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CHAPTER 4

What I should have felt when we first landed in Paris is obvious: Paris! Paris! Paris! Here were the routes I’d traced with a finger on childhood atlases, as though some miniaturized version of the city might bas-relief beneath my fingertips. It never had.

And it didn’t now. When Robert left, it turned out he had taken something—a small thing, perhaps, but still, an important thing: the exclamation point that had always followed the city’s name, at least for me. From the looks of the girls, he’d taken it from them, too.

Paris. Somewhere around here someone had once made a movie about a red balloon. Someone else had sat sketching schoolgirls marching about in two straight lines.

And back in Milwaukee, some couple had once argued whether Paris was best depicted in color or black and white. Now I saw—

That the city was spectacular. That it couldn’t and wouldn’t not be, and if I or my girls missed that exclamation point, we were missing the larger point. Paris wasn’t a painting, or a movie, or a poster. It wasn’t a prize. And now that we’d arrived, it was no longer a dream, either. It was real.

Then why didn’t it feel that way?

Well, in part, because it was so tyrannically hot. Those first August weeks in Paris, the heat staggered us. Even saying the month’s name in French—août—felt, and sounded, like a little cry for help.

Not that anyone could have heard us above the din—the city was a city, and this fact somehow surprised us, too: how noisy it was, and at all hours. That I’d booked us a hot, cramped apartment between a hospital and train station did not help. During our daytime adventures, we’d sometimes find a narrow, anonymous passage and duck into it, in pursuit of nothing other than silence.

What surprised me most was how kind the city was to us. Nothing prepared me for this (though the girls, fed on Madeline, assumed it their due). I’ve experienced various Parisian unkindnesses since, but I’ll never forget those first days here when so many strangers seemed so warm, even courtly, especially toward the girls. Shopkeepers, museum guards, passengers on the Métro. Men gave up their seats; women stopped me to compliment my daughters’ beauty; bakers dropped a tiny chocolate (and then, with a wink, two, three) into the bag with our croissants. And the third Nutella crêpe? Free for the beautiful lady—who apparently was me. Paris in August is empty but for tourists, but the Parisians who’ve stayed behind need those tourists, they needed us. And, I was slowly letting myself believe, we needed them.

But with just four days left in Paris, we also needed Daphne’s passport.

It was gone. Eleanor’s fault: she’d told me that the first step in raising strong, independent women was to give them responsibility, starting with their boarding passes and passports.

Ellie misplaced her boarding pass between TSA and the plane in the United States; Daphne had lost her passport that morning in Paris. No idea how, where, just that it was gone. Also gone, and more devastatingly: the nascent confidence Eleanor’s plan had begun to instill in her. The State Department could help us with the passport, but I wasn’t sure who would reissue Daphne’s pride.

Not me, because I’d lost almost all of my own, having forgotten to bring the passport photocopies Eleanor had insisted I make. Fortunately, she’d insisted on keeping a set as well, and when I called that afternoon, she said she had the copies right at hand.

I waited for “I told you so,” autotext she keeps tucked in her cheek.

But instead: “I’m so glad you called,” Eleanor said. “I have something to tell you—unless—is this costing you thousands, this call?”

It wasn’t; Ellie had known to acquire these chips hardly bigger than a beauty mark that, once inserted into our phones, somehow made calling and texting and surfing cost next to nothing, or so she said.

“Not thousands, but . . .” But I needed to hurry Eleanor along; Ellie was bored and Daphne’s face was blotchy with tears and shame. Both were eavesdropping avidly. “Eleanor? The passport’s number. That’s all I need.”

We were sitting on a bench in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, a destination I’d put off, partly to hold it in reserve as a grand finale, partly because I hadn’t realized climbing it, especially at peak season, required an advance reservation.

And partly because—this is silly, or maybe not—I’d long ago envisioned climbing to the top and planting a kiss on Robert once there. Look who’s made it to Paris, France, from Paris, Wisconsin! Eighteen years, and here we are!

