Finding Paris

by Joy Preble

  His words bounce against my frozen brain, not penetrating. A foreign language.

  “Stop talking,” I tell him, covering my ears. “I don’t know.”

  But he asks again, “Why not?” and an answer begins to surface. It sits sharply in my empty chest, waiting.

  I think of my sister, of who she is and how she navigates this life of ours. Drawing castles with princes. Making me tell her stories with happy endings. Even as our mother uprooted us, chasing the better life that always receded, just out of reach. I think Paris believed—still believes—that if you pretend long enough, wish hard enough, close your eyes long enough, the desire becomes truth.

  Max is still watching me and waiting. Why? I know he hates himself right now—for leaving Ashley, for deferring college, for all of it. But he got in his truck and drove away and came here to make a life that was something else. I know he thinks he’s a coward. But I don’t.

  But Max isn’t like me and Paris. He’s on his own.

  My sister knew I would come for her. No matter what it took. That’s what I do.

  But what if I was wrong about that? What if this has always been only about getting me here?

  What if that was the thing my sister wanted to do?

  I think about my dollhouse and the way I found the dolls, hers protecting mine.

  Exactly how far would my sister go to protect me?

  And what exactly did she believe she was protecting me from?

  I swallow over the boulder in my throat, working out the rest of it, seeing the parts I should have seen but didn’t. Couldn’t.

  My sister slamming the brakes of our Mazda in the middle of the road. I’d do anything for you, she told me. Like our mother, I thought she was being dramatic. Being Paris.

  What would she do? And if she’s not home and not here, then where the hell is she?

  If Max and I are both still in the dark, who would my sister trust to help her?

  Her friend Margo? Tobias the boyfriend I’ve never met and who didn’t even take her to the prom? Grammy Marie in Paso Robles who we haven’t talked to in months and months?

  There is only one person that makes sense. Only one person who is not me that my sister would tell things to. That my sister would go to if she needed help.

  And that person is not here in LA. Not anywhere near.

  “Max,” I say. “I need to go home. Now.”

  He blinks at me curiously. “Why?”

  I look at him impatiently. My body feels already somehow in motion—flying back through the desert to Paris.

  “The waitress at the Heartbreak. Maureen,” I say. In my head I hear her, feel her arm on mine, pulling me aside, asking me if Max was bothering me. Telling me she’d kick him out if he was. Just say the word and he’s out of here.

  I see those dangly red-stone earrings Paris made for her. The ones she wore like all the time. She’s been through stuff, I hear my sister say.

  There is only one reason my sister would send me to LA without her. So she could do whatever she needed to make sure Tommy Davis didn’t hurt me like he has hurt her.

  Max looks at me, waiting. I hesitate, then tell him what I’m thinking. We’ve come too far together. I owe him this much truth. His jaw tightens, his face pale.

  “Paris is in Vegas,” I say. “I don’t think she ever left.”

  SEVENTEEN

  WE DRIVE WITHOUT STOPPING, THE SUN BEATING ABOVE THE TRUCK then lowering behind us as we head east, that tiny white scar over Max’s eyebrow periodically reflecting the metallic glint from oncoming cars. Sometimes we don’t talk at all, and in those moments I rest my forehead against the passenger window, eyes closed but not sleeping, feeling the desert heat on the other side of the glass.

  Just somewhere between California and Las Vegas, the road making whumping sounds under our tires, Max says, “I’ve done other things I’m not proud of.”

  “Oh?” I turn from the window.

  “Drove my dad’s Lexus into our front porch two days after I got my license.”

  “Seriously?”

  “It was raining. I was a goober.”

  We drive most of another mile before I stop laughing. And the thing is, he looks so sweet and earnest as he says it, and I know he’s told me because it’s the only thing he can think of that might break the tension or make me feel better or less worried or something.

  He does not understand that I can laugh even though none of those things are possible.

  “I’m a better driver now, though,” he adds.

  “Good to know,” I tell him. And I smile at him because it seems the right thing to do.

