The Paris Key

by Juliet Blackwell

  “Genie . . .” Jason’s voice dropped, becoming gentle, earnest. “What in the world are you going to do in Paris? You’re a copy editor, not a locksmith.”

  “Suddenly you’re a fan of my copyediting?”

  “At least it’s a real job. Locksmithing is a . . . a dream. A childhood memory.”

  His words sent Genevieve’s mind tripping over the memory of all the locks she had mastered at her uncle’s side: the double-ball padlock and dimple devices she practiced on until she was ready for Schlage’s side pin. She could hear their soft clicks and whirs in her mind, drowning out Jason’s words.

  “Genie . . . you don’t have to do this. We could see a marriage counselor, work things out. How many times do I have to say it? It was a mistake. I’m sorry. It didn’t mean anything; it just happened. . . .” He trailed off, shook his handsome head. Remembered what his life coach told him about being a man and taking responsibility. “No, that’s not right. No excuses. I’m so sorry I hurt you, Genie.”

  Genevieve continued searching the contents of her coffee cup without responding.

  Here was the truth: Deep down she didn’t care. She was using Jason’s affair as a reason to demand the separation, but it was the very fact that she couldn’t get herself to care that made her realize they should divorce. When they first met, she had been dazzled by Jason’s straightforward, sunny disposition; now she found it stifling, exhausting. Unbearable. Jason was not a bad man. He needed something from his partner that Genevieve could not give; must he be condemned for that? And yet, publicly, she did place the blame on him, citing his affair, feigning heartbreak, taking the easy way out. Allowing people to make assumptions, just as they did about the key she wore around her neck.

  She reached up to brush her fingers along the rusty talisman, warm from her skin.

  Genevieve had found the key while cleaning out her mother’s lingerie drawer, not long after she died. It had been swathed in Bubble Wrap, in an airmail package.

  With it was a note written in a spidery, all-caps scrawl: YOU HOLD THE KEY.

  It was postmarked Paris.

  Chapter Two

  1997

  The uncle she had never met picked her up at Charles de Gaulle Airport, which she learned the locals called Roissy. They drove toward Paris in the smallest car Genevieve had ever seen, past hulking blocks of cement buildings that made up dismal housing projects and industrial sites. At long last they exited the thruway and began inching through thick traffic in the streets of Paris. Ominous skies were drizzling more than raining: a sluggish, lugubrious wetting. Parisians hunched over in their coats and boots, collars turned up, wielding umbrellas like weapons on the crowded sidewalks.

  Everything, from the darkening sky to the balconied buildings to the trash in the street, was some dreary shade of gray. Why did people speak of this city with such adoration? Her mother always used to refer to Paris as “the City of Lights,” her voice taking on a rare reverential tone when she spoke of it.

  “How was your trip?” asked Uncle Dave as they drove.

  Genevieve shrugged in response, not wanting to look at him.

  Dave was an old man, Genevieve had realized with a shock when she first set eyes on her uncle in the airport. He had a full head of white hair and a Don Quixote–style goatee, and he walked with a limp. At more than twenty years her mother’s senior, Dave seemed more grandfather than uncle. According to family lore, a teenaged Dave had come to Paris to help rebuild after World War II, fell in love with a Frenchwoman named Pasquale, married, and never returned.

  At the airport, he had stood outside of customs holding up a hand-lettered sign, black ink on bright red paper: GENEVIEVE MARTIN, WELCOME!

  Her Air France escort, who had been tasked with making sure Genevieve didn’t somehow become lost on the nonstop flight from San Francisco, was an elegant, slender blonde who filled out her uniform perfectly and called Genevieve “sweetheart” in English with a lilting, melodic accent. Genevieve had hated her on sight and throughout the twelve-hour journey answered her gracious condescension with sneers and eye rolls.

  Upon spying Dave’s sign the flight attendant gave Genevieve’s uncle a frosty nod and handed her charge over to him without a word, disappearing behind doors clearly marked: DÉFENSE D’ENTRER. No admittance.