And we were. I let my eyes travel up the structure and squinted. It looked even hotter up there, that much closer to the sun.

“Nonsense,” Eleanor said. “It’s better to have the page itself,” Eleanor said. “I’ll FedEx it to you.”

“That will cost thousands,” I said.

“Thousands?” Daphne squeaked. Daphne worried about money for reasons that were obscure to me—had Robert and I once argued over finances in her presence? In Milwaukee, she had collected jars and jars of change. And if we were ever in a bookstore and she saw a discount sticker on one of Robert’s books, she took it off.

“No—Daphne, it’s okay,” I said. “It’s just that Aunt Eleanor wants to mail us a paper copy of your passport, and—”

Ellie exhaled long and slow. “Wow,” she said finally, and stood. Eleanor’s cumbersome suggestion proved just how old she was. But this moment proved to me just how old Ellie had become. She was about to turn fifteen then, a teen. Witness the exhale, the “wow,” the shimmering disdain, but most of all, the sheer height of her: when your child achieves (or exceeds) your height, you come to feel barely half their size. Ellie and I could now look each other in the eye. We could wear each other’s clothes. She dwarfed me. “Just, wow,” Ellie elaborated. And with that, she took the phone from me, explained to Eleanor what was needed—scan, upload, send—and then ended the call, brought up a map, and led us to a nearby Internet café.

Such cafés are all but extinct now and this one should have been then. It was un-air-conditioned, unpleasant, filled with young men who should have spent their last euros showering instead of surfing. The room rang with conversations in a dozen languages, but rules were rules—the manager pointed to a sign, in English, NO PHONE TALKING—so I was ordered out to the sidewalk when Eleanor called back.

“You’ll have it in a moment, I expect,” said Eleanor. “But can I use that moment?” she asked. “Like I said, I may have found something.”

I stared into the café; Daphne stared back; Ellie stared at her screen; the manager stared at my girls.

And an ocean away, Eleanor began to explain that the man whom we thought had disappeared without a trace had left behind a substantial one. Not six letters, but one hundred pages.

“It’s some sort of—well, manuscript, I guess,” Eleanor said. “With a cover letter. Addressed to a prize competition. It arrived earlier via campus mail, from the math department. My assistant’s theory is that Robert must have tried to send something to our department’s central printer ages ago—it’s time-stamped March, a month before he vanished—and the document turned left instead of right at some digital intersection, spitting itself out at a random printer across campus.”

“March?” I said. “It’s August.”

“Five months, five hundred yards,” Eleanor said. “That’s about right for campus mail. Speaking of, has my e-mail arrived?”

I tapped the café window; Ellie looked over—as did half the café—and shook her head. “No?” I said.

“Shoot,” she said. I heard clicking. “Resending. In the meantime, let me read just a paragraph or two, because it’s so very . . .”

And here my waking dream began in earnest—or I’d been dreaming since arriving in Paris, or since Robert left.

“Okay. ‘Please find enclosed my submission for the Porlock Prize,’” Eleanor read, and then paused. “Never heard of such a thing. Mind you, I lead a sheltered life. ‘It is’—this is him now—‘per the guidelines, a manuscript that, in the spirit of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s great “Kubla Khan,” lies unfinished due to the author having been interrupted during its production.’ Let’s be clear,” Eleanor said, “Coleridge wasn’t ‘interrupted,’ despite his claim that a ‘person from Porlock’ had ruined his poem; no, he was—well, speaking of brains, actually—”

“Eleanor, Eleanor, I lied,” I lied. “This is an expensive call. And I’ve left the girls on their own in—”

“Shush,” said Eleanor. “The competition, it turns out, is sponsored by a brain surgeon. In Grand Rapids, Michigan. Do you know what’s a telltale sign of a health care system out of control? Neurosurgeons making so much money they endow literary prizes.”

“He’s a neurosurgeon?” I said.

