by Susan Wiggs
Immigration and customs lines were a drag, but Mason gritted his teeth and shuffled along with everyone else through the lines. Kids and their short-tempered parents griped at one another. Most of the French people took out cigarettes, poised to light up the second they stepped out of the terminal. Apparently for smokers, the new ban on all in-flight smoking was torture.
The guy at passport control barely looked at him, just stamped his passport and gave him a brief nod.
The next stop was baggage claim, followed by customs, and by that time, Mason felt as though his back teeth were floating. Fortunately, the customs officials didn’t think he looked too sketchy. His mom always made him dress half decently for flights, claiming you got better treatment that way. So he was wearing a polo with the Dalton School logo, twill chinos and leather slip-ons. He probably looked douchy, but at least he wasn’t going to see anyone he knew. All the kids he knew were partying back home.
He finally found the men’s room and nearly collapsed with relief. Then he washed up, dousing his face with water to wake himself up, and joined the swelling throng at the exit. It took him only a moment to spot his dad. They had a set rendezvous spot at Charles de Gaulle—a café that sold Trevor’s favorite type of beer, Blanche de Belgique, which was served in old-fashioned pottery tankards with hinged lids. No matter what time of day it was, when Trevor came to pick someone up at the Charles de Gaulle Airport, he could always be found with a cold beer in a stein, seated at one of the café tables, looking like Falstaff with a big grin on his face.
Mason ran to him. “Dude!” he said as they man-hugged.
“Hey, son, it’s good to see you. How was your flight?”
People always asked that. “It got me here.”
“So I see. Glad you made it, buddy. It’s going to be a great summer.”
Working in an office. Woo-hoo. “That’s the plan,” he said, forcing cheerfulness.
“Yep. You got everything?”
He nodded, zipping his passport into his jacket pocket and grabbing the handle of his rolling duffel.
“Omar’s waiting to take us home.”
“Omar?”
“Mr. Hamini. New driver. Algerian guy. He’s great.”
They found the car in the waiting lot. It was a black Citroen, the kind a diplomat might ride around in. Mason’s dad liked having a driver in the city because parking was totally impossible. Dad did have a car, though, and he’d already promised Mason they would take a couple of road trips out to the coast. Mason was totally pumped about driving in France.
He noticed someone in the passenger seat.
“Oh, forgot to tell you. Omar’s daughter is in the car. She’s another intern at the agency, so I told him to bring her along. There’s a reception tonight, and I thought it’d be nice for you to have a friend in the group.”
Mason yawned and stretched. “That’s fine. Whatever.”
Omar came bursting out of the car. “Welcome, welcome, we are happy to meet you at last.” His French was heavily accented.
Mason shook his hand. “Thank you.”
“Just remember, wherever you wish to go, I am at your service.” The guy was swarthy and strapping, wearing wrinkled trousers and a wool sport coat that looked way too heavy for the heat of the day. Grinning beneath a full mustache, he hoisted the bags into the trunk.
“Thank you.”
They got into the car. “My daughter, Katia,” said Omar, gesturing at the passenger in the front seat. “Katia, this is Mr. Bellamy.”
Mason nodded at the girl in the front seat. She wore a veil that covered her head and another that obscured the lower half of her face. Above the veil, her eyes were large and richly brown, with thick lashes. Somehow he could tell she was smiling. There was a sparkle in her eyes, and they squinted in a friendly way.
“Hello, Mr. Bellamy,” she said. Her voice was nice—smooth and deep, like an actress’s.
“How about you call me Mason?”
“D’accord.” She nodded. The eyes kept smiling.
“I think the two of you are the same age,” said Mason’s dad. “Seventeen, yes?”
Katia nodded again.
“School has just finished,” said Omar, speeding onto the expressway that ringed the city. “She is going to spend the summer serving her family and pursuing her studies.”
“Sounds awesome,” Mason muttered under his breath to his dad in English.
“My father is joking,” Katia said in perfect British English. “I’m going to be working at the NGO for the summer. The same one you are. And I assure you, it will be awesome.”
Mason felt his ears turn red. “Oh, cool.”
The beautiful dark eyes smiled again, and she turned toward the front. She took out a paperback novel in French and started reading. Her father said something in Algerian, and the eyes flashed. Defiance? Did girls in veils defy their fathers?
“Speaking of work,” his dad said, “here’s how it lays out. You’ll be going into the office three or four days a week. You’ll work with Thierry Rousseau. He’s in charge of communications and funding initiatives.”
“Sounds good.” Truth be told, Mason was slightly excited about financial stuff. His dad had always been adamant that he, Adam and Ivy should learn the family business, and certain things about it were totally cool. International finance sounded classy, and more important, it sounded interesting. His dad put business deals together. He must be pretty good at it, because he made a lot of money.
“The other days are all yours,” his dad said. “I want you to enjoy the city. And the countryside. I got you a student rail pass so you can take unlimited side trips.”
Mason folded his hands behind his head and grinned. That sounded more like it. He was here, so he might as well make the best of the situation. It was a far cry from the way he spent most summers, though.