  Despite her attempts to alienate the attendant throughout the flight, Genevieve felt a pang of abandonment as she watched the woman go. Glancing up at the smiling old man with the sign, Genevieve thought, He could be anyone. He had shown no documentation, after all. And he didn’t look much like the old photo on her mom’s bureau. What if he was some creepy French child molester who’d read her name on a list somewhere and decided to pick up an “unaccompanied minor” to do awful things, the kinds of crimes spoken of in whispers?

  Genevieve wished her brother, Nick, were here, or her dad. Uncle Dave had invited them all to come; Genevieve had overheard his boisterous voice on speakerphone, declaring that Paris could cure heartache. Her father and brother claimed they were too busy with the farm, but they booked a flight for Genevieve, whether she wanted to go or not. Probably glad to be rid of her, she thought.

  “Did you eat on the plane?” Dave asked as they drove.

  Genevieve shrugged again. Still, she was relieved he spoke English. She hadn’t been entirely sure he would but had been too embarrassed to ask. Her mother, Angela, had told stories about her Parisian brother over the years, and Genevieve had a vague sense that he might be the reason she was saddled with a name that was so difficult to spell, but she hadn’t really put all the pieces together. But now she realized that, like her mother, Dave had been born and raised in Mississippi. He even spoke with a slight drawl, reminding her of home. Of her mom.

  Her dead mom.

  She felt the hot prickle of tears behind her eyes. Threatening, humiliating. Genevieve had come up with a trick to keep them at bay: She bit her tongue and imagined peppermint candy, the red-striped disks she used to steal from her neighbor’s candy dish. The metallic tang of blood let her know she’d bit too hard. Not for the first time.

  “Well, I hope you’re hungry,” Dave continued, unfazed by her sullen silence. “Because Pasquale’s a great little cook. One thing about living in France, you eat well. Hey—you like croissants?”

  She shrugged again.

  “You tellin’ me you’ve never had a croissant for breakfast? How about a pain au chocolat? No? Why, you’re in for a treat, darlin’.”

  “We eat whole grain at home.”

  “Oh, well, that’s commendable. But a genuine Parisian pain au chocolat . . .” He trailed off with a chuckle and a shake of his head.

  “Is it breakfast time?” Genevieve asked.

  “Oh no, it’s almost suppertime. The croissants will be for tomorrow morning. We’ll take a walk, see the neighborhood. You’ll love it.”

  She gazed out the foggy window. It was rush hour and the streets were jammed; pedestrians made swifter progress than the cars.

  “This corner might not look like much,” Dave said as they sat immobilized, watching as the light turned red for the second time, “but this is where the Bastille used to be.”

  “What’s the Bast-ee?” she asked, curious in spite of herself.

  “You haven’t heard of Bastille Day? It’s sort of like Fourth of July, but here it’s le quatorze juillet, the fourteenth of July.”

  “Independence day?” Genevieve wasn’t great at history. Had France been a colony?

  “Not an independence day like in the States . . . but sort of. The Bastille was an old prison that stood right there.” As he pointed, Genevieve studied the crookedness of his finger, the gnarled blue veins and ugly brown spots that covered the back of his hand. She tried to reconcile his rheumy eyes and sagging cheeks with old family photos. Dave had been a teenager when he first came to Paris: dashing and romantic, with dark hair and a go
atee. More than fifty years ago. He had lied about his age, insisted on enlisting. It was the tail end of the war, but they still needed fresh, uninjured boys. “See that sign over there?”

  Genevieve searched but saw nothing more than gray shopfronts, a restaurant, and a bar. Spindly-looking chairs were tilted forward to lean against tiny café tables, glistening in the rain. A clutch of commuters waited for the bus, huddled under a bright yellow awning that looked garish in the otherwise monochromatic cityscape.

  “On the corner of the building, there,” Dave said as the light changed and they finally moved on. “Not that interesting, I suppose, in any case. But here’s a good skill to learn: In Paris the signs are usually found on the corners of buildings, not on poles like in the States. So if you’re looking for a street sign, look for a plaque on a building. And sometimes you’ll learn a little bit about history, instead. Almost by accident.”

