I pound on the lobby doors.
“Hey, you!” I call at an usher walking past. “I lost somebody! Hey, help!”
He barely glances at me as he walks past.
Tears start to choke me. I pound harder on the glass, but it’s probably pointless.
“Help,” I whisper. “Help, help, help.”
No one comes to my rescue. I stay pressed against the glass doors for a small eternity, hoping and praying that some solution will pop out of thin air. Maybe some Parisian magic will spark along this darkening street and the ghost of Victor Hugo or something will lead me to my brother.
No magic. No solution. Only me, paralyzed and cowering.
I guess I have to make my own magic.
I pick a direction and stride purposefully up the street. Maybe I can fool myself into believing that I’m a strong young woman capable of dealing with this situation. I try to think like a detective. Where would Levi go? He knows I was coming to get him, so he wouldn’t stray too far. There’s no familiar landmark around he might have been drawn to, and he certainly wouldn’t ask a stranger for directions.
Why the hell didn’t he just stay close to the theatre? He knew I was coming back, why didn’t he just wait for me?
I’m wondering if I should maybe turn and go the other direction when I round a corner and see a bright light across the way: McDonald’s. Levi is a big lumpy silhouette in the front window. I swear I almost evacuate my bowels in relief.
I hurry across and wrench open the door. It’s bright, friendly, full of primary colors. Levi turns to me as I walk in.
“Where the fuck were you?” he says. “They kicked me out, you took so long.”
“Where were you? I came out and you were just fucking gone! Why didn’t you just wait out front or something, somewhere I could easily find you?”
He shrugs moodily. “I’m hungry.”
I sigh and go for my wallet. I’m still clutching my autographed program. I tuck it safely into my purse.
“I need chicken nuggets,” he says. “And a large fry and large Coke.”
I buy his food and a couple of cheeseburgers for myself—worrying really burns through a stomach full of crêpes—and we eat in silence. My heart is still recovering from the fear of finding Levi gone. How did we ever get to this point? How could my adorable baby brother, who called me Kee-wa until only a few years ago, become so fragile, so close to the edge of nonexistence? Levi is right here, I try to convince myself. Levi is with me. Safe.
I can’t believe I got so distracted. There’s no way Alec Rideout could have lived up to the fantasy I fabricated. No one ever does; haven’t I already learned that lesson? Family before boys. I need FBB on a bracelet to remind me.
I repeat it like a mantra inside my head, feeling a little comforted.
I swear I won’t need to learn this lesson a third time.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The next day, Levi’s monotone wakes me up. “Keira, we have to go to that bakery again.”
You don’t need to ask me twice.
The day is gorgeous. Warm, even in the early morning, and sunny as a tropical paradise. The bakery is full of the light that reflects off our hotel’s windows—and full to bursting with treats.
We pick mostly the same things we had yesterday, but today there’s an even bigger menagerie of tiny marzipan animals under the glass. Little elephants and pigs, even cows with tiny blobby spots. I get one of each, as well as an unhealthy amount of croissants and jam cookies.
Levi discovers he doesn’t like marzipan, so I get all the animals to myself. No problem. We polish off everything and then I fan the brochures out across the tabletop.
Levi leans forward, his lower lip puckered in concentration. He grabs my metro map and surveys it. “Franklin D. Roosevelt,” he murmurs, pointing out that same stop. “Funny.”
I let him pick what he wants to do today, and he’s obviously going to take forever, so I lean back in my chair to admire the shop. Okay, and to give my stomach room to shamelessly expand. I didn’t notice the old photographs on the walls yesterday, shots of a family in bellbottoms and wide collars, in what might be this very shop. When I’ve digested my food, I stand up to examine the pictures further.
“Ma famille,” the woman behind the counter says, the same lady from yesterday. Her eyes sparkle with pride. “I am in the middle, five years old. My brother on the left side. He is chef here.”
I smile at her. “That’s so cool. Is this your … grandfather?”
She nods, beaming.
