That Spring in Paris

by Ciji Ware

  “What! Why not?”

  “No, I mean it,” insisted Avery. “Alain and Dominique are Catholic, so they’ll never divorce. All but one of their kids lives on their own. Nobody raises any eyebrows that we’re together. He and I are both artists,” she added, as if that justified everything. “We each need our solitude, but we enjoy the times when we’re together. And besides, it suits me not to be too entangled.” She winked. “More my style, you know what I mean?”

  “But what about children? We’re thirty-six! Don’t you want to have any?”

  Avery shook her head, realizing she was about to speak heresy. “Actually? No. I don’t want to be a parent. My portraits are all the children I want in my life. But you!” She gave Juliet’s shoulders a gentle squeeze. “You’re a completely different case altogether—more’s the pity.”

  * * *

  Finn found himself pacing back and forth in front of the door leading from the pilothouse to the deck. He hadn’t believed his eyes when he’d seen Juliet standing at the top of his gangway and watched her register that there was another woman on board. Did she realize it was my soon-to-be-ex-wife? Or did she think it was someone else? That I’m a two-timing—

  “Finn!” Kim exclaimed, bringing the chaos swirling around in his head to an abrupt halt. “Who was that, just now?”

  “A... person who knows Madame Grenelle next door. She apparently decided it was too early to call here and left.”

  It wasn’t a lie, but not exactly the entire truth, was it?

  Kim said from the sofa, “Well, look... I came all this way! Can’t we at least talk about all this?”

  “Talk about what? My lawyer has kept me up to date. You could have just express-mailed the divorce papers to my aunt and I’d have signed them.”

  Finn took the legal-size manila envelope from her hands.

  “I just wanted to be sure you received them,” she replied, not holding his glance. “I’m supposed to get married in June and the divorce obviously needs to be finalized before then.”

  “Obviously,” he repeated, walking toward the desk, looking for a pen. “But you might have called first.”

  “I called Claudine.”

  “Yes, I know. She immediately rang me, which is the only reason I gave her the go-ahead to give you this address so we could get this over with.” He looked over his shoulder. “But nobody told you to come over at seven a.m.”

  “I-I wanted to be sure to catch you at home.”

  “Well, I’d very much appreciate it if you keep it to yourself where I’m living.”

  “Your father knows you’re here in Paris,” she said, with a defensive shrug of her shoulders. “He was the one who told me how to get in touch with his sister.”

  “But why track me down?” he demanded. “Our lawyers were to handle everything. That was our agreement.”

  “Your agreement, you mean. You’d already cleared out of Nevada completely when I was informed there’d be no more direct communication between us.”

  Finn turned around and looked at her with a steady gaze. “And you know why that was, don’t you?”

  He felt himself begin to plot the fastest way to sign the papers and get Kim off the barge so he could do some tracking down of his own. Avery Evans’s place would be his first stop.

  “Yes, I know why you’ve refused to speak to me all this time.” Kim rose from the sofa to peer over his shoulder at the desk. “Guilty as charged. But before you sign, I feel there are a few things we need to discuss—in person. The General had just been here—at Claudine’s, he said—when I talked to him about... well... about the proceedings between you and me. He was quite upset to hear you’d filed for divorce. He and I agreed that the best thing was to put me in touch with Claudine so she could—”

  “And my aunt,” he overrode her sentence, “respects my privacy. She first asked my permission to let you know this address. I just didn’t think you’d show up before breakfast,” he repeated, gazing stonily at the woman he’d married right out of the Air Force Academy. “Really, Kim. There’s nothing to discuss. Let’s just both sign the papers and be done with it.”

  “But I don’t want you to sign!” Kim cried, her voice escalating to a near wail.

  Dumbfounded by this declaration, Finn stared at the bride he had escorted under a forest of swords on the steps of the U.S. Air Force Academy in what seemed, now, another lifetime.

