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CHAPTER 3

Robert disappeared from our home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, twelve weeks before my daughters and I arrived in Paris. The exact moment and means were never a mystery: very early, on foot, out the back door. His departure raised no alarm; he was a runner and liked early mornings best. And it wasn’t worth much more notice when he didn’t return for breakfast; occasionally he ran long.

When he later missed dinner, I reminded myself that he’d sometimes get consumed by a project, so much so that he’d forget to charge his phone (which he made reluctant use of regardless). After still no sign of him that night, I decided that he’d gone off on one of his “writeaways.” Ellie and Daphne asked if he’d left a note. He had not.

And then I discovered he had, a very short one. Six letters.

The first person I called when Robert disappeared was Eleanor. It’s not quite correct to call her my friend. Nor is it correct to call her Ellie’s godmother—we never had her baptized—but both insist Eleanor is. What is true is that back when I was in graduate school, I’d taken some English classes and she was the department chair. I went to her to complain about a grade I’d gotten from another professor, and over the course of an hour, she convinced me both that the grade I’d received was, if anything, too generous and that if I spoke as plainly and fearlessly on paper as I did in person, I’d never have cause to complain about a grade again. She was right, but I still knocked on her office door regularly ever after, even once I’d quit my program: I was sure she could resolve my life’s larger complaints as readily as she had my academic ones.

“Leah,” Eleanor said after one particularly long afternoon. “I’m not the chair of your life.” I smiled, and smile now at the memory. It was the only time she ever lied to me.

Not that I believed all the things she told me, such as, your parents don’t hate you. I told myself that they did, as they’d died before I’d had a chance to apologize to them for being a terrible daughter. Their deaths came within months of each other my third semester in graduate school, my father after a long illness and my mother after a short one. For the record—and as they themselves would surely protest—I wasn’t a terrible daughter. I had been bothered by them for being so old for so long, for not providing me siblings, for living in rural Wisconsin, for not having more money, and finally, for assuring me it was “just fine” if I didn’t go to college (neither of them had). So many grievances, and so minor, and yet, during their illnesses prior to their deaths, I’d fancifully expected to be in some way relieved when they departed.

I was, of course, ruined. I paid for an elaborate funeral few attended and a massive joint headstone that would have embarrassed them. That used up just about all the money they’d left me; they’d mortgaged the bar to pay for my undergrad degree at a private college, a misspent five-year experience (I’d flunked much of freshman year, including French) I thought I could justify by doubling down and attending graduate school.

Other professors resisted the in loco parentis part of the job, but for Eleanor, avowedly single, childless, ageless, it was the job. She tidied up my grad school exit; found me that campus speechwriting job; told me, when I showed her the picture of my parents’ gaudy grave (I don’t know why I did this, but I had to, I kept it behind my license in my wallet), that I was a good daughter and, when I wailed in protest, told me she was sorry we weren’t graveside right then. I asked why. She said that would allow her to break off part of the outsize stone and hit me over the head with it.

Guilt, the greediest emotion, wants everything, she said. Grief just wants time. And time is just what she gave me.

So when I called her after Robert disappeared, I wasn’t surprised she told me to sit tight for another day. But when, on the third day, I called her and said I was calling the police, I was very surprised to hear she already had.

The police had told her what they’d told me, but they told me in person, during the middle of the day, all of this invisible to the girls, safely at school: wait.

I then told the girls their father had decided to get an early start on his summer writing period, always an intensive stretch, and that he’d be home soon enough. Ellie and Daphne exchanged sidelong glances—something didn’t quite add up—but Dad was Dad. And our family was our family, which is to say, a bubble, the kind I suppose a woman who loses her parents young inflates automatically. I don’t mean I bubble-wrapped my daughters, just that my default parenting position was to forestall adulthood as long as I could. The tooth fairy still called on us faithfully to collect the odd bicuspid. Daddy would return, too.

And then it was a week without him, and then it was three, and then it was the last day of school. We were crossing the street with the help of a motorcycle cop pressed into service for the great summer exodus. He blew his whistle, stopped traffic, waved us past. Ellie stopped.

