The Space Between Words

by Michele Phoenix

  “Uh . . . sure.”

  “I’ll need one month’s deposit, and payments are due on the first. We split utilities three ways, and each person has a shelf in the fridge. If that works for you, it works for me.”

  “I . . . Don’t you want to interview me or . . . ask me questions or something?”

  “I have radar for good people.”

  “Oh.”

  He raised an eyebrow and crossed his arms. “So—you want the room or not?”

  I looked into his direct and honest gaze and couldn’t think of a reason to hesitate. “Sure,” I said.

  He extended a hand. “Welcome home.”

  And here I was in France, just over four years later, embarking on yet another adventure with a man whose kindness and impulsivity had drawn me into a friendship as solid as it was unpredictable. There was a nobility to his eccentricity, a keen curiosity, and a humane generosity.

  Patrick and I were polar opposites in many ways. I proceeded with caution where he leapt with abandon. I chose the outskirts of crowds while he shone in their center. I was happy with plain while he thrived on fancy. In our grooming alone, the differences were evident: my shoulder-length brown hair in need of a trim and the impeccable blond pompadour he retouched twice a day.

  Patrick burst through the door of his Parisian studio holding a paper bag aloft. “I’ve got croissants!” he declared, his voice more conquering hero than early-morning shopper. By the looks of the butter stains seeping through the bag, I could tell he’d gone the extra mile and picked them up at Chez Paul, the bakery we’d elected Best in Paris within hours of our arrival.

  Nothing motivated Vonda like the promise of decadent carbs. She was pulling a jar of Nutella from the kitchen cupboard before Patrick got there with his loot. “Kitchen” was a bit of an overstatement. There was a microwave, an electric burner, and practically no storage. The studio was small—too small for one person to inhabit comfortably, let alone three. And with Vonda’s mattress bridging the space between Patrick’s twin bed and my couch, the floor was all but invisible.

  “Eat up,” Patrick said after I’d pulled a plaid button-down on over my nightshirt and joined him.

  “Way ahead of you,” Vonda mumbled around the croissant already in her mouth.

  I grabbed my own and reached for the Nutella jar while Patrick unloaded the plastic bags of groceries he’d carried up two flights of stairs. Sandwich fixings, fruit, pasta, canned goods. “You realize we’re leaving tomorrow, right?” I asked.

  “And all of this,” he said, waving at the food like a game show hostess, “is going with us. The beauty of an Airbnb is that we can cook for ourselves.”

  Vonda rolled her eyes and gave me a long-suffering look. Then she turned back to Patrick. “But before we go off on your Dumpster-diving adventure,” she said, a bit of derision in her voice, “you’ve promised me a day of touristy sightseeing. Right?”

  “If we must,” Patrick said. “But we’re not climbing the Eiffel Tower, and we’re certainly not posing for tacky charcoal portraits on the Place du Tertre.”

  Vonda smiled. “Got one yesterday.”

  “So what’s on the tour?” I asked.

  “We can hit the Musée d’Orsay this morning, then the Latin Quarter for lunch. And . . .” He brightened a bit and made a production of pulling three tickets out of his breast pocket. “The opening of an art exhibit in the 14th arrondissement this evening!”

  “I’m not spending my last night in Paris at a stuffy art exhibit,” Vonda said.

  “Come on,” Patrick reasoned. “What better way to finish our time in ‘Paree’ than standing around with a bunch of rich people, commenting on obscure art and drinking free champagne? It doesn’t get much more ooh-là-là chérie than that.”

  “It doesn’t get much more yawn than that,” Vonda corrected him.

  “My prof gave me his passes.”

  “So you’re not wasting any money by doing something else.”

  “Patrick’s let us crowd his space for a week,” I said to Vonda, fearing the skirmish might escalate into a debate. “Maybe going to this exhibit can be our way of saying thanks?”

  Vonda looked at Patrick. “She’s in crisis-prevention mode again.”

  “And we haven’t even started cussing at each other,” he said, grinning.

  “We’ll go to the art show,” I told him.

  But I hadn’t taken into account Vonda’s inability to abide by an established plan.