  “But you just said you’re getting married in June!” he declared, exasperated. He bent over the desk silently cursing the fact he couldn’t locate a pen. By the time he finally found one wedged next to his toaster, he was alarmed to see that Kim’s eyes were brimming with tears.

  “I know, I know,” she said, barely above a whisper, “but—”

  “But what?” He whirled to face her fully, pen in hand. “You left the marriage by having an affair, remember? Which means you left me. You had a baby with another flyer, remember?”

  “But I still love you!” she cried. “I’ve always loved you, and I wanted us to have a baby so much! But you were so angry at everything... so distant and remote. You cut off any real communication with me even before your last tour in Afghanistan—and then, when you got home after rehab, you barely talked to me and hardly ever slept with me!”

  She began to cry, her face buried in her hands. Scenes of his returning to their house on the Nevada air base and shutting the door to the spare room drifted through his mind. He’d had nothing to say to her during those horrible months when he didn’t tell anyone what the drone job was like—not that she would have been able to understand what he’d experienced after his helicopter was shot down or the hell he endured in those unmarked trailers. What had happened to their marriage was nobody’s fault—and yet, if he were brutally honest with himself—it was both of their responsibilities.

  He reached out and gently touched her shoulder. “You’re right, you know,” he allowed in a softer voice. “At times I acted like a complete bastard. A sick bastard, by the way, but neither of us knew how sick I was.”

  Kim’s hands fell from her face and she looked at him hopefully through her tears. “But you’re better now, right? Claudine told me you were, and now that I’m here, I can see that.” She reached out and seized the hand not holding the pen. “Please, Finn... let’s not do this! Can’t we figure this out? I... I still love you!”

  Finn gently pulled his hand from hers and set the pen on the desk.

  “Kim... we are way past a reboot—”

  “Please, please Finn!”

  She was begging, now, and it made him want to sink through the deck to escape her entreaties. He walked back to his leather chair where he had felt reasonably secure when she’d been sitting on his sofa.

  Kim followed him, pleading, “I know what I did was terrible and I’ve paid a huge price, but can’t you please try to understand—”

  “I do understand,” he intervened, reaching for a calm he didn’t feel. “I completely get how lonely it was for you during those deployments, and how I drove you crazy when I got back, still in such terrible shape after the four guys I’d tried to rescue died in the crash. And then I flew the drones. But there’s too much that’s happened since you and Pete... had a child together. You took a different path. So did I.”

  “How were you so sure it was Pete’s son and not yours?” she challenged with a tilt of her chin.

  “My gut told me... plus a couple of DNA tests.”

  “You tested whose DNA?” Kim demanded, her voice rising.

  “Yours, mine, and... the baby’s.”

  “How?” she challenged him, skepticism dripping from that single word. She crossed back to the sofa and flounced down. “How did you get my son’s DNA? You didn’t even want me to tell you his name!”

  “When I first got out the hospital and we were stationed at Creech—”

  Interrupting, she said, “You were at your absolute worst, then.”

  Finn nodded. “Very true. I didn’t know what was happen
ing to me then, but I just knew I couldn’t deal with anything but going to work and coming home and trying to sleep. And you said in the middle of all that, that you were pregnant.” He shook his head. “Well, given how we were with each other by then, it seemed very unlikely.”

  “I was trying to live a normal life!” she protested. “I tried to get you to make love to me. I couldn't figure out what the hell was going on with you, and Pete was so....”

  Finn nodded again. “It was pure crap for all three of us, I know. And that afternoon we had that barbeque at the house and Pete was there.... don’t ask me how, but I knew instantly when I saw you two together that you and he had had an affair and that the baby you were carrying probably wasn’t going to be mine.”

  “And you never said a word!” Kim accused. “And by the way,” she added, with a steely glint in her eye, “everyone said you were a total shit for leaving a pregnant woman in her eighth month. You just walked out without warning—boom!—and moved into the bachelor officers’ quarters on the base. It was humiliating!”

