Maybe in Paris

by Rebecca Christiansen

  “But I could have been there,” I murmur to my hands in my lap. “I should have been there. Instead I wanted to spend time with a stupid boy. He—he had this in his hand when I found him.” I shove my stupid, lying note into Josh’s hand. “I was late. He must have gone out looking for me.”

  Josh reads the note over and over, his eyebrows knitting together. He’s going to freak out, I can tell. Yell at me. “Hey,” he says, his voice all sad and soft. I realize there are tears running down my face. “Don’t cry, Keir. No one could blame you for wanting to spend time with a boy. Sure, maybe you could’ve done things differently, but none of us has a time machine.”

  I sniff back tears. “He was so … so distant when I found him. Like a ghost.”

  “You didn’t do that to him, Keira. His own brain does that to him. Don’t beat yourself up over this.”

  “Don’t let Mom hear you say that,” I warn him, wiping my tears with my bandages. “She wants to kill me, I know she does.”

  “Hey, look.” He pauses. “No, really, look at me.”

  I do. His eyes are wide and honest. For the billionth time, I say a silent prayer of thanks that Mom met him.

  “She isn’t angry with you,” he says.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because what have you done since this mess started? You looked for him. You didn’t give up hope.”

  “But that’s the most basic thing,” I say. “Who would give up? ‘Oh, looks like my brother’s missing, I’ll just lie down and die now.’”

  “Keira, be serious.”

  Anyone would be a complete and utter lame-ass for not doing the bare minimum I did. Really, I could’ve done so much more. Not gotten frustrated with Levi for his brain chemistry. Had a little more sensitivity. Realized he’s been ill all along. Zombie Levi, who I saw today? That’s who he was for years. If I’d sensed the wrongness earlier, spent some time with him like he so desperately wanted, maybe he wouldn’t have tried to kill himself. He’d be a whole lot better off.

  “All I’m saying is to stop beating yourself up for not being more than human,” Josh says. “We couldn’t have asked any more of you.”

  I politely disagree, silently.

  Josh gently pats my leg, careful to steer clear of my knee. “If anything is anyone’s fault, it’s mine.”

  “Hey, if I’m not allowed to take blame, you definitely aren’t.”

  “No, really,” he says. “I know Levi’s always resented me. He barely acknowledges me, and it’s been how many years now? I should’ve tried harder to win him over. Tried to change his mind about me.”

  I’ve never heard heartbreak in Josh’s voice before. Right now, as his downcast eyes search my bedspread like it has the answers, it’s the first time I’ve ever seen him be anything other than calm, laid-back. That uncertainty doesn’t belong in his eyes. I shake my head so hard it almost hurts.

  “Never mind what Levi thinks,” I say. “You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to any of us. I’ve been trying to convince him for years.”

  Josh shakes his head. He smiles faintly. “Keep trying for me. God knows you’re the only one he’ll listen to.”

  I reach over and hug him.

  “I’ll wear him down eventually,” I tell him. “I promise.”

  I’m not sure if I’m stuck in the hospital for my own sake, or because they’re still working on Levi. Josh stays with me, trying to keep me entertained, but I don’t see Mom for a few hours. When she comes into my little curtained-off area, her eyes are sunken pits, red from tears, and her ponytail is even frizzier than usual. Josh stands and takes her hand.

  “What’s the news?” he asks.

  “Bloodwork came back,” Mom says, her voice unsteady. “He—he hasn’t been taking his medication, probably not since leaving treatment. That’s weeks of flushing pills.”

  I have to stop her from saying any more. “I don’t need you to tell me it’s all my fault.”

  She looks up at me. Deadly silence fills the space between the hospital curtains.

  I continue. “Believe me, I fucking know. How do you think I feel, knowing you were right? I can’t be trusted with Levi—I can’t be trusted with myself. I’ve been, like, two seconds away from a mental breakdown this whole trip. How the hell could I ever take care of Levi?”

  I only realize I had this fear when it comes spilling out of my mouth in a shrill, unhinged screech. Tears fill my eyes. Mom is silent. I can’t see her anymore through the blur.