“Ellie, no,” Daphne said, a hiss, a plea.

Ellie looked at me, several steps ahead, and then replied to her sister: “Well, we know she won’t.”

The policeman pointed to the curb. “Hurry along, girls; catch up to your mom.”

“Where’s our dad?” Ellie said.

And then, tears. Daphne’s, followed by Ellie’s, the latter’s quite rare, almost as rare as a policeman abandoning traffic control after two girls go to pieces mid-crosswalk. Everything that followed seemed to take place in three minutes but in real-world time took at least as many weeks: explaining to the cop—and thus, the girls—that yes, their father was missing and yes, the police knew this; and no, the police didn’t know where he was, either.

The detective assigned to us did have a theory, however, which he shared with me when we were alone. “In my experience,” he said, “the more dead they are, the more clues you find.” He nodded, agreeing with himself. “So no sign,” he said, “is not the worst sign.”

And so we didn’t make signs. No flyers, no posters, no posting online. I didn’t want to advertise our loss; to do so would somehow make it real. Daddy was simply away. He’d left no clues. I shared the detective’s theory, edited, with the girls. Inane, and yet, it steadied them. It steadied me. I sounded like an adult. I spoke to them as little adults. Robert’s disappearance had aged them, but my talking this way somehow ratified that leap.

I’m not sure I should have said anything. Everyone has to grow up sometime, yes. But like most parents, I didn’t want it to happen in an instant, outside a police station. I protected them to a degree: little grown-ups they might be or were becoming, but I still took care not to say the word alive, and I certainly didn’t say dead.

Even though he was. Had to be. Like the police, I had no evidence, except one important piece that I couldn’t share with them because they’d think I’d lost my mind. Which I had, partly, but enough remained for me to note that I didn’t feel Robert in my life anymore. I have a theory that couples are bound with some type of invisible rubber band. It expands and contracts, but it’s always there, a slight tug that you may not even notice until you notice, as I had, that it was completely gone.

What I also didn’t feel—this will sound awful, but wait—was sad. I felt scared, and angry, and alone. I could see sadness, some dark shore up ahead, but I wasn’t there yet because the truth wasn’t here yet. I felt Robert was gone; I didn’t know. And yet, amid all the advice I read about keeping the faith, keeping hope alive, I found one tough-talk website that said, your spouse might be dead. Prepare for that, too. So I did.

The funeral director who buried my parents had been ashamed at his success in overselling me—my theory, anyway, for why he gave me a pile of books, free, on death and dying and surviving, which had survived on my bookshelves ever since. With Robert three weeks gone, I went to the books and started poring over them anew. It didn’t quite make sense: Robert had not been declared dead, and as I’ve said, we resolutely avoided that word, even the concept.

But I had lost someone, hadn’t I? I had. And at least one of the books reassured me—in a chapter addressing the death of a loved one whose remains are not recovered—loss is no euphemism.

It was a start, anyway. A start into a peculiar descent into a peculiar grief. I found that, at this stage, the practical advice these books dispensed was useful: eat, exercise, sleep. I should not rush past my loss, not feel any undue burden to “move on,” but I shouldn’t linger, either. Keep moving. I did.

And I kept reading, and not surprisingly, reading about death, widowhood, survivorship, colored my thoughts—my hopes—of Robert. As weeks passed without him, these feelings gathered force, mass, became a scar.

It wasn’t right. I wasn’t right. But has there ever been a wife in the world who’s not imagined the death of her husband? Idly or urgently, depending on the situation. Mine was both. And mine was complicated still further by the fact that this was not the first time I’d wondered whether he was alive, whether he’d come back from this or that writeaway right away. I didn’t wish him ill—no, the absolute opposite. I wished him well because I hoped it would make him well, which would, in turn, make us all well. I had been losing him, Robert, and when the police asked, were there any signs he’d disappear? I lied and said no because I didn’t know how to say that he himself was the sign, that he and his words and his smile and his question marks were steadily disappearing, day by day.

I did not want Robert to have died. But I also did not know what else would explain the way I felt, which felt so similar to what I’d experienced after losing my parents: achy, antsy, haunted.

