Ellie had left Daphne in charge of the register, and Daphne wavered there like a ghost, worn-out from school, her stay in the hospital. She should have been resting upstairs in bed, but she’d tried that and didn’t like it. She insisted the store, on the other hand, calmed her. And the reliable absence of customers meant it was almost as quiet as her bedroom. Nevertheless, seeing Daphne through Eleanor’s eyes, I winced. Daphne was better, but not completely better. It was one reason I’d not been answering Declan, who’d been texting. I wanted to be able to say everything was fine. It wasn’t.
“Tante Eleanor! Bienvenue!” Daphne said, and let herself be swept up in a hug.
“My, my,” Eleanor said into Daphne’s hair, which, to me, still smelled of hospital. I worried my brain would ensure it always would. “A French welcome! So fancy.”
“Les jumeaux sont où?” I said. Because I wanted to demonstrate some competency, too, in some tiny area of my life. French would do.
“Peter and Annabelle are up in the children’s section,” Daphne said. The twins had rejoined us at Daphne’s express request, and since I wasn’t in a position to deny anything Daphne wanted, request them I did. I would be lying if I said I didn’t like having them around, too. Their love was easy, powerful, general.
“Ah, yes,” Eleanor said. “The foundlings. I’m so curious to meet them.”
“Daphne,” I said, “you left them up there tous seuls?”
“Ma mère,” Ellie said, “just because we live in a nineteenth-century building doesn’t mean we can’t have us some twenty-first-century technology.”
“Qu’est-ce que c’est?” I said.
Daphne held up a little tablet, an iPad knockoff that I was using to forestall her acquisition of an actual phone. Previously, Daphne had prized an iPod hand-me-down of Ellie’s, but this tablet was actually quite nice; I’d bought a model with a spiffier camera, quietly thinking that while Daphne was at school, I could explore its filmmaking capabilities. Back in my own school days, filmmaking had meant borrowing loaner equipment that was always missing a key piece or due back before you were done. Now everyone had the equipment (because now everything, including one’s phone, was equipment). Anyone could use it. Even me. Especially me. I’d finally make my film.
Except I’d first learn that someone was making films of me. Of us all.
“Asif rigged a camera up there,” Ellie said, “for just this reason.”
Eleanor looked at me with raised eyebrows. I thought she was alarmed about the camera—that’s what was panicking me now—but then I realized it was the mention of Asif.
“Asif rigged a what?” I said.
“Asif is her petit ami,” Daphne said to Eleanor.
“He’s not so petit,” I said to Eleanor. “Taller than me. Handsome.”
“He’s a good friend,” Ellie said. (She even blushed, which alarmed Eleanor and relieved me; I’d been worried that Ellie no longer blushed about anything.)
“But wait—what’s he doing with cameras in my house?” I said.
Ellie sighed. “You know we always lose more books from the children’s section because we don’t have someone up there. So now we don’t have to worry. You just click and watch. On anything. Even your phone.”
“That’s fascinating,” Eleanor said.
Everyone looked to me. I imagined a camera swinging my way. Wide shot, close-up, silence.
No one said anything then, until Daphne, my linguist, my wise younger child, said, “un ange passe,” an angel is passing, the expression one deploys during awkward pauses in a conversation. It wasn’t perfectly deployed here, but I was grateful for it all the same, at least until Annabelle, who’d chosen that exact moment to descend the stairs, shot a startled look at Daphne.
“Un ange?” Annabelle asked. “Is it your papa?”
* * *
—
Non.
Eleanor could not believe it. All the food before us was cooked from frozen?
Oh, but oui.
We were introduced to Chef Picard by Molly, who “cooked” a meal or two for us early on. I thought at the time that she had quite outdone herself: sliced duck breast with marinated mushrooms; pork tenderloin in a mustard sauce; monkfish; delicate green beans in butter; flaky, crisp apple tarts, more savory than sweet. But as we were soon to learn, all she—and every other woman and man in Paris, and not a few restaurants—had done was remove some packaging and turn on an oven.
