“What?” she screams. “Why would he go? Have you called the police?”
“Yes, they’re going to alert the media and do everything they can. We’re going to form some kind of search party, too, and go all over the whole city if we have to.”
Margot and Nico nod as I say these words. My heart melts at the determination in their eyes. Gable stares down at the tabletop, lips set into a firm line. I don’t know what that means.
“Keira … this is … this is beyond words.”
“I know. I’m so, so sorry, Mom. I’ve been doing really well looking after him, I swear, and I guess I just—”
She interrupts. “The only thing that matters right now is that we find Levi. Okay?”
“I don’t know how much you can do from home, but if I think of anything, I’ll let you know.”
“Keira … I guess I have something to confess.”
The worst words in existence.
“Josh and I … we aren’t at home. We’re in Paris. We’re staying in the eleventh district.”
I sit in silence. I can’t decide if I’m too angry or too happy to speak.
“Keira? Keira, are you still there?”
“Yeah,” I choke out. “How … why …”
“We left just after you did,” she says, sounding rightly miserable. “It was my idea, I’m sorry. I was just … so, so scared.”
“You assumed I was going to fuck up?”
“No! Josh and I thought it would be a good idea—”
“Don’t blame Josh.”
“—to have a base in Paris just in case,” she says, ignoring me. “If anything happened, we would be a lot closer and able to help.”
I swallow everything I want to scream at her. You liar. You horrible, rotten liar. Why not just tell me?
Instead, I focus on the tiny part of me that feels relief. “Just come meet me. I’m at Belliveau Pâtisserie in the 13th arrondissement.”
Mom says she’ll see me soon. I both hate and adore those words.
When I look up from my phone, everyone is staring at me.
“Turns out my mom and stepdad have been in Paris this whole time,” I announce, slapping a fake smile on my face and shrugging. “Isn’t that fabulous? Isn’t that just great, that they didn’t trust me to take care of my own brother?”
Except … they were right. They were right not to trust me, because it turns out I can’t be trusted with Levi. My pretense erodes and I burst into tears. Margot stands and wraps me in her soft arms. She smells like mint and bread.
“Tout sera d’accord,” she coos, stroking my hair. “It will all be okay. As soon as maman et papa arrive, we will start the search for Levi. Okay?”
I nod into her shoulder. It’s all I want. To be out there, searching.
Two detectives arrive soon after. They introduce themselves as Inspector Bredoteau and Detective Giroux. They wear suits and frowns and their English is impeccable.
They stick to routine questions, where Levi might go (I don’t know), what medications he takes (I go up and grab the bottles and recite the exact dosages for each pill), and what could happen if he goes without them for too long (I’m too scared to wonder). They ask if I have a photograph (I give them the one of him coughing next to a mime) and if I’ve phoned my parents yet.
“They’re in Paris, it turns out,” I say, sniffing away the last of my tears. “My mom and stepdad followed us here. They’re on their way.”
Mom and Josh arrive soon after. Seeing them walk into Margot and Nico’s bakery, Shoreline meets Paris, feels like I’ve fallen into some kind of alternate reality.
Mom bursts into ugly tears when she sees me. She holds me too tight, crushing me against her frizzy hair, which is out of its perpetual ponytail. Her eyes are bloodshot and her nose is Rudolph red. Josh looks deadly grim, lips a thin, thin line. The wrinkle between his eyebrows, one of the only signs of age to touch him so far, has deepened tenfold since I last saw him. He squeezes my shoulder when we sit down at our table.
“Madame Braidwood, I’m Inspector Bredoteau and this is Detective Giroux,” Bredoteau says. “We’re glad you could get here so soon. We are going to do everything we can to locate your son, and being able to start early is a blessing.”
Mom nods at them, and then her eyes travel to the others sitting at the table.
“Oh, Mom, this is Margot and Nico,” I gesture. “They own this bakery. Levi and I have been coming here every day the whole trip so far.”
Mom smiles at them, but sneaks a sideways glance at me. I can almost hear her thinking, Bakery treats, every day? Hmmm.