Prepare for life without him. Practice. I did. It helped. I determined I would privately pretend Robert was dead, then, until proven otherwise. And knowing I was pretending would stave off the larger, harder questions.

But what about my daughters’ questions?

Ellie and Daphne had held it together until the crosswalk and to a degree afterward, comforted that the police were on the case. But as days passed and Dad did not appear, things began happening. They acted out. Slammed doors. Fought. I asked the pediatrician for advice. This is normal, he said, which almost made me laugh, because nothing was. Still: I was to watch for “self-harm”—cutting—or eating disorders—or detailed discussions of suicide.

What I saw was none of this; the only self they were trying to harm was Mom. Suicidal thoughts? No. Homicidal, yes. Their eyes tracked me like I was prey. My jury-rigged survival approach—dead Robert as placeholder, receptacle for my grief-in-waiting—I could see that it would not work for them. Indeed, to declare him dead without producing his body—it would be as if I had killed him.

And so death stalked us, made somehow more powerful, more omnipresent, by our not discussing it. For example: one soft summer evening, walking our neighborhood’s shopping strip, salving our sorrows with ice cream, Daphne managed to smear chocolate on Ellie’s new top (its purchase an earlier salve). An accident, but Ellie screamed a soul-tearing scream. Daphne screamed a lesser scream, but in it rang the simmering anger of days upon days: at her father for disappearing, at her mother for not finding him, and especially at her sister, Ellie, for taking out all of her anger and despair and hurt on Daphne in a dozen different ways. And then Ellie smashed her cone in Daphne’s shirt.

Daphne plucked Ellie’s phone from her back pocket and threw it into the street.

At this point, the film goes silent for a full minute. Or it does when it plays in my mind. I know that, in real life, the next sixty seconds were particularly noisy, but I couldn’t hear them then. I couldn’t hear my own screaming, which eyewitnesses told me was even louder than my daughters’.

Ellie’s phone was her portal, her jet pack, her favorite toy. Something to be chased without hesitation, a ball bouncing into the street. One southbound car screeched and missed her, a northbound pickup ground her phone into the pavement. At this point, my film regained sound, just in time for me to think I was hearing Ellie’s bones crunch like kindling.

They didn’t; the pickup, after destroying the phone, had stopped just short of Ellie. Hip did meet bumper, but the driver had stopped so miraculously, precisely, shy of her that all his truck really did was tip her to the ground. She never hit her head. Someone ran up with a lawyer’s business card, insisted we go to the hospital. The paramedic said it was our choice. The driver was relieved when Ellie chose not to. I was relieved when Ellie, perhaps because she was so shaken by the experience, perhaps because she was certain I would now buy her a new and fancier phone, hugged Daphne and apologized for yelling at her. Daphne mumbled her own apology, incoherent.

We staggered home. We changed and brushed our teeth. We apologized to each other. Ellie told me what kind of new phone she wanted. Daphne said nothing, stayed bent over a diary Eleanor had given her, scribbling entries Eleanor said I shouldn’t read but which I of course did. I later woke Daphne when I saw that day’s final line:

Whoever you take next, let it be me.

Whom was Daphne addressing? I didn’t know, and so I hovered over her, wondering how to let her know she was loved, she was safe, she must never, ever wish for death—sweet girl!—

And studying her in those brief seconds before I saw she saw it was me, when I was still just some strange dark figure looming, I saw her eyes brighten with fear, and relief, that her prayer was being answered.

I heard a quiet, insistent knock at the front door minutes later.

Though it was almost midnight, I didn’t even bother with the peephole. Was it—?

Eleanor.

I’d made the discovery earlier that evening. The note. But not Robert’s usual kind, and not in the usual place. Before I shared it with the police—much less the girls—I wanted to discuss it with her, especially as it required some of her expertise, very close textual analysis. I’d suggested we meet the next morning, but Eleanor had said this called for a meeting, wine, immediately. Now that she was here, I tried to wave her off; I told her about Ellie, Daphne, the cones, the phone, the street. Now was not the time, I said.

After Eleanor confirmed everyone was physically okay, she said that this was exactly the time. More to the point, past time.

