Them: back before we left for Paris, I had met with the police for a final “update.” I put the word in quotation marks because there was no update. There was no nothing. This may not have been their fault, but it broke me, enraged me. Displaced anger, I suppose. There was some shouting, a chair I helped fall over, a door I slammed whose glass, I argue, was already broken. But I did not argue, and nor did the police, when Eleanor suggested she become the designated intermediary henceforward. We even signed a form.
I had found I liked having a buffer, liked it up until this very moment, in fact, when my buffer told me that Robert, my husband, the author, Daphne’s and Ellie’s dad, was dead.
Because the police said so. Because a “preponderance of evidence” said so. Eleanor had dutifully checked in with them the day she left the States, and this is what they told her, my duly designated representative, that this looked to be the determination they were going to make. They were still preparing the report, but—
But I had just seen him.
Eleanor was still talking: “There is not—I want this to sound like a comfort, but I know it won’t, and I really don’t want to use the word—there is not—”
“There’s no body,” I said quietly.
She looked surprised, and then nodded. “I’m sorry, Leah.”
I studied her for a moment.
“Not sorry enough,” I said.
“Leah.”
But it was true. Eleanor had sent Robert’s manuscript to the girls! Before that, Eleanor had sent us to Paris. And before that, Eleanor had believed. That Robert was alive. That I should believe so, too. And now, now that I knew—
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry you’re wrong.” Because she had to be, and so, too, the police. There was no body because the body was here, in Paris, and I’d just seen it, not dead, but alive, wandering a bookstore thirty meters from where Eleanor and I were sitting.
I picked up the tablet but could only stare at the black screen. I was too tired or confused or angry to turn it on.
“Sometimes,” Eleanor said, “we see things that . . .” She set her lips in a line.
“What did they say?” I said. “What did they see?”
“There was a boat,” she said. “The college’s sailing center.”
I was ready for her to say that they’d found a pair of shoes and a note by a bridge. Or an abandoned rental car an hour west of Green Bay. Or Montego Bay. Something so cliché I could say, not him. Can’t be him. He was a lot of things, but he wasn’t ever, not even for an hour, ordinary.
But the sailing center. It had been his one escape. He never went out of a love of sailing, but out of a need to get away, alone, and water worked. He’d first gone there to research an early book of his where some too-young heroine sails from Miami to Cuba. (Of course, Robert reversed the usual direction.) He quickly learned, I recalled, that Lake Michigan wasn’t the Gulf of Mexico. No sharks, true, but Lake Michigan wasn’t warm, either. It was an inland ocean; weather came up fast. There were more shipwrecks bubbling beneath than historians could count. But with training and grit and, most important, good weather, it could be sailed successfully. So long as you were prepared. So long as you had the right boat. So long as you had a partner, but as I’ve said, he hated sailing with someone. It would be very much like him to evade this rule. Especially if he wasn’t planning on coming back.
“The Coast Guard found a boat not long ago on the Michigan side of the lake, which turns out to be not only a Great Lake, but a gigantic one,” she said. “Gigantic enough that this boat—that is, the boat, could go missing for as long as it did. And we know it’s the boat because there’s a log there, at the sailing center.” I waited, wordless. “What I mean is—you’re going to get a long letter from the police, and you should answer the phone when they call next. There are legal things, which will be an agony, but they will ultimately make life easier for you.” She paused to let me respond. When I didn’t, she went on. “The detective said you’ll see that Robert signed out a boat in this log. Robert wasn’t supposed to go out alone that day—or any day—but especially that kind of day, something about how the wind was code yellow or—who knows? We live in an age that relies on kindergarten colors for safety—he signed out the boat. It wasn’t stormy, but the seas were high, say the weather records. It’s a good boat, what he signed out, but not for that kind of weather. Way too small.”
But sturdy enough to bob about that massive lake for a year?
“What day was this?”