  “They’re great—they’re fun,” she said later that afternoon, extolling the greatness of the “new friends” she’d made in a grunge-inspired clothing store while Patrick and I sat in Le Centre du Monde finishing up an order of crème brûlée. She looked from me to Patrick with expectation. “How often do you get offered free tickets to a concert?”

  “A death metal concert, Vonda. Do I look like the type of person who’d enjoy that kind of thing?”

  “All the more reason to try it,” she insisted. “Come on—be daring! It’s free. It’s Paris! Ditch your paintings and live a little!”

  Patrick gave her a look through the steam of his espresso. With a fancy art exhibit as an alternate option, his refusal was immediate and firm.

  “Listen,” she said, hands on hips and brown eyes firing. “I’ve let you drag me to every artsy-fartsy store and dusty flea market in Paris for days. I’m going to this concert, whether you two come with me or not.”

  “Vonda,” I tried, “you’ve only known these people—what—ten minutes?”

  She straightened to the full stature of her five feet eight inches, and I could tell by the way she tossed her hair over her shoulder and jutted out her chin that the outcome of the debate was a foregone conclusion.

  So Patrick had gone off to his art gallery without us, and I’d reluctantly agreed to tag along with Vonda. Attending a concert populated by head-banging youth and jaded metal-heads held absolutely no appeal to me, but her insistence that this would be “a side of Paris no one else sees” and a reticence to let my foolhardy friend venture out with virtual strangers had eroded my resistance.

  Tomorrow we’d begin a road trip to Southern France in Patrick’s dilapidated Citroën. We’d stop at every brocante we found along the way. We’d explore bustling cities and criss-cross peaceful countrysides.

  That’s what I expected as we said good-bye to Patrick and made our way by Métro to the Bataclan concert hall on that mild November evening in the City of Lights. None of us could have imagined how the rest of the night would dismantle our lives.

  TWO

  IMAGES FLASHED ACROSS MY MEMORY LIKE A GRUESOME montage, slamming me with the horror again and again. The gunfire following me to the bloody exit door. The bodies I jumped over as I fled into the alley. The woman screaming, hanging by her fingertips from a second-floor window ledge. Cell phones shining through closed windows, capturing my flight.

  I remembered being dragged into an alcove. There were voices—urgent, whispering voices—but my mind lacked the focus to translate what they said. Someone putting pressure on the left side of my waist. Pain screaming through my synapses. Then the welcome darkness of unconsciousness.

  Later I heard more voices, their sureness and calm somehow hopeful to my ears. Hands lifted me and laid me on a stretcher. Flashing lights. Sirens. A rough, swerving drive. Nausea. Pain.

  Hallway lights flashed by. Words I couldn’t fully understand. Medical words. The sound of curtains being pulled. Hurried activity swirling around me. Scissors tearing at my sweater. A woman’s gentle voice. A hand on my arm. Kindness. It made the horror I’d survived that much more terrorizing.

  I remembered asking for Vonda—begging for someone to find and tell Patrick. And my parents. I needed them to know I was all right—but I wasn’t sure I’d actually spoken the thoughts.

  There was the dim pain of IVs being placed—one in each arm. Beeping instruments. A raised voice barking orders.

  Then I remembered a groggy swim toward consciousness
. The shivering. The reassuring pats and whispered conversations just out of reach. The slow ebb of anesthesia. Auditory chaos that separated into recognizable sounds. A beeping monitor. A gurney rolling by. A male voice. “Jessica. Jessica.” I recognized his accent. France. I was in France. I was at the concert when . . .

  As memories assaulted me, I willed my mind to sink back into insentience, to reverse its slow rise out of darkness. There was nothing in the brutal light of reality that wouldn’t reverberate with the sound of gunfire bursts. Nothing that would shield me from a full remembering. From a full resuffering.

  The world around me continued to come into focus, insisting on my consciousness. I commanded myself to resist, a plight as futile as fighting against gravity.

  “Jessica, vous m’entendez?” The same male voice. My mind flashed to a sneering, menacing face, and my body convulsed—trying to escape. Trying to . . .

