M. Conrer greets her as she comes in. The café is full and he is busy but she pulls him aside and says, “I’m going to help you today. Whatever you need. The only thing I ask is that you do not mention Jennifer to me. Do you promise?”
He waits to answer, reaching out to take her arm, but she turns to avoid being touched. A customer asks for change and M. Conrer nods and says, “I promise.”
“Then I’ll get the change,” she says.
Estelle works like a robot the rest of the morning in the café, not speaking unless it is a necessity. She buses tables, wipes the windows, makes espresso, empties the garbage. She is constant, silent motion, never asking what to do, only doing. As the mornings have warmed, the business has picked up, and M. Conrer has no problem keeping his promise. At 10:30 there is a midmorning lull and she and M. Conrer and the two boys in the kitchen get caught up—the dishes washed, clean glasses stacked behind the bar, the chairs and tables gathered neatly.
“Now we will sit and have our own coffee,” M. Conrer says.
Estelle wipes her moist forehead with the sleeve of her shirt, then says, “Thanks, but I have to go. I will come back this afternoon.” She kisses him and leaves the café, walking to the newspaper stand on the corner for the morning paper. She looks at the date of the newspaper and doesn’t buy it. She walks back to the apartment and she feels refreshed from the sweat as she climbs the stairs, her blood flowing and her mind clear. But that all comes to a halt when she opens the apartment door and Jon is sitting on the sofa.
She closes the door, walks over to him, and says, “What are you doing here?”
“I needed some things.” His shoes and coat are off, his shirt untucked. His hair is slick and messy and his eyes are puffy.
“Didn’t you come last night?”
“Do I look like it?”
“Just please take what you need and leave,” she says, then she goes into the kitchen and pours a glass of juice. He gets up and follows her. She drinks the juice and stares at the spice rack next to the refrigerator. He leans on the counter and watches. She finishes and sets the glass in the sink and says, “You smell.”
“Do you mind if I take a shower?”
“Yes,” she says and she moves past him. She takes a cigarette from her purse and stands next to the open window of the living room. Again, he follows, as if walking in her footsteps will gain him grace.
“Do you understand?” she turns and says. “Which language do you prefer? English or French?”
“Estelle,” he says, then he pauses, folds his arms, and sways from side to side.
She smokes and ignores him.
“Estelle,” he says again.
She turns to him, irritated, and says, “What?”
He looks past her, out of the window. “Nothing,” he says and he goes into the bedroom to pack.
She finishes the cigarette and lights another as she waits on him to leave. He comes back with a suitcase and sits on the couch and puts on his shoes. Then he takes his coat from the back of the couch and lays it across his lap.
“The past doesn’t matter at all,” he says. “It’s getting harder to remember when life was any different than it is right now. I was thinking last night that if only I would have made a turn here or there, that we wouldn’t be here. You’d be off with some handsome man, living down south. A couple of kids. We might’ve passed on the street one day and never even glanced at one another. Or not even that. I’d probably never have made it to Paris. Only a slight turn, nothing special. If I would’ve taken the late train that day from Geneva. Or even if it was the same train, the lady at the desk could have given me seat twelve instead of twenty-two or whatever it was. But then I decided that none of that matters. Somehow, we’d still be sitting right here, looking at one another. Jennifer would still be gone. You’d still want me out. M. Conrer would still have that stupid smile on his face every time he tells me everything is going to be all right. I don’t know what the point is in decisions. You said something one time about the finger of God on your head, how it felt protective. I believe it’s there but not like that. More like He’s pushing and pulling us like puppets. Like mindless, wooden puppets who don’t get a say in what goes on down here. The Great Puppeteer is how I’ll start the next time I decide to ask for Jennifer back. If there is a next time.”
Estelle tosses her cigarette out of the window and sighs.
“What do you think?” he asks.
She leans on the window ledge and looks around the apartment, then to him. “I think you are lost. More lost every day.”
He nods. “Are you?”
“No. I know where I am. It doesn’t matter why. If He’s pushing and pulling us, then so be it. I don’t have time to think about it.”
“That’s all we have is time. Handfuls of it. We have so goddamn much I don’t know what to do with it,” Jon says, then he gets up and takes the suitcase. He walks to the apartment door and sets it down, then he comes back into the living room and says, “I didn’t get to ask you what you thought of the painting.”
“Once she is finished, I’d like to have her. Do you think that she will give her to us?”
“I think so.”
“Are you going to stay with her?”
“No, Estelle. It’s nothing like that. I tried to tell you.”
“I don’t want to know any more about it. This is probably what you think we do. This is France, right? We all sleep with each other and smile into the same mirror every day, like changing women is the same as changing socks.”
“Don’t lecture me. I’m not new to this and I’m sure as hell not some naive American living out his fantasies.”
“Then act like it.”
He wants to move to her and kiss her but knows he can’t. “I’ll call and let you know where I am,” he says, then he picks up his wallet and keys from the kitchen counter and he leaves the apartment. Estelle leans out the window and watches him walk out of the building and into M. Conrer’s café, leaving the suitcase on the sidewalk.