  They pulled behind a sea of cars at the next light. The lanes seemed to be mere suggestions, with cars straddling the painted lines willy-nilly. Ahead, a pair of drivers vied for position and began to argue, the taxi driver opening his door to half stand with one foot out, one foot in, the other yelling through his open window. The cabdriver made a series of hand gestures that, though foreign to her, left no doubt as to their meaning. Genevieve took note for future reference.

  The gesturer won the spot and nosed his taxi into the lane.

  “So, anyway,” continued Dave, “round about 1789 the French people got tired of the abuse they suffered at the hands of the aristocrats, and stormed the Bastille to release the prisoners.”

  Now interested, Genevieve twisted in her seat, looking behind them to see any traces of such a place.

  “We can walk by there one day when we’re out sightseeing, if you want,” said Uncle Dave. “But like I said, there’s not much to see anymore. You’d probably like the Eiffel Tower more.”

  “I went to a prison once,” Genevieve said.

  “Did you, now? Did the judge throw the book at you?”

  “I mean, just to visit. With my mom.”

  Genevieve had been in the fourth grade. There was a rally planned to protest the imminent execution of a condemned prisoner at San Quentin, the hulking state prison on the shore of the San Francisco Bay. Genevieve had begged and pleaded with her mother to be allowed to go. Angela had hesitated, pointing out that it was Sunday, a school night. But Genevieve’s father had encouraged the outing. “She’s not too young to understand injustice,” Jim had said, making Genevieve wonder why he never joined Angela at such protests.

  On the way, they sang her mother’s favorite childhood song: “I love you, a bushel and a peck, and it beats me all to heck, how I’ll never tend the farm. . . .”

  But once they arrived, things turned grim. The crowd milled around, chanting, witnessing, crying, or praying for a man none of them had ever met. The musty wool blanket scratched Genevieve’s neck when her mother wrapped it tight around her shoulders to ward off the chill blowing across the bay. Well-dressed television reporters checked their lip gloss and applied hairspray; bulky news vans bristling with antennae were parked in driveways rented from the locals; cameramen hoisted their equipment on their shoulders and scanned the crowds, looking for a good shot. A few reporters were interviewing random protestors, but most were waiting, as they all were, for something to happen: for the governor to issue a reprieve or for the executioners to act.

  Genevieve had gazed through the gates at the well-lit, Art Deco façade of the massive penal structure, her mind conjuring lurid images of what went on inside those walls.

  She knew she was supposed to care about the man who was about to die, but what caught her imagination was the town itself. It had an ice-cream parlor and a post office and sat right on the water, little clapboard houses inhabited mostly by prison staff and their families. A sweet little main street, like a movie set . . . but what about their monstrous neighbor at the end of the lane? How did the residents manage to drift off to sleep? Did they shrink from imagined faces in their windows? Did they wonder if this was the night a convict might scale the walls, jimmy the lock, sneak in to exact a grisly revenge?

  It made Genevieve shiver to think of that face in the window.

  Angela had gathered the prickly blanket tighter around Genevieve’s ears and pulled her daughter to her side, wrapping her arm around her.

  The back of her mother’s arm looked like melted ice cream, its skin puckered and shiny, yet to Genevieve the scars were familiar and comforting. She liked to run her finger over the strange surface; it felt slippery and hard, like plastic, so different from regular flesh. Whenever she asked her mother what had happened, Angela would say only that there had been an accident. If Genevieve pushed for an answer, Angela would reply, with a rare edge to her voice, that life was complicated and it was impolite to stare.

  Genevieve had craned her neck to study her mother’s face in the hazy yellow glow of the streetlamps. Angela was pretty (thick auburn hair, chocolate brown eyes, even features) and Genevieve noticed how some of the dads would linger at the school gates to talk with her. But Angela never responded, rarely smiling, always holding herself apart; “aloof” was the word Genevieve once heard someone use to describe her mother. She had looked it up in the dictionary, but to Genevieve it didn’t describe Angela. Angela was too good for them, was the problem.