“The day he disappeared. Just over a year ago.” She looked me up and down. “This is a lot,” she said. It was. I didn’t believe her, and yet—
“The sailing center?” I asked Eleanor. “Are you—are they sure that—”
“No,” Eleanor said. “I mean, I’m not sure, but the police are, and well, that does make me more sure. It’s hard to believe that the idiots at the sailing center didn’t realize it was missing. They’d even told the police all was in order way back when. But now, a year on, the Coast Guard finds a boat, someone does an inventory—it’s very haphazard, mind you. I drove by on the way to the airport to see for myself, and—I don’t know if you’ve ever been—”
I had not; it was Robert’s thing. His private pride and solace.
“It’s a mess, naturally. Student-run. I mean, there are boats—not a handful, dozens—in all states of disrepair, life jackets everywhere—”
Eleanor’s digressions, asides, and general anger—at the police, the club, and, I detected, Robert—softened the blow of her news somehow. And I still had my own solace, my self-delusion. I had my own pieces of evidence, although in the midst of this onslaught they seemed to be disintegrating. Forget the Coast Guard, the police, the student sailing center: what made me most anxious was that Eleanor now believed Robert was gone.
“But no sign of him at all?” I said.
“Dearest,” Eleanor said, and her face flushed as she turned away. “I knew this was going to be difficult,” she said to herself. She looked at me once more. “As I said, there are some legalities ahead, and you have to prepare. And I will help you prepare. But part of that is talking to the girls.”
“Prepare?”
“In Wisconsin and most other states, the presumption is that after someone has been missing for seven years and there’s no sign, they can be declared dead.”
“It’s hardly been seven minutes!”
“It’s June,” Eleanor said.
“Early June!” I said.
“What does it matter, Leah? The thing is, you don’t have to wait seven years if certain conditions obtain,” Eleanor said. “In all this time, there has been no sign of him at the bank, no sign of him on the credit card, no sign of him anywhere in Milwaukee—”
“Because he’s fucking here,” I said, and pointed to the tablet. “I just saw him.”
Eleanor looked around the room as if for support, but found none. “And who else?” she said, not angry but insistent. “We all saw that video—your own daughters saw it—and no one saw him then.”
“Daphne saw him on the bridge!”
“There, too, no one else,” Eleanor said.
“I found that ‘I’m sorry’ he wrote in that book,” I said. “I’m certain of that.”
“I’m sure you are,” Eleanor said. “But are you certain when he wrote that? Maybe it was years ago in another used bookstore. Can you be certain he wrote it?”
I couldn’t be. Because I couldn’t check. Because he’d stolen it back.
“I’m certain he wrote that manuscript!” I said. “And you can’t tell me you aren’t. One hundred pages, and he’s on every page, as you were the first to insist.”
“And I’ll insist that you start with the first page where it says ‘a novel,’ which means, as I sadly have to remind my undergraduates every single September, that each page followin
g is fiction.”
“It’s real! You’ve been to the store.”
“I’ve been to your store. But I didn’t meet—what was the wife’s name?—Callie?—and I’m quite certain I didn’t meet the husband, either.”
The lobby, badly lit, made Eleanor look old. I’m sure I looked even older. The room swallowed sound, too: my throat felt like it had just spent the entire evening yelling, but I’d been barely able to hear myself speak.
“I’m sorry, Leah,” Eleanor said. “I’m angry. Not at you. Or, a little at you, because you won’t let me help. But I’m angry at me, too, because I can’t figure out how to help. And because I can’t answer your questions the way that I should: am I certain the police are right? Am I certain Robert’s dead? Am I certain he’s at the bottom of Lake Michigan? I don’t know. I do know what I now believe, which is that he’s no longer with us.”
I still didn’t look up; I could feel her looking at me, waiting for me to meet her gaze, but I couldn’t, so I didn’t.
“You need to imagine a future without him, Leah.”