“He used to own this building,” she says. “He used to have a pâtisserie in this building, too. But the business was lost in the occupation.”
“Occupation?” I put it all together in my head, luckily before she has to explain to the American moron. “Oh, the Nazi Occupation.”
“Oui.” Her perpetual smile fades a little. “I save up for many years to buy these premises and restart the family business.”
Whoa. “That’s … that’s amazing.”
The smile is back. “Merci. C’est ce que je crois, aussi.”
That’s what I believe, too.
A man in a white chef’s outfit, who looks exactly like the woman—he could only be her brother—emerges from the kitchen. He has the same unbeatable smile.
“On a besoin de quelque chose?” he asks. “Des croissants, plus de pain?”
Do we need anything? Croissants, more bread? His sister glances at us and glances toward the door. The shop is empty.
“Non,” she says quietly, shaking her head.
In the time it’s taken to have my heart broken by the pastry chefs, Levi still hasn’t decided on a plan for the day.
“Pick something,” I say, tapping his arm. “War stuff?”
He shrugs. Perilously noncommittal. “We already looked at guns and stuff yesterday.”
“If you aren’t going to pick something, I will.”
He pushes the brochures at me. I take this as permission to do whatever the hell I want. And as soon as I see the corner of the brochure poking out from all the rest, I’ve decided.
We’re going to Versailles today.
Versailles. Finally, Versailles. I’ll be walking the halls Marie Antoinette walked, seeing myself reflected in the Hall of Mirrors. I’ll be in my dingy travel clothes, not the eighteenth-century garb of my dreams—not even my imitation Marie Antoinette prom dress—but it’s still my dream, the stereotypical princess fantasy that I’m not ashamed to admit I’ve always had. That, and my dream of going back in time and whisking Marie Antoinette off to a time that would have been kinder to her.
Versailles is just a forty-five-minute tour bus ride from the center of Paris. We disembark from the bus into the biggest parking lot I’ve ever seen, and on the other side is the palace, a planetary-sized building, all pillars and huge picture windows, statues of cherubs and saints adorning the roof. I can almost smell the grandeur. The other tourists on our bus flock toward the gates. I hang back to take a picture. I can barely fit the whole palace in one shot.
“This is the first picture I’ve taken here,” I laugh, snapping the photo. “It’s going to look like we arrived here straight off the plane.”
Levi doesn’t say anything. He just stares at the palace, squinting in the sun, with an otherwise neutral expression.
“Lev? What do you think?”
He shrugs.
I’m not going to let his indifference ruin this. This is Versailles.
We start the long walk up to the gilded gates, and the closer we get, the worse my stomach ache gets. It’s like I’m about to be introduced to a celebrity crush I’ve lusted after for years. Back at home, I have hundreds of pictures on my computer’s hard drive of frescoed walls, gold-foiled crown moldings, and the magnificent gardens. I’d pump Jacques for information and descriptions of the palace. He never said much, just kind of brushed me off. Later, I guess when the novelty of me fawning over him wore off, he admitted to me that he’d never even be
en inside the palace, even though he lives in Versailles.
Far across the massive parking lot, I can see the houses and restaurants of the town of Versailles. I don’t see any houses like Jacques described, row houses with flower boxes at the windows, but I can see them in my head when I close my eyes. Jacques and Selena could be there together right now, wearing black turtle necks and berets, giggling to each other.
I clench my fists. That used to be all I ever wanted, to come home with Jacques. Not really because of him—sometimes I used him like he used me. No, I wanted the free place to stay, the link to this place. A starting point. A diving board. Selena could be perched at the end of that diving board now, about to jump into everything I’ve ever wanted. Meanwhile, I just paid an exorbitant amount for a ride on a shitty bus to stand in this lineup for an hour.
Just when I feel like I’m miles from my dream, I look up. The Palace’s two wings cradle me in the Court Royale; their columns, gilded details, and busts of eminent characters seem to smile down at me.
