The Book of Second Chances

by Katherine Slee

  “You okay?” Frederic sat down beside her, but any attempt Emily would have made to reply was lost as the tune of “Single Ladies” blasted from surround-sound speakers and made her ears pulsate. Agnes came into the center of the room and began to sing in a powdery voice aimed directly at Tyler. Emily couldn’t help but watch as Agnes started to writhe, her body transforming in Emily’s mind into a serpent that was coiling itself around and around the room, wrapping them up tight and squeezing out all the air.

  Emily gave a sharp shake of her head, dipped her chin and tried to focus instead on the way in which she had earlier watched as a man blew into molten glass, turning it over and over to create a sculpted vase that looked as if it had a rainbow running through its center. She took a breath, waited for the music to do what it always did, make it possible to ignore the real world.

  “Do you want to try?” Frederic sat too close, and the way he was looking at her like some kind of delicacy to be sampled made Emily shift to the side, place a cushion on the space between them.

  “Non, merci,” she said, taking a sip of her drink and looking over to where Agnes was shimmying and writhing, all for Tyler’s benefit, but he seemed more interested in watching how Frederic was edging ever closer to her. It was surreal, like she had fallen down the rabbit hole and woken up in an alternate reality.

  The music stopped, and the room fell still with nobody speaking, each of them waiting for something to happen. Agnes sauntered over and held the microphone out to Emily, one eyebrow raised in silent question.

  “Elle a dit ‘non.’” Clementine took the microphone and offered a sympathetic smile to Emily.

  Agnes yawned, then helped herself to another drink, stirring through the martini with an olive on a stick. “So you are just an illustrator, not like your grandmother?”

  Just. One simple word thrown into the mix, so innocent, so deliberate. Then Emily realized what it was Agnes had said. “You know?”

  “The whole world knows about you and your little quest,” she replied. “Why else would he keep you so close?” Agnes looked over at Tyler, then back at Emily’s scar.

  It was a challenge—something Emily had managed to avoid for most of her life but at one point would have risen to without a moment’s hesitation. Perhaps it was the alcohol firing her spirit, or even the very otherness of this day which made her stand up, snatch the microphone from Agnes, and go over to the screen. Or maybe she was just fed up with the way Agnes was looking at her, with a mixture of pity and amusement, that had Emily scrolling through the list of songs, trying so very hard not to let her mind overthink what it was she was about to do.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Tyler said as he came up beside her and bent his head close.

  Emily didn’t dare look up at him, knew that if she did all her bravado, all her crazy impulsiveness would simply disappear.

  “Yes, I do.”

  As the opening bars of “Heart of Glass” filled the small room, Emily closed her eyes and imagined everyone else around her being spirited away. Her hand gripped the microphone as she felt the pulse of bass guitar, allowed it to fill the space inside of her, and she opened her mouth to sing. In that moment, there was nothing but her and the song, nothing but the way that music always made her free and completely detached from her fears. Her voice was soft, but powerful, each word wrapped up in rich tones that escaped from her throat without getting caught around either her scar or her doubts.

  The song came to an end, a moment’s pause as the world fell back into place, and Emily opened her eyes at the very same time Frederic, Clementine, and even Agnes leapt to their feet and began to holler their response.

  “Wow. Just, wow.” Tyler pushed his hair from his face and stared at Emily. She handed back the microphone and bit down on the inside of her cheek to try to stop herself from smiling, but it did nothing to quell the flush of emotion that spread from her cheeks and all the way down her neck. Bringing her hand up to cover her scar, she started when Tyler pulled it away and squeezed it tight.

  “That was amazing,” he said with a slow shake of his head.

  “So it’s not true?” Agnes asked with a frown.

  “What?” Emily replied as she placed one hand on the wall, aware of how the earlier two shots she had drunk were now spinning through her veins.