“So says the Internet. Which also says one of the reasons for his starting the contest was that he’d done research on the brain’s ability to handle interruptions.”

“Eleanor—”

“Clever! You interrupted. The man has a point. Okay—let’s see, skimming, another paragraph of throat-clearing, some vague groveling—it’s a little unseemly—it’s also very much Robert, I have to say, but—here ’tis. The synopsis.”

“Eleanor, do we have to do this now? Over the phone?”

“It’s short,” she said.

“So is our time here,” I said.

“That’s my point,” Eleanor said. “The story—Leah, it’s set in Paris.”

Moments before, the humidity had made it seem like there was too much air. Now it felt like there was none.

“I thought so,” Eleanor said, marking my silence. “So here goes: ‘Young Robert and Callie Eady’—yes, he uses real names, or his, anyway; I don’t know what’s up with ‘Callie’; makes me think of Caligula—‘exhausted with their life in Wisconsin’—I’d say that’s overstating things, no?—‘decide to take a year off with their daughters’—no names given—‘and travel the world.’ She’s a novelist, by the way, and he’s a speechwriter—ho, ho! That’s my ‘ho, ho.’ I’ll read on. ‘Once around and then home, much improved, in no small part because the plan is to work their way around the world.’ Okay, and now we get some sheep in New Zealand, grape-picking in Chile, etc., etc., teaching and coaching at a school in Zambia—”

“Eleanor!”

“Yes, yes,” she said. “Anyway, none of that turns out to be crucial. But this is: ‘Their trip stalls’—Robert’s words again—‘almost as soon as it starts. Crossing the Atlantic to France, they fetch up in Paris’—really not sure about that ‘fetch up’—‘where their plans to staff an English-language bookstore fall through. To bide time, they spend days wandering the city, quickly abandoning traditional guidebooks to follow paths laid out by the children’s books and films their two daughters love, chiefly Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline books and’— you knew this was coming, didn’t you?—‘Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon.’—Leah, are you listening?”

I was not. Or I was, but not to Eleanor. I was listening to Robert, through words read by Eleanor, trying to make out the words behind the words.

“I admit,” Eleanor said, “it doesn’t sound like him.”

It did and it didn’t. It was true that Robert’s recent experiments had been increasingly esoteric—a term he found “judgmental”—and he had been exploring the creation of electronic texts, including an e-book app wherein a finger swipe not only turned pages but erased words. Academics loved it. Techies, too. And some students, some of them his old fans. In short, lots of people who didn’t spend much money on books. Which was good, because the app was free. A variety of fame resulted. But he no longer seemed much interested in fame, or much else anymore. And I no longer—well, I didn’t understand. I told him so. He tried to explain: So finishing the book will mean—could mean—finishing it off, you know? I did, and excitement briefly flared in me. A large part of me also thought it was nonsense. But we were deep in a difficult season, and I wanted something to celebrate, and nonsense would do. It would be like the old days, our early days, when the less sense an act, a notion, a thought was, the more sense it made. Chase a shoplifter from a bookstore! Marry a man who loved Madeline! Live for art! Make something. And we had. And now we were—erasing that art? That life? Finished, Robert had said, like—

I know, I’d said, and I’d thought I had known, but now—now in Paris, this. This “prize” or contest, which was all about unfinishing? This didn’t sound like him, not the synopsis, not the contest.

Unless—was the whole thing—was this an experimental work of an entirely new order? He’d not only made up a new novel but a competition? Eleanor had found the contest’s website, but maybe Robert, mad puzzler that he was, had generated that, too.

“It’s a lot to take in, I suppose,” Eleanor said. “I think I hear you breathing. I’ll keep going. There’s not too much more. Though—steady yourself. ‘But as the weeks wear on,’ he writes, ‘Paris wears them down, and the family dynamic frays.’ And it would, wouldn’t it? ‘The girls fight. The parents fight. And then, one morning, Robert comes home from a run, and she’s gone.’”

