Paris by the Book

by Liam Callanan

  “Meet them, now?” Robert said, nervous in a new way, scanning the store, even backing up a pace.

  I shook my head. My great moral conundrum of moments ago had been transformed into logistics. “They got on a train to go to the park, the doors closed too soon, and the twins’ train left the station.”

  “How old are they?” he said.

  “You don’t even remember,” I said.

  “The twins,” he said, quietly adding, “Ellie turns sixteen in the fall. Daphne turned thirteen this spring.”

  I heard Ellie’s voice shouting at me from the phone. I lifted it back up to speak, but when I did, I heard Eleanor.

  “Okay, okay,” Eleanor said. Her department meeting fracas voice. “Ellie is fine, okay?” Eleanor said. “Moving on.”

  “Wait, what happened to Ellie?”

  “Daphne pushed her; she fell. Near the tracks, so it was dramatic.”

  “Oh my god—”

  “Not onto the tracks, just near the edge of the platform, which Daphne should not have done, as many people then pointed out to us in various tongues. But Daphne was angry and scared, and my goddaughter was in one of her less helpful moods. Anyway, to review: Ellie is fine, and it was all to the good because it finally got us the attention of a policeman, which had been rather hard to do. They’ve issued a lost-child alert, or so I am given to understand.”

  Ellie broke in. “Mom, the gypsies—” Her slip told me that she was as panicked as I.

  “Ellie,” I said. “Did Peter and Annabelle know where you were going? Would they know to get off?”

  “It was so stupid. Three trains to go five hundred meters,” Ellie said. “I don’t know—he was talking about the TGV, and Grenoble”—and New York, called Daphne from the background—“I don’t even know if they know our phone numbers.”

  “I’m coming to meet you,” I said.

  “The police say to go home,” Eleanor said.

  “Please tell them off in your best department-chair voice,” I said. “Ellie, do not call George.”

  “Leah,” Eleanor said. “I know this has been a lot, of late. I know you’ve been through a lot, but this is out of our hands now.”

  “George is their father,” Ellie shouted.

  “Leah,” Eleanor said. “I need to ask—”

  I pressed the red FERMÉ button on my phone.

  And then, another surprise, quieter, but in its way, no less startling. Before me stood the old Robert, in full. Calm and overly earnest, entirely and unemotionally focused on the task at hand.

  “Leah, what shall we do?” Robert asked.

  It almost worked. The sudden return of the man I’d married, and fought with, and made love to, and had children with, and wrapped presents with, and held birthday parties with and for, toasted to through one success after another after another after another until there was nothing left to toast with, or to—had this been the man I’d come to Paris with, not in misguided pursuit of, this would be the moment we’d embrace and cry and set about finding these children.

  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, Château 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.

  “Mais Zeus!” Annabelle said, overhearing the story. “Zeus” was Daphne’s name for the perpetually stricken man paired with a lightning bolt whose image appears alongside all electrified tracks. NE PAS DESCENDRE SUR LA VOIE, DANGER DE MORT, the yellow signs say. Straightforward enough, and yet, for me, very French: the signs are subtle, the sans serif typeface amiable and quiet, there’s no point d’exclamation! You either pay attention or, like Daphne, you briefly don’t.

  “Ecoutez!” Peter said. “Qui est le nouveau monsieur à la librairie? Il est très gentil.”

  There had been a new man in the store, very nice. But who was he?

  “Nouveau monsieur?” I said. “Qui est-ce? What are you talking about?”

  When Daphne and I had reached the store, it was empty—or it looked empty. The sign had been turned to FERMÉ, and the door was locked. I had unlocked it, and as soon as the bell above the door sounded, Peter and Annabelle had come racing down the spiral stairs.

  “Oh, he’s gone now,” Annabelle said. “He said that you would be home soon. And you were!”

  “Did you hire someone new? Est-il le nouveau Declan?” Annabelle asked.

  Daphne looked at me with her wide, wise, and, I now saw, forever-sad eyes. I wondered if she knew. Who had taken in the twins, asked them for a tour of the store, asked them about their favorite books, produced a pair of Lion candy bars that they ate readily. But Daphne said nothing. And so, instead of studying the twins’ faces, fresh from recounting this amazing story, I studied Daphne’s. If Ellie or Eleanor had been there, it would have all been different. But Eleanor was still lost and Ellie was off retrieving her, and it was just Daphne and me and the twins. And Daphne said nothing, so I said nothing.

  I didn’t tell the twins that was the girls’ father! I didn’t ask them why he thought he could leave them in the store—alone!—after they’d just been found. I didn’t ask them for details about what the man looked like or what he said or what he’d touched, where he’d sat, where his fingerprints might now linger. The twins said that he’d read some books to them, and then went downstairs while they read to themselves.

  “Where’s Ellie and Tante Eleanor?” Peter asked.

  “Is the man coming back?” Annabelle said.

  Before I could answer, Daphne jumped in.

  “No,” she said.

  This stopped me—because it was true, because to hear someone other than me say it aloud made it more true—but it merited hardly a shrug from the twins, who asked to go back upstairs to the children’s area. I nodded. Daphne and I watched them disappear.

  “It wasn’t him, Mom,” Daphne said. “That man, the one who stayed with the twins.”

  I wasn’t sure if I should say anything, if this was a dialogue she was having with herself—and if so, that it would be better if I didn’t interfere. I lowered my eyes.