  “I’ve told her, Amanda,” Josh whispers. “I’ve told her it’s not her fault, that we don’t blame her, but—”

  Mom turns and walks away, shoes squeaking on the hospital linoleum. I grab the cheap, flat pillow off my hospital bed, bury my face in it, and scream. It doesn’t do shit to absorb the sound.

  “Keira, it’s okay.” Josh sits beside me and wraps an arm around my shoulders. “She’s under a lot of stress right now. She needs some time to process everything.”

  My tears and snot soak the pillow. Some time? I don’t think a thousand years could change the fucked-up way we are.

  “You’re too hard on yourself,” Josh says. “Give yourself some credit, okay, kid? It’s so hard to hear you beat yourself up.”

  I nod numbly. Josh squeezes my shoulder one last time.

  “Want some baguette?” he asks, producing half a baguette wrapped in paper out of nowhere. “I was skeptical at first, but man, I’ve been living off plain bread since we got here. This stuff is the shit.”

  My lip twitches with the ghost of a smile. I rip off a chunk of slightly stale bread. It tastes like nothing, but I chew and swallow anyway. I will do anything for the parent who will sit with me while I cry instead of running out of the room.

  I manage to take a fractured nap, full of hospital noises and far from satisfying. When I’m in a drowsy half-sleep, a heavy weight lands on the edge of my bed. A hand squeezes my shoulder and I glance up.

  It’s Mom.

  “Are you okay, baby?” she asks. She tucks a lock of hair behind my ear, and my skin almost stings where her fingers brush.

  I sit up. She looks haggard, like a million worries have landed on her shoulders and her body is digesting them all. Her hair is greasy in its perpetual ponytail, her skin is breaking out, her eyes are red and puffy. She looks the way she used to when she was dragging Levi and me around town on errands and listening to us scream and make demands in the supermarket and then cry when we weren’t appeased. My brain says proceed with caution, screaming imminent, but Mom smiles hesitantly. At me.

  Something inside me breaks like a dam. I bite down on my wobbling lip when Mom holds out her arms. I sink into them. She rocks me back and forth and I just want to tell her everything. Every little worry I’ve had on this trip, every insecurity that has ever dwelled in my brain, I want to offer them all up to her and have her crush them to dust in the soft hands she runs over my hair.

  “I’m sorry I walked away,” she whispers.

  “It’s okay,” I say, because it’s what I’m supposed to say, even if it’s not okay.

  “No, it’s not. I was so angry at the situation with Levi, and when you accused me of blaming you, I was just so angry I couldn’t speak. Not angry at you,” she says hastily. “Angry with myself.”

  “With yourself?”

  I feel her nod against me. “Because I have blamed you in the past. I’ve turned a blind eye when it comes to you, in general, especially the past few months. I convinced myself that helping Levi was more important. I … I saw some signs of trouble with you, but I … well, I pretended I didn’t. Part of me thought your problems were your own to deal with, and now I realize how stupid it was for me to think that.”

  I want to tell her it’s okay, don’t worry about it, but I can only sit here, dumbfounded.

  “You remind me of myself, Keira,” Mom admits. “In more ways than I can count. You fight so hard you exhaust yourself, and you only cry for help when it’s almost too late. You blame y
ourself for everything, you throw yourself on the fire. That frustrates me because it’s what I do, too. My instinct was always to get angry, instead of teaching you to stop taking on all this guilt.”

  She sounds like she’s reading from a self-help book, but the truth of her words settles into me like a nourishing meal. Her honesty feels like a kick in the gut—in a good way, if that’s possible. I have no idea what to say, so I just say, “It’s okay, Mom.”

  “It’s not okay. You think you’re the problem here, and I should never, ever have let you think that. I’m sorry, Keira. I was scared. Finding out that Levi’s been tricking me and lying to me about taking his pills is even scarier.”

  I just nod.

  “So I’m sorry,” she says. She finally releases me from her embrace. “You aren’t to blame. Levi is his own worst enemy.”

  “But he’s my responsibility.”

