Fiona clicked the attached scan. A triangular group—ten in front, seven in the next row, and so on—of mustachioed men, gazing at one another rather than at the camera. A skeleton draped across the laps of the front row. On a rug in front of them all, a naked woman, ample backside facing the camera. A spoof photo, the belle epoque version of a goofy group shot.
She moved her finger on the screen to the third row, the second man. Dark curly hair, a long slit of a mouth. Hair slicked and parted down the middle. A skinny, floppy bow tie.
What had been so special about him? Fiona didn’t know what she’d expected, but something more than this. Ranko Novak was worth seventy years of devotion. Ranko Novak was irreplaceable, a hole at the center of Nora’s universe. And this was it? A face, two eyes, two ears.
Well, try telling that to someone in love.
She zoomed in. He didn’t get any clearer, just larger.
Her affair with Dan had started with a conversation after yoga class, a walk to the juice place around the corner, where he’d asked her thoughts on what the teacher had said that day about letting go of attachments. He said, “Money is one thing. If I wanted to be a monk I could give up my car and it would only hurt for a week. But people. That’s the hard part.”
They’d sat a long time, talking. Fiona said, “I always thought geese were so funny.” Dan had started laughing, and she said, “No, what I mean is, they mate for life, right? But they all look exactly the same. They are exactly the same! How would you ever tell one goose from another? I mean, what, do they all have different taste in music? But a goose could recognize its partner from miles away.”
“And we think we’re so special,” Dan said. He got it, and this was when she started falling for him. “True love and all that. You think we’re as random as the geese?”
“But the tragedy,” she said, “is that knowing it doesn’t change a thing.”
And here, a hundred and some years on, was Ranko Novak. A face among the faces, a goose like all the other geese. He was gone, and Nora was gone, and what had happened to the passion that had consumed them both? If Fiona could convince herself that it was floating around the world—just disembodied, leftover passion—wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing to believe?
* * *
—
At two in the afternoon, Cecily called and said she’d changed her mind; she was about to board her connection at O’Hare and would be there late tonight. She didn’t need a hotel. An old college friend lived in the Latin Quarter. “I won’t be in your way,” she said. “I’ll work on Kurt. And then—do you think I should bring presents? For the little girl?”
* * *
—
At five o’clock, Fiona unwrapped her bandage to apply the ointment the doctor had given her. Her hand was hurting less. It was amazing how quickly you could forget physical pain, how soon you couldn’t even summon its echo.
At eight, Jake called. Serge had given him the number. He wondered if she’d come out and grab a bite. She was tired, she said, and managed to hang up. She’d have to have a word with Serge.
At nine forty-five, lying in bed, she started hearing sirens. Far too many, for far too long. At nine fifty, her phone started ringing. First Damian and then Jake—frantic, cryptic questions about where she was. Stay inside, they said. Then Richard was knocking on her door. She came out to the living room to watch the news. She stood in her nightgown, her feet cold. Serge paced the floor, swearing. Richard lay on the couch.
Fiona made herself breathe.
The attacks were far enough from here that she tried to imagine she was home, hearing about something on the far side of the world. There was no chance Claire had been out at what sounded like some kind of heavy metal concert; a person’s tastes couldn’t change that much. She might have been at that restaurant, or walking down that sidewalk, but the odds were small. The soccer stadium was up in Saint-Denis, where Claire lived; that worried her most. But Claire had a young child, and it was so late at night. Claire had her number, at least—but why hadn’t Fiona tackled her and made her write down her own? She didn’t have Kurt’s either. Running around the city to search for her was out of the question. She should go get a sweater, but she didn’t want to move.
There was nothing to do but keep calm. Cecily was in the air, and hopefully they’d let her plane land. What were the odds that Claire would show up for work tomorrow morning? What were the odds that the city would be thrown into such chaos that Fiona would never find her again?
She was surprised by her numbness, at least regarding the televised carnage, the bloodied, sobbing people on the streets. Was it because it wasn’t her city, or because the rituals of outrage and grief and fear felt so familiar now, so practiced? Or maybe it was the pain pills she’d popped after dinner for her hand.
She was struck by the selfish thought that this was not fair to her. That she’d been in the middle of a different story, one that had nothing to do with this. She was a person who was finding her daughter, making things right with her daughter, and there was no room in that story for the idiocy of extreme religion, the violence of men she’d never met. Just as she’d been in the middle of a story about divorce when the towers fell in New York City, throwing everyone’s careful plans to shit. Just as she’d once been in a story about raising her own brother, growing up with her brother in the city on their own, making it in the world, when the virus and the indifference of greedy men had steamrolled through. She thought of Nora, whose art and love were interrupted by assassination and war. Stupid men and their stupid violence, tearing apart everything good that was ever built. Why couldn’t you ever just go after your life without tripping over some idiot’s dick?
Richard’s show: No one knew if the preview could happen on Monday as planned. His publicist called, and his manager. “They need to calm down,” Richard said. “You’d think they’d have better things to worry about.”
Serge said, “We’re screwed. The whole world is screwed.”
He hadn’t stopped moving for the last hour and a half.
“I don’t mean to sound callous,” Fiona said, “but we’ve been through this in the States. And it’s not—”
“No,” Serge said, “whatever, a hundred dead people, I don’t care. That could have been a bus crash. What I care is, now they elect right wing across Europe. And then, yes: You, me, all of us, we’re screwed. Everyone acts from fear, the next year, two years. What happens, you think, to people like us?”
Fiona felt herself sinking. She said, “Things might seem different in the morning.”
Serge wheeled on her. “When people are afraid, we get the Christian Taliban. We get it here, you get it there, and we’re all in jail. We’re all in jail.”