“It’s great to meet you,” she says, shaking Margot’s hand and then Nico’s.
“Anything you need of us, you have only to ask,” Margot says with a shaky smile. “We will do anything we can.”
Mom’s lips tremble. “Thank you.”
Then she looks at Gable.
“This is Gable McKendrick,” I say. “He’s a—a new friend.”
I know right away that Mom knows what’s up. My awkward introduction could only mean one thing.
My heartbeat races as the meeting goes on. We form a plan to make posters and start hanging them all over town. The police tell us alerts will go out to every department of law enforcement, to radio and TV stations, on the metro, social media, everything.
“Obviously, we cannot make guarantees,” Bredoteau says, pained honesty in his eyes. “But I am confident that we can find Levi.”
“There’s no reason for him to run away,” Mom says, mostly to herself. “He must have just decided to go for a walk and gotten lost. Right, Keira? Right?”
“I—I think so,” I say.
What I don’t say is “If there’s a reason, it’s me.”
The detectives leave after promising to stay in constant contact. Nico sets up his computer and printer in the bakery seating area and gets to work on a poster of our own. He and Margot argue over the wording in French. Details like Levi’s hair and eye colors, height, weight, and what he was last seen wearing are traded about the room. Finally, Nico prints it, and he and Josh rush out to find the nearest photocopier. The wheels have been set in motion.
I eat chocolate croissant after chocolate croissant during all this, and when the chocolate and pastry starts gluing my mouth closed, I move on to jam cookies and milk. Mom and Margot try to talk to each other while they wait for Josh and Nico, but Margot’s English is too uncertain and Mom speaks not a word of French. She pronounces it “Bon-joo-er,” for God’s sake. I want to cover my eyes when I hear her try to repeat Margot’s pronunciation of “mon fils,” French for “my son.”
“Moan feez,” she keeps saying.
“Mon f-EESS,” Margot repeats. “More, ah …”
“More emphasis on the S,” I say to Mom. “And if you can’t say the ‘n’ at the end of ‘mon,’ just skip it. ‘Mo’ sounds closer than ‘moan.’”
Mom shoots subtle daggers at me. It looks like an even stare, just a cursory glance, but there’s so much in that look. I just want to rest my head against the table and sleep, although I doubt I’d be able to with Gable drumming his fingers on the tabletop.
No. I just want to get out of here and search for Levi. Scour every metro station and tourist attraction, plaster the entire city in posters with his scowling face on them and repeat the words “As-tu vu mon frère?” a million times.
“Maybe there’s a clue in the hotel room,” Mom says.
“I’ve already searched the whole place. His wallet is there, minus his metro pass.”
“He could be anywhere,” she whispers.
“He wouldn’t go just anywhere, Mom. He’s not that adventurous. Believe me, I know.”
She takes off her glasses and rubs her eyes. She murmurs, “Please stop, Keira.”
“Please stop what?”
“Acting like you know everything,” she says. “Being reductive, shutting down ideas like they’re worthless. ‘No, he wouldn’t just go anywhere. No, there are only
five specific places he could possibly go. You’re crazy for thinking he could be anywhere else!’”
“Stop making that voice,” I almost spit. “It’s called using logic, Mom. Thinking logically about where he might go.”
“And then, when he doesn’t turn out to be in the places you so logically picked out for him, what then? We just give up, go home?” She scoffs. “I don’t think so, Keira.”
“When did I ever suggest giving up and going home? If we don’t think logically and just shit our emotions out all over the place, how is that going to help us find him?”
“Sit, Keira,” Margot says, hands on my shoulders. I didn’t even realize I was on my feet. “You too, Madame.”
“How could you lose him?” Mom says, turning away from me. Her shaking hand covers her eyes. “How could you, Keira?”
Petulant teenage words build up behind my teeth. I could say, “It wasn’t my fault he ran away, how could I stop him?” I could scream and shout about how unfair this all is, about how they lied to me, and if they didn’t trust me they shouldn’t have let Levi come in the first place instead of lying to me. I could drudge up some crap about how if I was the one missing, no one would care. Past Me would have said all of this.
