Yale rolled toward Charlie and decided to apply Bill Lindsey’s advice on talking to Cecily Pearce. He phrased it as a question: “Do you think it’s possible that all the sickness and funerals and everything—they’ve made us feel less secure? Because this is new for you. And I’ve never given you reason to worry.”
Charlie spoke to the window. “I’m going to say something terrible, Yale. And I don’t want you to judge me.” And then he didn’t say anything at all.
“Okay.”
“The thing is, the most selfish part of me is happy about this disease. Because I know until they cure it, you won’t leave me.”
“That’s fucked up, Charlie.”
“I know.”
“No, that’s really fucked up, Charlie. I can’t believe you said that out loud.” He could feel a vein pulse in his throat. He might get in Charlie’s face and scream.
But Charlie was shaking.
“I know.”
“Come here.” He rolled Charlie toward him like a log. “I don’t know what’s going on with you, but I’m not looking for anyone else.” Yale kissed his forehead, and he kissed his eyes and chin. “We’re all under a lot of stress.”
“That’s generous.”
“You get afraid of one thing, and suddenly you’re afraid of everything.”
2015
Fiona realized, as her cab approached the center of the city, that it was too early. She’d imagined delays and traffic, but here they were at 7:22 a.m., and she’d told Richard nine o’clock. She had the cabbie pull over and show her, on her fold-out map, where she was—she didn’t want to wear out her phone battery till she was sure her charger would work with the converter she’d bought at O’Hare—and then she got out and started walking definitively down the broad sidewalk, even though she wasn’t sure it was the right way at all.
At the corner, she checked the map again (her face buried in it, suitcase next to her, like the world’s most muggable tourist), and it looked like three miles. Walking, she could keep her eyes peeled in a way she couldn’t from a cab. Better use of her time than sitting on her ass at Richard’s, waiting for business hours so she could call the private investigator back. (A private investigator! How was this her life?) She had booked the first flight she could afford, and the urgency of the packing and dog-sitting arrangements made the whole thing feel like a race, but what was one more hour? The video was two years old. Still, walking felt like a delay. She should be getting there and doing something.
If she saw the Seine, she’d feel better. She just needed to follow it west. Fiona remembered both islands from her high school trip; they’d stopped at Notre Dame, on the bigger island, where some classmate had read grisly suicide statistics out of a guidebook.
She passed a father carrying a little boy on his shoulders. The boy held a Buzz Lightyear, zoomed it in front of his father’s glasses.
It was a stroke of fate that she’d be staying right in the middle of the river, because hadn’t the video shown Claire on a bridge? It had been impossible to tell which one—the video was grainy and didn’t reveal much background—but after looking at photos online, Fiona had eliminated a few. It was one with padlocks all over the chain link, but apparently most bridges had that now.
She passed bouquinistes opening up their green stands of paperbacks and antique pornography. She stopped at each bridge to see if it looked like Claire’s bridge, to see if Claire had been magically frozen to the spot. It was a gorgeous day, she’d failed to notice. And my God, she was in Paris. Paris! But she couldn’t summon much awe. Her daughter may or may not have still been involved with the Hosanna Collective, and was probably still under Kurt Pearce’s thumb. Her daughter may or may not have been the mother of the little girl in the video, the girl with blonde curls like Fiona’s. All of those things felt more foreign to her than the simple fact of Paris. Paris was just a city. Anyone’s path might lead here. But who ever thought their baby would get mixed up in a cult? Who imagined this was how they’d experience Paris—searching it for someone who didn’t want to be found?
It was quite possibly a hopeless quest. When had her attempts to reach Claire not backfired?
She’d been thinking lately about a time when Claire was seven, when they’d all been in Florida at the beach—she and Damian still married, just barely—and Fiona had announced that it was time to go, that Claire had already been given extra time to finish her sandcastle. Claire had started to cry, and instead of leaving her alone, instead of letting her have her way, Fiona decided to hug her. Claire pushed her away and ran to the water, throwing herself into the surf with her sundress on. “Let her cry it out,” Damian had said, but twenty yards down the sand Claire had picked herself up and walked into the ocean, thigh deep, waist deep. “She’s not going to stop,” Fiona said, and Damian laughed and said, “She’s Virginia Woolfing herself.” But she really was, and Fiona was up and running, knowing better than to call to Claire, knowing that at the sound of her voice Claire might throw herself under the waves. By the time she reached her, grabbed Claire from behind, the water was up to her own chest; Claire’s feet hadn’t touched sand in a long time. That was just one day. Claire had done similar and worse on a thousand others. But the incident had taken on greater meaning lately: the first time Claire had flung herself off the continent.
Fiona crossed to Île Saint-Louis and passed an ice-cream shop, the smell of the waffle cones reminding her that she was starving, and she passed shops selling bright leather purses and wine and Venetian masks. Here, finally, was Richard’s building, three stone stories above a shoe shop. “Campo/Thibault,” it said beside one of the five black buzzers. It was 8:45 now—close enough, good enough. She rang, and a minute later it wasn’t Richard who came down but a thin young man in a motorcycle jacket. He said, “You’ve arrived! I’m Serge, partner of Richard.” Ree-sharr. “I take you up, okay? You get settled. Richard is having a shower, then he joins us.”
Serge plucked up her suitcase as if it were empty, and she followed him up the dark stairs.
The apartment was chic and sparse, but the light fixtures and windows and the wrought iron railings outside the glass doors looked wonderfully ancient, and the details on the walls—the relief pattern of vines, and even the light switch panels—had been softened by endless layers of paint. Fiona remembered Richard’s place in Lincoln Park, the treacly peaches and pinks. This was its opposite: bright monochromatic paintings over gray furniture straight out of an architecture magazine. Serge showed her where she’d be staying—a book-lined room with a white bed and a single plant—and then brought her to the kitchen and poured her an orange juice. She heard Richard’s shower end, and Serge called that Fiona was here. Richard called back something she couldn’t understand, and it took her a moment to realize he’d answered in French.