Chef Picard is our own nickname; the food all comes courtesy of a frozen food chain, Picard, whose stores I avoided until Molly finally revealed the source of her gourmet cooking. My first impression, when I finally entered one, was how antiseptic it looked. The space was filled with glass cases, flooded with bright white light, and the walls, while cheerily painted, were almost completely blank. But the packages themselves are adorned with museum-quality photographs that, unlike in America, accurately reflect what’s inside. I sometimes like making Picard meals just to look at them. And when I do, I often think of Robert’s creations. Of the “cooking shows” with Eleanor.
Frozen or fresh, the meal completely charmed Eleanor—I had opted for beef carpaccio with olive oil and basil for her, Ellie, Daphne, and myself, and then pépites de poulet panées—chicken nuggets—for Peter and Annabelle. (Molly says the secret is to use the Picard as a base and then add your own tweaks, but I like what Picard makes just fine.) Eleanor quizzed the girls on school (very hard, they said, and it made them feel like school stateside had been too easy), life in Paris (they wished the church bells didn’t ring so early and often), and, finally, the bookstore.
“When I was a little girl,” Eleanor said, “I dreamt of living in a bookstore.”
“You did?” said Peter. I could see he found Eleanor more grandmotherly than his actual grandmother, Madame Brouillard. “What kind of bookstore?”
“Oh,” said Eleanor, putting down her fork and knife and taking up a napkin. “I think it was a red bookstore in a faraway place.”
“Our father is often far away,” said Peter.
“This bookstore is red!” said Annabelle.
“And I dreamt that there was a little apartment above the red store,” Eleanor said quickly.
“There is an apartment above this store!” said Peter.
“And that I could go and see the books anytime I wanted,” said Eleanor.
“We can’t do that,” said Annabelle. “Our papa says we would get distracted.”
“I can’t imagine there are better things to be distracted by than books,” said Eleanor.
“Mais oui,” said Daphne.
“I think you dreamed of this store ici!” said Peter. The same way question marks defined Robert, exclamation points defined Peter. Even the shapes fit each of them—besieged, Robert curved over into a hunch? Exuberant, Peter often popped straight up out of his shoes!
“Ici means ‘here,’” said Daphne.
“Yes, I think I did dream of this very store, here,” said Eleanor.
“Sometimes,” Ellie said, “it’s a nightmare.”
Peter made a face. Annabelle liked to torture him by always asking to have Mon Premier Cauchemar—a French picture book about nightmares—read to them at bedtime. Ellie poked Annabelle. Daphne stifled a laugh. I looked at all their faces—this was a family, a kind of one, the five of us. Even without a father, even with two kids on loan from another father, we were our own kind of intact, “normal” family, the kind who kidded with each other over dinner and ate beautiful food.
And I thought, once again: Robert would have loved this. Not a guess. It was there in the pages of his manuscript. The family loves Paris. It loves almost all of them back.
“Let us not talk of nightmares so close to bedtime,” Eleanor said.
“I only meant that it’s not easy running a store,” Ellie said. “Sometimes it’s hard. Somet
imes people steal things.”
“Like the gypsies!” Peter said.
“Peter!” Ellie said. Just a month prior, Ellie (and Asif) had been at a rally in support of the stateless Romani at the Hôtel de Ville, arguing that the Romani were habitually accused of crimes that they did not commit. Ellie decreed that we were not allowed to say the word gypsies, nor even to read Bemelmans’s Madeline and the Gypsies. This was hardest on Peter, since the book featured a circus. (He thought all books should, and not enough did.)
“One time someone stole one of my books,” Annabelle said.
“Oh, dear,” said Eleanor.
“Well, if you just leave your own books lying around,” Ellie said, “what do you expect?”
“People to be honest,” Daphne said.
“Don’t we all,” Eleanor said, and turned to me. “And when is bedtime, by the way?”