“He’ll be drunk in half an hour,” she says, then thinks it isn’t such a bad idea and she opens a bottle of wine and sits on the floor of the living room. She turns on the television and spreads the newspaper out in front of her. She looks for and finds the classified section and the telephone rings.
She shakes her head, believing it is either Jon or M. Conrer. She opens the classifieds to the pets and looks for a puppy. The phone continues to ring. “Son of a bitch,” she says and she crawls over to the wall to unplug it and the machine answers. She stops to listen when she hears Marceau.
“Estelle and Jon, this is Detective Marceau. If you are there, pick up the telephone.”
Estelle knocks the receiver to the floor, fumbles it, then picks it up and says, “Yes?”
“Estelle? Is Jon with you?”
“Yes. I mean, sort of. He’s downstairs. What is it?”
“Two days ago at the train station in Brussels, a five-year-old boy who was being abducted from the bathroom broke away and ran screaming through the station. The police arrested a man, who led us to another man. We traced him to a house on the outskirts of Lille. We need you and Jon to come to the police station and I will explain the rest.”
“No. Don’t do that to me. Explain the rest.”
“I think it’s better if you are together.”
“We are together. He’s downstairs. Tell me now.”
Someone speaks to Marceau in the background and he covers the phone and answers. Estelle hears only mumbles and she screams, “Marceau! Tell me now!” She rises from her knees and waits, the mumbling like the beating of drums off in the distance. She breathes hard as she waits, then again she screams into the telephone, but the mumbling continues.
Marceau returns and apologizes, her screams seemingly unheard, and he says calmly, “It is very simple, Estell
e. I need you and Jon to come to the station because we have Jennifer.”
12
She drops the phone and runs to the window and yells, “Jon! Jon!” Then she rushes out the apartment and down the stairs and he is coming out of the door of the café.
Her thoughts are quicker than her mouth and it is difficult to get out, but she manages, “Marceau, Jon. Jennifer, Jennifer. They have Jennifer.” Then she turns and runs for the metro and Jon chases after her. Too many people crowd the sidewalk, the train is too slow, the streetlights won’t change when they want them to. They make it to the police station much quicker than it seems and they push through a crowd gathered on the front steps. The bottom floor of the police station is divided by a wide, marble hallway and Marceau’s office door is at the other end. They weave through janitors and uniformed police holding folders and go into a large room with a high ceiling shared by the detectives and their secretaries. Marceau’s desk is in the back in front of a window and they hurry through the maze of cubicles and he is sitting on his desk waiting for them. He is without the overcoat and his sleeves are rolled up and he grins with his mouth closed.
“Where is she?” Estelle asks. She and Jon are breathing fast, their faces flustered.
Marceau reaches to greet them with his hands but neither reaches for him and Jon says, “Where is she?”
“She is okay. Please, just a moment.”
“Marceau,” Estelle says.
“I am not keeping you because I want to but I have to speak with you a moment. Please. Sit down. This will take two minutes. The sooner we talk, the sooner we see her.” He motions them to sit in the wooden chairs they stand next to and he stands between them.
“Now,” he says. “I want you to understand that she doesn’t look the same right now. Her hair has been shaved and she has lost weight. A doctor has looked at her and she is going to be fine but she is different. Take a breath and understand this. It is important that you don’t let her appearance shock you.”
Estelle and Jon look at each other, then back at Marceau. “We understand,” Jon says. “Is that it?”
Marceau walks around and stands behind the desk. “There is one other thing and this may change when she sees you, but she hasn’t spoken since we found her. She was in a closet, gagged and blindfolded, and I get the idea that she wasn’t allowed to speak but I don’t know for sure. But she hasn’t said a word. Like I said, we hope this will change when she sees her parents.”
Estelle stands and says, “I don’t want to hear any more of this.” Then Jon stands and says, “Me either. I understand what you’re trying to do but take us to her.” Marceau nods and says, “Follow me.”
They follow Marceau out into hallway and up a flight of stairs. After the stairs, he goes into a door which leads down a thin hallway. He stops at the second door on the left. “She is in here with a nurse,” he says and he opens the door. Marceau motions for the nurse to leave the room and Jon and Estelle go in. The child sits on a cot with a blanket draped around her shoulders. Jennifer sees them and she says, “I tried,” then she begins to cry and they race to touch her.
13
It is late in the summer and the afternoon is humid and clear. A couple and an infant sit on a blanket with a picnic lunch. The infant is a new crawler and moves anxiously from side to side on the blanket, the parents barricading the child from crawling off the blanket and into the grass. The couple is young, blond stubble on the man’s face and the woman’s hair highlighted an array of browns and reds. The woman is barefoot and the man wears a white T-shirt and his arms are lean and tanned. Occasionally, the man will lift the child and toss him, or her, into the air and the child grins and claps closed fists together. Then the man will set the infant back down and the child crawls until it bumps into its mother’s legs and then it turns around and heads back across the length of the blanket.