“So again,” Eleanor said. “This was where?”

We were in the kitchen. She’d brought a paper-bagged bottle but ignored it as soon as I gave her the “note.” Not the usual three words, be back soon, but, as I said, just six letters: CWTCCJ.

“In the granola,” I said. I went to get the box, but she flicked an impatient wrist. I returned and continued. “The weird organic shit that he was forever buying but never ate. Certainly no one’s touched it in the four weeks since he’s been gone.”

“Until today,” Eleanor said.

“Until today,” I said.

“Because you were hungry?” Eleanor said.

I nodded, because that was easier than admitting I didn’t have the stomach for almost any food those days, that I’d gone to the granola for the most pathetic of reasons: I’d accidentally washed his clothes. Right after he left, I’d discovered some shirts of his in the laundry pile, and set them aside for the police to inspect. Which they declined to do, because, as they gently asked, what would that tell us? I was too dazed to know how to answer, though in the subsequent weeks I did: it would tell you who he was. I kept the shirts in a pile on the floor, sometimes buried them beneath a pillow as I slept. I smelled them and remembered, until one sleepy morning I forgot what I was doing and dumped them into the washer with everything else. And out they went with the Tide. I panicked, I pretended I wasn’t panicked, I went through his closet, some drawers, but the scents there were too faint, too clean. And in the kitchen, looking for some noninebriant that would make me hungry again, I found his granola. It smelled stale. And then I saw the slip.

“So my idea,” I said. I was still wobbly from Ellie’s close call, but Eleanor was here now. She had her reading glasses on. Time to work. “It’s a rhyme scheme, right?” I said. “He loved puzzles? Words? A poem? I mean, you’re the expert, but . . .”

Eleanor turned it over. Nothing.

“Not a poem,” she said.

“Well, it’s not from the granola people,” I said. “This is a thing of his. You know him. He loves hiding notes for the girls.”

“Do you have a laptop?” Eleanor said.

“Google had nothing,” I said, which wasn’t entirely true. After I’d failed to find anything with those six letters, I’d set Google to another task, which led me to a French firm that offered to make a perfume from a DNA sample, which they could collect from a variety of sources, like, say, an old piece of clothing, the more unwashed the better—

“Maybe you asked Google the wrong thing,” Eleanor said, and found a stool. “Get your computer and let’s visit some airlines, starting with the ones that fly out of Milwaukee. Failing that, O’Hare.”

“Why?” I said.

“Because six dollars says it’s a confirmation code, dearest.”

Which was how Eleanor reminded me that most of Robert’s puzzles were solved easily; recognize the frame or context and then everything flopped into place. CWTCCJ wasn’t an anagram or rhyme scheme but an itinerary. And so we tried one airline, and then another, and then there it was, a three-week trip to Paris. Departing the first of August.

“Surprise,” Eleanor said.

Robert had been due to go to Paris in late summer, as Eleanor knew. Earlier in the year, for the sake of cash flow, he’d written an article about children’s lit and Paris, and a small publisher who’d seen it had asked if Robert thought it could be a book. With maps. And directions and addresses and opening hours and URLs. And there’d be an advance, some money for expenses.

Great, Robert told me, I’ve graduated to writing guidebooks.

Really great! I said. Because I wanted some kind of light on his horizon, someone other than me telling him, you’re good. And I didn’t ask, is there enough money to take me? the girls? because I knew there wasn’t.

But I had wanted Robert to ask, to explain, to renew the promise that someday we’d go to Paris. Honestly, at that point, I would have smiled at an invitation to return to Paris, Wisconsin, either one, so long as doing so would return to me some older, less wise, less weary, less wary Robert, one who said, “sure,” “why not,” and “we’ll figure it out,” and once, when I was in the midst of stealing a book, “I think you forgot something. . . .”

Because I hadn’t. I forget nothing. Not the number of cats in The Red Balloon or the color of the picnic table where he’d proposed, nor that he’d once upon a time promised to take me to France.

Paris in August is terrible, he went on.