I’m here.
Levi fidgets beside me.
“Thank you for being so patient,” I tell him. “We’ll be inside soon.”
“And then it’s just going to be more standing around,” he says, and the instant he lets one negative thought out of his mouth, it unleashes the flood. “It’s just going to be more portraits of rich people and paintings by dead guys and idiots staring at them. Ugh, I can’t even believe you wanted to come here.”
“It’s Versailles.”
“How can you even like the French monarchy?” His glare is stormier than the sky. “They were fucking terrible.”
When he says stuff like that, starts on political diatribes grown from the pro-Communism websites he trolls, I get this “shut up, Levi” knee-jerk feeling, and a million possible arguments could break the surface, but I stifle them all because he’ll start using that damn circular logic and I’ll end up so mad I can’t breathe, let alone argue properly. The whole thing just makes me hate him. And I don’t want to hate him, especially not here, in the shadow of Versailles, under the watchful gaze of windows Marie Antoinette once peered out. Here, I just want to feel wonder and that old sadness. But Levi won’t let me.
“You know Marie Antoinette was an idiot, right?” he says.
“Oh God, Levi, just stop,” I groan.
“Why? You don’t know her. She isn’t, like, your ancestor or anything. Why do you even care?”
I can’t even begin to explain it to him. No matter what I say, he won’t understand the overwhelming sympathy I feel for her, a young girl uprooted from her country and married off to another, barely knowing the language when she arrived. Having to figure out the rules in a new court. Dealing with an arranged, loveless marriage, never mind the enormous, constant scrutiny that marriage was under. And then, later, having to deal with the people of France completely turning on her family and sending them, unapologetically, to their deaths.
“You know she was probably illiterate, right? And she didn’t care about the people at all. She was totally up her own ass.”
“None of that is her fault,” I say, measuring each word.
Levi makes a disgusted face. “She didn’t even try to investigate what the life of the average citizen was like. She just lazed around this place all day, letting her servants do everything for her.”
“She was aristocratically born and bred. She never knew the life of a commoner; she was purposefully kept ignorant. That isn’t her fault.”
“She could’ve tried.”
“Levi, would it be reasonable of me to freak out at you for not understanding the plight of the three-toed sloth? Or the humpback whale? Or any other form of life that is anything other than a teenaged boy?”
He glares, but not at me. At the windows, at the tourists in line with us.
“She just wanted to sit around all day,” he says. “With nice, expensive things around her all the time, doing nothing.”
I groan. So much for trying to force some perspective on him.
“You don’t know anything.”
“Keira, you don’t know anything.”
I fold my arms across my chest. He’s got me there, but at least I’m a little less stubborn than an old mule. “Whatever. Let’s just go inside and look at all her nice, expensive things.”
His glare gets even cloudier but he doesn’t say anything.
And thank God. Because once we’re inside, underneath a frescoed ceiling that feels like it covers a square mile, I don’t want to hear Levi’s venomous voice grumbling about how it took so much out of the artist to paint that he killed himself after its completion. I shell out for the audio tour headset so I can tune out his pessimism and tune into cheesy, tinkling harpsichord music and an English gentleman feeding me tidbits of information.
Each room just kind of leads into the next, shrinking as they go. There are no real hallways or corridors. Back in the day, there were guards at each door, deciding who could and couldn’t advance into the next room. The public was allowed in the palace, allowed to roam free, for the most part, through the courtyards and outer rooms. You had to be a little fancier to get a little further in, and it got more and more selective until only a privileged few could enter the smaller rooms and have more chance of being alone with the king and queen.
In the Queen’s Bedroom, I picture Marie Antoinette walking these floors. Sleeping in that bed (sometimes). Having to give birth in that bed, in front of the gawking public—what a nightmare—so that no one could dispute a royal birth. She lived a good portion of her life with no privacy, with her cottage in the vast gardens as her only escape. I can hear Levi now, complaining about how silly it was that an adult woman, a queen, played peasant in the woods. The epitome of First World Problems: too much money, too much privilege, so you run off and play pauper every once in a while.