  “That the accident left you unable to speak properly. Because you can sing, so you must be able to speak.” She held out her phone, showed Emily a photograph taken of her inside Shakespeare & Company along with a headline in French that Emily didn’t manage to translate before Agnes pulled the phone away. “Is it all a lie, for the publicity?”

  Emily wobbled, fell back onto the sofa as she tried to get her brain to put together something vaguely resembling an intelligent response.

  “Singing is different.”

  “Agnes.” Clementine tugged at her friend’s arm. “Laisse la tranquille.”

  “The books are incroyable,” Agnes said with a pout. “But it is wrong to lie if there are no more.”

  “You may have lost an idol, someone you admired from afar.” Tyler draped his jacket over Emily’s shoulders and helped her to her feet. “But she lost her grandmother, so leave her alone.”

  “It was good to meet you, Emily.” Clementine smiled as she held the door open for them both, gave a small shrug of her shoulders as she glanced back at where Agnes was now sitting on Frederic’s lap.

  “Come on, Cinderella,” Tyler said to Emily as they climbed the stairs and he escorted her back through the bar. “Let’s get you home.”

  “Home,” Emily mumbled as they stepped outside, and for a second she felt her mood drop back down from where it had been balancing, if only for a little while, precariously close to happy. Then she breathed in the scent of a city she did not know, remembered the sound, the sight, of a group of strangers who had invited her into their world, and it made her smile. A real smile, one that pushed along her scar and beyond, one that made her believe, for the first time, that coming here, with Tyler, wasn’t a mistake.

  The moon was low and bright, casting dappled pieces of light on the puddles that had appeared while they were inside, singing about love, loss, and all the fractious hope that Emily had told herself not to believe in. Once more, it was as if she had stepped inside someone else’s life, an existence that didn’t belong to her, that had never before been within her reach. For so long she had assumed that the future she once thought she could have had would never be. Years had passed since she had done anything other than follow a routine, a script of the day-to-day that never changed because it was safe, it was secure. But now she had been shown the other side, seen what was waiting for her if she dared to step through the door and into the secret garden that she had ignored for far too long.

  “We could wait for a taxi?” Tyler said as he lit a cigarette, then blew a couple of rings into the sky.

  Emily shook her head as she wrapped her arms around herself and looked both ways before crossing the street.

  There was something inside of her that seemed to be trying to set itself free. A feeling, or a memory of a feeling, that, up until now, had seemed nothing more than an impossible dream. Emily still couldn’t wrap her mind around the idea she was walking the streets of Paris, with Tyler by her side, away from everything she thought she needed, what she thought was all she could ever have.

  Is this what her grandmother had wanted her to find?

  She looked up again, began to count the stars that were blinking back from the heavens.

  “I’m moving to Nashville.” Tyler was staring at a street performer on the bridge as they passed, a man with a dark, wiry beard and pink cheeks that swelled as he played on a burnished trumpet.

  “Why Nashville?” Emily couldn’t think of anything better to say, because she couldn’t figure out why a man who used to trade stocks and shares, making rich people richer, could suddenly decide to pursue a career in country music.

  “To collaborate. To breathe
it in. To wear it like a favorite jumper, have it cocoon you, nurture you, protect you from all the negativity.”

  Just like Catriona had when she came to Paris and met five strangers who became her closest friends.

  “There’s a romance to it all,” he said, taking her arm and guiding her across the cobbled street. “Drowning yourself in music, and country has all that heartache, all that pain, wrapped up in such beautiful melodies.”

  Emily thought of the notebook he carried around with him. She wondered what was hidden within, and if he would share it with her, the way she had shared her drawings.

  The hotel staircase was old and narrow, with a metal cage for a lift that ran up its center. Room 304 had a brass door knocker in the shape of an owl.

  A group of owls is called a parliament. Emily looked along the corridor, saw a line of little brass owls, their beaks peeping out from every door. And their ears are asymmetrical so they can pinpoint the exact location of their prey. She began to tap the owl’s head against the door, softly, softly, over and over.