Really? I thought. But what I said was see? You do sound like a guidebook author! He turned away, I turned it on: a real artist would say, “a few weeks, on my own, in Paris? I’ll buy the ticket tonight.” After a few hours of furious silence, he said he would. And don’t tell the girls, he said, it would be a surprise.

The next morning, the surprise came when he told me he hadn’t bought the ticket, and wouldn’t.

“You had no idea?” Eleanor asked, peering at the screen. I peered at her, curious how the blame that had pooled just moments ago at Robert’s feet was somehow seeping toward mine.

“Eleanor,” I said.

Not only had he booked himself a ticket—he’d booked tickets for all of us.

Paris. I would finally—

He had finally—

We would all go to—the actual place. The city. Not the one with the cornfield and the water tower, not the wayside with the picnic table and trash barrel, not any Paris on this continent, but the real city, Madeline’s city, Lamorisse’s city, mine.

Paris.

Eleanor watched me, waited, but I couldn’t speak. So she did. “We’ve learned two things, then,” she said. Her seminar voice. She folded away her glasses. “One, he booked flights—including for himself, I see—and two, he had—has?—a credit card you don’t know about.” (Had, it was later determined. The trip was the last thing charged on it; before that, a year or so of little purchases—gas, food—that roughly corresponded with his various prior absences.)

I picked up the little slip of paper. I now almost wished it were a rhyme scheme, an acrostic.

Can’t

Write

Think

Can’t

Crashed

Jumped

I felt the world rushing up at me—and I mean that, not the floor, not the carpet, but the world, all of it, including Paris, where I’d wanted to go for so long, and now here it was, the code, the key, the passageway—

I did not want to go anywhere, except maybe to bed or outside to scream. I wanted a glass of something, something worse than wine. But I couldn’t get any farther than the sink. I watched myself turn on the water. I watched myself bend to the tap. What was I going to do? Drink, apparently, right from the faucet. I drank for a long while and then turned it off and dried my face. Eleanor waited quietly, hands in her lap.

I waited, too, and when I was ready, I spoke. “We haven’t learned the most important thing,” I said. The rational part of me—which was also the angry part—was slowly returning. “Why?” I said. “Why this way? It’s one thing for him to leave a sad little puzzle behind for me to solve. But it’s another thing for him to tease the kids, a code tumbling out of a box, his old m.o., and they’d have gotten so excited—”

Eleanor nodded. “That’s the part that troubles me,” she said.

“That he was a jerk?” I said.

No, Eleanor said. Robert could be clueless but not cruel, and therefore would not have left the code for his family to find if he’d known he wasn’t going to be around when they found it. And it was doubtful we ever would have found it without his prompting, given that we never went near that box. What troubled her was that this meant something had happened.

What troubled her, she went on, was that I’d been abandoned before, my parents dying so suddenly, so soon.

Our eyes met.

This was not that, she said.

“Got it,” I said, instantly angry that she would bring it up, angry all over again at my parents for dying, angriest of all, of course, at Robert.

“But do you get this?” Eleanor said. There was no question, she said. We should go.

“To France?” I said.

“That’s where he booked tickets to,” she said.

“Now?” I said. I’d sooner take a journey to the sun.

“Three weeks from now,” she said, “or whenever the reservation is for. We’ll pay—I’ll pay—for expedited passports, and—oh, none of that is an issue. Leah, of course go. And my god—don’t come back, not right away. If something terrible has happened here—I hold out hope that it hasn’t—there will be, for a time, the distraction of distance. So change the tickets. Take a month. Take however much time you need. Take leave. The university will figure it out. So will the airline. So will the girls’ schools. Ellie and Daphne may even figure out how to smile again.”

“They’ll be devastated,” I said, “especially when—”

“They awake tomorrow morning, and the next morning, and the next and the next, and he’s not here, in this house, in Milwaukee. This is what’s devastating them, Leah. This is what’s hurting.”

I thought of the ice-cream fight. I thought of Daphne addressing her diary, the dark: take me. I thought of both girls wishing that their dad was not dead and somehow wishing even more that their mom, their own mother, would more visibly join them in this wish and, better yet, make their father reappear.

I thought of how Robert had darkened everything of late, as though a black frame set upon a scene might come to leach its color into what one saw.