I get it, though. It wasn’t the money or the privilege she was trying to escape; it was her own life. The perfection was an illusion; palace equaled prison. She probably built it all up in her mind when she was married at fifteen—she was going to be the queen of France! Everything was going to be brilliant and perfect forever! She could never have imagined the constant, unceasing criticism, the horrible marriage, the contrived charges and the bloody execution.
Ideal situations don’t always turn out like you expect.
As understandable as that is, my inner cynic—my inner Levi—starts getting snarky. All these mammoth portraits taking up whole walls, frescoes on ceilings painted by masters, cabinets and candlesticks and tchotchkes made of gold and gems … it all seems false. Pointless. Meaningless. Because really, why is it all here? To satisfy the vanities of a select few? What good does that do? These objects made from precious resources at such high cost, serving no material purpose. I can’t find the part of me that just reveled in glory without a second thought. Suddenly I’m mercenary, utilitarian, staring up at a chandelier so dripping with crystals that I can’t even see where the candles would go and wondering what the fuck the point is. Yeah, maybe she had a sad, boxed-in life, the same way some celebrities have sad, boxed-in lives, but all this glittering gold and crystal, here purely to tickle her fancy and trick lesser beings into worship? It’s senseless.
This place isn’t a shrine to beauty. It’s an exhibit of hopelessness.
The rest of the palace passes in a haze of disappointment, directed at myself. I dream of this place forever, and then when I finally arrive, I give in to Levi’s pessimism. I look at marble pillars and wish they were stone, I look up at gilded moldings and think too elaborate. But I can’t even mourn. I’m tired.
The rear of the palace faces onto the enormous grounds. The (artificial) lake goes on forever into the distance. Scale and size, that’s what these places are about. That’s all they’re about.
I pull out my map of the grounds and find the star that marks Marie Antoinette’s private estate. I’ve always wanted to see her cottage, but now, somehow, it doesn’t mean anythi
ng to me. Has part of me died? I’ve misplaced my sympathy for her.
Levi starts to back away from the gardens, toward the exit. I look over my shoulder at the man-made lake and sculpted, manicured gardens, the promise of oohs and ahhs and that little thrill of a feeling, deep in my chest, when something beautiful touches me just so. Once upon a time, all I ever wanted …
I walk back to the bus.
The bus ride into the city center is fraught with existential crap. Versailles was impressive, of course, but empty. I essentially met my celebrity crush, and he was a complete asshole.
I think about taking Marie Antoinette off the list in my head of girls I would save if I had a time machine. Sure, there are men I would go back and save, but infinitely more women. Women had all the tragedies and deserved almost none of them. Anne Boleyn. Joan of Arc. Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia Romanov. Anne Frank. Marie Antoinette was always on that list. Her beheading seemed like the cruelest thing in the world. She was beautiful and innocent and, I thought, a martyr, and the world cut her down with a sharp blade to the neck. Now I think Levi might be right: sure, she stood for beauty and unadulterated fun, but she was ignorant, sheltered, and not even very intelligent. A selfish, silly little girl.
But I’m selfish and silly a lot of the time. Does that mean I deserve a bloody execution? Does that mean I’m not worth saving?
“If you could go back in time and rescue someone,” I say to Levi as we hurtle along the highway back to Paris, “someone who suffered a fate they didn’t deserve, who would you save?”
Levi is quiet for a long time. He stares out at the trees we pass with his lips pressed tightly together.
“Hitler,” he says.
A few seconds pass before I recover enough to respond. “Hitler. Adolf Hitler.”
“No, Joe Hitler. Of course, Adolf. He was brilliant. Good leader. Good planner, aside from the war-on-two-fronts thing, and the Russian winter thing. And he was an artist.”
“Jesus Christ, Levi, he killed millions of people!”
“Not personally,” Levi counters.
Maybe in Paris Page 10