  But then Angela had looked stricken, tormented by the stranger’s imminent death.

  “Do you know him?” Genevieve asked, embarrassed that she hadn’t thought to ask earlier.

  Angela looked down at her, an uncomprehending look on her face. “What?”

  “Do you know the man they’re going to execute?” Genevieve clarified.

  “No, baby,” said Angela. “I just . . . I just think it’s wrong to kill.”

  “No matter what?”

  “No matter what.”

  “Even if it’s self-defense?”

  Genevieve would have thought it impossible, but the sorrow on her mother’s face seemed to intensify, her brown eyes gleaming with unshed tears.

  “Like, I mean, if someone was trying to kill you,” Genevieve hurried to explain, not wanting her mother to think she was an ogre, that she thought it was okay to kill. “Then it would be okay to do it to them first, right?”

  Angela nodded slowly, looking back toward the prison. When she spoke, her voice was hushed. “Yes, I suppose self-defense is a different matter altogether. Hush, now, baby; let’s remember why we’re here.”

  Genevieve fell silent. The cold salt air stung her cheeks, and her stomach growled. But she didn’t complain. She knew she was supposed to feel sad for the man, but the truth was she hoped there would be more protests, that this would become a regular mother-daughter event. It felt special, grown-up, even magical to be outside in the middle of the night, stars sparkling overhead.

  No reprieve was granted. At 12:13 a.m. an announcement was made: The man had been put to death. A few protestors lingered, gathering in prayer circles or making statements to the press, but most shuffled back to their cars in silence.

  Angela had driven them home, her cheeks wet with tears. It was only as they were nearing the farm that Genevieve realized she didn’t know what the man had done to earn his death sentence. The sad, distracted look on her mother’s face kept her from asking.

  She was sorry, now, that she hadn’t. There were so many things she wished she had asked her mother when she had the chance.

  “What had they done, the prisoners in the Bast-ee?” Genevieve asked her uncle.

  “Offended the king in some way. They were political prisoners.”

  “Were there a lot of them?”

  “Good question!” Dave chuckled and shook his head. “Actually, turns out there were only seven prisoners in the Bastille at the time, but it was a symbolic victory. And never underestimate the power of a sy
mbolic victory. Now, see that river, right there? That’s the famous Seine.”

  The river was a black expanse in the rapidly fading light. A series of small bridges lit by ornate streetlamps straddled the water, leading to yet more bleak buildings on the other side.

  “And here we are, home at last,” Dave said as he turned onto a tiny street with cobblestone sidewalks.

  Genevieve looked up just in time to catch sight of a small plaque on the side of a building. Craning her neck, she made out white letters against a faded blue background.

  “Village Saint-Paul?” she read.

  “Village Saint-Paul,” Dave repeated with the French pronunciation. “One of the oldest neighborhoods in all of Paris. Full of nooks and crannies, little lanes and courtyards with no cars allowed, just the occasional bicycle. We’re known as the antiques district, people come from all over to shop, and we have a few big outdoor antique fairs every year.”

  “Oh.”

  Dave looked at her with amusement. “You don’t like antiques?”

  She shrugged.

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” he said in a whisper. “I don’t care much about them, either. Not antiques per se, anyway. But I do love antique keys and the old houses they belong to.”

  Dave stopped the car in the middle of the street, killed the engine, and got out, circling around to get her suitcase and bag out of the trunk. Genevieve followed suit. It made her nervous that they were blocking the way, but there weren’t any other cars on this narrow side street. In fact, there seemed to be no life at all.

  “This is it,” he said proudly, gesturing toward a storefront. The lights in the shop were out, so all she saw was a display window in the anemic glow of a streetlamp that barely cut through the cool mist of the evening. A wooden sign over the window read: UNDER LOCK AND KEY.

  “It’s in English.” The one thing Genevieve had been prepared for upon her arrival in France was not to be able to understand anything.