  “You’d left the marriage first by having the affair with Pete,” he repeated without emotion, as if just stating a simple fact. “I stayed at the BOQ until I was certain that the baby wasn’t mine.”

  This time Kim shouted her demand. “How, God dammit? How did you know for sure?”

  “Just to be sure my intuition was right, one day on my lunch hour, after you’d brought the baby home, I waited down the street until I saw you leave the house with him. Then I just jimmied the broken window frame at the back, walked in through the kitchen into the bathroom, and took some hair out of your hairbrushes.”

  “And then...?”

  “I had the hair samples tested, along with my own.” He gave her a hard look. “Turns out, my instincts were a hundred percent correct.”

  “So that’s when you left the country and didn’t tell anyone where you’d gone—or why?”

  “That’s right. I’d put in my resignation a few months before and the final paperwork came through the week before DNA tests came back. After that, it all seemed a sign that it was time to get outta Dodge.” He spread his arms wide. “So, here I sit.”

  “There you sit,” Kim echoed, the anger drained from her features and her eyes so full of sadness, it nearly undid him.

  His tone softening, he said, “Look, Kim, I—”

  “I don’t want to marry Pete.”

  Her expression told him that she thought her startling declaration might shift things between them.

  “Then don’t marry him,” he said in an even tone.

  “But I want to be with you!”

  Finn shook his head. “We two are long past that as a possibility.”

  “Why? Why can’t we—”

  “It’s not just about your baby,” he interrupted. “It’s us. We’re not right together. We never were, but we persuaded ourselves otherwise. Us, together, won’t work.”

  “Please, Finn!”

  He held up his hands, a silent gesture for her to listen to him. More gently he said, “I want you to know how sorry I am for the way I walked away without explaining what was going on with me. We’re pretty different people and we didn’t find that out soon enough to prevent this train wreck.”

  “What do you mean?” Tears began to spill over her eyelids and stream down her cheeks.

  “We like such different things and each of us sees life through a completely different lens.”

  “But that’s not true!” She was getting angry again. “You used to like what I liked when you were at the Academy. You liked sneaking into my bed, didn’t you? You liked fucking me.”

  Finn tried to repress a smile at the memory of hot, young lust. “And you liked it too. We were nineteen and full of raging hormones. But we’re totally different people, now, and I’m guessing we always were, but we just didn’t see it back then. Meanwhile, we’ve gone down very different roads and finally gotten to know ourselves better.” He waved at his crammed bookshelf. “I like simple stuff. I like reading... and cooking—can you believe it? And I like living in a small place like this. You like hanging out with lots of friends and thinking about a new, bigger house and all the things you want to put in it. And children,” he added. “You wanted kids and I knew for sure I wasn’t fit to be a father back then—”

  “But now? Do you want kids now?” she demanded.

  “Some day, I hope... but, no... not now.”

  “Not with me, you mean. Not after—”

  Finn didn’t answer as the truth bloomed between them.

  Kim inhaled deeply and Finn guessed she would toss one more Hail Mary pass at him. In a tiny voice she ventured, “But we’re both military brats. That’s something we share... along with a lot of family history, and—”

  “But I’m a military brat who loves exploring new places,” he intervened, “and you... well, moving around so much has made you want to burrow in your nest and never move again, which I totally understand. You hated it when we transferred to Nevada, and wanted nothing so much as to go back to Colorado and live next door to your parents, which makes perfect sense, now that they’re retired. But I don’t want to be in Colorado or D.C. where my dad is based. In fact, now that my mother has died, I hope I can avoid my father as much as possible from here on out.”

  Kim was calmer now and looked at him steadily. “He cares about you, you know.”

  “In some ways, yes, I think that’s true. And it’s not that I don’t care about him and my sister, Maureen. I do. A lot. The problem is, I have a dad who just wants me to do exactly what he did... be the next General Deschanel. I know, now, that’s not the life I want, not the life I ever wanted—now that I think of it—but I was too much of a coward to tell him to his face. And Maureen... well, my sister has married into the military, too, and thinks I’m just weird for the way I feel about the wars our country has been fighting for fifteen years. Truth is, none of us Deschanels hardly knows each other. Not really.”

