Declan, Daphne, the twins, and I caught up with Ellie at the local station—an ornate petit palais that looked like an outbuilding at Versailles—where, after a brief reunion, Declan went to work. On the way over, he’d reassured us that he’d extricated many a young American from worse. While the rest of us sat on a bench in a two-story arcaded atrium—the lobby, though it feels silly to call it that—Declan moved a few steps away and argued our case.
Ellie refused to speak to me beyond muttering that she hoped this didn’t take hours. I secretly wanted it to; I felt I’d need at least that much time to sort out what had happened. What had Daphne shouted? Who had seen what?
Here is what I’d seen: a bigger drop from bridge to water than Bemelmans’s drawing makes it out to be, though not so big that college students (reported Declan) and the occasional fifteen-year-old American girl can’t navigate the plunge with élan. The only real challenge—apart from avoiding boats, which luck had allowed—is getting out. The current runs faster than it looks. But Ellie never panicked; I may even have seen her smile, which I think she did once she realized she had chanced into a stunt I’d never have allowed. Never mind that the river, though not as polluted as it once was, was not safe for swimming: the appeal was that what she was doing was forbidden. That the frogmen from the tidy red-and-white plants-in-pots-on-the-roof Brigade de sapeurs-pompiers barge who rescued her later emphasized this point seemed only to please her more. (Though what may have pleased her most was how handsome her young rescuers were; many, many selfies were taken aboard the boat with the crew, who looked, in the pictures, a bit too obliging.)
Here is what I had not seen, not on the bridge, in the water, at the police station after: Robert.
I pretended I’d heard Daphne wrong. She hadn’t yelled Dad—or if she had, neither Ellie nor the twins had heard her, because that’s all they would be talking about now. And I didn’t want to bring it up because—because I didn’t want to come off as crazy. Not in front of the police, not in front of my daughters.
And not, come to think, in front of Declan, who returned to us with a thin smile—he’d gotten them to waive the fine, he said—
“There’s a fine for accidentally falling into a river?” I said.
“No,” he said. “But there’s one for standing on the rail. Anyway, doesn’t matter.”
“Thank you,” I said, rising to go.
“In exchange, though . . .”
So there was a fine. Or there was something about the visas George had mysteriously acquired for us. If so, that would be worse than a fine.
“Girls,” Declan said. “You just have to talk to someone, okay? Your mom will be there for it. Part of it.”
“Who?” Daphne said, worry spreading from her eyes to her forehead, her whole face.
“A psychologue,” Declan said to me. “A psychologist.”
“A what?” Ellie said.
Declan explained that he’d had more than one of his study-abroad students routed through and out of the police station this way. Just avoid talking about politics, he said: the only time he’d ever had trouble was when a drunken student confessed ardent admiration for Margaret Thatcher. Otherwise, Declan said, thirty minutes, tops.
Daphne said something then that was so quiet Declan had to have her repeat it: “Did you tell them about”—she paused again, and I waited for her to say something about her father, but she didn’t. “Did you tell them about the tour?” Daphne asked. “Madeline? That we run a bookstore?”
Ellie put on her let’s-do-this face, and stood. “That’s probably why they think we’re crazy,” she said.
* * *
—
Declan offered to accompany us, but the women who’d come to usher us in frowned, and the twins needed watching anyway. So off Daphne, Ellie, and I went, to an office that looked like a hospital ward. The therapist that Robert and I had seen in Milwaukee had had a beautiful riverfront loft downtown, clean and uncluttered, simple lines. It always made me think of a day spa, tranquility, balance, burbling peace. Robert said he always thought of Ikea, all those opaque directions.
But this room made me and the girls think of Madeline. Specifically, the 1950s-era hospital where Madeline has her appendix out. A half-dozen cots ran along one wall beneath fourteen-foot ceilings and a row of massive, openable windows. It looked ancient and unused—but also clean and quiet and calm. There was a bud vase with a single rose, yellow, real, on a desk just inside the door.