  The sun is setting, the Luxor light streaming blue, as we head into Vegas. I call my sister for what feels like the millionth time. “I’m back,” I say.

  No answer except her voice mail. I am not surprised.

  Not long after that, we pull into the parking lot of the Heartbreak Hotel Diner, two nights after we’ve left. I have not called ahead and asked for Maureen.

  “Better to just walk in,” Max says, and I agree. Less time for her to make up some lie. I am positive she knows where my sister is.

  My heart contracts at the sight of Paris’s silver Sharpie message, still on Elvis’s pants leg.

  I half expect Paris to be at the hostess booth as we walk in, but of course she is not.

  Maureen, who usually works the graveyard shift, is also nowhere to be seen.

  “I’m Paris’s sister. Did she come in today?” I ask the hostess. She’s the one who was here the other night, I think—skinny, tall, long brown hair in a messy bun stabbed with a pencil. Blue eye shadow. Her name tag announces that she’s CeCe. She shakes her head. Tells me Paris called in sick. I exhale a breath I didn’t even know I was holding. A phone call doesn’t mean she’s here. But it means she’s somewhere.

  “What about Maureen?” Max asks. “You know when she comes on duty?”

  CeCe looks him up and down and then says, “She worked day shift today. And left early.” She heaves a disgruntled-sounding sigh, then peers beyond us, clearly done chatting.

  “We need her address,” Max informs her curtly, and her gaze snaps back to him.

  “Dude,” CeCe says. “We don’t give that out.”

  “It’s important,” I say firmly, staring her down.

  She lifts a pencil-thin arm like it’s a huge effort and brushes a loose strand of hair behind her ear.

  On the wall, Elvis and Priscilla stare down at us. “Hound Dog” blares from the speakers. The only other person in the dining room is a geriatric lady in a flowery dress with short puffy elastic sleeves. She’s sitting at a front table, loud-slurping a bowl of soup.

  She glares at us, then glances disinterestedly around the diner. The old lady keeps slurping soup.

  Then she adds, “I haven’t seen your sister.”

  I move so we are nose to nose. Her breath is a mixture of peppermint and something less fresh.

  “I need to find her. Maureen knows where she is. You need to tell us where Maureen lives.”

  She shrugs, unruffled by my closeness. “Saw her the other night. You were here though. I think she came in after you left.”

  Something this side of relief floods through me. If Paris came back that night then maybe I’m right. She’s here in Vegas.

  “CeCe.” Max’s gray eyes are storm clouds. “If you know where Paris Hollings is, you need to tell us.”

  Maybe it’s the way he says it. Maybe it’s because he’s a guy and some girls do what guys say.

  Or that ridiculously, tears start running down my face. We’ve come so far only to meet another dead end.

  More likely it’s because the cook stomps out of the kitchen, hollering so loudly about the waitstaff’s deplorable lack of work ethic (not his exact words) that Priscilla and Elvis shake on the wall.

  “Your sister is at Maureen’s.” CeCe sighs, and my heart stops for any number of beats. And then she tells us the address.

  We walk up the
driveway to Waitress Maureen’s house, small, run-down, but with a pot of flowers by the front steps. Brilliant purples and yellows and bright pinks spilling everywhere. We move neither fast nor slow but with the steady gait of two people who have been trying to get somewhere for days now and, because they both know science, understand that gravity can bend light and that things are not always where we perceive them to be.

  We ring the bell, only the little white plastic piece is cracked and we don’t hear any sound, so I bang on the door with my fist.

  When nothing happens, just a roadrunner skittering by in the growing dusk, looking tired and hot, I thud the door again, palm open. Bam. Bam. Bam.

  There is the sound of someone walking and stopping, a heavier footstep than my sister could make.

  Maureen is wearing skinny jeans and a black sleeveless T-shirt and she is surprisingly sturdy and fit, something I had never suspected. Her arms are muscled, probably from toting those heavy food trays—all those pie slices and sandwiches. But her hair is down and I can see strands of gray at her part where the color has worn off. Her eyes are puffy underneath.