  The pain was brutal. It seared its way across my abdomen and down my spine. “Non. Non, non, non.” His voice was gentle but urgent, his accent thick and comforting. “Don’t move, okay? Don’t move, Jessica. It will open your incision.”

  Incision. My eyelids felt leaden. I struggled against their weight. My mind was still locked on the massacre. Snapshots of the terror assailed me with every breath—with every heartbeat. I needed to open my eyes. I needed to . . .

  A face swam into focus. That accented voice again. “Hello, Jessica.” I squinted to see more clearly. A middle-aged black man in scrubs smiled down on me. His wasn’t one of the faces imprinted on my mind.

  “My parents,” I tried to say. What came out was more croak than whisper. I cleared my throat. “Has someone called my parents?”

  He leaned close. “Please repeat.” His concern seemed genuine.

  I took a deeper breath and tried again. “Do my parents know I’m here?”

  The nurse leaned back and laid a hand on my shoulder. “Yes. I think so. The—how do you say—emergency. The emergency nurse found your phone and police took it. I think they called. I will ask, okay? I will ask.”

  “My friend. Vonda . . .” I took a couple breaths as a wave of nausea swept through me. He patted my shoulder until I could speak again. “Vonda—she was there with me. Do you know if she . . . ?”

  He shook his head. “We have no list of names yet. It’s too soon. Too much—too many people.”

  “She was in the balcony . . . Were people killed in the balcony?” Just uttering the words stole the breath from my lungs. People killed. People killed.

  I felt tears gathering in my eyes and running down my cheeks into the hair at my temples. “Please,” I whispered. “I need to know if Vonda’s okay.”

  It was night when I fully woke again. Pain medication weighed down my body and slowed my thinking. There were at least two other patients in my room. I’d heard them speaking to the nurses. Curtains drawn between the beds offered flimsy privacy.

  I lay immobile, the pain somewhat bearable as long as I didn’t try to move. Memories converged again. There was no use trying to evade them. Death had burned its savagery into the fabric of my consciousness. I felt stained. Branded.

  When a nurse came to check on me, I didn’t ask the questions grating through my mind. I craved and feared their answers.

  “Are you comfortable?” the young woman asked in nearly perfect English. “How is your pain?”

  “I’m okay.” My voice still rasped over stunned vocal cords.

  She put a call button in my hand and wrapped warm fingers around mine for a moment. “If you need anything, you push the button, yes? I’m in the couloir outside the door.”

  More tears. The kindness wounded me. “I need my phone. Can I have my phone?”

  “It isn’t here. The police, they have to look at it. If you have pictures they can use to . . .”

  “I didn’t take any. Not after the . . . Not when the . . .”

  “I’ll bring it to you when they return it.”

  “Please.” I tamped down the sob that threatened to escape. “Please,” I said again, swallowing hard.

  “I’ll get you more medicine. Maybe you can sleep a little now.”

  I grabbed the nurse’s wrist as she was turning to leave and bit my lip to stifle a yelp of pain. “Did a lot of people die?” I asked. I had to know.

  The nurse nodded, and I saw tears in her eyes too. “Many,” she said. Then she took a deep breath and added, “But many survived.” She patted my hand where it still gripped her wrist. “I know you are américaine, but you are French now too.”

  Patrick had found me. I woke to see him sitting at my bedside, his eyes closed behind horn-rimmed glasses. He leaned forward in his chair, elbows on knees, hands clasped, his eyebrows drawn together in thought. Or fear. Or relief.

  “Patrick.”

  His eyes snapped open and found mine. He didn’t move. He didn’t touch me. But somehow—in a way that had bound us to each other since we’d met four years before—his strength bridged the space between us and eked into my bloodstream.

  “You found me,” I said, my voice sleep-rough and horror-hoarse.

  “No easy task.”

  “You found me,” I said again, dread softening into tears.

  “And you’re alive.” I felt the miracle in his voice. He moved then. Just far enough to rest his forearm on the mattress beside me and lay his fingers against mine. “You’re alive,” he repeated, as if the warmth of my skin had sealed the unthinkable.

  “It hurts.”

  “What?”