  “I’m sorry.” Tyler stood beside her, holding out a key. “About what Agnes said earlier.”

  “Forget it,” Emily replied, letting go of the owl to fiddle with the chain of her locket.

  “I didn’t want you to find out about that stuff on the Internet.” He was leaning against the door frame, the very tip of his boot touching her shoe.

  “It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s not fair that everyone gets to have an opinion on what you’re doing here, when you don’t even know yourself.”

  Everyone had an opinion on her, they always did, only now Emily couldn’t ignore it, because if she did, if she gave up and went home, there might not be anything to go back to.

  “Good night, Tyler.”

  “Good night, Emily,” he said as he leant toward her and gave her a gentle kiss on the cheek, but she didn’t flinch, didn’t back away from his touch as she would any other.

  He smelled the same. Of leather, hair gel, and mint. It snapped her back to her childhood, up through to the beginning of adolescence and the first time they looked at each other in a different way.

  She had been stood in the hall of her old house, ready to go to a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Regent’s Park with her hair down and wearing a tea dress made from the deepest green. The doorbell rang, and she opened it, saw him before her in jacket and tie, with hair slicked back and a look of disbelief on his face.

  Thirteen years old and on the cusp of a life most extraordinary. Two children still to grow into adults, catching a glimpse of how they were changing into something more.

  He pulled back and looked at her in the exact same way as he did that summer night, fifteen years ago, as if he was only seeing her then for the first time, looking beyond the scar and all the damage her body had endured.

  For a second, for just a fraction of a moment, Emily forgot all about the absolute bombshell her grandmother had dropped. But as he walked away and she closed the door to her room, Emily realized she felt a little disappointed; that somehow he had managed to brighten her mood, and without him all seemed duller, less interesting, than before.

  So she did what she always did when the pain began to creep close: she sat by the window, opened it wide to breathe in the night, slipped on the borrowed headphones, and began to draw. But this time the lines that appeared were of someone new. A man who ambled as he walked, a guitar thrown over one shoulder and a curl of hair at the nape of his neck.

  She drew him in the middle of a field draped in midnight, with trees that turned to listen as he played. A long line of notes escaping from strings gently plucked. Notes that flew up and over his head, one by one transforming into a swarm, a miasma, of hundreds and hundreds of birds on the wing.

  12

  BLUEBIRD

  Sialia

  The woman sat across from Emily wore her face like an apology for getting old. She was stirring her coffee and eating tiny forkfuls of cake, waiting for Emily to finish reading another excerpt from her grandmother’s past. Emily herself was trying to ignore the symphony of accents coming from the other side of the café, from where a group of six people was huddled around a table, discussing the previous night’s adventures in broken English, one of whom had a dark bob.

  Agnes was part of the current clutch of hipster twenty-somethings living out their literary fantasies by sleeping in the upstairs library next door—apart from when they were exploring the delights of Paris, and one another, from what Emily could make out, on a summer’s night just gone. It made her jealous, to think of all that life they still had yet to live, that someone like Agnes was following in her grandmother’s footsteps when Emily had never had the chance to do so herself.

  “Catriona used to write to my mother, even when she no longer ran the shop.” Madeleine was staring at Emily’s scar. She could feel those eyes on her as she carefully folded her grandmother’s words, tucked them away inside her bag. “She used to send us an advance copy of all her books, even the ones from before she was famous.”

  Before, Emily thought. It always came down to before. As if her grandmother was only worth remembering because she had stumbled upon an idea, a character, that had touched the lives of so many. She always found it insulting that all of her grandmother’s published works up until that point were only considered of worth because of what came next. Fame and fortune, the perennial dream.

  Emily yawned and took a final sip of her coffee. She hadn’t been able to sleep again last night, tossing and turning in the unfamiliar bed as she tried to draw, but found her mind full of questions, too many reasons to disappear back to England. In the end, she got up, slipped a note under Tyler’s door, and walked through Paris, searching for more clues about her past, waiting for memories to appear.