Even the flaking paint—also yellow, a pale lemon, the color of the tart the girls were later offered as a snack—was beautiful. And Ellie was able to identify yet another parallel to Madeline—wherein the young heroine, recovering from that appendectomy, discerns the outline of a rabbit in the ceiling cracks of her hospital room—which made our own ceiling cracks that much more quaint. For me, anyway. For the psychologist, a bespectacled older man who insisted on speaking to us in English (with a disorienting Scottish accent), it only reinforced his belief that our collective mental health needed attending to.
Once again, Daphne cited the tour, the bookstore, Madeline, Bemelmans.
Bemel-mans? No, the man said. He is not known.
Ellie began to explain about the books, the bridge, how Bemelmans himself had once been suicidal, although there was no evidence he’d ever gone off a bridge or wanted to—
Mademoiselle, he interrupted.
C’est vrai, Daphne chimed in.
The man looked at his clipboard and then at me.
“Girls,” I said.
Ellie ignored me and continued. The initial inspiration for the whole series, in fact, had occurred in a hospital, when Bemelmans, recovering from minor surgery in a ward much like this one, struck up a friendship with a little girl who was visited each day by a kindly nun, a nurse, in that swoopy white thing, like a hat? Ellie looked at me. “Wimple?” I said.
Ellie looked at Daphne. “Comment dire ‘wimple’ en français?” Daphne shook her head. The psychologist looked at me. Ellie continued.
Bemelmans and the girl passed the hours deriving stories from shapes made by cracks in the ceiling.
Daphne broke in to point out that there were no smartphones back then. Life was more boring. She said this in French.
Do you use the portables? the man asked me in English. There are many dangers on the portable phones. I know of America this is different, but this is not America.
Ellie asked if he would like to hear more of the story. I said no. The man said yes.
The hospital that Bemelmans and the girl—a girl close to Daphne’s age—had been in was not in Paris, but another part of France. Did he know it? The Île d’Yeu in the Bay of Biscay, just south of the mouth of the Loire.
The psychologist pursed his lips and then fell into muttering French. “We will go now to the separate rooms?” he said. “Different rooms, different questions, the mother, the girls, this sort of thing.”
* * *
—
Does your mother hit you? This had been his opening gambit, Daphne reported once we were home and the twins asleep. She and Ellie said they said non.
And did he ask anything else?
She and Ellie conferred with their eyes. Non.
But during my individual interrogation, the psychologist said differently. He did mention he’d asked them about being struck—he said that, in his experience, Americans professed to not believe in corporal punishment, but many of them practiced it as soon as they left the United States . . .
But he also said he’d asked them about their father, and that the conversation had gone like this.
Where is your father, girls?
Il est parti. He is gone, the girls said. He asked how long; they told him. He asked them where, and they told him—or rather, they told him they weren’t sure. He had pressed them on this point and “the younger one” had finally said, s
ome people say he is dead.
Madame, the psychologist said down his nose to me, she say this with no tears. This is not normal.
Would it suffice, I wondered, if I cried for them? Their lack of tears was not evidence of resilience, which I’d let myself think for months, but delusion. It was indeed not normal, not for their father to have disappeared, not for them to be so certain he was coming back—or, to judge from what had just happened, to judge from Daphne’s account over coffee weeks before, that Robert had come back. For many nights after Robert left, I cursed him for not considering how his disappearance would mess up our kids—but now I worried how I was messing them up. After our rocky early days in France, I’d fallen into the fiction that coming to Paris had been good for them. Because what young girl doesn’t want to come to Paris? I always had. And now I was here, just like I’d always dreamed, in a police station talking to a mental health professional.
He continued: And then the big one say, “but we do not believe he is dead.” He looked at his notes. And then I ask them, “why do you not believe he is dead?” I ask because this is important to understand. Death is not small, we must be very clear when we speak on it. And so the small girl looks at the big girl and the big girl looks at the small girl and the big girl speaks.
“‘He’s looking for us,’” he said Ellie said.
“‘I do not understand,’” the psychologist said he told her.
“‘You wouldn’t,’” he said Ellie said.
I do not, the psychologist said to me.