  “Leo,” she says, and her voice is firm but kind. “Your sister’s gone.”

  EIGHTEEN

  “GONE?” MY PULSE EXPLODES. WE CAME THIS FAR AND SHE’S NOT HERE?

  Maureen gestures for us to come inside, but I’m already pushing past her to search. What if she’s lying? Everyone else is—or at least has.

  Family room: no. Kitchen: no. Max shouts my name, but I’m on the move. Bathroom: no. Bedroom: no. Just a rose-colored comforter and some plastic-framed nature scene prints on the walls. Hotel art. The kind of thing my sister hates.

  “She’s not here, Leo,” Maureen says. She reaches for me, but I dart around her.

  “What did she tell you? Where the hell is she?” I race to the next room.

  No Paris.

  “Let me get you something, Leo,” Maureen says when, eventually, I stop searching. “A Coke, maybe? I’ve got Dr Pepper. Iced tea?”

  Why is she talking about beverages? “She was here, right? We need to find her.” I feel the fight seeping out of me. To follow all those clues and be right and be so close and then . . . nothing.

  “A Coke,” Maureen says again. “It settles the stomach.” Max nods like he agrees and because somehow he is standing next to me, I let him squeeze my hand.

  In the small kitchen that smells like spray cleaner, I stand stiffly at the counter while Maureen pours Coke from a half-empty two-liter bottle into squat glasses. In her waitress outfit she always looks old. Here in her own house, I see that she’s not much older than my mother.

  I don’t want to drink Coke. I need to find Paris.

  “I was wrong,” Maureen says, lifting her glass but not drinking. “I’m never wrong, not usually. But your sister, I didn’t read her right.”

  Maureen sets the glass down. “People have a way of hiding the bad shit. I should have paid better attention. But I thought I knew her. I thought—”

  “What did Paris say?” My heart is thumping and my brain is parading horrible things.

  Max rubs a hand over my shoulders, but I shrug it away.

  “Maybe you should sit down,” Maureen says. “You don’t look so good.”

  She starts to say something else, but I have no patience. “What did you mean that you were wrong about Paris?” I blurt. “How long was she here? Did you know that she sent me and Max all the way to LA looking for her? You knew, didn’t you? But you let me go. Why would you do that?”

  The words tumble out of me, water through a broken dam.

  Maureen’s brows squinch together. She cocks her head like I’m speaking Swahili. “What? You did what? I just figured . . . you drove to LA? Why the hell would Paris make you do that? She came back after you left. Shit. I had no idea. Leo, honey, I would never . . .”

  She interrupts herself with a string of creative swear words. Everything inside me feels combustible and unbalanced. I had convinced myself she knew. But she doesn’t.

  “She said your mother kicked her out. That they got into a fight over her boyfriend and she needed a place to stay. You know I like Paris. She’s a sharp one, your sister. So I said sure. It didn’t occur to me that—”

  “Fight?” I gape at her, mouth dropping open.

  Maureen makes a thick sound in the back of her throat like she’s going to spit. “It’s bullshit, isn’t it?” She twists the cap back on the Coke bottle, but the cap slips from her hand and bounces—a tinny sound—onto the floor, rolling into a corner. “She had this whole story—had me believing she needed out of your house. Said you’d try to make peace with the family because that’s how you were and she didn’t want that. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do. Wanted to think things over. Just for a day or so, she said. That’s why she ran out on you like that.”

  “She wrote me a note on Elvis’s leg. Didn’t that seem off to you?”

  “Leo,” Maureen says. “A guy came in the other night without pants. Nothing seems off to me.” But her eyes are serious.

  She opens a drawer at the counter, her hands rummaging even while she holds my gaze. “Where are those damn cigarettes?” She seems to direct the question to the drawer. “Try to quit and try to quit, but I never do.”

  I stare at her, attempting and failing to process, except that Maureen believes things in our life are so horrible she was willing to hide my sister from it.

  More rummaging and now Maureen is opening another drawer, then slamming it closed and back to the first. “Damn it,” she says.