Most years, he and his brother and sister went to camp. And summer camp rocked. That was where he had learned to sail a boat, cast a fly, scale a sheer rock face. At camp, he had kissed his first girl, drunk his first beer and made friends from all over. At the end of the camp session, the whole family would travel to one of the places served by the NGO, and that was where the real work happened. They had built houses in Cambodia, dug wells in Ghana, helped migrant workers in Kentucky, worked in a vaccination clinic in Peru... He lost track of all the different places they’d been. A lot of times the conditions had sucked—raging heat, bugs, pit toilets, uncomfortable beds. But there was another side to it that wiped out all the parts that sucked.
It felt good to help. It was that simple. He didn’t like talking about it or even thinking about it. He liked feeling it. And no matter how annoyed he got when his parents were dragging him all over the globe while he’d rather be hanging out with his friends, he always ended up finding that moment. The one that made all the bugs and heat worthwhile.
Mason had been twelve years old the first time he’d felt it. That was the year Ivy came down with pneumonia, and his mom had to stay home with her for weeks. Adam and Mason ended up spending the entire summer in Montauk with their grandpa George Bellamy.
Grandpa George was magic. Mason had always known it, for as long as he could remember, all the way back to when he was a tyke. That summer, he had taken Mason and his brother, Adam, to the PAWS shelter near his summer place on Long Island, where he put the two of them to work.
At first the boys had been horrified. While their friends were playing Nintendo and going to the beach, Mason and Adam were picking up dog poop and hosing out kennels. No matter how much lemon-scented cleaner was used, the place reeked. Mason was sure his formerly fun grandfather had gone senile, forcing him to work like a rented mule.
And then he’d met Sam—short for “Samuel L. Dachshund.” He was a tiny, skittish wiener dog, so skinny you could count his ribs�
�if he would let you get close enough to count. He was mean and scrappy and funny-looking, with a pointed nose and crooked teeth and long, floppy ears.
Despite the growling and snapping, Mason felt a squeeze of love in his heart when he looked at that trembling, growling little dog, huddling in the corner of his crate, his whip of a tail curled under his bony hips. Mason approached the crate slowly. He dropped a treat just inside the door. The starving dog snapped it up, then retreated to the corner again. Mason repeated the process. Several times a day, he would place a treat into the crate. The dog would dart forward and grab it. By the end of the second day, Sam was taking treats from his hand. After another day, he let Mason stroke him a little, on his chest. Eventually, he allowed Mason to pick him up.
It felt like a little miracle, holding that trembling pup against his chest. Sam licked Mason’s chin. After several days of being held, licking and playing, Sam allowed Mason to give him a bath. Mason held him while a volunteer trimmed the dog’s toenails. Within three weeks, little Sam was sleek and well fed, and when a nice lady named Mindy came to the shelter, she cradled him in her arms and said, “Okay, I’m going to take him.” She adopted him on the spot, then called her husband to tell him she was bringing home a dog.
As Mason said goodbye to the little dachshund, that squeeze of sentiment in his heart felt bittersweet. Grandpa George said, “That’s the way love works sometimes. You get to have someone for a while, and then you let him go. And that’s okay because you did some good in the world.”
“I’d rather have the kind of love I can keep.”
“We all feel that way, my boy. Let’s go get some ice cream.”
Helping became a Bellamy summer tradition.
In his more cynical moments, Mason figured his parents’ insistence on volunteer work was geared to give him a decent topic for his college application essays. Still, he could not deny the heart squeeze that happened time and time again, whether he was helping a stray dog in New York, or an old lady in Trinidad who was too frail to make her way to the village well.
When he got to his dad’s apartment in Paris, he retrieved his bags and thanked Omar for the ride. As his dad explained the door code and elevator keypad, Mason kept thinking about Katia’s large, dark eyes and wondering what was going on behind the veil and under all those swaths of fabric wrapping her as if she was a fragile icon being shipped somewhere far away.
“What’s up with her?” he asked his dad as the car went down around the building’s service alley.
His dad shrugged. “Katia? She seems like a nice kid. Keeps to herself. Omar and his wife are pretty traditional.”
“You think?”
“If you need a ride, there’s a call button in the apartment.”
“I’ll pass, thanks.”
Dad nodded. “The metro is quicker, anyway. Closest station is Rivoli, but it’s easier to cross the bridge to St. Michel. More connections there.”
The elevator let them off right into the apartment, which was why there was a strict security code. The door glided silently open, and they walked into Dad’s home away from home. His folks had bought the place years ago when Dad realized he was spending so much time working in Paris. It was way smaller than their place in Upper Manhattan. There was a kitchen and lounge room with a balcony overlooking a park with shade trees and stone fences and sandy walkways lined with benches. The spare bedroom was the size of a closet, but Mason and all his gear fit in it.
He thought he was too keyed up to sleep, but when he wheeled his luggage into the little bedroom, he did a face-plant in the middle of the bed and crashed for several hours. When he woke up, the sun was low, and for a moment he couldn’t figure out if the orangish thread of light through the blinds was sunrise or sunset. He was shocked to see the time—after seven. The day was nearly gone, and he had to go to that dumb reception for the interns. Yawning, he got up and shuffled to the bathroom, then to the kitchen, because he was starving.