“We can’t leave,” I said, so quietly even I couldn’t hear the words. “Robert is away, writing, and is coming back.”

Eleanor could be brusque and businesslike, but like Robert—like the Robert I thought I knew—she was never cruel. She looked at me directly. “Do you believe that?” she said.

“Robert’s moved far away, and he’s changed his identity.”

“Do you want to believe that?”

I didn’t. I feared that he was dead. Because those books had convinced me. Because I had needed them to convince me. Because the world didn’t make sense otherwise, starting with six letters in a cereal box.

“Eleanor,” I said, more whimper than word.

Joking, sarcasm, anger was a way of pretending that I was fine, that I didn’t miss him. And part of me, I confess, did not. But the reader in me, the makeshift muse, word-drunk and bereaved, she suffered. And, yes, the rest of me, my fingers and mouth and hair and stomach, I missed him like air, like water, like a second skin, like a book you love, you need, but is no longer on the shelf when you go to look because it turns out it was never written.

“And the girls? What do they think?” she said.

Ellie and Daphne thought their father was a hero. And I’d agree if allowed to qualify, a classical hero, someone as heroic as he was remote, someone always off on an adventure. I occasionally convinced myself the solution to his (or our) angst lay in taxonomy. If only I could classify what was wrong with him, or me, our family, that house, that life, then I could solve it. He ran off on his writeaways because that was healthy, not rude. He was a good father, had to be, because the girls adored him. So, for the longest time, did I. He remembered Picture Day. He knew which summer camp deadlines fell the fall before. When he was home, he did color-correct laundry, sometimes helped with the dishes, and claimed the girls were telepathic because whenever asked to guess the number in his head, they were, somehow, always right.

And they laughed when he told them they were right because he was lying or telling the truth, it didn’t matter, not to them, no more than the fact that he would sometimes disappear for a night, a day, a weekend. It had been weeks at this point with no word. Which meant Robert now fit a profile. I didn’t see it myself, not right away, but the police did. Nobody’s that clean, the police technician said, and the detective eventually had to update his theory about corpses leaving more clues. Because not a penny of our bank account had been pinged, not an electron of his e-mail disturbed.

“Do they think he’s alive?” Eleanor pressed. “The girls.”

You’re going to have to stand a little taller was one of the first things Eleanor had told me, back in the freshest, darkest hours after Robert disappeared, and I had taken that to heart. I stood taller, even as I noticed that taller put me just the slightest bit farther from the girls. They looked up at me and I looked down and we saw each other, but from a new distance. The result wasn’t vertigo, but it left all of us mildly ill, and no one asked what was for dinner, what number was in any one of our heads, whether Dad was still alive. Dad is away was our collective term of art, and so solid-seeming it had been, too, until it began to teeter in that school crosswalk, and then shattered, like Ellie’s phone, in that busy street.

“They do,” I said.

“You don’t,” she said.

“I—can’t,” I said.

“Can you try?” she said.

I didn’t answer; I couldn’t. It was the same question I’d asked Robert the last night I saw him. He wasn’t happy, he’d said. Wasn’t sleeping. Wasn’t working.

Can you try? I’d asked. The girls were tucked in bed upstairs; otherwise I would have been louder, because I wanted him to listen to me, or to the doctor, or the therapist he refused to keep seeing.

Writing is ruining me, he’d said.

I listened to the clock tick. My heart beat. Myself say, in this whole house, only you?

I didn’t eat the morning of our flight and not the night before. I’d drunk some wine; that went poorly. Then coffee: worse.

Worse still, the airport, where every father of every age seemed to have gathered. They lifted bags out of taxis, held doors, ferried lattes in cardboard carriers that were—like much of the world, I realized—designed for four. They scooped up little boys who hugged them good-bye and dropped everything to catch daughters, mid-leap, who welcomed them home. They wore suits, sweats, fatigues. Were shaggy-haired, buzz-cut, bald. As short as Robert, as thin, as haunted, or nothing like him at all. The fathers were everywhere except at the airline counter. Eleanor distracted Ellie and Daphne out of earshot while I asked if a Robert Eady had already checked in.