Present Me hates Mom all the more because everything she says is true. I wasn’t trustworthy. I was stupid and air-headed and I neglected my brother because I wanted to have fun. And now look what happened, all because of me.
I’d rather die than tell her she’s right for hating me.
“I want to go up to the hotel room,” she says. “There must be some kind of clue up there.”
“I’ll come,” I murmur. If she finds anything I’ve missed, she’s just going to throw it in my face and use it as more evidence against me, but that’s a fate I can’t escape.
I almost forget Gable is still here. Mom and I head for the door and suddenly I see him, sitting there, half-drunk espresso in front of him.
“You don’t have to stay for all this,” I tell him. “You can go if you want to. I won’t hate you for it.”
If he goes, it’s likely to be the end. I’ll just be some girl he kissed in Paris whose brother went missing. Some crazy anecdote. It hurts, but I have to be okay with that.
He nods. Stays sitting.
“So …” I start, but he jumps in.
“I’m going to wait for your stepdad and Nico to bring the posters,” he says. “I’ll bring a stack with me. Help plaster the town.”
It’s my turn to wordlessly nod. I follow Mom outside and across the street to the hotel.
I introduce Mom to the hotel manager, Yves.
“How are things progressing?” he asks, worry lines all over his forehead.
“As well as can be hoped,” I tell him. “I’ll bring you some copies of the missing poster when it’s done.”
He nods repeatedly. “Please, please do.”
We have a long wait while the elevator takes its sweet time getting down to the lobby. Mom runs her fingers through her hair and stares blankly ahead at the wall. I tap my shoe just for something to do. The elevator lights show that it’s still three floors above us.
“What have you guys been doing in Paris so far?” I ask gently. I’m treading on very thin ice.
“Nothing,” Mom says. “We don’t have the money to enjoy the sort of vacation you’re taking.”
It stings like acid to the face. The sort of vacation I’m taking … I worked my ass off to save the money for this trip. I earned it. I deserve it. I want to tell her “You didn’t have to come here,” but, if I want to keep my head, I can’t exactly say things like that to a mother with a missing child right now.
We step into the elevator and say no more until we get to the room.
“It stinks in here,” Mom says, walking immediately toward the window. “Let’s get some fresh air flowing.”
She opens the curtains and the window and starts poking through Levi’s things the same way I did, and she finds nothing I didn’t find already. His wallet. The Billionaire Rancher’s Bride. His cell phone, sitting on the TV stand. She sighs.
“Kind of a pipe dream that he would take it with him,” she says, touching it.
I nod and step into the bathroom, closing the door. I’ve been vaguely aware of the fact that I’ve had to pee for a while, and now the urge is overwhelming. I lift the toilet lid and that’s when I notice something.
A tiny pill, semi-dissolved, sticks to the side of the bowl.
I grab Levi’s pill tray. All the ones leading up to today are gone, as usual.
But if that pill is down there … I’m willing to bet they all are.
Mom sighs in the next room. Bedsprings creak as she sits down.
I’m frozen.
She’ll scream at me. She’ll berate me for being a complete, utter moron. I could tell, when she saw Gable, that she was wondering how she could’ve ended up with such an airhead for a daughter. Who goes on a trip and acquires a boyfriend? The same daughter who accidentally leaves the milk on the counter after pouring it into her cereal. The same daughter who once walked into the sliding glass door and ended up on the floor with everyone laughing while she suppressed tears. The one who once forgot to lock the car for a five-minute grocery run, giving someone the perfect opportunity to steal Mom’s iPod and Josh’s expensive headphones. The one who was always conveniently unavailable when the family needed her, when her brother needed her, because who wanted to deal with difficult feelings when she could bask in the glory of Jacques St-Pierre and his smirk instead? That daughter was willfully blind, willfully ignorant. She skipped out on her family.
That idiot daughter couldn’t keep on her brother to take his meds, didn’t even think to watch him swallow them and check underneath his tongue. Big surprise. She can’t do anything right.