  “He’s all of our responsibility,” she says, “but you are not his parent. You’re his sister. That’s important—crucial, even—but you are not to blame. Okay?”

  I nod, maybe not believing her, but willing to try.

  She takes my hand and squeezes it. Hers is cold and dry, probably from loading up on hospital hand sanitizer. “How have you been feeling?”

  I held up my bandaged wrist. “Sore. My knee, too. Plus I have all these scrapes and—” I think of everything that’s happened to me on this trip: the museum episode, my panic in the dark catacombs. The tightness in my chest, the fear and anxiety over how close Levi came to being gone … “—and I was under a lot of stress, the past few days. I’m okay, though. Or I will be soon.”

  Mom smiles and reaches into her purse for a tissue. She hands me one, too, and we mop up the remnants of our tears while laughing. I can’t take my eyes off her. I’ve suddenly realized what a miracle it is that she’s here, in Paris.

  “What do you think of Paris, Mom?” I ask her. “Or what you’ve seen, anyway.”

  She doesn’t answer for a moment as she folds her tissue into a tiny square. When she speaks, it’s a whisper: “It’s incredible, Keira. Can you make me a promise?”

  “Um, sure.”

  “Promise we’ll come back, all four of us, and see it all together?”

  I grin. “Easiest promise I’ve ever made.”

  I go back to the hotel on crutches, once the doctor has put a brace on my knee and given me a strict warning to be careful or else he’ll come find me in America and force me to rest it. I think he was trying to be funny, but it came off as vaguely threatening. Josh and I laugh about it for something to do, but there’s no disguising the fact that we’re missing Mom and Levi, who are still at the hospital.

  “Get some rest, Keira,” Josh says as I hobble to my room. He opens the door for me. “This will all look better in the morning.”

  The morning. We have a flight booked. We’re going home.

  I don’t know how I feel about that. I do understand that, yeah, Levi needs to go home. He needs to see his doctors. He needs a full-arsenal effort to try to figure out how to help him. I feel like the biggest idiot for ever denying that now. My brain tries to tell me I couldn’t have known how serious his problems were until I saw them with my own eyes, that I never got the full blast of his condition. I was sheltered.

  My heart tells me I’m the shittiest person alive for never trying to become unsheltered. It was easy to deny, and I’m lazy. I will always pick the easy route even when it comes to my brother. Who I love more than anything.

  But then I think of Marie Antoinette. You can’t always blame people for their ignorance, for the circumstances of their lives. It’s not always something they can control, and the full truth of the world’s awfulness isn’t always something they can handle.

  I’m wiping up tears yet again when my phone rings. It’s Gable.

  “Hey,” he says when I answer. “I heard you found Levi.”

  “Yeah, at the Arc de Triomphe. He stayed the night in a park.”

  “Is he okay?”

  I swallow. “He will be.”

  “Good.” He pauses. “Are you okay?”

  “Just a sprained wrist and dislocated kneecap, but nothing rest won’t fix. I would never let a SmartCar take me out.”

  “What? I meant emotionally—what the bloody hell are you talking about?”

  “Oh! I almost got hit by a SmartCar. I jumped out of the way in time, though. It’s all good.”

  “That sounds intense.”

  “It was. Sort of badass, though.”

  “I can imagine.”

  Awkward silence. I fiddle with my knee brace while I wait for him to say something, anything. I don’t want to talk.

  “So, shot in the dark,” Gable continues, “but I’m going home to Edinburgh tomorrow, and I was sort of wondering if you’d maybe like to come along? It could just be for a few days, even, while your family works out what you guys are doing. I don’t know. I realize now that it’s a stupid idea, and you’re one-hundred-percent free to shoot me down, but …”

  A few days ago, this invitation would have been the best, most fairy-tale thing to ever happen to me. I would’ve been shaking, just imagining the wind-swept highlands and the craggy mountains and myself conquering that rugged land.

  But, right now, in Scotland with a cute boy is not where I need to be.

  “We actually have a flight home booked for tomorrow,” I murmur.

  “Oh,” he says. “Right. Of course.”

  More silence. What is there to say?

  “If I’m ever in Scotland, I’ll give you a shout?”