“Wait—who’s gone?” I said.

“You are listening,” Eleanor said. “So, yes, this is the curious part. She’s gone, this Callie character—the wife.”

“The wife?”

“The wife, and stranger still—okay, let me finish.” Eleanor dropped her voice, caught up in the performance. It was almost fun to listen to, to hear someone else get swept away by another’s prose and magic, even if it was only a synopsis. It reminded me that Robert had possessed that magic. It reminded me that it had possessed me once upon a time. It made me realize, briefly, that something similar was happening again, here on a crowded sidewalk in a distant city, my girls behind glass, my husband behind words someone was reading to me. “‘There’s no sign of her,’” Eleanor read. “The wife, he means. ‘There’d been no warning. The police, the embassy, are no help. The father prepares to head home; the children resist. The father’s compromise: a final trip to the bookstore where they were to have worked.’ Whereupon they find a ‘clue.’”

“A clue—Eleanor! All this time you’ve had me on the phone—why didn’t you just—what in god’s name is the clue?”

“It doesn’t say. That’s where it ends. By design, I assume. Indeed, that’s the contest’s conceit. But here’s what I think of as a clue: the synopsis and manuscript differ. I’m not sure why, and this is only after the speediest of reads, but it appears Robert changed the manuscript before writing the cover letter. Or maybe after. What I mean is, in the manuscript, there’s just this one material change: it’s no longer Callie, the wife, who leaves. It’s . . .”

She paused.

“Well, it’s the husband,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s a clue or the opposite of one. But otherwise, for all this talk of clues in the cover letter, there’s no explicit discussion of clues in the manuscript itself. Maybe he forgot. More likely, as I said, things changed. We don’t even know if he sent it in, after all—perhaps this was just a rough draft.”

We didn’t know anything, she said, but I knew this: it sounded like Eleanor was gloating. She’d had a hunch that Robert was alive and well somewhere, and this somehow proved that.

But it didn’t. We’d found my husband’s manuscript. Not my husband. This manuscript wasn’t evidence he was alive. Unfinished, it was evidence he was dead.

Wasn’t it?

Eleanor could endure my silence no further. “Oh, but of course,” Eleanor said, thinking she’d figured out why I’d paused. “I have anticipated your very desire. My able assistant has already scanned in the whole thing, cover letter and all. And she e-mailed it to you along with Daphne’s passport page. Maybe that’s why it took so long. No matter—Ellie messaged me while we were talking, said she’d gotten it, was printing it.”

“Ellie? Eleanor, you should have . . .” I turned to look through the glass again. Ellie’s workstation was empty. I looked at the line for the bathroom; no.

And then I saw my two daughters, sitting at a little round table, Daphne bent over Ellie bent over a messy pile of pages—bent, anyway, until Ellie looked up, saw me looking at her, and opened her mouth.

I opened mine, too, but nothing came out. My grief books were no help here; none of them discussed partial manuscripts that churned out of printers in Paris. What could I tell my girls that they would believe now? Their father wasn’t gone, he’d come back? Or their father had come back and gone again? Or their father, my husband, was sitting right there on the table, just beneath those words, staring out at us? I wanted to go in and stuff the pages back into the printer. I wanted to gather them up in one giant, messy pile and hug them to me, and not let go: I’m sorry I thought you were dead! I’m sorry you ran away. I’m sorry I said I would—

And then I looked around, and the pages became pages again, and my girls became fatherless again, and I thought, I’m sorry I thought you were back.

Here is my own synopsis of what happened next, pared to the minimum and thus truer than Robert’s: pay, taxi, room, read, argue, cry, call, embassy, cry, call, read, argue, argue, call, call. Stay.

Stay?

Stay in Paris. The girls’ idea. Or, Eleanor later argued, their father’s.