* * *
—
Neither did I, not entirely, and so that night, tucking Ellie in—taking advantage, as Ellie had, of an extraordinary event enabling something never to be permitted again—I told her we needed to talk. I’d meant to say the same to Daphne, but hadn’t found a gentle enough way to do so before she fell sound asleep, exhausted by the excitement of the day.
“I’m listening,” Ellie said, lying on her stomach, face away from me, eyes closed. And as her breathing slowed and deepened, as I stroked her hair, as the building creaked its evening creaks and the street outside grew almost completely quiet, but not quite, I listened, too.
* * *
—
I might have sat there all night, in upright sleep, had I not heard the watery tones announcing an incoming Skype call downstairs. I let myself imagine that it wasn’t the office computer but some distant church tower, but the bells came again, and I thought, must be—
Eleanor. Ellie had posted her frogmen photos, and Eleanor, for whom Ellie served as her sole access point to the vast, roiling world of social media, had seen them and wanted to know what, exactly, had happened.
So I told her. Everything. Which, in my version, amounted to nothing. I told her about the tour, the rude guide, Ellie’s declamations, her plunge and rescue. I didn’t mention that a man named Declan had helped us navigate the police station. I didn’t mention that I thought I’d heard Daphne shout something.
I didn’t mention this, but knew I would have to, and soon. Eleanor was her own kind of gravity when it came to the truth, endlessly pulling it toward her.
“You look pleased,” I said, almost angry.
Eleanor sniffed. “I haven’t been ‘pleased’ since Eugene McCarthy won New Hampshire. I am relieved, even delighted, to discover, however, that my goddaughter has learned to so ably navigate the waters of life, metaphorical and otherwise.”
“Eleanor, I can’t—” I said. “Don’t be clever. Not now.”
“Then I’ll be direct,” Eleanor said. “Why did Ellie fall?”
“Speaking of water,” I said. “How are our renters? How is our old Milwaukee house? You’ve been kind to play landlord. With summer coming, they’re going to get water in the basement—”
“Dry as a bone. Unlike Ellie. Leah, what happened?”
“She lost her footing,” I said. Eleanor waited. “Something distracted her.” Eleanor looked at me like she already knew what I was going to say. I don’t think she actually did, but it’s the only excuse I have for crumbling. “Okay,” I said. “Daphne shouted ‘Dad!’ Or what sounded to me like ‘Dad.’ Like she’d seen him. She didn’t say a word about it after, neither of them did, and I was going to talk to them about it tonight, but I lost my fucking courage. Maybe it’s good I did. Maybe I heard her wrong, maybe she’d just shouted something like aaaaahhh—” I stopped. “Eleanor,” I said, “what’s going on?”
She shook her head. “Leah,” she said. “They miss their father.” She paused carefully. “Of course they do.”
“I miss their father,” I said, which was so starkly not something I was planning to say, something I had not said, for so long, that I said not a word more, and nor did Eleanor. I could feel her looking at me, and I could feel myself looking away.
I did miss Robert. Single-parenting was like a single-take scene, so much pressure on that cameraman to not trip over the cables, not knock into the boom mic, not mistake which fever was worthy of a 4:00 A.M. call to the pediatrician and which wasn’t. I thought I’d mastered it back in Milwaukee—we’d readily survived all those writeaways, after all. But I’ll admit, cooking and cleaning and scheduling and scolding and encouraging: it was hard not having help. And here in Paris, it was hard making the dozens of judgment calls that arose each week. Should the girls have allowances, and if so, how much? And paid out of what imaginary bank account? Should we switch to an international school? Should we get a cat?
Should we go home?
You can sit in a four-legged chair that’s missing a leg: it just takes more work, more concentration. And Paris, like a pile of books pressed into service, had served as a replacement leg, at least for a while. Not as sturdy, not as sound, not a permanent solution, but we were holding up. Enough time had passed now that it was possible to forget, for a stray millisecond or two, that he was gone. Thinking him dead had, for the longest time, helped with that. But then someone would come along and rip a book out from the pile, maybe one with I’m sorry scribbled inside, the chair would teeter. And then one of us—Daphne, for example—would shout Dad, and someone would fall. This time it was Ellie. Who would be next?
