“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
“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