“No,” said the woman.

Simultaneously relieved and devastated, I said something about how it was unlikely he would check in.

The woman shrugged and delivered a bored speech whose punch line was a $150 change fee.

That’s all? I thought. I almost paid it. It seemed cheap compared to how much change my life had gone through since April; $150 wasn’t much to change it back, to bring a man back from the dead.

I shook my head. She scribbled something on our boarding passes that the TSA agents took as instruction to subject us to a scouring search. I watched as my purse, Daphne’s underwear, and a petite container of Clearasil pads I didn’t know Ellie had packed were wiped down with what looked like a Clearasil pad. For explosives, the agent said, winking at the girls as if this were a game.

For three weeks, I’d told the girls. Twenty-one days in Paris. This trip, which we were going to take with Dad, we’re going to take ourselves. Daphne had asked if we were going to meet him there, and in the pause it had taken me to mull whether saying maybe was right or wrong or kind, Ellie had said no.

I said our only real goal for this trip was to get away, see the sights, see some pages from Madeline come to life. Dad had needed a longer than usual writing break, apparently. And, apparently, this was his plan for us: Paris. Besides, they loved Bemelmans, right? Ellie especially. She loved sharing alarming anecdotes from the “grown-up” Bemelmans anthologies Robert had found—did I know Bemelmans claimed to have shot someone? That his governess had killed herself when he was six? That Bemelmans had thought of killing himself with a velvet rope from the Ritz? No, I did not. (Had her father thought such thoughts? For the longest time I did not let myself think so. Now I couldn’t not.)

To fly anywhere these days means navigating, first, a gauntlet of questions.

Did you pack your own bags?

Did anyone ask you to carry something for them?

Has your bag been in your possession the entire time?

But the most difficult one came from Daphne.

“Did you leave Dad a note?”

“Yes,” I said, which was untrue.

Ellie, who had been pretending not to follow our discussion as she played with her new phone, tilted slightly closer to us, eyes still focused on her screen.

“I did, too!” Daphne whispered loudly. “I left it on my pillow.”

This was too much for Ellie. Earlier, when Daphne had gone to a bathroom near the gate, Ellie had asked: is Dad coming back? Tell me the truth, now—Daphne can’t hear you.

Ellie had not been satisfied with my I hope so and even less so by my I don’t know. I braced for the follow-up, is he alive? My answers would have been no different: I hope so; I don’t know. But somehow I knew that her just asking the question would make everything different.

But here, now, Ellie was pressing Daphne, not me. “You left the note on your pillow?” Ellie asked.

“Yes?” Daphne said, not quite seeing the blow that was coming.

“You didn’t write ‘be back soon,’ did you?” Ellie said, furious now. “Like he always did? Because that would be so clever.”

Daphne’s eyes filled, but she didn’t break her sister’s stare. She just let the tears, when they came, pulse down her cheeks one by one in silence.

Ellie stood and stormed away toward a scrum awaiting a Florida flight.

Daphne fell into my shoulder. I pulled her close. What’s always amazed me as a mother is that even as your children grow, they still fit. Infant or tween, their chins can find their own individual ways to burrow into your shoulder, your arms, your chest. And then you breathe in and they breathe out, and our molecules are all mixed up again, indivisible once more.

Daphne wriggled in deeper, mole-like, which meant I had to have her repeat what she said to make out the words: “What did your note say, Mom?”

I stiffened, just the slightest bit.

My note, before I’d torn up three different drafts and thrown every last one into the trash, had said that we missed him, we loved him, we were worried about him, please call, please write, please tell us what happened, why this happened, how we can keep this from happening again. My note said I love you and but you make it harder and harder to do so and we need to talk, and we did, but as I scratched one underline after another under that word, I remembered that we never would, because he was—had to be? the police seemed to think? the funeral director’s books seemed to suggest?—dead.

I thought of the boy in the bar with the books, the boy who’d loved Bemelmans, the boy who’d bought me a book about a balloon, the boy who said we’d go places. And we had. And now he had.

But where?

Daphne looked up at me, and so I told her what I’d written, which I hadn’t:

Meet us in Paris.