  “Oh, Patrick...” Kim said, and Finn realized the brutal truth of his words had finally hit their intended mark.

  He slowly rose from his chair and crossed to the sofa. He leaned down and took hold of her left hand. Major Pete Dexter’s diamond engagement ring winked back at him.

  “Kim, I am truly sorry for the pain I’ve caused you. I went into radio silence for most of our marriage and that wasn’t fair to you at all. My only excuse is that, for most of the time we were married, I was experiencing some strange form of modern day shellshock. When I got back from the Middle East it became a lot worse flying drones. For sure, I owed it to you to tell you what was going on with me and how nothing in my life fit before, during, or after I joined the Air Force. As I said, the truth is that I was too much of a coward to come clean with what I was feeling back then. Nothing was making sense, but I want you to know that none of that was your fault.”

  “But, then, if you know, now, that you were going through something strange, why can’t you—”

  “Because I can’t,” he said simply. “I can’t back-track and fix it with you, or for you, or for us, and for that I am truly sorry. I’m going to sign these documents today, and I hope you will too. I want you to have a happy life, Kim. It just can’t be with me.”

  Finn returned to the desk where he’d left the pen, along with the legal documents awaiting their signatures.

  Behind him, Kim stated flatly, “There must be somebody else. You’ve met someone, right? Some little French number who—”

  Finn looked over his shoulder. “Trust me, no little ‘French number’ is going to walk in here.”

  He was lucky Kim had not dwelled on the sight of Juliet storming down the gangway. Then his gut cramped at the memory of her stricken expression when she saw he was with another woman eating croissants before ten a.m. How could she know that Kim had waited for him on the quay until he returned from his morning trek to the boulangerie? Oddly, though, with Kim now standing next to him at the desk, Finn felt a wave of c
ompassion for what the last years had put both of them through.

  “C’mon,” he said with a genuine smile. “Let’s do this right... and please know that my signing these documents isn’t about French girls or my dad. It’s about facing the truths between you and me and wishing each other well from here on out.”

  There was a long pause and then Kim gave the tiniest shrug of accord.

  Finn said, “Let’s have a decent end to this so we can both move forward and find some peace.” He bumped his fist gently against her chin. “And may I say, I admire you for the gutsy thing you did today.”

  “What was that?” she asked, subdued.

  “To come all the way to see me and force me to hash this through with you. I think we’ve done that pretty well, don’t you?”

  “I didn’t win you back,” Kim said with a stubborn, sideways glance he remembered so well when she didn’t get her way.

  He held up the pen. “You gave it your all, so be proud of that. Let’s do this nice and dignified. I’ll go first.”

  And with that, he bent down and signed “Patrick Finley Deschanel” at all the spots indicated with red post-it tags.

  Once again, tears had begun to stream down Kim’s cheeks while she waited next to him for her turn. He handed her his pen with a faint smile of encouragement. After a long moment’s hesitation, she, too, bent over the documents and wrote her signature on the lines next to his.

  He carefully slid the papers into the legal envelope they’d arrived in and walked Kim to the door of the barge. They stared mutely at each other with the swish of the Seine flowing swiftly with spring rain that had coursed from the Loire Valley and was headed to the sea. Finn opened the door to the deck and a cool breeze rippled through the pilothouse. Kim remained stationary, and then looked back at the large manila envelope containing the divorce documents sitting on his desk. Finn gently seized both her shoulders with hands that had piloted aircraft high in the sky and bent to kiss her lightly on each cheek, European style.

  “All the best, Kim. Truly.”

  The woman he had known since before he’d turned twelve gazed at him wordlessly, her eyes still moist, and then she walked through the door he held open for her. He stood rooted to the salon’s teak decking, listening to her footsteps treading on the metal gangway and then fading into silence.