“There were some kids just today,” Daphne said. “While Ellie was down meeting you at the hotel. A bunch came into the store, and I know one of them stole something.”
“Ellie,” I said. “This is why I don’t like Daphne being left in charge of the store all by herself.”
“I like being in charge,” said Daphne.
“I was only two doors down,” said Ellie. “So were you.”
We had a simple protocol with shoplifters: let them steal. Sometimes, if the suspect was younger than herself, Ellie broke the rule and would confront him or her (more often the latter, which surprised me) outside the store. I would often undo Ellie’s police work by making a gift of the book. One time Ellie had intercepted a young, freckled, overweight girl in the act of stealing Dieu, tu es là ? C’est moi Margaret ! With apologies to Judy Blume, that’s a book I almost think a young girl should steal (which is why I stock it even though Judy Blume is still alive—and may she live forever). And adults stole Bibles and cheap Shakespeare editions, while the backpackers, maps.
And one very special criminal, a very special scribbled-in copy of Robert Eady’s Central Time.
“I think I remembered some of the kids from Ellie’s app night,” Daphne said.
“Nice,” Ellie said. “Blame me.”
“I wasn’t!” Daphne said. “And maybe I was wrong. There were just so many of them, and I thought, this is odd—it just felt odd. Maybe it was because this kid, and I’m not even sure if he was a kid—he was wearing sunglasses and a hat—”
“What did he take?” said Annabelle.
“Probably the nightmare book,” said Ellie.
“Ellie,” I said, but Annabelle shot away to check. Then Peter said to himself, Tintin, and he ran away, too.
“Lovely, girls,” I said. “Daphne, I’m sorry this happened, and you won’t find yourself in that spot again, all alone in the store, but let’s also try to remember not to talk about such things in front of the jumeaux, d’accord?”
“I feel fine,” Daphne said.
Now Ellie got up and ran away.
“Well,” Eleanor said.
“Never a dull moment at The Late Edition,” I said.
“It makes me worried for you,” Eleanor said.
“Don’t be,” I said. “Shoplifters are—irritating. But normal. You may recall that I stole something from a bookstore once.”
“I’ve heard that story,” Eleanor said. “But I thought we weren’t going to talk about—”
Ellie returned, staring at Daphne’s tablet.
“That’s mine,” Daphne said.
“I know,” Ellie said, “it’s just easier to see on this—wait—”
“No technology at the dinner table, Ellie, you know the rules,” I said.
“I just got the tail end,” Ellie said, still staring at the screen. “It only saves the last two hours, and then it overwrites, I guess, so we’re missing most of this guy’s visit, and I can’t even see what, or if, he stole anything, but here he is, going out of the store.”
For some reason, she showed Eleanor first. She tilted back her head. “Honestly,” Eleanor said, “I’m no good without my glasses.”
Ellie gave the tablet to me. Daphne came and looked over my shoulder. “Yes, that’s him,” she said, and we studied him, and Ellie paused and zoomed this way and that, and we all agreed that yes, in the crowd Daphne had seen, there had been a boy who had stolen a book. (The camera even allowed us to read the title: The Cloud Atlas.)
But here was what was more remarkable by far.
I seemed to be the only one of us who saw that someone else had broken free of the crowd to move across the opposite corner of the screen at the precise moment of the “heist” (as Ellie had come to call it). He quickly disappeared from the shot when Ellie zoomed in on the thief, and as I said, he was in a corner of the room opposite from where the heist had occurred. Which meant no one noticed him.
But of course, I did.
I’d know my husband anywhere.
This was different from seeing him in the static pages of a book, imagining that I’d seen him in a photograph taken a half century before. This was a film, from two hours ago. This was Robert. This was life catching up to my imagination, or the other way around.
The reason I’d been having more and more trouble, ever since coming to Paris, imagining he was dead was because he had come to Paris.
He’d come to our store.
We’d found him. I’d found him.
And he’d found us.