  “You need some help?” Max asks. I’d almost forgotten he was here. Maureen ignores him, yanking the drawer again, this time with such force that it pulls full out of the counter. It drops with a hard thud on the tile floor, spewing papers and coupons and pencils and random clots of junk.

  “But it’s been two days. And I . . . I came home a little bit ago,” she begins, words coming faster now. “Said I had a migraine coming on and left early. I’d been working double shifts and enough is enough sometimes, you know? Your sister—she wasn’t expecting me. She was at the table, but I don’t think she heard me because she was listening to music and her earbuds were in and she was scribbling on a piece of paper. So I walked over and I see that she’s drinking my red wine. I told her she needed to tell me what the deal was. I’d help her if I could. But I didn’t need any trouble. I had enough of my own.”

  My heart pounds its way up my throat and then higher, beating in my ears, my temples.

  “Did she tell you anything?” I say, voice very small.

  Maureen says, “No.”

  Max is frowning, looking from Maureen to me to the crap on the floor from the fallen drawer and back through the cycle. Maureen sinks to her knees by the drawer, pawing at it now with her big-knuckled hands, the muscles in her arms flexing as she sifts through the papers, looking for something that’s obviously not there.

  “Your sister said she’d explain. But it had to be quick. She had somewhere to be.” She tilts her head, assessing. She has stopped looking for whatever she’s been searching for. “She said she thought she had more time to be sure. But you were coming back. I didn’t think to ask her where you’d been. And by the time I changed out of my uniform, she was gone.”

  Maureen looks up at me more carefully. She rubs her hands on the knees of her jeans. “Leo. Was something bad going on in your house?”

  I look away. Max is quiet.

  “You have to understand,” Maureen says, and something in her tone makes my stomach seize. “I live on my own. People who come into the Heartbreak—they’re not always the best quality, you know. And then there’s my ex-husband, well . . . I have a gun. It’s just me in the house, so I keep it here where I can grab it. If he comes in that door—”

  “Gun?” I whip my gaze back to her, to the mess on the floor.

  “In the drawer,” Maureen says, pointing. “But it’s gone. Just like your sister.”

  “Gun?�
�� Max says. “She took your gun?”

  It all makes terrible, horrible sense. Of course Paris would send me away. Not just to keep me safe. But so when she went after him, I wouldn’t be there to stop her.

  I know then what she plans on doing. And when he looks at me, I know that Max does, too. His fists clench and then unclench. Like he’s going into battle for me, and that crazy thought feels like a miracle that will be put to no use.

  “She knows I’m here,” I say to him. “Because I called her and she knows and now she’s got a gun.” My voice comes out weirdly calm.

  “What the hell does your sister need a gun for?” Maureen’s voice rises to the ceiling. She pushes fast off the floor.

  “It’s not your fault,” I say, and I really mean it.

  “What’s going on here, Leo? That’s my fucking gun she took. Shit.”

  “Leo,” Max says quietly, his voice barely audible. “Is there more to this?”

  But I’m already running out the door.

  NINETEEN

  HE CATCHES UP TO ME AT THE TRUCK.

  My body is shaking, little nervous tremors, like when there’d be a small earthquake in LA and you might not have even noticed except that the floor felt like it was humming.

  I ask Max for his phone, and when he hands it to me, I press in the numbers.

  Sure enough, Tommy picks up. The sound of his voice runs up my spine like nails. But he has no way of knowing it’s me. He won’t recognize Max’s phone.

  “Who the hell is this? Damn computers keep calling and not saying anything,” he says, and in the background I hear slot machines and chips clinking and someone very near the phone asks, does he want to double down? Then there’s a shuffling sound and a muffled PA announcement somewhere in the background, and he hangs up.

  My heart freezes. This is the first time I’ve called him since Paris disappeared. Has someone else been trying to pin down his whereabouts?

  Paris.

  Max waits, key in the ignition. Max who is on the run from his own life and from Ashley Pennington, who loved him. Even if he goes back to Texas, even if he goes back to her. It may never end for him. I get that now. I do.