“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.
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