“I’m going to ask you something,” said Eleanor.
Now I played Eleanor’s game: I said nothing.
“I was expecting to be interrupted,” she said.
I still said nothing.
“Well, this is one benefit of Skype,” Eleanor said. “Anger or agreement, it’s all free. On the phone, silence feels so expensive.”
I shook my head.
“May I quote an expert to you?” Eleanor asked. “I’m afraid I must, as it’s about a topic I know nothing about, which is children. This expert told me the seriousness of a young child’s injury is proportional to the time that elapses between incident and scream. Minor things, the cry comes right away. Major things, the scream is a long time coming because so much else is at work: there is the child’s gradual recognition of what’s happened, there is the drawing in of extra air to deliver a scream at extra volume—”
“I told you this,” I said.
“I know you did,” Eleanor said.
“Did I address the worst-case scenario, where no sound at all comes, ever?”
She didn’t flinch. “You did not. Because who would speak of death, even hypothetically, in regard to her own family?”
I did flinch. I did have to pause before I spoke. And when I did, I found my own breath mostly gone, and with it, the force of my anger. That is, I was still furious—with Eleanor, with Robert, with my daughters even, for resurrecting him, however hallucinatorily—but I was tired, too. That’s why I saw him in the pages of that book. That’s why I felt his eyes on me, all the time. It wasn’t because he was alive and in Paris. It was because I was exhausted and alone.
“He’s not a child,” I said. “He didn’t fall. We’re not waiting
for Robert to scream.”
“No, we’re not,” Eleanor answered. “We have Daphne, who thinks she saw him—sees him. We have you, who saw a note scribbled in one of his books. We have one hundred pages of a manuscript that I found, describing a family who sound a hell of a lot like one I know,” she said.
We’ve reached a turning point: I waited for Eleanor to say it. But she said something else, something that made me realize Eleanor and the girls had reached that point long ago, and it was time for me to.
“We’re not waiting for him to make some noise,” Eleanor said, “because he already has.”
CHAPTER 10
Robert was a quiet person; it came with the job, he said. I can remember him shouting three times, I think, in our married life. Once when Daphne, six, broke free and scored the winning goal for her coed soccer team; another time when Ellie, ten, won the spelling bee (on scrumptious); the third, and most unusual time, was at the end of an evening we’d spent with some of our fellow soccer parents. As such evenings in Milwaukee occasionally go, one drink led to a dozen, and around 11:00 P.M., calls were made to sitters to buy a little more time, because someone had had the brilliant idea that we’d go dancing.
I loved dancing, perhaps because I’d come to it late; I’d only started going out in grad school and so was in my dancing adolescence. That’s not a term, but it’s how I behaved. Pre-kids, I’d dragged Robert out once or twice, and he’d been game but not great. After that, I mostly went out with my old grad school girlfriends, and as they grew older or left town, I didn’t go out at all. And now here we were, judgment impaired, dancing: nothing special, just the back of a bar, but the DJ was bribable and the music was great. Robert and I danced like clothes on a line in a storm. We put on a show for the twentysomethings, the regulars, who tolerated us because we were entertaining and because they knew we were never coming back. But maybe it was one of them who called the police, who arrived around midnight saying they’d gotten complaints about noise. The lights went on, the music off. Robert stood in the center of the room and shouted: Noooooo! There was a deep and sudden silence after that, cued by the cops, who didn’t know Robert was harmless, a writer, a dad. They watched him intently. So did the room; so did I. I was grinning because I was drunk and it was funny to see Robert so alive, but then I wasn’t grinning because as the o’s trailed on, I heard everything else pent-up in him; no was not only a complaint about the music stopping, but also the magic he’d once lived under. Maybe I’m reading too much into the moment, but it’s what a writer’s wife does. That, and go to her husband, take up his hands, kiss him, and then theatrically turn to the cops, the crowd, pretending it was all a show, and bow. Good night, folks!
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