  Just before dawn, she found herself outside the bookstore café, already lit from within, the scent of coffee and croissant spilling onto the street. A woman stood behind the counter with auburn hair, flecked through with gray, who looked up as Emily stood in the doorway, and the two of them paused a moment, to drink each other in.

  Madeleine had gestured toward a table by the window, with a view of the world slowly waking, then brought coffee, dark and strong, along with slices of almond and cherry cake because the croissants were still in the oven. After she sat down, she slipped a plain, white envelope over the tabletop toward Emily without a word.

  Emily looked across at the hipsters and wondered what it would feel like to be a part of something so uninhibited, so raw; if she would have been a person brave enough to embark on such an adventure, had her life turned out differently.

  “I’m sorry for keeping you in the dark.” Madeleine followed Emily’s gaze, watched with her as the group ambled out of the café, and Agnes nodded in their direction while saying a curt bonjour.

  Emily envied them their closeness, the bond made through shared experience. The ease with which they moved around one another, the scent of desire stuck to their clothes, their skin. “You knew.”

  “About the treasure trail?” Madeleine picked up her cup, set it down again. “Yes, but I promised not to tell.”

  Promises and secrets, all tangled up as one.

  “Who’s Antoine?”

  Madeleine smiled at the mention of his name, then used her fork to gather the crumbs of cake into a small pile.

  “Antoine was—is—a force of nature. Strong, handsome, and intelligent. A lethal combination in any man, more so in one who could recite the entire works of Shakespeare, even after two bottles of wine. My mother told me they were all in love with him, in one way or another. Even I had a crush on him, as a teenager, despite realizing he would never be interested in someone like me.”

  “Where is he now?” He’s alive. Emily felt a murmur of anticipation.

  “You tell me. Isn’t that the point of all this, to make you figure out the clues yourself?”

  Emily wished she knew what the point was, an
d if Antoine was the real reason she was there.

  “Come.” Madeleine stood. “Let me show you what it is I asked you here for.”

  They went to the back of the café, climbed a tight, winding stair to reach a cluttered attic space that seemed to be part office, part storeroom. Madeleine began to search through stacks of books, then clambered onto one of the desks and moved aside dusty cardboard boxes from a top shelf.

  Emily went over to the window, leant out and looked down to see an internal courtyard where someone sat, reading. Balconies and rooftops of Paris were dotted as far as the eye could see, and if Emily stood on tiptoe she could just about discern the tip of the Eiffel Tower on the horizon.

  “Ah, here it is.” Madeleine dropped something onto the desk, then clambered back down, wiping her hands together and sending tiny particles of dust spiraling through the air.

  It was a photo album, filled with snapshots of the past. Emily recognized Gigi first of all, pouting at the camera with one foot kicked out behind her while standing on an upturned crate, stacking shelves in the shop next door; then another of her seated in an oversize chair, drawing on a cigarette, all of her concentration on the book in her lap.

  There was also one of Charlie, arms thrown wide as she danced in the courtyard, surrounded by fallen leaves and candlelight. Another of a man with hair that reached his shoulders, smiling at the camera with eyes that seemed to see inside your soul.

  “Noah?” Emily asked.

  “How did you know?”

  He had that look about him. Dangerous but alluring.

  She turned the page to find a group shot of six people, young and full of hope. They were huddled together outside the front of the café, arms draped through and around one another, no space between them to let the light through.

  Emily recognized them now. Her grandmother, front and center, holding Gigi at the waist; Noah on her other side, his arm draped over her shoulder, but with fingers wrapped into those dark curls. Next to him was Charlie, just as tall as he, even in bare feet, who was shouting something at the photographer, brow furrowed, hand waving. No doubt as commanding a presence back then as she was now.