames per second flying by until the reel runs out, tickety, tickety, tickety—
But it wasn’t that at all. It was a book, and it was ending.
“Parents stick around,” I said.
He chuffed.
The shift in tone, the disappearance of tears, was so abrupt it took me a moment to follow. Then I did.
“Okay, no, look—yours didn’t—mine didn’t.” He stared at me, cornered. Defiant. I had to fight to not look away. “I refuse to admit we were bad parents,” I said. “That I was. That you were. When you were around, you were great. And you were around a lot.”
“Maybe too much.”
“What?”
“My writing, work, all those years? It only got worse.”
I looked at him square. “You cannot, you will not, blame us for that.”
“I can’t and don’t and won’t. It was my own fault. I wasn’t doing the work.”
I meant what I said next. “Robert, the work? Okay, I know, but—who cares? Switch to plumbing. Or painting. Or just cooking for kids. The world has plenty of books. Including some great ones of yours. It’s okay if it doesn’t get more—”
I didn’t hear that I’d added from you until I saw it in his face. And once I did, I tried to blurt a retraction, but he waved it aside, not angry now, just exhausted. “I know,” he said. “I know it’s okay with the world.”
He took a breath, looked outside.
“I miss the picnic table. The trash barrel. The empty country road.” He looked back at me. “I miss Paris. Wisconsin.”
“Robert,” I said. “That was—”
“Years ago. But I went back once, one of my ‘writeaways.’ I never told you—I should have—but I shouldn’t have gone back. Table’s gone. Barrel’s gone. Corn’s gone.” He exhaled. “I wasn’t even sure I was in the right place, but the map said I was.”
I didn’t need the map to tell me. He had been there, was there now. I could see it in his face. And I could remember that night, that moon, those kisses, that heat.
“Ticket’s gone.” His voice was very quiet now.
“Tickets?” I asked.
“Ticket. I . . .” He stopped. “I’d bought you a ticket to Paris. To Paris, France. Way back when. Before that trip we took to Paris, Wisconsin. You’d never been to Paris, and I was going to give it to you there, that night, in that Paris. Between savings, what space I had on my credit card, I had only had enough for one round-trip, but I thought, that’s enough, for now, she’ll go, she’ll finally go, and then I thought—”
“Robert—”
“Then, that night, I looked at you and I thought, ‘don’t be stupid! Paris? She’ll never come back.’ And I stared at you and you stared at me and then you were talking nonstop about marriage, and I couldn’t believe my luck—this amazing, crazy woman—right here, she wants me to ask her to marry her? And I’m going to put her on a plane? Let her fly away? And we made love and we made our deal and you dozed and I tore up the ticket and threw it into the field, promising myself I would make it up to you somehow, someday, write or make something so incredible it would change our lives. That we’d get here.”
“Robert,” I whispered.
“I’m sorry. That’s what I’ve been trying to say. For years.”
“Robert,” I said. “We’re here. We made it.”
He shook his head. “You did.”
My cell rang. He looked at the door.
“Stay,” I said.
He stared at me.
“Just tonight.”
“I have to go.”
“Listen to me.”
“Leah, I can’t—”
His voice was rising and so was mine. “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation,” I said. “That you’re here. That you’re going to try to leave again after giving me—us—all of twenty minutes to work it out.”
The phone stopped ringing.
“I’ve had a long time to think—”
“I haven’t!” I said. “How about an hour? A week?”
I looked toward the door now, too. Why couldn’t the girls just walk in now?
He closed his eyes then, and I don’t know what he saw. Me or that picnic table or that field outside Paris, Wisconsin. Or if he saw Ellie or Daphne, or wherever it was he was headed next. I don’t know if he saw that he’d been a good father once, and might yet be again. I squinted hard. I wanted to see it.
“Leah,” he said. “Maybe we could—”
The phone rang again. Twice in two minutes?
Eleanor. The caller ID display dredged up a recent photo in case I’d forgotten who the unforgettable Eleanor was. I showed Robert. He managed a kind of smile.
“You know, she’s in France,” I said.
The smile fled.
Then Ellie’s number and face appeared on the phone’s screen alongside Eleanor’s. Robert rocked back.
I’m too technologically illiterate to do what I did next on purpose, but I somehow managed to answer the phone in such a way that I was speaking to both of them.
“Oui?” I said, lifting the phone to my ear.
“Peter—” Ellie said.
“Annabelle—” Eleanor said.
“Where are you?” I said. The panic in their voices made the phones disappear; it was as though they were standing right there with me. But they weren’t. Only Robert. “What’s going on?” I said.
“Mom!” Ellie said.
“They’re gone,” Eleanor said.
CHAPTER 17
Peter and Annabelle had it, whatever they call it—twintelligence, the special understanding that twin children seem to possess. This granted them special survival skills. Or so I prayed as the story was now recounted in detail. (Too much detail, but Eleanor and Ellie kept correcting and augmenting each other’s tales.)
After Eleanor had collected Ellie, Daphne, and the twins, she announced that they would make the most of the afternoon’s sunshine—our first in days—by stopping off at a small park. Peter, eyeing an opportunity in my absence, nominated the Square du Temple, a compact parc about a kilometer from the store, with a forbidden pond. Annabelle readily agreed.
None of this interested Ellie, who suggested Grenoble and stomped off, leaving Daphne to explain to Eleanor that this wasn’t the name of a park but a town in the French Alps, about eight hours away by bus (they’d once taken a class trip there) or three hours by high-speed rail, the TGV (an option I’d not paid for).
Eleanor proposed a compromise. They would go to the park first, and then, if there was time, to the train station to look at a “high train.” Peter didn’t budge until Eleanor wondered aloud if they might take the Métro to the park? Sold. Even Daphne agreed.
Not Ellie. She looked up the route on her phone and announced that the Métro made no sense: getting there would require three trains and thirty minutes; walking would take hardly half that time.
Eleanor said she would buy Ellie “whatever you want most in the world” if she accompanied them on the Métro. After some reflection, Ellie agreed.
I wonder what Ellie—or
Daphne—thought of as they descended into the Métro and wove their way through the crowd to the platform. What they wanted most was not for sale.
Nor was what Peter wanted—“to take the TGV under the sea to New York”—but before Ellie could explain this was impossible, Peter and Annabelle disappeared.
Not poof, like magic, but slam, like the subway car’s door muscling closed on the late-afternoon crush, splitting the group: the twins inside, on the train; Eleanor, Daphne, and Ellie on the platform, screaming. Impossible.
As the train slid away, the argument began. Daphne said everything would be okay; the plan had only been to go one stop before changing trains. Ellie said Peter wanted to go to New York; the plan should have been to walk. Daphne pointed out that there was an avenue New York across from the Eiffel Tower; Ellie said the TGV didn’t go there.
Daphne said there was a system, a family emergency plan, for this specific scenario, which called for whoever wound up on the train to get off at the next stop, whatever that stop was, and wait, for however long that took.
Ellie said Daphne had confused something she’d read in a book for real life, which made sense because Daphne was the most like Dad and had lost a lot of her grip on reality at the hospital.
And then Daphne had done something awful . . .
“What’s going on?” Robert whispered.
“The twins . . .” I said. I held the phone to my chest to mute it. “They’re—they wanted to get on the TGV—but they got on the Métro—and—”
“Twins?” he said.
“Kids. Little. We watch them. For money. Because—”
“The girls were coming to see—me? Us? Here?”
“For fuck’s sake, Robert,” I said. “Eleanor was taking them to a neutral space, a park. She thought if we—if we all met there—”
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