I looked at the girls, but they’d already set off with the twins for the children’s section to see what else might be missing. I looked at Eleanor, but she just shook her head sleepily at me. I felt my vision freeze and scatter, as though my eyes were just another balky piece of technology.
Robert was alive.
CHAPTER 13
Ellie had left the tablet behind and I took it up now, slowly slid my finger back and forth, REWIND, PLAY, left, then right, not unlike Robert’s old experiment, the book that erased itself, back and forth, except this was different. The story got clearer with each pass.
It was him.
It was not a good picture of him. The camera never caught his face, only him moving away. He appeared to have lost a good deal of weight, but still, on this tiny, grainy film, there was his shape, his profile, how he moved. How he moved amongst books, that was the greatest marker for me. I remember this from almost any bookstore we ever visited anywhere. He moved through them with a strained delicacy or grace, the bull who knows he’s in a china shop and is terrified his hooves will slide out from under him. Books drew him, I knew, not just as things to be read but as things. I’ve never known a writer who didn’t like just holding a book, feeling its mass. (And I’ve found a surefire way to close a sale is to put the book in a customer’s hands, let them feel it, fan it.) I get it: a physical book of paper and glue, it conveys its worth through its weight. The reason people once lined their shelves with encyclopedias was not that they thought they’d turn to them daily, but rather that they might daily bear witness to those spines: it’s a complicated world, and all that mass was a moat.
But as much as Robert loved books, he’d also grown to hate them, especially in stores where he wasn’t shelved, but also in those where he was: what was he doing in the bargain bin? He hated when other people published books he had not published. He hated the books of authors he hated, and he even hated the books of people he loved. At the bargain table of our Paris bookshop, he did exactly what he used to always do at every other bargain table at every other bookstore: he lifted up a copy and gave a quick glance beneath. If a black mark was flecked across the bottom of the bound pages—something invisible to absolutely everyone else in the world but authors and booksellers—that meant it had been remaindered. That meant it hadn’t sold at full price the first time around. That meant another author had, like Robert, come up short. Those marks were a comfort, I knew Robert thought that. And, needless to say,
those marks also meant a bargain. He liked that, too. Because as much as he came to hate books, he also couldn’t not love them in the end. When he disappeared back in Milwaukee, my first thought was to go to the library. I told the police this, and they went, and they didn’t find him, so I went, and although I didn’t find him either, I saw him, I could imagine him in every corner, under a toppled bookshelf, a massive dictionary striking the fatal blow, or perhaps even squeezed to death by one of those mechanized accordion shelving systems. That was the end I foresaw for him, though I’m sure he saw otherwise. Such a death would have been too showy, too apt.
* * *
—
Eleanor gamely offered to take over the bedtime routine, which was incentive enough for everyone to race up the spiral stairs. She dispatched me, meanwhile, to the lobby of the hotel: later, she said, we would talk.
And we eventually did, but the conversation did not go as I had planned. After waiting an hour for her—they’d all wanted bedtime stories, of course—and after I spent that hour rewinding, replaying, zooming in, zooming out, proving to my eyes what I’d known immediately in my bones—I shared my discovery with Eleanor. She took it poorly. At first, I understood her reaction to be rooted in her general reaction to technology: not to be trusted. And it wasn’t. But here, I showed her. I slowed it down, I advanced it frame by frame. I said no, you can’t see his face, but you can see his shoulders, his hips, how he moved—I told her all about how he’d moved; she’d had to have seen this herself, hadn’t she? I would still need to see him in the flesh, somehow, somewhere, but until then—
She shook her head.
“What do you mean?” I said. “Why can’t you see this?”
Her eyes were red-rimmed, watery, but intent. “Because I know what happened to Robert,” she said, and then started again. “Leah, this is what I’ve been trying to tell you. I know that’s not him because, months ago—actually, days ago . . .”
I waited.
“I’m so sorry, dearest,” Eleanor said. “I called them.”
Paris by the Book Page 21