Dr. Cheng said, “I’m going to stay in the room while Gretchen draws your blood,” and he did just that. Yale looked away; he always had a problem with his own blood, watching it rise up the vial. “We have some party favors,” Dr. Cheng said and presented Yale with an opaque plastic bag of rubbers. “You’ve got five different kinds in here. Several of each. Do you know how to use them?”
Yale said he did. He’d put one, laughing, on a banana, at one of the meetings Charlie had organized in their apartment. Charlie had introduced him to the group as “my spokesmodel for prophylactic application!” But he’d never actually worn one. He’d had a couple used on him, before he was with Charlie, and he hadn’t particularly appreciated the feeling. Yale wondered if he’d ever use these, or if they’d languish in their bag as he spent the rest of his life, long or short, celibate.
Gretchen was done. Yale walked back to the waiting room, his sleeve still rolled up, and when he saw Fiona—God was he happy to see her—he pointed to the bandage in the crook of his elbow, the cotton ball.
Her eyes were red, but she said, “I’m going to buy you a lollipop. I am! There has to be one around here somewhere. I’m buying you a lollipop.”
2015
Fiona chose her outfit carefully: gray slacks, blue blouse, black heels.
She could have taken the Métro, but she didn’t want to worry about changing lines, getting smelly. So she crossed the bridge away from the movie set and took a taxi all the way to the eighteenth, to an address that turned out to be at the bottom of Montmartre.
Cecily had said, “Remember that you have time. You don’t have to solve it all at once.” But Cecily didn’t know Claire—the way one wrong move might make her vanish. And Cecily, although she’d been hungry for the few details Fiona could provide about their granddaughter, hadn’t wanted to come to Paris. “I’d make things worse,” she said. Since when was Cecily the expert on anything?
Fiona hadn’t been sure what to expect from a “bar-tabac,” but really it was just a bar. A cozy dive you might as easily have found in Rogers Park. Film posters, little Christmas lights running along the shelves of bottles. It was just before noon, and there were a few patrons, mostly men, mostly alone.
She couldn’t feel her feet.
Fiona held her shoulders back and approached the woman at the bar—definitely not Claire—and said, “Je cherche Claire Blanchard. Elle est ici?”
The woman looked at Fiona, an Oh, you’re her look, and said something quick that Fiona couldn’t follow. She disappeared through the door at the end of the bar.
And then: Claire. Pushing the hair from her face. Taking a huge, bracing breath.
Those were Claire’s eyes, the dark lashes. The marbled brown of her irises.
The other woman stood behind her, peered at Fiona. She asked Claire something quietly, and Claire nodded.
She looked thin but healthy—her cheeks pink, her hair back in a sloppy twist—and startled, caught off guard. Which she couldn’t have been.
Fiona had imagined a thousand conversations they might have, a hundred ways the morning could end, but she hadn’t thought through what to do with her face, her body. Claire smiled tightly, an embarrassed smile.
What Fiona said, eventually, was “Hi.”
Claire came around the bar and gave her a brief hug, the kind of hug you’d give a distant aunt. She said, “It’s good to see you.”
Fiona felt, of all things, angry and ridiculous. That she’d spent this time and money and despair to find someone who would hug her so casually, who wouldn’t collapse in her arms and ask to be rescued. This strange adult standing here, so collected. Her hair had darkened a bit, and her face had changed in ways that had nothing to do with her thinness; the bones had settled, the eye sockets deepened. She didn’t look at all like a college freshman, and not like the sun-washed, pixelated young woman in the video either.
Fiona said, “Can we go somewhere to chat?”
“I thought we could stay here.” She said it firmly, as if she’d practiced. As if the woman behind the bar were going to make sure Claire wasn’t abducted today.
They sat in the corner under a TV showing a soccer match. The scattered patrons looked in that direction, but it was at the game, not at Fiona and Claire. Fiona wished for something to drink or eat, something to anchor them to the table. Something to lend this meeting the timeline of a meal, guarantee it would last longer than a minute.
Fiona said, “I need to know that you’re okay.” She wanted to touch Claire’s hands, to feel if they were rough now, or still soft. She wanted to tuck her hair behind her ear.
Claire said, “We’re fine.”
“You have a little girl.”
Claire smiled. “I’m teaching her English, don’t worry.”
“That wasn’t really my concern.”
Claire pulled a phone from the pocket of the apron Fiona just now registered her wearing—a white apron around her waist over a black skirt, a black shirt. “Hold on,” she said, and she thumbed the phone and then placed it on the table in front of Fiona. A little girl on a three-wheeled scooter, curls blowing in her face.
Fiona wanted to snatch the phone up, scroll through the pictures one by one, see how far back they went, how far forward. Instead she said, “She’s beautiful.”
“Kurt got married. He watches Nicolette sometimes while I work.”
She’d pronounced it the French way, Nee-co-lette, and Fiona couldn’t bear to ask yet if the child was named after Nico, after the uncle Claire had never known but in whose shadow she’d grown up. She feared both answers equally. She said, “Is she in school?”
“She’s only three.”
“You had her in Colorado?”
Claire got up and grabbed a cocktail napkin off the bar to blow her nose. Fiona worried she wouldn’t sit back down, but she did. She said, “Yeah, well. That was the beginning of the end. They—it was a home birth, and it didn’t go very well.”
“Oh. Oh God, honey.”
“I was bleeding a lot, like a lot, and they wouldn’t let me call an ambulance. So Kurt stole the car—there was one car—and he drove us. I nearly died. I was in the hospital for a week. They took us back though, after that. I think they figured we could’ve sued them.”
Your mother was supposed to be there when you had a baby, was supposed to yell at doctors for you and make sure you were resting. If Fiona had allowed her own mother in the hospital, would things have gone differently? Would her mother have insisted on putting baby Claire on her chest, making sure they bonded as they slept? The thought hit her hard, right in the abdomen, and so did the realization that what Claire had done to her was exactly what she’d done to her own mother. She hadn’t even thought to call her mother till Claire was two days old. She’d—oh, God.