  But when I looked up, she was looking at me, waiting.

  “I know,” I said.

  “If it was him,” she said, “he wouldn’t have left.”

  I just shook my head.

  “Not without leaving a note,” she said, but she didn’t quite say it like that; she added a question mark, and it hung in the air between us like a tiny bent pin, useless, dangerous. Had he left a note? What would it have said this time? What would I want such a note to say?

  I couldn’t say, only that it would have to be many, many pages longer than the little scraps of paper he once left.

  What would Daphne want it to say? That I knew specifically. Not six letters, but three words.

  Be back soon!

  She was still looking at me. I’d been distractedly answering my own questions without answering hers: would my father leave without leaving a note?

  “No,” I said, and caught myself as my voice rose, as another question mark wavered between us. “Absolutely not.”

  * * *

  —

  I called the police to let them know all was well. The police called the embassy. Carl called and asked me to confirm all was well. “That was a close one,” he said, and for a second, I thought he was referring to Robert. Yes, I said.

  Ellie wanted to go out to “celebrate” and of course she did; she had ventured out on her own and rescued Eleanor, she had managed to not fall onto the train tracks, she had achieved some sort of rapprochement with Daphne, she had set out in search of the two twins, and though she hadn’t found them, here they were, safe and sound and smiling.

  And, the most difficult achievement of all (though she did not realize this), she’d not set eyes on her father. She listened to the twins’ story of the courteous man and immediately determined that it was Carl. Peter and Annabelle disagreed, but without fuss. Ellie was la grande sœur, and they’d long ago learned that she was always right, even when she was very wrong.

  I had no interest in dining out, and neither did Eleanor. I wanted to burrow. I wanted to lock the door to the store and then the door to our living quarters and drag a box or two of books over to barricade ourselves in. I wanted a frozen fête de Picard and I wanted a lot of wine to go with it. As we started our way upstairs, Eleanor hung back and whispered a suggestion: perhaps Ellie could babysit while Eleanor and I ducked out for a tête à tête? I was a step above her on the staircase, and so when I turned to tell her no—eventually, yes, but not right now—I kissed Eleanor on the forehead.

  “Don’t get fresh with me,” Eleanor said, and that somehow made me smile.

  I lifted the no-eating-anywhere-but-the-kitchen rule, and we wolfed down one of Picard’s more American creations—Penne rigate au jambon et fromage, the polyglot label cloaking mac and cheese with bacon bits—while we watched Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s 2007 homage to Lamorisse, Flight of the Red Balloon, which Eleanor had checked out of her hotel’s lending library.

  We didn’t finish. Deep into the film, dinner discarded and forks sticking to pillows and carpet, Peter and Annabelle falling asleep, Daphne watching intently, Eleanor watching all of us intently, Ellie got up and turned it off.

  “There’s not enough balloon,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  Among other things, Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s film involves an absent (though not unreachable) father. I don’t know if that’s the real reason Ellie turned it off. I also don’t know the real reason Robert left. I do know what I saw, and that was someone who was very afraid. Maybe then, there, he was only afraid of me, but I think he was afraid of all of us, of how much we loved him. Of how much that love required his presence. And I think—strangest of all—that he was afraid of Paris. He was afraid of the magic here, which had not only made his wife into a bookstore owner and his daughters into Parisiennes, but his fiction into reality.

  Except it hadn’t, not word-for-word. At one point, for example, not long after Robert’s manuscript has the little bedraggled family arrive in Paris, they go exploring. Somewhere along the way, while licking shop windows in an unnamed neighborhood, the wife peels off; the children and father march on ahead. This is foreshadowing of a sort; the husband will disappear in another twenty or so pages.

  But first there’s this: the wife finishes with whatever her distraction was and wanders up the street after her family. It’s some time before she finds them, but then, there they are, a
rrayed behind the glowing window of a gelato store, in grinning conversation with the staff inside. This flavor or that flavor or both?

  The wife has been gone for a good long while, so the obligation is to duck into the shop, all smiles and apologies. But she doesn’t. She stands outside and watches them. The shop is bright, her family, too. If she entered, the composition would slip; the bubble, in Robert’s words, would pop: the text makes clear that she can almost see, feel, the world sloping and the shop with it.

  The wife studies the scene for so long that she’s still outside when the family exits. Surprise and delight ensue. The children hold up their paper cups, their spoons: taste, taste, taste!

  The husband says to her, I’ll go back inside, I’ll get you your own, what do you want?

  The scene ends there. It’s up to us to imagine the wife’s answer, the look on her face, the shape her mouth made as she opened it, or if she opened it at all.

  * * *

  —

  Robert said something when he was in the store with the twins. I saw this on the surveillance video. Not to the twins: while he’s reading to them upstairs, a customer arrives and Robert must hear the bell—there’s no sound on Asif’s system—and he goes to the top of the spiral staircase. And pauses. What he must have thought then: that the time had come, that I’d come back with the girls. He pauses, he looks at the twins, who’ve taken over reading the book to themselves, he looks around the room as if checking for another exit. He looks down the stairs. (Below, whoever it was—the camera doesn’t catch them, they must not have come in far—has already left, likely because they were never issued a bonjour.)

  Robert says something and then takes the first step down.

  The twins don’t look up, so he must not have been speaking to them. Maybe Robert hadn’t said anything aloud. But he’d wanted to say something, one word, several—I saw his lips move. I couldn’t, not for the life of me, read them.