As he approached the fridge, he heard a noise. His dad’s voice, somewhere in the apartment. He spotted his father out on the terrace, pacing as he talked on a cordless phone. Moving through the dim apartment, he could hear his father speaking in a rapid murmur, in French. “What about Cancale?” he was asking. “You’ve always liked the coast out there. Simon loves it out there.” There was a pause. “Of course I would visit, chère, why would I not? It’s just that with Mason here, we must... Yes. I understand. Me, too...”
Chère. Dear. An endearment. The word raised a weird prickle on Mason’s neck.
He slid open the door to the terrace and stepped outside.
“D’accord. À bientôt.” His father ended the call.
“Who is Simon?” Mason asked.
“What’s that?” Dad looked distracted as he set aside the phone.
“Simon. Who likes it in Cancale.”
“Oh. A friend. The son of a friend.”
Chère. What kind of friend did you talk to like that?
Mason stared at the cigarette in his father’s hand. “You’re smoking.”
“Everyone smokes in Paris.” Dad stubbed it out in a flowerpot on the enamel-top café table.
“Great.” Mason picked up the light blue package of Gauloises. “I’ll join you.”
Dad grabbed it from him. “Don’t be a smart-ass.”
“I’ve never seen you smoke before.”
“It’s a nasty habit.”
“Then why do it? Jeez, Dad.”
“I know. Sorry. I’ll lay off the Gauloises.”
Mason planted his elbows on the railing and looked around the city. It was still lively at twilight, the warm summer air filled with the scent of roasting coffee and the sounds of traffic punctuated by the occasional two-toned flare of a siren.
“We should go. You’ve got that thing—the reception for the interns you’ll be working with at the agency. You up for it?”
Mason shrugged. “I guess.”
“It’s not far. We can walk.”
He took a quick shower and dressed in something he figured his mom would approve of—navy chinos and a collared shirt that didn’t look too wrinkled. They crossed the river at the Pont Royal and walked together along the Quai d’Orsay, passing busy cafés with red awnings, strolling tourists and flower sellers, people just getting started for the night. Dad showed him the St. Michel metro station where he could catch the subway or RER—the express train—if he needed to. Near the cathedral of Notre Dame, a group of French girls was singing a close-harmony rendition of “Kiss from a Rose,” their accents butchering the song but their voices nice.
All along the Seine were the bouquinistes—the booksellers operating out of battered, dark green metal boxes attached to the stone walls of the river embankment. The variety of books and trinkets was mind-boggling. He glimpsed everything from ancient comic books to dirty magazines to art prints and dumb stuff for tourists, like key chains, marionettes and neck scarves printed with scenes of the city.
One thing he could say for Paris—there was action and bustle. Always something to look at, like a woman dressed and made up exactly like the Mona Lisa, holding a gilt frame and cadging for tips. Old guys in flat caps were playing pétanque at a tiny park, a woman in a head scarf was bringing in her cages of birds for the night and somewhere a saxophone played a lonely melody. The air smelled of coffee and food and piss, and the traffic surged relentlessly along the main streets. Mason’s dad strode through it all like a native, and they arrived at the reception only a few minutes late. The director greeted them and gave them name tags.
Then it was time to mingle. Mason hated mingling. It seemed phony and forced, but this gang would constitute his social life all summer long, so he figured he might as well make the best of it. Plus, he was starving, so the quicker he got the social niceties out of the way, the better.
; The group included Taye, a Nigerian, who wore a soccer club shirt and was already piling a plate high with stuff from the buffet table. Malcolm, a Brit, was surly, copping an attitude with monosyllabic answers to all the polite questions. The other American was Lisa Dorfman, who in the first five minutes of conversation let everyone know she was a student at Andover and intended to go to Princeton, that her mother was a judge and her father a playwright. Mason found her beyond annoying. The other student, Katia Hamini, arrived with her father and glided around in her veils, quietly observing the event.
Misfits, dorks and elitists. “My favorite,” he grumbled.
“Hey,” his dad murmured.
“I know,” Mason said, heading off the correction.
There was a quick welcome and orientation talk. They were given schedules and contact information for everyone. There would be work trips to SHAPE headquarters near Brussels, and to The Hague, where the UN convened. Awesome, Mason thought glumly. There were plenty of places in Europe he longed to explore, but those two were not on his list.
Lisa Dorfman paraded herself back and forth in front of him in an obvious ploy for attention. He supposed she was cute with her blond ponytail and varsity tennis team body, but her snooty personality obliterated the cuteness.
When he went over to the snack table for some cheese and grapes, she sidled up to him. “Try the Reblochon,” she suggested. “You can’t even get it in the States because it’s got some kind of live culture in it that isn’t FDA approved.”
He put a hunk of it on his plate. “I don’t know much about cheese. I’d be just as happy with some Cheez Whiz on a Ritz.”
She laughed as if he’d said something hilarious. “So you go to the Dalton School, right?”