I squeeze my eyes shut. If I don’t tell her, it’s bad for me, but it’s even worse for Levi. She needs to know. The police need to know.
“M-mom?”
“Yes?”
“Come here.”
She walks slowly to the bathroom. Her face looks puffy and bleary in the yellow vanity lights as her eyes follow my pointing finger.
“What is …” Sharp intake of breath. “Oh my God, Keira.”
My grip tightens on the edge of the sink. Levi is out there with no medication in his body. God only knows when he last swallowed a pill.
Judging by Mom’s soft sobs, that’s something to be very, very afraid of.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Mom called Josh first, luckily getting him before they photocopied the posters. Josh added “Off his medications, may be confused or hallucinating” to the bottom and Nico scrawled the French translation. When the sky is dark, we finally have posters to distribute. I’m starting to feel exhausted, but now is not the time for rest.
All through the night, we paint the town with posters: taping them up in the window of every shop, fixing them to every street light, descending into the metro stations and handing them out to people on the last legs of their commutes. We see teams in the metro stations, plastering official Interpol posters all over. When we finally turn in after midnight, Josh, Mom, and I congregate in my and Levi’s hotel room and watch TV. The local French news stations broadcast the story of a lost American boy in Paris. Mom quietly sobs.
Gable had worked through the night with us, and my hotel offered him a free room just like they did for Mom and Josh, but he quietly refused.
“I need to go,” he said. “I’ll put up a poster in my hostel, okay?”
I nodded. He kissed my forehead and left.
I’m trying not to think about him.
Mom cries herself to sleep in Levi’s bed. Josh sits up with me, watching the news anchor make his way through the night’s stories, just waiting for Levi to be mentioned again.
“How has the trip been?” Josh asks, quiet so as not to wake Mom. She’s a light sleeper.
“Fine,” I mutter, turning my phone over and over in my hands.
“I mean … not perfect.”
“Everything you dreamed of?”
Tears sting my eyes. I reach for the box of tissues Mom had been clinging to.
“Everything’s different,” I whisper.
Josh doesn’t say anything else. He just waits.
“Being with Levi is hard sometimes,” I tell him. “It really, really sucks to be around someone who’s actively trying to hurt you. He gets in these moods where he’s determined to make me feel awful, to push every single one of my buttons. He’ll insult things I like, or just straight-up call me stupid to my face—he has no problem doing that.”
Josh nods. I keep going.
“Why does he have to do that? He threw a fit at Versailles because he didn’t want to admire a place he said was built on the backs of ‘the People,’ with a capital P.”
Josh’s eyes crinkle in a smile. “That’s Levi. Our red menace.”
My laugh is lost in another tiny sob. “But then … even though he pisses me off, I sort of admire the way he thinks. Mom will tell you it’s all because something’s been off with his brain chemistry this whole time, but it can’t just be that. You can’t write off every aspect of someone’s personality and explain it all away with an illness. Right?”
Josh sighs. “Your mom wants to find reasons. She doesn’t want to believe Levi means the things he says and the things he does. Sometimes he scares her.”
“He’s just not like her. That’s what she doesn’t like. I’m not her, either.”
“Hey,” he says. “Don’t think she doesn’t love you, like, an insane amount. She does.”
“A lot of the time it sure doesn’t feel like it.”
He squeezes my shoulder. “You’re growing up. I think both Levi and Mom are having trouble with that.”
I just nod, pretending I’m getting the message.
“We should both get some sleep,” he says. “Can I leave her in here with you?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“Goodnight, Keir. Everything will be better in the morning.”
But how can it be?
I leave Mom sleeping on Levi’s bed. I brush my teeth, change into my pajamas, turn off the TV, and slip under the covers, but sleep doesn’t come. I stare into the darkness, thinking about Levi and where he might be. The night is brisk and his coat is still thrown over the chair in the corner. Is he shivering? Is he sleeping, or staying up all night? A tired, weak Levi might be easier to find. A tired, weak Levi might even come home.
Maybe in Paris Page 17