  “Yeah, yeah, totally,” he says. “I’d like to see you again, Keira. We had a good time.”

  “Yeah, we did.”

  “Well … add me on Facebook?”

  I grin. “Of course.”

  So we say “so long, see you someday,” and then hang up. I log into Facebook and find Gable McKendrick. His profile picture has him on a mountainside, posing with a bunch of other kids who must be his siblings and a lady in the middle who must be his mother. They’re all wearing kilts. The lump in my throat swells.

  I like Gable. He’s sweet and funny and genuinely seems to care about me. But the time and place are so, so wrong.

  But hey, if I ever go to Scotland, I have a couch to sleep on. I’ve always read that, in the world of travel, that one thing can be worth its weight in gold.

  And anyway, there’s always “someday.”

  The next morning, I peek out the curtains at the rooftops across the way. Neighborhood cats hold a cranky congregation, the birds chirping teasingly above them. A girl speeds by on a Vespa. An old man at the local newsstand smokes a cigar and frowns at the front pages of the papers.

  I’m going to miss this place. No hostel by the Seine could have done any better.

  Even though I’m on my stupid crutches, I can’t let my morning tradition slip by, not on the last chance I’ll get.

  I hobble down to the bakery. It takes twice as long as usual, but I’d go three times as far for Margot and Nico’s croissants.

  This time, there’s a woman ahead of me in line, ordering a baguette and two pains aux chocolat. She smiles at me and tells me she’s glad I found my brother. A very serious-looking old man in a bowler hat sits at Levi’s and my table with a jam cookie and espresso. And Margot beams as she comes around the counter to hug me.

  “You look so happy,” I say into her ear as she squeezes me gently.

  “You have helped make it so,” she whispers. “Merci, merci, merci.”

  “Thank you,” I tell her, “for filling our time here with sweetness.”

  I can’t believe such greeting-card cheesy words just came out of my mouth, but Margot seems to like it. She finally lets me go with one last squeeze. She wipes a tear from her cheek when we finally pull apart.

  “Thanks to you,” she says, “I have met someone very special. Come!”

  She leads me toward the older gentlemen in the bowler hat. He stands up. His eyes twinkl
e under bushy, wild eyebrows.

  “Voici Monsieur Goldberg,” she says. “He is the nephew of the neighbor my grandpère gave refuge to in this very pâtisserie.”

  I shake Monsieur Goldberg’s hand. It’s papery and dry, but his smile is bright and warm.

  “Merveilleux de vous recontrez,” I stutter.

  “Toi aussi,” he says. “Thanks to the news story of your brother being found, I was finally able to locate the bakery that was next to my uncle’s apartment. I saw this street on the news and recognized it from the old photos.”

  “That’s amazing,” I say. “I’m so glad something good could come out of this.”

  “Something good definitely has come of it,” Monsieur Goldberg says, lifting his cookie and toasting Margot with it. “The single best cookie in all of Paris, I tell you, the best!”

  Margot’s cheeks are so red and round, they look like balloons. “I’m so happy Levi was found,” she says. “Will he be okay?”

  “Yeah, he’ll be fine once he gets home.”

  “And you go home today?” she asks.

  “Yes.”

  Now it feels real. Leaving Paris. The real Paris isn’t the Paris of my early dreams—the sweeping grandeur of Versailles and the tingly gaze of haughty French boys—but it’s infinitely more beautiful than all that. I see that beauty in Margot’s smile. I taste it in the croissant she gives me.

  And when she says “I have something for you,” and brings me a gift bag, I see it again in two beautiful copies of the same book. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. One in English, one in French.

  “You said you want to read it, so I bought you the French, and I thought to have the English too would help.”

  I hug her again. I don’t want to let go.

  When I can finally force my sniffling, teary self to hobble out of the bakery on my crutches, book bag swinging from my hand, I run into Bald Guy on the street. He’s angling toward the bakery.

  “Are you going in here?” I blurt out. “Seriously?”

  He scowls, but nods.

  “Leurs croissants sont bons,” he grunts as he opens the door and goes inside.

  Their croissants are good.