And there was the problem, the reason that I was so angry, too. I was already living that future. But it was a carefully constructed future that relied on certain elastic ambiguities, the way seams in a sidewalk let the pavement expand and contract with the seasons. I had good days and bad days, but with each passing day, I learned to live without Robert. And part of me liked life without him. I missed the author, but not the angst. I missed the dad, but not the doubter. I missed the boy who chased me, but I didn’t miss the man who’d made me chase him for almost twenty years.
I didn’t know what I would say if I caught him.
Why’d you go? Why’d it take us so long to get to Paris?
And then what? Glad you’re back?
Good-bye?
That’s why I didn’t want to hear what Eleanor said. That’s why I didn’t want him to be dead. Not anymore. If he was dead, I couldn’t leave him. If he was dead, I might fall in love with him again. I just wanted him to be back. For the girls’ sake. For Eleanor’s. And maybe—if I could have that boy and his books and his smile and his eyes and his Paris and his Wisconsin map of the world—for my sake, too.
But more than anything, I wanted this to be something I determined. Not the police. Not Eleanor. Not even Robert. If I wanted to see him in the pages of a book, or the grainy background of a video, then I would.
Because I had.
I had the benefit, or burden, of being the last person who saw him alive, that last night he was under our roof in Milwaukee, when Robert said no, he hadn’t bought the tickets to Paris to research that guidebook, he didn’t think he could stomach it, the project, there wasn’t much he could stomach right then, and . . .
And I told Robert that if he didn’t get his act together, off the page, on the page, I was leaving.
As in going, gone, and not coming back until he’d figured out a way to get better, with or without medication, with or without a therapist, with or without a career in writing.
I waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. Instead, as Eleanor now did, he rose and climbed the stairs without a word.
As Eleanor disappeared, I decided that Robert’s unfinished manuscript didn’t suggest a work in progress, but a work interrupted. The problem was not that we’d lived a life out of, or in, Robert’s manuscript. It was that we were running out of pages.
* * *
—
The next morning, Paris shook itself awake, swept clean its gardens, sent water coursing down its gutters, peopled its streets, polished its storefronts, and pretended that nothing had happened the night before, that I hadn’t just heard that my husband had died, that I hadn’t just seen evidence that he was alive. Perhaps any city will do this after hidden tragedies, but Paris did it that morning with a particular glint, and ignored me with particular intensity. It reminded me of those occasions—far too many now—when I encountered soldiers in Paris, always in squads of three or four, always with hands cradling weapons, walking up some random street that I was walking down. Expat American bookstore owners are invisible to them. No small feat, as I saw that they saw everything: that parked car there, those shuttered windows there, that van, those men, that bag, that moto buzzing by. Everything but me. On one occasion, I was so incredulous—the street was otherwise empty, and they passed inches from me—that I sputtered “bonjour.” They kept moving and scowled, like they’d momentarily wandered through the frame of the wrong film.
Tfk?
Declan and Ellie had for some time been attempting to teach me SMS French. But I had enough trouble with spoken French, and its SMS variant struck me as needlessly complicated, impenetrable to everyone but teens: tfk, for example, is not something lewd, although when I first saw it flash on Ellie’s phone, I was sure that was the case.
It wasn’t. It only meant what Declan now meant, tu fais quoi, what are you doing, what’s up?
I was up, early, the morning after my talk with Eleanor, and I was wandering the store, having just seen everyone off to school.
I stared at my phone. The few abbreviations I had learned were of no use here: tg, shut up; t où, where are you; mdr, lol. Nothing they’d taught me meant hearing from you, Declan, makes me realize that we need to meet, to talk, and probably take a breather from whatever not-quite-relationship that we’re in, because life’s just gotten really complicated for me. I almost thought to text Ellie “how do you say ‘it’s not you, it’s me’?” but it would be no use; Ellie had lately abandoned abbreviations for emojis, particularly ones that denoted eye-rolling.
So I texted him back a single letter, Y, which meant yes, I’m up, at least to me.
A moment later, the phone rang. I looked at it. It was Declan.