  “Everything.” Moving. Breathing. Thinking. Forgetting. It all hurt.

  A muscle worked in Patrick’s jaw.

  “I had to have surgery and . . .”

  “I know.” He expelled a long breath. “The nurses caught me up. It could have been so much worse, Jess. With the amount of blood you lost between getting shot and being brought here . . .” He paused. “But the bullet missed your major organs and they got in there to fix what it damaged, so . . . It’s a small, clean wound—that’s what they said. A small, clean wound. That’s good. That’s amazing.”

  “I’ll get out in a few days,” I said, as much to prepare myself as to reassure my friend. “Once they’re sure there’s no infection.”

  Patrick’s expression softened. “It could have been so much worse, Jess.”

  A wave of panic washed over me. “Vonda,” I said. Fear drove the breath from my lungs.

  His fingers tightened into a grip on my arm. He leaned forward. “She’s fine,” he said, urgency in his voice. “Jess, she’s fine.”

  “Did she get out? When they started . . .” I closed my eyes against the memories. “Did she get out?”

  His voice softened into a soothing tone. “She did. She’s fine. She wasn’t hurt.”

  I looked toward the door, half expecting to see her standing there. I needed to see her. I needed proof that she was alive. “Is she . . . is she coming?”

  Patrick’s head dropped forward before he answered. “I don’t know,” he said. When he looked up, I saw frustration in his eyes.

  I fought a twinge of betrayal. She knew what I’d endured—what I was still enduring. “She’s scared,” I said, trying to excuse her absence. “Right? That’s why she’s not here.”

  “With what she saw . . .” He stopped himself short and sat up straighter in his chair. I felt a chill where his hand had been. “With what you both saw,” he amended, “I guess she needs . . .” He hesitated, and I could see him trying to inject certainty into his expression. “She’ll come,” he finally said. “She’ll come to see you when she can.”

  “I want to go home,” I said, betrayal yielding to desperation.

  “I know.”

  “I want to get as far away as . . .”

  “I know, Jess.”

  I looked into my friend’s face and felt overcome with powerlessness. “I thought . . .” I hiccupped on a sob. “I thought I was going to die.”

  The silence that followed felt overfull—
heavy with the gunfire and screams in my mind. All the terror I’d controlled until then flowed out of me in tears and groans and spasms. Patrick pulled his chair up closer to the bed and wrapped an arm across me, shielding me from the horrors I couldn’t stop reliving. There was a sacredness to that moment. Little was said, but everything was spoken as the injustice and bliss of survival washed over me in jagged waves.

  When the worst of it passed, Patrick pulled away again.

  “I don’t want to sleep,” I whispered. “Every time I close my eyes I see . . . I don’t want to sleep.”

  There was nothing he could say—no gesture he could make—to diminish the weight of my trauma. So he sat next to me, hour after hour, our silence binding my wounds. He stayed through the night, upright in his chair, a sentinel poised to rescue and soothe. He squeezed my arm and wakened me when nightmares filled my sleep. He whispered comfort, his face near my pillow, when memories scraped my courage raw.

  Patrick was still there when I woke the next morning. We waited for the doctor to come by, but he didn’t. Nurses filled us in on what they knew as they changed my dressing. An incision five inches long extended around my waist. I’d had the best surgeon, the nurse said. He’d come in from the suburbs when news of the attacks first broke. “They all came. Comment dire?” She searched for the English words. “All the medical people could not stay home. We needed to help.”

  “Merci,” I said.

  Patrick repeated his thanks. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”

  Vonda came the next day. I sensed a presence in the doorway and turned to see her standing there. Her face was blank—pale.

  “Vonda.” Tears flooded my eyes as I reached for her.

  She entered slowly, tentatively, and stopped a few feet from my bed. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “Sorry—?”

  “I can’t stay in Paris. I have to go. The nurses told me you’re going to be fine and . . .” She held up a plastic bag. “I brought you a few toiletries. And some clothes—clean underwear, a couple shirts, and some yoga pants for when you’re . . . when you’re better. But, Jess . . .” She closed her eyes and shook her head, as if she were trying to clear it. “I just—I can’t stay here.”