Jon lies on his side on his own blanket and watches the couple and infant. Estelle and Jennifer try to get a kite into the air, running freely across the open space of the park. Jon has already tried and failed with the kite but Jennifer seemed interested in the effort and so now Estelle works with her, hoping to catch the perfect breeze that will lift the rainbow-striped kite into the air. The couple and infant are in Jon’s line of vision of Estelle and Jennifer, and when there is a delay in their effort, a tangled string or dead air, Jon watches the new family as if he knows them.
The summer has set records for both heat and lack of rain. A free production of Romeo and Juliet scheduled for the garden of the Musée Rodin was canceled because the actors feared collapse wearing the heavy Elizabethan costumes. A hardware store in Jon and Estelle’s neighborhood gave away rain gauges as a promotion, hoping to conjure up storm clouds. The river sits low and the city has cut back on the hours that the public fountains run. But the summer is almost over and the temperatures are beginning to creep down. Half of Paris is hopeful for a rainy autumn and the other half is bitter that they have to hope for a rainy autumn that will clump the fallen leaves and cause the winter to hurry on. The only ones that haven’t noticed the dry gardens and park lawns are the ones who get on planes after they check out of their hotels and go home.
Jennifer yells, “Look!” and Jon sees the kite rise into the air and maintain as Estelle runs with the kite string. The couple with the infant also turns and looks and Jennifer stands with her arm raised and finger pointed skyward. Others across the lawn who have heard Jennifer’s cry look up and smile and tell their children to look at the kite. Jon sits up. Jennifer puts her hand over her eyes to shield the sun. The moment lasts for as long as Estelle can keep running, which isn’t long, and when she’s done and the kite swirls to the ground, heads turn back to cool drinks or conversation. Estelle bends over, winded, her hands on her knees. Jennifer looks at Jon and he waves but she doesn’t wave back and she goes to Estelle and helps her gather the kite and string. They walk past the couple and infant, who are picking up to leave, and sit down with Jon. Estelle still hasn’t caught her breath and Jon says, “You need some work.”
“At least we got it in the air, didn’t we?” Estelle answers and looks at Jennifer.
Jennifer nods and takes a bottle of water from a plastic bag they brought with them that is filled with drinks and sandwiches and chips. “I want to run with it next time,” she says.
The suggestion pleases her parents and then Estelle says, “We’ll try again in a few minutes. Do you want to eat something?” Again Jennifer nods and she takes a tuna sandwich from the bag.
“I think I saw an ice cream cart on the other side of the park. Would you like some?” Jon asks.
“Later,” Jennifer says.
Again, her response pleases them because these answers are more of the answers of their Jennifer. The Jennifer who was athletic and energetic and never turned down a dessert. The Jennifer who sits in front of them now shows glimpses of that child through the quiet stares and one-word sentences and each glimpse is met with wide smiles.
It will be a work in progress. Be patient. You are one of the lucky ones. These phrases, and others like them, have been given to Jon and Estelle over and over by the voices of children’s services. The words float in their minds when they look at Jennifer. Whether it is a doctor, or a therapist, or a social worker, the clichés sit on the tips of their tongues, as common as hello or good-bye. The first time that the therapist said to them that they were lucky, Jon said, “You have a strange idea of luck.”
“In your case, life itself is luck,” he answered. He was a sleek, smart-looking man with a pointed chin and Jon didn’t like him from the start.
“I don’t believe in luck,” Estelle said.
“Me either,” Jon said.
“Whatever you believe in, you may attribute her return to that. Not many children return after they have been missing for more than two days, let alone months.”
“We know,” Jon said and th
e next day he complained to children’s services that he didn’t want a therapist assigned to his daughter who would tell them each week how fucking lucky they were. Estelle stood next to him in the kitchen as he spoke on the telephone, nodding and holding his arm. After he hung up the phone, he asked her if she knew she was touching him.
“Yes,” she said.
“I hoped so. You can whenever you want.”
“Sometimes I want to,” she said. “But sometimes I don’t want anything.”
“Maybe just a little now and then. Like this. Just touch my arm or hand. Small things.”
“You sound like the people we talk to about Jennifer. Everything has to be so small now. I feel like an inchworm.”
He had apologized to Estelle in letters, in cards, in phone calls from work. The urge to do it again rose in him and she saw it coming and stopped him.
“Maybe,” she said.
“Maybe what?” he asked.
“Only maybe.”
Jennifer finishes her sandwich and says, “I’m ready.”
“Why don’t you try by yourself?” Estelle asks. “And then I’ll come along if you need me.”
She ponders it a moment, looks across the park at other children playing alone, no adult in sight. She picks at the grass and says, “Promise you’ll watch?”
“We’re right here, we promise,” Jon says.
Jennifer takes the kite and walks into a clear stretch of grass, plenty of room to run. She turns and says, “Watch.”
The Hands of Strangers Page 11