“‘Why’?” he said. I didn’t realize he was quoting my text.
“What are you talking about?” I said. “Also, good morning, which is something else I can’t remember the abbreviation for.” My voice sounded odd, like I was impersonating some less troubled version of myself, which I now hoped I was.
“The letter y,” Declan said. “You texted me that.” Then a pause. “Hey,” he said. “What is up? Are you okay?”
“Y meant ‘yes, I’m up, I’m here,’” I said. “But it also means I feel bad I’ve been out of touch. There’s been a lot—too much—going on, and I’m sorry. And I . . .”
Wait, I thought, I’m going to do this on the phone? I needed to meet Declan. Awkward as it might be—well, maybe it wouldn’t be awkward. He was a friend, after all, and a gentler one than Eleanor. I wouldn’t have to discuss the police department’s discovery. Or mine.
“Are you free?” I said. “Just for twenty minutes—an hour? We should meet.”
“Not only am I free—until after lunch—I have an amazing bottle of wine this student’s parents bought me for helping them jump the line at the Louvre.”
I smiled, or tried to, though he couldn’t see, or hear, that. Or maybe he could.
“Leah?” he said. “It’s . . . been a while.”
“It has,” I said, and then, again, nothing. Because this meeting was a terrible idea. What I needed was time—a week, a month, more—to reassess, think things through.
“It was a really long line,” Declan finally said. “And they were really grateful. And really rich.”
“Declan,” I said. “I can’t—I mean, it sounds amazing, but—let’s do coffee, okay? Still free—I’ll pay.”
“That’s not really what I was talking about,” Declan said.
“I know,” I said. “I’m not really talking about what I’m talking about either.”
That sounded more nonsensical than even the worst of my SMS missteps, but as we efficiently made plans to meet in the Place des Vosges, I could hear in his voice—sad, heavy, spent—that it was the one exchange all morning he’d understood perfect
ly.
* * *
—
Bises, one cheek, the other, and the scent, the smile, almost made me stop and kiss him on the lips. But then my phone buzzed, and there was my other life, interrupting.
Good morning my dear I am sorry for last night I will need COFFEE and now: a text from Eleanor, vital, to be sure, and yet I worried she had absolutely no idea how much she was spending using her American cell phone in France. I shook my head, apologized to Declan, and quickly texted Eleanor back: I’m meeting a friend. I’d texted her in English, of course, but I wondered how that friend would translate.
We need to TALK, Eleanor said. See you at the store in a horse.
“Ellie?” Declan said.
Hooray, Eleanor texted.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I have a little less time than I thought.”
HOUR, Eleanor texted.
It took Declan and me far less time to skip past pleasantries to anger.
“So this is how it’s going to go down?” Declan asked. The waitress brought our cafés. I didn’t really want coffee; I wanted a shot, even a beer. I wanted this to be our first drink, I wanted to be headed off to go dancing soon, and I wanted to be paging through The Red Balloon again in my kitchen, and this time, instead of studying Robert’s face in a photo, I wanted to close the book and study Declan’s.
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
“It’s been over a week since I’ve heard from you, you know,” Declan said. “I mean, I’m sorry I took you out dancing the night your daughter got sick, but that was your idea—”
“Declan,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t call. I’m sorry I didn’t answer your texts. You were very kind. I was very distracted. I am very distracted. There’s been a lot going on.”
“I’m sure,” Declan said. “I mean—I know. The hospital. Daphne. It must have been very scary.”
After I’d fiddled with my cup and saucer long enough to let my own anger melt into sadness, I told him about Eleanor, about everything. Everything I should have told him earlier. I told him that I had not been a widow and now might be—but for the fact that I was increasingly convinced my husband was alive. There’d been a note in a book. There’d been Daphne’s shout on the bridge. There’d been the back of someone’s head in the fuzzy corner of a frame from a DIY surveillance video system installed by my teenage daughter’s Canadian boyfriend.
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