I had not read anything of Robert’s in manuscript form in quite a long time. (I’d once made the mistake of reading a manuscript of his in bed and falling asleep—a perfectly common event in any reader’s life, but, as I learned, unacceptable for an author’s wife.) His words, once bound into a book, always seemed settled, set.

Reading him in double-spaced, 12-point Times Roman was an entirely different experience, and not just because he fussily preferred throwback typewriter fonts: the words here seemed jittery, loose, like a photograph in a tray of developer that refuses to fix.

The manuscript wasn’t bad; I’ll get that out of the way immediately. It didn’t sound like him, but then, none of his books for adults—and this was one—really did. But I hardly focused on that, so distracted was I by the fact that he’d written something. He’d gone away, and come back waving pages!

And on those pages, a message. To us. This was the girls’ opinion, and one they held fast to, despite the cover letter to the prize competition. The book was a message and the message was this: go to Paris, stay in Paris. (Come to think, that may be the synopsis for every book ever set in Paris, even the ones—and there are many, even a majority—about leaving.)

In Robert’s manuscript, the family does stay. Despite their grand plans to travel the world, when the father disappears, they go no farther than Paris. They don’t go home, either. There’s a passage where one of the fictional daughters talks about “missing person protocol,” about how it’s best to “go where the one who’s missing liked going”: this resonated deeply with Ellie and Daphne. I wanted to point out that this was taken almost word-for-word from a conversation we’d once had at the Milwaukee Humane Society, where the topic had been the neighbor’s missing dog and the destination a park. I wanted to say this but then didn’t, because, among other things, when they’d found the dog, he was dead.

The mom in the manuscript manages, and the girls do, too. The bookstore that initially rebuffed the family takes pity on them in the wake of Dad’s disappearance and offers them jobs; the mom finds an apartment nearby; the girls enroll in schools. Every so often, mother and daughters take to the streets and walk a route lifted from a Madeline book. Many Paris landmarks have cameos, and some less familiar spots, too.

There is occasional talk of clues. But as Eleanor said, no specifics.

We revised our trip’s remaining itinerary to follow the manuscript’s pages. But just as quickly, the girls’ interest in the itinerary waned and so did mine. We’d seen most of Paris’s top tourist sites; we’d seen a lot of tourists. We’d not seen Robert.

We had eaten a lot of Nutella crêpes, however. Ellie and I now sat on a bench along a swept path in the Tuileries Gardens just west of the Louvre and watched Daphne search for that hour’s ration. We’d expected to find dozens of crêpes carts here but instead encountered countless informal exercise classes, running and leaping amongst the trees and tourists. Ellie had ordered Daphne to go ask someone where we could find food. I’d told Ellie Daphne wasn’t her servant and Ellie had said, no, she wasn’t: she was our translator. And it was true; the past few days had proven Daphne’s superior language skills.

The afternoon was especially hot, which I hoped meant we could forgo further conversation. Across the way, Daphne tentatively approached an older couple. They listened to her with grave, attentive faces.

“Mom,” Ellie said, “if we go back home—”

“To our apartment?” In addition to its prime spot between the busy hospital and noisy train station, the apartment had a half bath in the hallway shared with the neighbors.

“Blech,” Ellie said. “To Milwaukee.”

“ ‘If’?”

“You know what I mean,” Ellie said, and I decided I didn’t, not yet. “Anyway, we should leave Daphne behind.”

Again, it was hot, and we were in dappled shade, which must have looked pretty, but a solid concrete roof would have done more to protect us from the sun. Our brains were baking, Ellie’s especially.

“That’s sweet, Ellie,” I said, and straightened up. Apparently, it was time for a talk after all. “Daphne’s your sister.” Ellie kept staring at Daphne. “Ellie,” I said, “I know it’s been hard but—”

“But that’s not what I mean,” Ellie said. “Look at her. She’s, like, thriving over here.” And Daphne was. She had moved on from the older couple and was now in an animated conversation with two tall teenagers, everyone nodding, laughing, pointing this way and that.